Britons’ Houston shows reflect aging as art
Time does not fly near the end of Tacita Dean’s film “Craneway Event” so much as it slowly burns in the light of a setting sun that reflects on a shiny floor and flares through huge windows. It silhouettes a frenetic reverie of dancers whose urgent footfall mingles with the ambient sound of air in a massive building, set against the sight of a lone figure in a wheelchair who is nodding off.
That lone figure is Merce Cunningham. He died seven months later, in July 2009, before Dean could finish handcutting and syncing the optical sound of about 17 hours’ worth of 16mm anamorphic film she gathered during three days of rehearsals. The result runs a ruminative one hour and 48 minutes.
Dean, who said people were appalled that she made such a long art film, doesn’t lock the gallery doors at Rice University’s Moody Center, where “Craneway Event” is screening three times a day, but strongly advises viewers to stay for the whole experience, to grasp the emotional arc and observe the progress of the dance.
“Art people think they can just pop in and do it on the hoof,” she said during a visit to Houston for the opening. For what it’s worth, there’s “movement” in every frame, she said. “It’s not necessarily boring; I’m often accused of that.” Nor is the action just ambient; as it progresses through three days, the film captures how the dance comes together.
“I felt I had a responsibility in the end not to make it an illusion of a single day, which I might have done had he not died. It was incredibly precious footage,” Dean said. “It was an absolute labor of love to sync the sound of the footsteps; can you imagine? So the whole thing took ages, but it meant that I was listening to him for the first time after he’d died. I could hear him; it was really emotional.”
In the Moody’s lobby, the equally celebrated conceptual artist Gillian Wearing is also showing in Texas for the first time. Her “Rock ’n’ Roll 70” installation offers another investigation into an aging body — her own — with a site-specific showing of “Wallpaper,” a monumental grid of portraits that have been digitally altered by others to imagine what she will look like in 20 years.
Dean and Wearing, both born in England in the 1960s, belong to a famous generation of British art stars who are still sometimes called the “Young British Artists.” They are now in their 50s.
Capturing Cunningham
Dean’s own body is slowed by rheumatoid arthritis. Her acute empathy for aging artists has revealed itself in a number of shorter filmed portraits — not on view in Houston but gathered for a major show in London last year — that are uncompromisingly poetic, even elegiac. She has fixated on David Hockney’s ancient hands as he cradles cigarettes, watched Cy Twombly (also shortly before he died) contemplate sculptures he couldn’t sell, observed the Italian Mario Merz as he cradles a pine cone and listens to funeral bells and caught Claes Oldenburg dusting a lifetime’s worth of collected objects.
The first time she filmed Cunningham it was her request, not the company’s. She wanted to know if he had ever performed “4:33,” his longtime partner John Cage’s confounding composition in which a pianist sits at his or her instrument, not playing. Cunningham hadn’t, and he was already wheelchair-bound by then; but he created a performance for Dean in which he sat still, changing positions only for each of the three movements.
The beauty of “Craneway Event” is that it takes us into Cunningham’s still quite agile brain. He and his company are preparing for one of their “events,” a performance of randomly ordered excerpts from their repertory across three barely raised stages in a nonproscenium space.
The building is itself an evocative vessel of time. Designed by Albert Kahn and opened in 1930 as a Ford assembly plant at the Port of Richmond, along the San Francisco Bay, Craneway was famous during World War II as the home of Rosie the Riveter.
Cunningham’s company went there at the invitation of the University of California, Berkeley, and asked Dean to film it, anticipating her work would be part of the choreographer’s “Nearly 90” celebrations in 2009. She fell in love with the site, ultimately rescuing the underfunded performance project by trading an edition of her high-dollar artwork to the building’s owners (who were converting it into an event space) for rent.
Metaphors about time flow not just in close-ups of the legendary artist as an old man but also in the panoramic views and barely audible thrum of barges and boats that glide by, sometimes at a glacial pace; the wafting curtains from which the dancers emerge; and the chance presence of birds, creatures Cunningham adored as much as his dancers. Dean opens with a close-up of a pelican on a pylon, later following a waddling pigeon that wanders inside the building.
Her anamorphic format — made with special lenses on the 16mm cameras as well as the projector that produce a doublewide effect — is by nature less sharp than digital imagery, a kind of chance operation with potential for failure that Cunningham appreciated. “What you can’t do with digital is the nondeliberate,” Dean said. “There is no way of knowing what’s happening inside a camera until you process the film … . It’s all about what’s blind. And you kind of sense it; there’s a poetry in the unintended act, which is for me, radical.”
Doing ‘the thing’
The setting, of course, also added elements of chance — “things that go wrong in order to go right,” Dean said. “I’m a great believer in that.” She didn’t expect the factory’s floor to be varnished and reflective, and didn’t anticipate how each day’s changing weather would impact “Craneway Event.”
The dancers’ rigorous steps are already firmly imprinted in their bodies. For long moments, all that’s audible is the pounding and squeaking of their feet, which you hear even when you don’t see it. That sense of weight belies the spry movements; Cunningham dancers move like gazelles or, well, birds. Still, you can’t help but feel exhausted with them at the end of each day, amazed that they grasp what the choreographer wants.
Which is primarily a matter of directions. Dean’s film reveals Cunningham shaping form in space; how he paints with bodies as he nitpicks where certain dancers will face, and when, in the vast volume of a building where the audience will walk around. They work in silence, with only their own rhythmic pacing for timing. Cunningham’s dancers never rehearsed to music, hearing it for the first time during the first performance of a piece. That, too, appealed to Dean.
Even before she had had a chance to view the entire film, choreographer Kimberly Bartosik, who also was in Houston for a public talk with Dean, understood the scene intimately. She danced with Cunningham’s company during the first nine years of her career. “He didn’t want to control; he just wanted to make sure that you did the thing, in the amount of time, in the space that the work needed. And whatever you brought to it was what you brought to it,” she said. “You had to be thinking all the time.”
By “the thing,” she meant the steps, “the form in time and space,” she explained. “Those were the three elements. It was a step, and it took a very particular amount of time, and it was in a very particular space. All of his work was about how those three things communicated together.”
Bartosik recalled performing Cunningham and Cage’s “Ocean” at a quarry in Minnesota with
‘Tacita Dean: Craneway Event’ and ‘Gillian Wearing: Rock ’n’ Roll 70’
When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. TuesdaysSaturdays; “Craneway” screens at 10:15, 12:30 and 3 p.m. through July 15; “Rock ’n’ Roll 70” through Aug. 31
Where: Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University; Stockton off University Blvd.
Details: Free ($10 parking); 713-348-2787, moody.rice.edu similar directional challenges. “Your body had to figure out how to completely renavigate itself so it didn’t lose track of what it had to do because there wasn’t one place you had a reference for,” she said.
Bartosik saw Cunningham pass physical bridges first-hand. During her first years with the company, he could still use his body to suggest what he wanted the dancers to do, even though he wasn’t exactly demonstrating the moves. “You just did the most extreme version of what he showed,” she said. Then he pioneered the use of Life Forms software that produced reams of complex instructions, requiring the dancers to think of their bodies in parts — arms do one thing, legs another, torso another, head another — “then put it back together again and make sense of it.”
Always, there was room for failure, Bartosik said. “That’s part of why it’s so alive. You have to be in every extreme moment. If you pull back to stay on your balance, it loses its life. That’s why it’s beautiful to show rehearsal: Stuff happens. You fall down. You have an injury you’re nursing, so you’re not quite full out. You lose your place because there’s a ship passing by. To show all the human reality about what it is to be a dancer and to do the work Merce asked of you really communicates something.”
‘Deepfake’ Wearing
In the bright light of the Moody’s foyer, Wearing’s coolly conceptual installation seems to demand less of viewers. It also looks intentionally mundane, although it consumes a huge wall. Here is Wearing’s face, aged and multiplied many times, against plain, blandly colored backdrops of portraits that are mostly yearbook-style, straighton affairs. The kind of portraits that are only interesting to the people in them, generally.
At the center, atop “Wallpaper,” hangs the unfinished triptych “Rock ’n’ Roll 70,” which has a dour image of Wearing at 50; an enhanced image of her slumped and grayer, suggesting 70; and a blank space where she plans to insert an actual portrait of herself when she turns 70 in 2033. I’m a few years older, and doing the math. Essentially, Wearing is asking viewers to endure a longer time of waiting and watching than Dean.
There’s more immediate gratification in the small, dark gallery devoted to new media works, where “Wearing, Gillian” loops. Running about five minutes, this “deepfake” film is a slick, playful collaboration with the advertising firm Weiden + Kennedy that utilizes artificialintelligence technology. It employs “face masking” — familiar to anyone who has watched some of this year’s partisan political propaganda on YouTube or Facebook — to integrate the artist’s facial features (and her voice) with those of a diverse group of actors. You walk out still unsure which one of them, if any, is actually her. (Over at Inman Gallery, a work by Jason Salavon adds interactive facial recognition to the equation, so viewers can watch their own faces morph with those of characters who include Donald Trump, Kanye West, a clown and a cat.)
“Wearing, Gillian” — get the title’s pun? — is engagingly humorous and will be wildly appealing to some people. Her work is as finely nuanced as Dean’s but focused in a different direction, on ideas about identity and self-representation. In the age of selfies and internet memes, it’s both meaningful and topical. We are a self-obsessed society.
Still, I confess: I wasn’t in the mood to tolerate it.
A friend who stepped into the “Craneway Event” screening when I was there Wednesday felt that way about Dean’s film. I think she loves both art and dance as much as I do, but she lasted maybe 20 minutes, max.
“I don’t have the patience to sit through two hours of this,” she said. “My ADD would not like it.”