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Dean, Tacita
Tacita Dean (Canterbury, Kent, Reino Unido, 1965)Bubble House, 1999- Film (16 mm), colour, sound, 7’. Ed. 4/4
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2006
- Tacita Dean’s films are conceived as part of an installation that encompasses its own projection devices. In that sense, they could be called ‘sculpture-films’. While her work also involves photography, drawing, sound and installation, 16mm film is a central aspect of her oeuvre. ‘Bubble House’ is the name given by the inhabitants of Cayman Brac Island to an abandoned building. The unfinished, egg-shaped house from the 1960s, with huge cinemascope windows facing the sea, designed to resist the wind and withstand the hurricanes and tropical storms, was found by chance by the artist during a trip made to the island to photograph the wreck of sailor Donald Crowhurst’s yacht, the subject of an important body of work began in 1996 inspired by remarkable stories of personal encounters with the sea. Dean conceived 'Bubble House' as a portrait. The absence of a narrative structure is emphasized by the loop system used to show the film, which ensures there is neither a beginning nor end. Her long, static shots invite the viewer to experience a sort of temporal suspension.
Tacita Dean (Canterbury, Kent, Reino Unido, 1965)Boots, 2003- 16 mm film, colour, anamorphic projection, optical sound, 20’. Ed. 1/4
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2005
- Tacita Dean’s Boots is an elegy to memory and architecture. The film has its origins in Dean’s exhibition at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in 2002, during which she became fascinated by the ‘melancholy’ and stage-like setting of the nearby Serralves Villa, then about to be renovated. Originally a private residence, the remarkable pink art deco villa and surrounding park were commissioned by the 2nd Count of Vizela, Carlos Alberto Cabral, on the grounds of what had been his family’s summer house. Designed and constructed between 1925 and 1944 by architects José Marques da Silva (1869?1947) and Charles Siclis (1889?1942), it is considered the most notable art deco building in Portugal, its interiors by many of the best-known designers of the time, including Jacques Émile Ruhlmann (1879-1933) and René Lalique (1880-1945). In Dean’s three-part 16 mm film, an aging narrator returns to the Villa, walking over its parquet floors and through its limestone interiors. ‘I wanted to animate the house very specifically’, Dean recounts, through ‘a fictional architectural account of the peculiarities of the villa’. Decaying opulence becomes a setting for erotic remembrance. The film’s titular narrator, Boots, was in fact Dean’s sister’s godfather, an architect whose real name was Robert Steane. ‘We knew him as Boots because of his orthopaedic boot’, she recounts in an interview with art historian Simon Schama. Rather than play the part of its architect, however, Boots chose to cast himself as the lover of Blanche, the former resident of the Villa. The three versions of Dean’s filmic triptych are comprised of sequences of narration and dialogue in English, French and German, the three languages of the polyglot Boots. Rather than translations, however, each is a distinct part of a single film, the various languages affording shifts in the narrative. Dean plots the narrative of Boots’ sexual conquests and mannerist connoisseurship across the three floors of the house, from the main axis and glass canopy, to the patio encased between the different volumes of the building. ‘Each version shows a different facade of the house, Boots entering a different room on the ground floor’, Dean explains in the text she wrote about this work for Artforum. Part of the film’s distinct quality - its mesmerizing atmosphere - is achieved by the framing through which Boots enters and exits. Dean’s use of anamorphic film imposes a particular relation between depth and filmed object, the camera neither zooming nor tracking, and with no change in aperture or focus, giving it a distinct sense of scale, light and compositional order. Shot in the light of late afternoon and dusk, Boots and the villa are seemingly both in and out of time, the film weaving past with present. As Boots recounts in the film, ‘one has the feeling (?) that they are still here but in another dimension? and this whole house is in another dimension’. For the artist, making a film is itself ‘connected to the idea of loss and disappearance’, all the more given the growing obsolescence of film in the digital era. Dean’s commitment to the medium of film - ‘made with chemistry, alchemy, light’ - is not mere fetishism. Rather it is a belief in film as a medium of time, and its particular material and pictorial qualities. Yet along with the remarkable light and framing, Boots is particularly marked by the importance of sound, central to Dean’s work: the sound of birdsong, of traffic, the distinct taps and clicks of Boot’s footsteps and walking sticks - resonating through the empty interiors, keeping time with the whirl of the film projectors.
Tacita Dean (Canterbury, Kent, Reino Unido, 1965)Craneway Event, 2009- 16 mm colour anamorphic film, optical sound, 108 min. Ed: 3 / 4 +AP
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2014
- In November 2008, Tacita Dean filmed the choreographer Merce Cunningham [1919-2009] and his company as they rehearsed over three days in an industrial building that once housed a Ford assembly line in Richmond, California. Attending these rehearsals the artist was able to observe closely Cunningham’s choreographic process, namely the construction of the dance without music. ‘Craneway Event’ has since become one of the most important records of Cunningham’s working methods as well as a powerful document of an unrepeatable event. Describing her making of the work, Dean noted:‘There is also no music in the rehearsal. I liked the idea of the dance happening in silence. The music he uses is usually created separately from the choreography, so the dancers dance by counting. I also liked it that the dancers weren’t in costume but are wearing their own clothes. I asked them to wear the same clothes every day, because I thought I was going to cut the film as one day, which is how I’ve done things in the past. But in the end, the light was so different that I actually made it three autonomous days [?]’. ‘Merce told me I didn’t have to be faithful to the chronology of the dance, which was very liberating but, in the end, I was quite faithful. The Event had three stages on which the dancers dance simultaneously, so as a viewer you never have a composite view, which is the same in my film: no single perspective. The actual Event is always broken up’.The 1 hour and 48 minutes long film is one of Dean’s most ambitious works to date and is emblematic of the themes of portraiture, movement, and narrative that have defined the artist’s oeuvre over more than twenty years. According to the artist: ‘There is not a single shot in this film that does not have movement because I needed to keep the film active as it is so long’. The work is also an exemplary account of the consciousness of the passage of time - a constant feature of Dean’s works together with the use of analogue film, the medium of registering time ‘par excellence’. There are no technical tricks: ‘There are two places in this film where I use jump cuts because I wanted to include a succession of moments, once on Merce and once on the dancers. On the second day, he gets very active. He starts scrutinizing their transitions, saying things like, "Take her off now. Put her down now!" Then the camera cuts between the dancers, as I didn’t want to break the tension. On those occasions, I break my stylistic norm. I don’t often pan in my films. Pans annoy me. [?]. I like things to happen within the frame; I prefer to wait for it. It’s an aesthetic thing’.The integration of ‘Craneway Event’ into the Serralves Collection reinforces the Museum’s commitment to reflecting the relationship between the visual and performing arts, and consolidates the artist’s long relationship with Serralves, which began with her exhibition at the Museum in 2001 and her subsequent commission, ‘Boots’ (2003), filmed in the Serralves Villa.
Dibbets, Jan
Jan Dibbets (Weert, Holanda, 1941)Structure Piece - Leaves (1), 1974- Colour photographs montage
- 40.5 x 200 cm (fotografias: 20 x 180,5 cm)
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2005
- The work 'Structure Piece - Leaves (1)' is made of a sequence of tree leaves mounted along a horizontal line. Recorded in close-up and decontextualized from the landscape, the leaves lose depth, while the texture and the serial presentation of the motifs create a geometrical pattern that brings about a tension between space and the two-dimensional surface.Despite having studied painting, Jan Dibbets soon turned to photography as his medium of choice. His photographic compositions adopt natural elements as their theme, such as grass, water and leaves. The medium of photography is used by the artist as an analytical tool to investigate our perception of the natural world.
Durham, Jimmie
Time Heals All Wounds, 1995- Free standing frames with colour photographs (2 elements)
- 125 x 190 cm (each)
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2014
- 'Time heals all wounds' depicts scenes in which ‘a stone jumps up and falls on a pedestal’. The two photographs that comprise the work were taken a year apart in Paris and Lille, during which artist Jimmie Durham documented his use of stones and other materials to transform an object into something else. Stones are not only the simplest tools, or forms of human technology, but a means of altering the world, and of shaping nature itself. Along with addressing the myths of technological advancement and civilization, Durham also proposes that the relationship between two objects that come into contact, such as a stone and a table, may only differ in degree from our own relationship to those very objects. An internationally acclaimed artist and writer, Jimmie Durham has explored the nature of materials - their physical as well as metaphysical qualities - for over three decades. Durham has also been an activist in the American Indian Movement, and was the representative of the International Indian Treaty Council to the United Nations. His artistic practice, which encompasses sculpture, installation, drawing, video, performance and photography, is closely intertwined with this political activism, in the form of its confrontation with prejudices of Western-centric modalities of thought and understanding of the world. What unites much of Durham’s work is a stance against what he calls, ‘the two foundations of the European tradition: belief and architecture’. In rejecting the certainty and monumentality of both, through objects, images and words, Durham’s approach is, in contrast, ‘to be investigative’. Much of his questioning and experimenting has taken the form of ‘stoning’, or letting stones rest, fall, strike, or mark diverse objects and materials. A falling stone works with gravity to break a table and so changes its shape; a piece of obsidian - a dark rock formed from lava and valued in the Stone Age - splits and slices through organic and inorganic matter. Durham uses stones to crush cars, dent refrigerators, or break apart furniture.
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