Tacita Dean's preference for analogue over digital mediums betrays her love of obsolete technologies, writes Aidan Dunne.
As an artist, Tacita Dean is hard to pin down. She is someone who seems to have progressed intuitively towards self-realisation through her work. It is as if at first she was entirely in the dark as to what it was all about but, as she moved from project to project, it's gradually become clearer, to herself and to us, her audience. Up to a point, that is, because she is by nature discursive, always receptive to the unforeseen possibility, or what she terms "objective chance".
She likes, as she says, to set out for somewhere and to end up somewhere else, because of a prompt or a lead encountered along the way. It's noticeable that even now, writers who address her rich and diverse output often end up dealing in generalities, evoking time and space, reality and imagination, nature and culture - accurately enough, if not very informatively - because you really can't be sure what she's going to do next.
A couple of other ideas come up recurrently, though: failure and obsolescence. And they are oddly central to what she does. The piece that really put her on the map was about someone who disappeared off the map, in tragic circumstances. Disappearance at Sea (1996), the first of a series of multi-faceted works she made based on the story of Donald Crowhurst, a yachtsman who is thought to have faked a record of his progress in a round-the-world yacht race before going overboard, along with the vessel's chronometer. While her work struck a chord in the imagination of the wider public, that had, she says modestly, "more to do with Crowhurst than me". His was and is, she points out, a compelling story.
He doesn't feature in the substantial exhibition of her work currently running at the Hugh Lane Gallery. It concentrates on more recent projects including a strange, compelling film, Kodak (2006), in 16mm colour, that chronicles the last few days of production at a Kodak film factory in France. It is sombre and oblique. You have to adjust to its pace. As always with Dean, the camera is static, and what we see is delivered in the form of several continuous chunks of time: unbroken shots that apparently eschew much of the formal and technical possibilities of moving film. But Kodak is in large part an elegy for analogue film and, in an impassioned text piece related to the film - a pattern of working that Dean is fond of - she elaborates on her preference for analogue over digital.
It's clear that we are looking at the end of an era in Kodak, and that turned out to be even more the case than Dean thought at the time. The theory was that the plant would switch to the production of X-ray film, which is still in continuous demand. In the event, corporate economics decreed that it wouldn't happen, so the factory is gone, along with the expertise, built up over several decades, she points out, of the people who worked there. New technologies supplant old, but it's rarely a straightforward case of progress, as such. Something is usually lost along the way.
Dean likes the way analogue processes have an organic integrity in the way they produce a seamless "simulacrum" or "a continuous signal", as opposed to the way digital breaks things down into discrete bits and then reconstitutes them. For her, she writes, "it just does not have the means to make poetry". So long, unbroken takes are more in keeping with her liking for analogue than the frenetic montage typical of, say, today's Hollywood. But she is, as she has often commented, in thrall to the obsolete, to once visionary technologies or schemes that have become redundant. More, she is fascinated by failed utopias, futuristic ideas that inevitably turn out to be wide of the mark, so that they belong nowhere, neither to their own time nor to a mistakenly imagined future.
Dean was born in Canterbury, Kent, and studied at Falmouth and later at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She began as a painter or, she corrects herself: "It's often said that I trained as a painter, but the reality is that in art school you received no training whatsoever in painting as such. But it is true that everything I've done has been pictorial rather than sculptural." Everything is pictorial, in that it is image-based, but: "I've never managed to restrict myself to single images. They are always serial or multiple."
One form that is distinctly her own, for example, is the sequence of blackboard drawings, sometimes quite like storyboards. So starting to use film must have been a bit like arriving home. "There were a number of epiphanic moments along the way," she says. "I'd experimented with standard 8mm in Falmouth, and then with Super-8 at the Slade. I always liked working with it." While still at the Slade she made a film piece, Story of the Beard, which was important in a number of respects for her. It provided her with a model of research-based working, often drawing on archival material and imagery, and: "It was the first time I realised I could use a fiction, put across in an authoritative factual way."
All of these strands and methods have consistently informed her work since, though her use of voice-over developed into something else. "Disappearance at Sea was a turning point in that I was going to use a voice-over narration but it just didn't seem to work. And I haven't felt the need to return to voice-over ever since." But text has been important in other ways, written into the fabric of her multi-panel T&I (the initials deriving from the story of Tristan and Isolde), for example, or as sections of work in itself, often in the form of short, reflective essays. The late WG Sebald is mentioned in the handwritten notes that feature in T&I, and his meditative, circumlocutory, eclectic way of working is, if not a direct influence, certainly close in spirit to Dean's thinking.
At first glance, Presentation Sisters, the film she made as part of Cork 2005 (in a project curated by Sarah Glennie) might seem to stand apart in her oeuvre. It is a calm, considered look at the lives of a small community of nuns in Cork's South Presentation Convent. But of course, as with Kodak, it indirectly chronicles a disappearing world. The order of teaching nuns, she notes, and the community, in its way a small utopian community, "is rapidly becoming an anachronism" as vocations dwindle.
Given that the sea has played an important part in much of Dean's work to date, it is interesting to note that she has been based in Berlin since 2000. She smiles: "Yes, a totally landlocked city." But in any case, she points out, she travels a lot, and doesn't really miss proximity to the sea. What happened was that she was awarded a German Academic Exchange Service scholarship to Berlin in 2000. "I found that Berlin was just easier," she says, by way of explanation. "Compared to London I found there was more time in the day." The city was tailored to make life comfortable in many other ways as well, she felt. Coming towards the end of the year, she and her husband talked it over "and we thought, well, we don't have to go back". Appropriately, one feels, for an artist whose work dwells often on themes of disappearance.
Tacita Dean runs at the Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, Parnell Square, until June 17
