This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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About the ArtistTacita Dean is a British European artist born in Canterbury, England. She lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles, where she was the Artist in Residence at the Getty Research Institute in 2014-2015. Dean has been the recipient of numerous prizes including the Kurt Schwitters Prize, the Hugo Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale. Solo exhibitions have been held at MUDAM, Luxembourg; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Basel; Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo; NY Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen; Serralves Museum, Porto; Kunsthaus Bregenz, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; and a trifecta of exhibitions in London in 2018 at the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery, and The Royal Academy of Arts. The exhibition Face to Face: Portraits of Artists by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe and Catherine Opie at the International Center of Photography (running Jan 27–May 01, 2023) features two of Dean's films. |
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Tacita Dean, Mario Merz, 2002. 16mm color film, optical sound, 8 1/2 minutes. Film stills.
Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris
Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris
Truth in Photography: Could you talk about your process in terms of the relationship between photography and film in your work? How do you see or conceive the image that you set out to make?
Tacita Dean: Every project that I make comes from a different source. Historically, I've made films as artwork as opposed to as any other sort of document or entertainment. When I made some very early films, my reference point was painting more than photography or documentary. How do you depict a moment? Obviously, a still image is very different from how you would do it in a film. But it's about the creation of atmosphere, really. Using sound, detail, and light to create a moment in an afternoon or very, very small moments of time. That was very much the earlier films and what are being categorized as portrait films. My first film of an artist, Mario Merz, was just him one afternoon in Tuscany. The weather was changing, and a storm was coming. The sound was very, very important. It's eight and a half minutes, but it is that moment. It is that afternoon, and then it's gone. Time and place are so important in what I do. But then you've got works that do play on the still image like Buon Fresco, which is the film I made of the still images of the fresco of Saint Francis of Assisi by Giotto in the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi. So, very, very still. And my use of cinematography is also very still. I like things to happen inside the frame. I will wait for a very long time for a light to change or for a butterfly to fly across or something. There's the element of languor in it, too. But it does differ from photography quite substantially.
Tacita Dean: Every project that I make comes from a different source. Historically, I've made films as artwork as opposed to as any other sort of document or entertainment. When I made some very early films, my reference point was painting more than photography or documentary. How do you depict a moment? Obviously, a still image is very different from how you would do it in a film. But it's about the creation of atmosphere, really. Using sound, detail, and light to create a moment in an afternoon or very, very small moments of time. That was very much the earlier films and what are being categorized as portrait films. My first film of an artist, Mario Merz, was just him one afternoon in Tuscany. The weather was changing, and a storm was coming. The sound was very, very important. It's eight and a half minutes, but it is that moment. It is that afternoon, and then it's gone. Time and place are so important in what I do. But then you've got works that do play on the still image like Buon Fresco, which is the film I made of the still images of the fresco of Saint Francis of Assisi by Giotto in the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi. So, very, very still. And my use of cinematography is also very still. I like things to happen inside the frame. I will wait for a very long time for a light to change or for a butterfly to fly across or something. There's the element of languor in it, too. But it does differ from photography quite substantially.
Tacita Dean, Buon Fresco, 2014. 16mm color film, silent, 33 minutes. Film stills.
Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris
Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris
TiP: I find your work very engaging because if you take the approach that you're describing, then the work is at once ponderous but also evocative in unexpected ways. It's not preconceived, exactly.
Dean: It's never preconceived. I never know what I'm doing ahead of doing it. That's very important. It courts a sort of blindness. I work very much as an editor in that way. I never storyboard. I just have to see what happens, and then that becomes the material.
TiP: Talk a little bit more about this idea of blindness.
Dean: Film is quite blind because you trust in something that's happening inside this dark box. Increasingly with the films I made where I put many exposures on top of each other, that is so blind. But also, my process is blind. I just cannot know what I'm doing because then I lose interest. It's a strange thing. I've always talked and always relied on coincidence and contingency and accident. Rather uncomfortably so. It would be better to be more knowing than I am. I often talk about objective chance as a means to make something. Allowing my journey to be interrupted and to go in a different way. I do rely on these strategies, actually. But it's the not knowing what I'm doing that is a paralyzing thing sometimes, too. It doesn't make for an easy journey at all.
TiP: Could you talk about the pieces that they're showing at the International Center of Photography?
Dean: They're showing two 16-millimeter films: Portraits and One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting. Portraits is a film I made with David Hockney, and it's filmed in Hollywood Hills where he lived. It's basically David smoking five cigarettes. Each cigarette has a different personality. The reason it's called Portraits is that he's working on a huge series of portraits, including one that he painted of my son, who was ten years at the time, which was still on an easel within the frame of the film when I made it. I suddenly realized it was very reflective of what portraiture is. So, I pluralized the title because it includes his five portraits of five cigarettes and then David's portraits of all the people that were around him when I filmed him. And it was very reflexive.
Dean: It's never preconceived. I never know what I'm doing ahead of doing it. That's very important. It courts a sort of blindness. I work very much as an editor in that way. I never storyboard. I just have to see what happens, and then that becomes the material.
TiP: Talk a little bit more about this idea of blindness.
Dean: Film is quite blind because you trust in something that's happening inside this dark box. Increasingly with the films I made where I put many exposures on top of each other, that is so blind. But also, my process is blind. I just cannot know what I'm doing because then I lose interest. It's a strange thing. I've always talked and always relied on coincidence and contingency and accident. Rather uncomfortably so. It would be better to be more knowing than I am. I often talk about objective chance as a means to make something. Allowing my journey to be interrupted and to go in a different way. I do rely on these strategies, actually. But it's the not knowing what I'm doing that is a paralyzing thing sometimes, too. It doesn't make for an easy journey at all.
TiP: Could you talk about the pieces that they're showing at the International Center of Photography?
Dean: They're showing two 16-millimeter films: Portraits and One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting. Portraits is a film I made with David Hockney, and it's filmed in Hollywood Hills where he lived. It's basically David smoking five cigarettes. Each cigarette has a different personality. The reason it's called Portraits is that he's working on a huge series of portraits, including one that he painted of my son, who was ten years at the time, which was still on an easel within the frame of the film when I made it. I suddenly realized it was very reflective of what portraiture is. So, I pluralized the title because it includes his five portraits of five cigarettes and then David's portraits of all the people that were around him when I filmed him. And it was very reflexive.
Tacita Dean, Portraits, 2016. 16mm color film, optical sound, 16 minutes. Film stills.
Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris
Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris
One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting is a conversation between Luchita Hurtado and Julie Mehretu, entirely as a result of the coincidence that they share a birthday. I realized at a certain point that Luchita was going to be 100 in 2020 and Julie was going to be 50 in 2020. On the same day, the 28th of November. I just had the title first. They're both painters, they're both these amazing, wonderful women, and I just thought, my God, I've really got to make a film with these two, and I want to call it One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting. I want to give it this very grand title. Then it was scrambled together very, very quickly. And I'm really glad it exists, because I only decided to do it at Christmas 2019. And we filmed on the 3rd of January 2020. And then, of course, the world changed with the pandemic. And Luchita died and didn't make it to 100. And so, it's this document of this amazing conversation between these two women filmed one day in Santa Monica, this beautiful kind of sunlit room belonging to Luchita. It's a loop and it goes round and round. It's something that was born out of chance.
Tacita Dean, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting, 2021. 16mm color film, optical sound, 50 1/2 minutes, continuous loop. Film stills.
Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris
Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris
TiP: What is a portrait? In what ways does a portrait, or can a portrait reveal truth about the individual? What's the objective of making a portrait?
Dean: I would never pursue truth about an individual. I never call them portraits. It’s a term imposed on them from elsewhere that I sometimes lightly adopt. For me, it's about, not a truth, it’s about an essence. It's an essence that is so located in the locality of a moment of their lives. Building up the atmosphere around it is really important. It's not the truth of any one of the people I film. But it is their presence and existence on that afternoon, or on that morning, alongside everything else that happened, the noise from the street, the weather. And I would never dare to call that truth.
TiP: That is a fantastic answer. When you talk about truth, the number of different answers is remarkable in a way.
Dean: We’ve lost touch with truth, haven’t we? The world has lost touch with the truth completely. It feels like that increasingly, we're in jeopardy in relation to truth.
TiP: The idea of the essence is really interesting to me, because the moment becomes essential. How do you know, when you're either photographing or filming, that you're achieving that? What reveals that? Do have a sense in the process of making, or is it in the process of editing?
Dean: Well, it’s funny, because I know when I don't get it, you know? I know when that alchemy is not there. One of my enemies really is self-consciousness. I have to get to a point where whoever I'm filming is no longer aware of the camera in a very self-conscious way. So how I pursue that is very particular. I risk having bad sound so people don't have to have mics. I concentrate on detail with hands a lot. What people do with their hands and with their bodies is something I can really get, because I use time, that maybe photography can't get in the same way. I concentrate on the details that are often considered secondary, but I always think that they're quite primary.
Dean: I would never pursue truth about an individual. I never call them portraits. It’s a term imposed on them from elsewhere that I sometimes lightly adopt. For me, it's about, not a truth, it’s about an essence. It's an essence that is so located in the locality of a moment of their lives. Building up the atmosphere around it is really important. It's not the truth of any one of the people I film. But it is their presence and existence on that afternoon, or on that morning, alongside everything else that happened, the noise from the street, the weather. And I would never dare to call that truth.
TiP: That is a fantastic answer. When you talk about truth, the number of different answers is remarkable in a way.
Dean: We’ve lost touch with truth, haven’t we? The world has lost touch with the truth completely. It feels like that increasingly, we're in jeopardy in relation to truth.
TiP: The idea of the essence is really interesting to me, because the moment becomes essential. How do you know, when you're either photographing or filming, that you're achieving that? What reveals that? Do have a sense in the process of making, or is it in the process of editing?
Dean: Well, it’s funny, because I know when I don't get it, you know? I know when that alchemy is not there. One of my enemies really is self-consciousness. I have to get to a point where whoever I'm filming is no longer aware of the camera in a very self-conscious way. So how I pursue that is very particular. I risk having bad sound so people don't have to have mics. I concentrate on detail with hands a lot. What people do with their hands and with their bodies is something I can really get, because I use time, that maybe photography can't get in the same way. I concentrate on the details that are often considered secondary, but I always think that they're quite primary.
Tacita Dean, Buon Fresco, 2014. 16mm color film, silent, 33 minutes. Film stills.
Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris
Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris
TiP: The idea of smoking five cigarettes is very evocative. What gave you that idea?
Dean: I was new to L.A. and I'd had dinner with David Hockney. I noticed that David had a very idiosyncratic way of holding a cigarette. I had just made Buon Fresco, which is all done with a macro lens. It was really, really detailed. So you could see the fingernails of Saint Francis or the friars. And I said to David, I'd love to make a film just of you smoking, because your hands are so wonderful. David is fanatical about smoking and keeping his right to smoke. I asked him if I could do it, and he said he'd happily sit for me. He used the language of portraiture. He's a heavy smoker. But after that film, he didn't really want to smoke immediately again for a while. I think I smoked him out briefly.
Dean: I was new to L.A. and I'd had dinner with David Hockney. I noticed that David had a very idiosyncratic way of holding a cigarette. I had just made Buon Fresco, which is all done with a macro lens. It was really, really detailed. So you could see the fingernails of Saint Francis or the friars. And I said to David, I'd love to make a film just of you smoking, because your hands are so wonderful. David is fanatical about smoking and keeping his right to smoke. I asked him if I could do it, and he said he'd happily sit for me. He used the language of portraiture. He's a heavy smoker. But after that film, he didn't really want to smoke immediately again for a while. I think I smoked him out briefly.
TiP: It seems that part of that essence is the person and the visual compositional elements, but it seems that there's also this underpinning of humor. What's the role of humor in your work?
Dean: It's more that I treat anybody I film with a massive amount of affection. I think sometimes affection borders on humor in a strange way. I endeavor to have a light touch. With David, it ends with a laugh. And when he laughs, you laugh with him. You can't not laugh with him. It's so contagious. I guess in the editing, that’s probably where it might come out. The humor. It's not something I deliberately seek, it's something that I might find.
TiP: Too many of the cinematographers I used to hire developed terrible back problems as they aged, because carrying 16-millimeter cameras and running around is very demanding. Are you still shooting with a 16-millimeter camera?
Dean: Yes. On both of those films, I used a crew though. I didn't do it myself. Partly for the exact reason you just said, I physically can't handle it anymore. But also, I've never been a happy technician. I have done some films myself, but they're always out of focus. And I have such a drop-off. I never really understood light meters. I'm not a good technician, so I prefer if I just employ someone who is a technician to do it.
TiP: Have you ever used your iPhone?
Dean: No. I've sort of staked my soul on trying to fight for 16 and 35 millimeter and keep it going. I just have to be the person that holds out.
TiP: Could you talk more about One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting?
Dean: That was filmed in Santa Monica, in Luchita Hurtado’s house. It was done in a seat-of-your-pants way. I only got it together in just a few days. It was just very lucky that Luchita lived in California and Julie Mehretu was coming down for New Year’s. I managed to get my crew and my cameraman there, and it all came about very gracefully in a way. It had to be a loop. It had to be continuous. There was to be no start and end. There was to be no fade to black, no finality. Julie did a magnificent job because Luchita was 99 and still utterly vital and articulate. Luchita had recently had some success with her career, and she'd gone into a sort of interview mode, so it was much more difficult for Julie to bypass that and find a different journey to talk about. But it's very, very beautiful, some of the areas of discussion that they enter into. There’s something very profound within it. Especially with the age difference: they're 50 years apart to the day. And they're both such joyful and exuberant and attractive women, and the discussion about their painting and their process and their love of color. There were huge connections between them. It was just so much love and joy and respect within that whole interaction. It could have gone so wrong, but it just worked. Partly because they're both such exceptionally generous and wonderful people.
Dean: It's more that I treat anybody I film with a massive amount of affection. I think sometimes affection borders on humor in a strange way. I endeavor to have a light touch. With David, it ends with a laugh. And when he laughs, you laugh with him. You can't not laugh with him. It's so contagious. I guess in the editing, that’s probably where it might come out. The humor. It's not something I deliberately seek, it's something that I might find.
TiP: Too many of the cinematographers I used to hire developed terrible back problems as they aged, because carrying 16-millimeter cameras and running around is very demanding. Are you still shooting with a 16-millimeter camera?
Dean: Yes. On both of those films, I used a crew though. I didn't do it myself. Partly for the exact reason you just said, I physically can't handle it anymore. But also, I've never been a happy technician. I have done some films myself, but they're always out of focus. And I have such a drop-off. I never really understood light meters. I'm not a good technician, so I prefer if I just employ someone who is a technician to do it.
TiP: Have you ever used your iPhone?
Dean: No. I've sort of staked my soul on trying to fight for 16 and 35 millimeter and keep it going. I just have to be the person that holds out.
TiP: Could you talk more about One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting?
Dean: That was filmed in Santa Monica, in Luchita Hurtado’s house. It was done in a seat-of-your-pants way. I only got it together in just a few days. It was just very lucky that Luchita lived in California and Julie Mehretu was coming down for New Year’s. I managed to get my crew and my cameraman there, and it all came about very gracefully in a way. It had to be a loop. It had to be continuous. There was to be no start and end. There was to be no fade to black, no finality. Julie did a magnificent job because Luchita was 99 and still utterly vital and articulate. Luchita had recently had some success with her career, and she'd gone into a sort of interview mode, so it was much more difficult for Julie to bypass that and find a different journey to talk about. But it's very, very beautiful, some of the areas of discussion that they enter into. There’s something very profound within it. Especially with the age difference: they're 50 years apart to the day. And they're both such joyful and exuberant and attractive women, and the discussion about their painting and their process and their love of color. There were huge connections between them. It was just so much love and joy and respect within that whole interaction. It could have gone so wrong, but it just worked. Partly because they're both such exceptionally generous and wonderful people.
Tacita Dean, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting, 2021. 16mm color film, optical sound, 50 1/2 minutes, continuous loop. Film stills.
Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris
Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris
TiP: It’s always difficult to film interactions between two people. When you were shooting that, were you using two cameras?
Dean: I used two cameras and then one of my cameras went down. There was a technical problem. So, for a large amount of it, I just had one camera. The editing in that, which will totally disappear for people who don't understand how huge an artifice editing is, was not easy at all. Luchita, fortunately, spoke quite slowly, so borrowing frames between her syllables enabled me to get from one moment to the next. People don't have any instinct or understanding anymore about the art of editing, really, and what's involved. But I still edit on my cutting table, so it's very physical. What happened is that I shot it on January 3rd, 2020. I came back to Berlin on the 5th of January. And then, at the beginning of March, obviously, the world closed. And I had the rushes here. But I just couldn’t do it. I was paralyzed. Only in September did I start the long job of trying to edit this film, to make it a moment in time, to make it seamless, to make it a continuum, to make it a conversation. It took me months and months to edit it in order for it to look like it was a quick conversation. We filmed for a whole day, and the light changed. It's, as you can imagine, very, very hard. But that's the point of filming cutaways. To film details and hands. It was a job. Only people that actually know what it's like to edit with one camera understand. The camera operator is trying to change position and you have stuff you can't use. For me it's about bridging from one shot to the next shot without doing a jump cut, which I never do. I'm quite a formal filmmaker. Without resorting to my limited cutaways that sometimes work, sometimes don't, I just had to find ways of crossing that gap by stealing moments between words from Luchita. It was really a big job. It was very, very labored. But it looks effortless, which is, of course, the best thing one can do, is to try and make it look effortless.
TiP: Are you editing to sound?
Dean: This was a lip sync film, obviously. But sound and image are completely autonomous. They're separate things. I think this is one of the major profound differences between digital and film, is that basically film arrives back silent, so you see it and perceive it first silent. There's something very beautiful and undiscussed about that. Then you create the soundtrack as a second level of artifice, so that they're both independent of each other. And that's very much the nature of film. But with digital, it's not the same thing at all. They come together. It's an act of bravery to take it apart because you've known it with that sound. And it becomes something else.
I have films where I cut them entirely silently and the soundtrack is something that I do later in a totally other way. I do digital sound post-production. I have a ludicrous process because I film on 16 mil and I record my sound digitally, and then the sound goes to mag and then it goes back to digital and then ends back as analog.
TiP: That is a very arduous process.
Dean: I do believe that the labor involved in making a film somehow is residual in that film. People always say, what's the difference between a work made by me on 16 millimeter and a digital thing? That labor is embedded somehow, in the silences. There's a lot of things embedded in film which you somehow perceive, even if not consciously. And I have to believe that that's why it has a different quality that's worth fighting for.
Dean: I used two cameras and then one of my cameras went down. There was a technical problem. So, for a large amount of it, I just had one camera. The editing in that, which will totally disappear for people who don't understand how huge an artifice editing is, was not easy at all. Luchita, fortunately, spoke quite slowly, so borrowing frames between her syllables enabled me to get from one moment to the next. People don't have any instinct or understanding anymore about the art of editing, really, and what's involved. But I still edit on my cutting table, so it's very physical. What happened is that I shot it on January 3rd, 2020. I came back to Berlin on the 5th of January. And then, at the beginning of March, obviously, the world closed. And I had the rushes here. But I just couldn’t do it. I was paralyzed. Only in September did I start the long job of trying to edit this film, to make it a moment in time, to make it seamless, to make it a continuum, to make it a conversation. It took me months and months to edit it in order for it to look like it was a quick conversation. We filmed for a whole day, and the light changed. It's, as you can imagine, very, very hard. But that's the point of filming cutaways. To film details and hands. It was a job. Only people that actually know what it's like to edit with one camera understand. The camera operator is trying to change position and you have stuff you can't use. For me it's about bridging from one shot to the next shot without doing a jump cut, which I never do. I'm quite a formal filmmaker. Without resorting to my limited cutaways that sometimes work, sometimes don't, I just had to find ways of crossing that gap by stealing moments between words from Luchita. It was really a big job. It was very, very labored. But it looks effortless, which is, of course, the best thing one can do, is to try and make it look effortless.
TiP: Are you editing to sound?
Dean: This was a lip sync film, obviously. But sound and image are completely autonomous. They're separate things. I think this is one of the major profound differences between digital and film, is that basically film arrives back silent, so you see it and perceive it first silent. There's something very beautiful and undiscussed about that. Then you create the soundtrack as a second level of artifice, so that they're both independent of each other. And that's very much the nature of film. But with digital, it's not the same thing at all. They come together. It's an act of bravery to take it apart because you've known it with that sound. And it becomes something else.
I have films where I cut them entirely silently and the soundtrack is something that I do later in a totally other way. I do digital sound post-production. I have a ludicrous process because I film on 16 mil and I record my sound digitally, and then the sound goes to mag and then it goes back to digital and then ends back as analog.
TiP: That is a very arduous process.
Dean: I do believe that the labor involved in making a film somehow is residual in that film. People always say, what's the difference between a work made by me on 16 millimeter and a digital thing? That labor is embedded somehow, in the silences. There's a lot of things embedded in film which you somehow perceive, even if not consciously. And I have to believe that that's why it has a different quality that's worth fighting for.
Tacita Dean, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting, 2021. 16mm color film, optical sound, 50 1/2 minutes, continuous loop. Installation view Tacita Dean, Mudam, Luxembourg, 2022. Photograph by Remi Villaggi. Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris