Tacita Dean Review

In his book The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Christopher Lasch uncannily predicted the perilous state of the contemporary subject. He anticipated a cultural landscape surplus with images of desire rendering the subject beholden to an amalgamation of preexisting material confronting them through the pervasive mediums of photography and the ever-present wallpaper of screen culture.¹ In 2024, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) exhibited a fragmented survey of Tacita Dean’s oeuvre. The works selected for this exhibition reveal an artist working in archival materials, and invested in historical citations and references points as a means of presenting something of herself. The exhibition, Tacita Dean, exemplifies Lasch’s articulation of the then-emerging and now-realised contemporary subject — a curated personality; a performing self forged by ‘an impenetrable network of social relations’ whose ‘only reality is the identity [s]he can construct out of materials furnished by … film and fiction, and fragments torn from a vast range of cultural traditions’.²

This survey is the largest exhibition of Dean's work in the Southern Hemisphere. It emphasises her video work alongside monumental chalk drawings, photography and archival object installations. Dean’s fixation on curation is woven throughout the exhibition and is poetically discussed in a recent film, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting (2020). The film is a conversation between painters Luchita Hurtado and Julie Mehretu. The women discuss their artistic lives across a vase of orchids and lilies. Hurtado and Mehretu meander on the topic of art history’s networked existence. They discuss the solidification of symbolic and textural intellectual richness. Their discussion exists like a labyrinth, moving between ideas of technique, recollections of artists and movements, and the realisation of their painterly practices. Hurtado and Mehretu are inadvertently discussing the curation of their artistic lives. In a way, the women mirror Dean’s own oeuvre. Much like Dean, Hurtado and Mehretu can only conceive of themselves and their work in relation to existing notions of what it means to be an artist.

In Dean’s video work, Claes Oldenburg draws Blueberry Pie (2023), the artist Claes Oldenburg very methodically works on drawing as he speaks of his work. In this film, Dean seems to conflate her artistic identity with Oldenburg. Manifesting what Norman Mailer conceives of when he notes, ‘the first art work in an artist is the shaping of his own personality’.³ These two films reveal Dean’s artistic inclination to curate her personality from preexisting materials. Her work, thus, becomes a navigation through the art historical web. A movement that seeks to ensure the artist’s status as a cultural figure.

The most intriguing work featured is Buon Fresco (2014). The film is composed of still frames — a composition that resembles a colour field abstraction. The film captures and abstracts Giotto di Bondone’s painting, The Life of St Francis (1296) in the Upper Basilica of St Francis of Assisi, Italy. Using a macro-lens and a mechanical lift, Dean sought to reproduce Giotto’s painting, emphasising his technique and material process. 

The MCA exhibition guide describes Dean’s artistic sensibility as a ‘sensuous’ approach ‘to the optical effects of colour and light’.⁴ The film and media professor Ágnes Pethő, in her essay on Dean’s Affective Immediately, emphasises how these sensations are but an augmentation of the structural whole. By emphasising the sensual, Dean abstracts Giotto but remains attached to his artistic persona. With Affective Immediately, Dean entices the audience to practise noticing. She is enticing a sensuous experience of Giotto’s painting. There is an ode to attention and contemplation, an element of the mystical. Yet, the fact that Dean so overtly associates herself with Giotto, through creative suggestion, perhaps partially obscures the attentive qualities of the film. Rather, Dean subverts the mystical, the unknown, and what could have been avant-garde. 

The sensuous quality of Dean’s films and the attentive rigour demanded is enticing. Dean emphasises the importance of looking and the banal. The experience of texture, stained grit and pentimenti within the opaque ambience of rolling film is transcendent as a practice. But culture demands more than appreciation. Culture demands the associative narrative. The material quality of Dean’s works is compelling, as her films embody an appreciation for the sake of pleasure. However, as Lasch suggested, the contemporary subject — and artist — no longer exists outside of the socialised web. Dean, as an artist, only exists within her curation of historical and textural references. The contemporary artist exists only as a fragment of the structural whole. Dean does not resist what Lasch proposes, rather, she bolsters her films by placing herself within a web of artistic lineage/s.

Georgia Puiatti is a writer and researcher with a background in Anthropology and Art History. She is interested in artistic practices that demarcate cultural identities. Her current research considers embodied art as an intuitive pedagogy.

• [1] Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, New York: Norton, 1979.
• [2] Ibid.,pp. 166-67.
• [3] Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1963, p. 284.
• [4] ‘Tacita Dean Exhibition Guide,’ Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2023-2024, https://www.mca.com.au/exhibitions/tacita-dean/exhibition-guide-en/.