Mesmerising, restful and ruminative
You can’t help feeling that the British artist Tacita Dean takes herself a little seriously. I say “British”, but Dean, who divides her time between Berlin and Los Angeles, now calls herself “British European”, presumably to signal her antipathy for Brexit. And her films – for she is principally a filmmaker, who fetishises oldfashioned 16mm and 35mm film – are usually wistful, high-minded affairs.
Two related exhibitions, at the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery (later this year, Dean will also be honoured with a third, at the Royal Academy), confirm her as an artist with high culture in her sights.
The show at the NPG is more substantial by far – an extensive solo presentation of Dean’s filmed portraits of other artists, including David Hockney. The smaller NG exhibition, an elegant disquisition on the genre of still life, does contain work by Dean, but casts her more in the role of curator, selecting historical artworks – including an enormous brooding canvas of a hat by the 20th-century American painter Philip Guston and Francisco de Zurbarán’s 17th-century study of a cup of water, a delicious model of subtlety.
In May, the RA will explore a third genre: landscape, culminating in a new hour-long film titled Antigone (an Ancient Greek heroine, as well as Dean’s sister). Portraiture, still life, landscape: there is a learned bent to the shape of Dean’s new shows.
At the NPG, there’s no denying high-mindedness is everywhere on display. Providence (2017), for instance, a portrait of the actor David Warner featuring spellbinding footage of hummingbirds, refers to a 1977 movie by the French filmmaker Alain Resnais in which Warner appeared.
Meanwhile, upstairs, Dean presents an ingenious, tri-part portrait of three Shakespearean actors, including Ben Whishaw, projected as a tiny sliver of film beside a row of Elizabethan and Jacobean miniatures.
Frankly, the rarefied nature of Dean’s work sometimes produces awkward effects. She specialises in documenting artists in old age, one being the American Pop artist Claes Oldenburg, shuffling about his studio, perusing his collection of amusing everyday objects. I’ve interviewed Oldenburg in that studio, and Dean’s mostly silent film conveys little of his sprightly, subversive wit, presenting him rather as a kind of Beckettian janitor, engaged in a pointless, absurd pursuit. Likewise, her 16-minute observation of Hockney, hunched in a blue cardigan and orange polo shirt, does not wholly or faithfully record Hockney’s hard-wired irreverence.
Hockney, Yorkshireman that he is, might remark that Dean sometimes steers perilously close to pretentiousness and pomposity. And the fact that she is being feted by three venerable institutions, makes you want to rebel and say, “Wait a minute, surely Dean doesn’t deserve all this.”
Yet, despite that, I adored both exhibitions. There is a reason why Dean loves film, and that is because its effects are so gorgeous: rich and sensuous – even, in her hands, painterly. Moreover, Dean has a gift for simple visual poetry: those hummingbirds, for instance, are a beautiful metaphor for daydreaming thought.
And once you accept that melancholy is Dean’s métier, her work, with its empathy for people in old age, becomes profoundly moving.
This is the first time that the NPG has devoted an exhibition to film, but Portraits (2016), as her Hockney film is titled, feels museum-ready, an elusive yet palpable document of a major artist in the twilight of his life. I have no doubt that her simulacrum, a kind of son-et-lumière Golem, will endure.
Dean is a bride of quietness, of silence and slow time – aside, that is, from the perpetual whirring of the projectors that are, themselves, an important sculptural presence in her installations. As a result, her uncompromising films – both ruminative and restful – are mesmerising, even revelatory. Truly, Dean has the distinctive, powerful aesthetic of a strong artist.
Her portraiture suggests the fundamental strangeness, even impossibility, of imagining what it’s like to be within another person’s skull.
Both from tomorrow until May 28; information: 020 7306 0055 (NPG); 020 7747 2885 (NG)