Tacita Dean: fictions du temps qui tourne [Tacita Dean: fictions of a revolving time]

• Published in: Cahiers du Musée National d'Art Moderne (France) no. 86; pp. 4 - 21
• Main Author: Newman, Michael
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: French
• Published: 01.12.2003
• ISSN: 0181-1525

Revised text of a paper first given at the symposium `As painting: division and displacement , held at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (17-19 May 2001), in which the author discusses the work of the Berlin-based British artist Tacita Dean (b.1965). He examines two audio and video pieces that reference projects by Robert Smithson, Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty (1997) and From Columbus Ohio to the Partially Buried Woodshed (1999; illus.), both of which raise important questions about documentation, its relationship to film and the temporality of this medium. With reference to Hubert Damisch's theory of perspective as outlined in his book Théorie du Nuage (1972), he analyses the video projections Banewl (1999; illus.), shot on the occasion of the 1999 solar eclipse in Cornwall, England, and Delft Hydraulics (1996; illus.), which depicts a wave machine, and explores three further films featuring panoramic shots of the horizon, Disappearance at Sea I (1996; illus.) and Disappearance at Sea II (1997; illus.), which he links to Dan Graham's installation Two-Way Mirror Cylinder (1981-91) and to Michael Snow's film La Région Centrale (1970-71), and Fernsehturm (2001; illus.), explaining how its views of the sun setting over Berlin differ from the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and Edward Hopper's painting.