Ruptures esthétiques 2

• Ruptures esthétiques 1
• Paradigmes historiques du Classicisme 
• Hypermodernisme / Minimalisme, Postmodernité et Arte Povera
• Typologie des montages 

Tacita Dean (The Guardian)

Much ado about nothing

People complain that not much ever happens in Tacita Dean's films. But that's the whole point.

By Jeanette Winterson, The Guardian, 29 September 2005

on Fernsehturm (2001); also mentionned : Girl Stowaway (1994); Disappearance at Sea (1996); Disappearance at Sea II (1997); Teignmouth Electron (1998); Pie (2003).

"This summer we had the pleasure of walking alongside the Thames between the Hayward Gallery and Tate Modern, and finding not one but two major women artists dominating both spaces. Rebecca Horn and Frida Kahlo were an exciting double first and, this autumn, women will again be major players in the art galleries, with new work by Rachel Whiteread, Sarah Lucas, Gillian Wearing and Tacita Dean coming our way.

Four women, and four British women, is good news. British art right now is robust, world-class and ground-breaking. We can be especially pleased that so much of the new energy and direction is coming from women. Anyone who doubts that the girls have got what it takes should go and see for themselves - beginning at Tate St Ives with the strange and haunting filmscapes of Tacita Dean. "Everything that excites me no longer functions in its own time. I court anachronism - things that were once futuristic but are now out of date," she says.

Dean was born in 1965, the "new" decade of free love, space travel, rock and pop, fitted kitchens, ITV, adverts, drugs, vitamin pills, nuclear bombs and the cold war. In the communist part of Berlin, a revolving cafeteria allowed diners exactly an hour to eat cream buns and drink tea while watching a 360-degree panorama of their city, looking out towards the forbidden Berlin of the West. The Fernsehturm resembles a lighthouse or the prow of a ship. It is a relic of a particular regime, a particular time. It is marooned in its own past, and it beams out futuristically across the skyline. Like so much else, what was once a symbol has become a tourist attraction, and, significantly, a full rotation has been sped up from one hour to just 30 minutes.

Life has moved on. There is no wall, no GDR, but though the Fernsehturm can turn faster, it can only be caught at its own pace. In 2001, a year after she went to live in Berlin, Tacita Dean made the interior of the Fernsehturm into a 44-minute film - in which nothing happens. Unlike other film artists, such as Bill Viola or Billy Innocent, Dean is the genius of Nothing. Nothing needs a capital letter, because it is a Sartre Nothing, or a Beckett Nothing.

Her genius, with her slow, steady, held frames, is to allow the viewer to dream the Fernsehturm; to enter it without hurry, without expectation, and to accept, as we do in a dream, a different experience of time, and a different relationship to everyday objects. The glasses, the cutlery, the windows, the light, the shapes of people, the geometry of the tables ask, through the medium of the film, to be noticed, and to be understood. Time slows, then slips its loop altogether. The restaurant revolves, but we are outside of time - observers in space, with a weightlessness that contrasts to the solidity of what we are asked to observe.

I have watched people watching this film - one of her longest - and some walk away quickly, some lie down and have a snooze, some surrender themselves to the intensity of the experience. Others watch half of it, then complain bitterly in the cafe, because they waited and waited, and nothing happened. But climbing out of the nothing, like shy creatures, trodden-on and overlooked, is the curious life of objects freed from their everyday imprisonment. We understand that when Cézanne paints an apple, or Vermeer a milk jug, it is as though we had never seen these objects before.

On film, which has become the medium of action, contemplation is anathema. Yet when film allows a moment to unfold in real time, we realise that a moment is agonisingly long and that our perception of time is both subjective and approximate.

Dean can draw beautifully, and some of her drawings will be on show at the Tate, but 16mm film is her preferred medium because she is attracted to its relationship with time. She likes the beginning, middle and end that film allows, but far from reaching for a conventional narrative, she uses the time-line of the film to release her subject into its timeless state.

One of her new short films, PIE, is eight minutes of magpies in the trees outside her window in Berlin. Their restless squawking and hopping gives no sense of time passing, or of any purpose but their unplanned choreography becomes a dance of life - life that can only be found in the moment, but which depends on the illusion that the moment will last forever.

"I do not think I am slowing down time, but I am demanding people's time," she says. In a busy world, that is a big demand, but one of the many reasons why art matters is its ability to stop the rush. Art on film makes us conscious of the time and space we occupy, and give us an insight into the nature of time itself.

Many people will be familiar with Dean's work from her Friday/ Saturday project for the ill-fated Millennium Dome. She recorded sound over 24-hour periods, Friday through Saturday, at locations round the world determined in relation to the Greenwich Meridian. The Dome, anachronistic before it had begun, worked well with her preoccupations. She located her installation in a ventilation hut but there was so much noise from the Dome itself that she reinvented the soundscape in a jukebox, a construction halfway between the deck of the Starship Enterprise and an old-fashioned radiogram, with light-up dials and knobs to select your latitude: Alaska, Bangladesh, Yemen. Once selected, the jukebox will play one of its 192 CDs.

Dean takes great care with her film soundtracks, but her sound-alone installations open a world where hearing becomes our only radar. She turns us into bats or moles, dependent on just one of our senses, and that sense heightened to a painful acuteness.

There is discomfort in Dean's work - and no getting away from it, except by refusing it the time or the concentration. If you want a quick fix, she will seem superficial; you can't just pop in and have a look, as you can, say, with Damien's shark or Tracey's bed, or the Mona Lisa. The films and the sound installations need something of surrender to get the best out of them, and the gallery space is ideal for this. Although when she projected her Sound Mirrors on the wall of the National Theatre in 1999, it was a spectacular success, perhaps because the theatre is a dedicated building and her work has a sense of the sacred, and the dedictated.

She is a global traveller, and part of her work follows the peregrinations of others who, like her, who have been on a pilgrimage of sorts. Girl Stowaway (1994) charted the journey of an Australian girl dressed as a boy, who survived 96 days at sea to get from Port Victoria to Falmouth in 1928. Teignmouth Electron (1998) took Dean to the Cayman Islands to find the abandoned catamaran of Donald Crowhurst, the round-the-world yachtsman who went mad on his 1968-69 voyage, and drowned himself in the Sargasso Sea.

Disappearance at Sea is a film of unbelievable beauty set around Crowhurst and the Berwick lighthouse, and Disappearance at Sea II is the mythic story of Tristan, floating alone in a coracle for seven days and seven nights until, wounded and weary, he finds the healing of Isolde.

I first discovered Dean through her sea and lighthouse films, and they are some of the most moving images I have stored in my memory. I think of them often, and that must be a test of their power. The sea, time, timelessness, the unregarded, the discarded, are all themes of Dean's work. But what makes these themes into a continuing narrative is her gaze, which turns obsession into engagement, and offers us a chance to see what she sees, heightened and fully aware.

The vividness of her images and the vibrancy of her soundscapes are a challenge to the desensitised, coarse world of normal experience, where bright lights, movement and noise cheat us into believing that something is happening. Tacita Dean's slow nothingness is far more rich and strange."

Related:

• New romantic, Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, 3 April 2007
• Website | Wikipedia | Lecture (Tate, 2006) |

Filmography:

1. The Story of Beard, 1992
2. The Martyrdom of St Agatha (in several parts), 1994
3. Girl Stowaway, 1994
4. How to Put a Boat in a Bottle, 1995
5. A Bag of Air, 1995
6. Disappearance at Sea, 1996
7. Delft Hydraulics, 1996
8. Foley Artist, 1996
9. Disappearance at Sea II, 1997
10. The Structure of Ice, 1997
11. Gellért, 1998
12. Teignmouth Electron, 1998
13. Bubble House, 1999
14. Sound Mirrors, 1999
15. From Columbus, Ohio, to the Partially Buried Woodshed, 1999
16. Banewl, 1999
17. Totality, 2000
18. Fernsehturm, 2001
19. The Green Ray, 2001
20. Baobab, 2002
21. Ztrata, 2002
22. Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers), 2002
23. Diamond Ring, 2002
24. Mario Merz, 2002
25. Boots, 2003
26. Pie, 2003
27. Palast, 2004
28. The Uncles, 2004
29. Presentation Sisters, 2005
30. Kodak, 2006
31. Noir et Blanc, 2006
32. Human Treasure, 2006
33. Michael Hamburger, 2007
34. Darmstädter Werkblock, 2007
35. Amadeus, 2008
36. Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage's composition 4'33" with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances; six films), 2008
37. Prisoner Pair, 2008
38. Still Life, 2009
39. Day for Night, 2009
40. Craneway Event, 2009

Watch Now:

• Tacita Dean: Craneway Event, 13 May 2010 — 26 June 2010, Firth Street Gallery, London
• Craneway Event, 11 June 2010 - 23 Jul 2010, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris

Ruptures esthétiques 1

• Ruptures esthétiques 2
• Rêveries du spectateur solitaire (Rousseau) / La pente de la rêverie (Victor Hugo) / Foster-child of silence and slow time (Keats) / Francis Ponge
• Paradigmes historiques du Classicisme 
• Hypermodernisme / Minimalisme, Postmodernité et Arte Povera
• Typologie des montages 

The virtue of contemplation (Aristotle)

"[..] Since every sense is active in relation to its object, and a sense which is in good condition acts perfectly in relation to the most beautiful of its objects (for perfect activity seems to be ideally of this nature; whether we say that it is active, or the organ in which it resides, may be assumed to be immaterial), it follows that in the case of each sense the best activity is that of the best-conditioned organ in relation to the finest of its objects. And this activity will be the most complete and pleasant. For, while there is pleasure in respect of any sense, and in respect of thought and contemplation no less, the most complete is pleasantest, and that of a well-conditioned organ in relation to the worthiest of its objects is the most complete; and the pleasure completes the activity. But the pleasure does not complete it in the same way as the combination of object and sense, both good, just as health and the doctor are not in the same way the cause of a man’s being healthy. (That pleasure is produced in respect to each sense is plain; for we speak of sights and sounds as pleasant. It is also plain that it arises most of all when both the sense is at its best and it is active in reference to an object which corresponds; when both object and perceiver are of the best there will always be pleasure, since the requisite agent and patient are both present.) Pleasure completes the activity not as the corresponding permanent state does, by its immanence, but as an end which supervenes as the bloom of youth does on those in the flower of their age. So long, then, as both the intelligible or sensible object and the discriminating or contemplative faculty are as they should be, the pleasure will be involved in the activity; for when both the passive and the active factor are unchanged and are related to each other in the same way, the same result naturally follows.

How, then, is it that no one is continuously pleased? Is it that we grow weary? Certainly all human beings are incapable of continuous activity. Therefore pleasure also is not continuous; for it accompanies activity. Some things delight us when they are new, but later do so less, for the same reason; for at first the mind is in a state of stimulation and intensely active about them, as people are with respect to their vision when they look hard at a thing, but afterwards our activity is not of this kind, but has grown relaxed; for which reason the pleasure also is dulled. [..]"

"If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be that of the best thing in us. Whether it be reason or something else that is this element which is thought to be our natural ruler and guide and to take thought of things noble and divine, whether it be itself also divine or only the most divine element in us, the activity of this in accordance with its proper virtue will be perfect happiness. That this activity is contemplative we have already said.

Now this would seem to be in agreement both with what we said before and with the truth. For, firstly, this activity is the best (since not only is reason the best thing in us, but the objects of reason are the best of knowable objects); and secondly, it is the most continuous, since we can contemplate truth more continuously than we can do anything. And we think happiness has pleasure mingled with it, but the activity of philosophic wisdom is admittedly the pleasantest of virtuous activities; at all events the pursuit of it is thought to offer pleasures marvellous for their purity and their enduringness, and it is to be expected that those who know will pass their time more pleasantly than those who inquire. And the self-sufficiency that is spoken of must belong most to the contemplative activity. For while a philosopher, as well as a just man or one possessing any other virtue, needs the necessaries of life, when they are sufficiently equipped with things of that sort the just man needs people towards whom and with whom he shall act justly, and the temperate man, the brave man, and each of the others is in the same case, but the philosopher, even when by himself, can contemplate truth, and the better the wiser he is; he can perhaps do so better if he has fellow-workers, but still he is the most self-sufficient. And this activity alone would seem to be loved for its own sake; for nothing arises from it apart from the contemplating, while from practical activities we gain more or less apart from the action. And happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace. [..] So if among virtuous actions political and military actions are distinguished by nobility and greatness, and these are unleisurely and aim at an end and are not desirable for their own sake, but the activity of reason, which is contemplative, seems both to be superior in serious worth and to aim at no end beyond itself, and to have its pleasure proper to itself (and this augments the activity), and the self-sufficiency, leisureliness, unweariedness (so far as this is possible for man), and all the other attributes ascribed to the supremely happy man are evidently those connected with this activity, it follows that this will be the complete happiness of man, if it be allowed a complete term of life (for none of the attributes of happiness is incomplete). [..]"

" The liberal man will need money for the doing of his liberal deeds, and the just man too will need it for the returning of services (for wishes are hard to discern, and even people who are not just pretend to wish to act justly); and the brave man will need power if he is to accomplish any of the acts that correspond to his virtue, and the temperate man will need opportunity; for how else is either he or any of the others to be recognized? It is debated, too, whether the will or the deed is more essential to virtue, which is assumed to involve both; it is surely clear that its perfection involves both; but for deeds many things are needed, and more, the greater and nobler the deeds are. But the man who is contemplating the truth needs no such thing, at least with a view to the exercise of his activity; indeed they are, one may say, even hindrances, at all events to his contemplation; but in so far as he is a man and lives with a number of people, he chooses to do virtuous acts; he will therefore need such aids to living a human life.

But that perfect happiness is a contemplative activity will appear from the following consideration as well. We assume the gods to be above all other beings blessed and happy; but what sort of actions must we assign to them? Acts of justice? Will not the gods seem absurd if they make contracts and return deposits, and so on? Acts of a brave man, then, confronting dangers and running risks because it is noble to do so? Or liberal acts? To whom will they give? It will be strange if they are really to have money or anything of the kind. And what would their temperate acts be? Is not such praise tasteless, since they have no bad appetites? If we were to run through them all, the circumstances of action would be found trivial and unworthy of gods. Still, every one supposes that they live and therefore that they are active; we cannot suppose them to sleep like Endymion. Now if you take away from a living being action, and still more production, what is left but contemplation? Therefore the activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative; and of human activities, therefore, that which is most akin to this must be most of the nature of happiness.

This is indicated, too, by the fact that the other animals have no share in happiness, being completely deprived of such activity. For while the whole life of the gods is blessed, and that of men too in so far as some likeness of such activity belongs to them, none of the other animals is happy, since they in no way share in contemplation. Happiness extends, then, just so far as contemplation does, and those to whom contemplation more fully belongs are more truly happy, not as a mere concomitant but in virtue of the contemplation; for this is in itself precious. Happiness, therefore, must be some form of contemplation.

But, being a man, one will also need external prosperity; for our nature is not self-sufficient for the purpose of contemplation, but our body also must be healthy and must have food and other attention. Still, we must not think that the man who is to be happy will need many things or great things, merely because he cannot be supremely happy without external goods; for self-sufficiency and action do not involve excess, and we can do noble acts without ruling earth and sea; for even with moderate advantages one can act virtuously (this is manifest enough; for private persons are thought to do worthy acts no less than despots-indeed even more); and it is enough that we should have so much as that; for the life of the man who is active in accordance with virtue will be happy. [..] Now he who exercises his reason and cultivates it seems to be both in the best state of mind and most dear to the gods. For if the gods have any care for human affairs, as they are thought to have, it would be reasonable both that they should delight in that which was best and most akin to them (i.e. reason) and that they should reward those who love and honour this most, as caring for the things that are dear to them and acting both rightly and nobly. And that all these attributes belong most of all to the philosopher is manifest. He, therefore, is the dearest to the gods. And he who is that will presumably be also the happiest; so that in this way too the philosopher will more than any other be happy."

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics; book X, chapter 4, 7, 8; ~322 BC

Personnage paysage (Bernardi)

"[..] Vu par Sandro Bernardi, Antonioni refuse les premiers plans de visages au profit d'espaces illimités d'où seuls peuvent émerger les forces mythiques. En lui retirant sa fonction de pur décor le décentrement transforme le paysage qui devient à la fois horizon et incertitude. Placés devant une nature qui leur échappe, ne leur est pas soumise et les dépasse, les personnages détournent le regard, ou au contraire acceptent d'ouvrir les yeux, sans être jamais assurés de voir. La nature ne s'impose pas, au long des routes boueuses, sur les plages indifférentes, dans les déserts, elle peut sembler endormie ou grouillante. Une partie se joue entre elle et les silhouettes qui s'agitent au premier plan, s'absorbent en elle ou, parfois, savent faire halte et prendre garde à ce qui se dévoile obliquement. Ainsi les films laissent-ils sourdre un paysage-personnage, ou mieux, un personnage paysage, qui n'est ni cadre ni protagoniste mais à la fois révélateur et dévorateur. Remise en cause du sujet humain comme centre du monde?

Ainsi revisitée, l'analyse antonionienne modifie les stéréotypes paysagers. Cadres et décentrages, mobilités multiples et disjointes, enrôlement simultané, mais décalé, de l'homme et du lieu, palimpsestes glissants... Remises en jeu dans une réflexion transversale, ces variantes deviennent autant de composantes inédites pour interroger, à travers la formation de paysages à vocation symbolique obscure, notre rapport actuel au mythe et à la pensée du monde qu'il recouvre. En remodelage permanent, aussi insaisissable que les monstres qu'il fait renaître fugitivement, le paysage de cinéma confère au retour du mythique la force d'une énigme, d'autant plus insistante qu'elle se trouve privée, par la forme même, de toute substance propre : image sans visage, où le film invite à reconnaître un savoir venu du vide."

Christian Doumet, Michèle Lagny, Marie-Claire Ropars, Pierre Sorlin, "Antonioni. Personnage paysage", 2006. (Avant propos)

"[..] Certes, le paysage est considéré traditionellement comme le triomphe de la culture, du regard souverain qui a donné forme au chaos, qui a transformé le monde confus en espace ordonné, lieu de plaisir et de contemplation visuelle. Dans le paysage, l'homme tient un rôle central ou, mieux, dominant. Mais est-ce vraiment ainsi que les choses se passent? Que nous disent tous ceux qu'on vient de nommer et dont le regard ou l'esprit se perd au loin ? Qu'est-ce qui les attire dans cette vision sans fin, ensorcelée, au-delà de l'ordre apparent? Dans ces images, le regard est un mouvement qui emporte l'homme au-delà de lui-même, dans la direction de sa transcendance ou vers sa propre origine, au-delà du savoir commun, vers quelque chose de mystérieux qui apparaît et disparaît dans le même temps. On trouve dans ces images l'idée que le paysage est certainement le sommet de la culture, mais aussi juste le contraire, sa frontière, une limite, une sorte de fresque ou de rideau fragile, derrière lequel on sent encore le souffle froid d'un monde inconnu.

Cela suffirait à justifier une étude du paysage au cinéma. Si ce topos est récurrent dans la littératue ou la peinture, il devient essentiel dans le cinéma moderne ou contemporain. Il s'agit d'un dispositif dans lequel la présence d'un observateur, faisant partie intégrante du paysage, implique une référence à l'acte de voir et à la position de celui qui regarde.

Le paysage est donc une interrogation sur la culture, il n'est pas un objet autonome; étudier le paysage, c'est étudier une culture, sa façon de construire l'espace et de se comprendre, dans ce rapport entre le connu et l'inconnu que nous appelons habituellement le monde. Etudier le paysage au cinéma signifie aussi réfléchir sur l'acte de voir qui est l'acte constitutif du cinéma même."

Sandro Bernardi, "Antonioni. Personnage paysage", 2006.