tacita dean: JG, the medium of time

on

 i attended the last public encounters talk, where paul also presented. he mentioned the work by tacita dean, 'trying to find the spiral jetty', which i was interested in at first because it is an audio work.. i found links where it is talked about, and how she is interested in the fiction of sound..another kind of illusion.. and i think i am particularly interested in 'illusion' and 'fictional' Something that is usually logical e.g. diagrams or catalogue or archive.. also, as I read more about her ideas and work, I realise a lot of it has to do with time as well, which i think is major in my practice.. this still above with the clock is especially intriguing to me, making me think back to the video experimentation i did with the numerous clocks..

(On the work 'Disappearance at sea') "..The genesis behind the actual work was my investigations into Donald Crowhurst, who was the lone yachtsman who disappeared at sea in 1969. History has always attracted me, and I'm fascinated by fact and fiction. Crowhurst set off as an amateur sailor in 1968 as part of The Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. In 1967, Sir Francis Chicester had become the first man to succeed in sailing solo round the world, although he did have a stopover in Australia. So as a response to that, The Sunday Times issued a challenge for someone to do it without stopping. About eight people went in for it. Crowhurst, who was an amateur sailor in Teignmouth, Devon, and a married man with four children and a failing business, very naively took up the challenge and set off on October 31––the last possible date. This bright but fairly mediocre person set off to navigate the "unknown."

When he got halfway around the Atlantic, he realized that his boat wouldn't make it. So instead of giving up (this is where the story takes on this very curious quality), he decided to fake his journey. He cut off his radio contact, but the world started to fake his journey for him. He had a press agent in Teigenmouth who was saying, "He's past the Falkland Islands." Meanwhile, Crowhurst had entered into a psychological state that was, I think, mirrored by the state of the sea, which is where my interest in him comes from. All sailors have to have a chronometer to plot where they are in the world in relation to time in Greenwich and time on board the ship. Crowhurst committed a cardinal sin in sailing––he let his chronometer stop––and he lost all sense, not only of time, but of where he was in the mass of the ocean. He then suffered from what is known as "time madness," because he had no props to hang anything on. Five or six months later, his imagined journey caught up with where he was in the Atlantic. He re-opened radio contact, and he was winning the race. I think at about this point the became obsessed with his deceit, his great lie, in a huge, existential way. It's very sad, because he jumped overboard with his chronometer, and they only found his empty boat.."

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dean-disappearance-at-sea-t07455 Dean trained as a painter but began making films in 1992, producing works characterised by long takes and an exploration of narrative, memory and history.


this reminds me of one of Sugimoto's work I referenced in my dissertation:






"...You mention fact and fiction, and of course that recalls your installation for Tate's "Art Now" series, Foley Artist.

A foley artist is somebody who makes human sounds for cinema that can't be captured on film. When Tate asked me if I had an idea for "Art Now," I said I really wanted to make a fake soundtrack and that I was simultaneously very interested in foley artists and the whole idea of the fiction of sound you year. As the work progressed, I found out that ninety percent of cinema sound is fiction, which is such a glorious license. At Shepperton Studios, I actually faked a cinema––although it was only seven and a half minutes––using two foley artists. "



"In April of 1970, the American sculptor Robert Smithson travelled to the Great Salt Lake of Utah with tonnes of mud and rock to build a jetty. The result was a curved spiral earthwork sculpture that jutted mysteriously out of the lake. Soon to become one of the world’s most famous examples of land art, "Spiral Jetty" would later make an impression on the Berlin-based British artist Tacita Dean, becoming the impetus for her new film "JG" (2013), currently on view at the Frith Street gallery in London."

"However, in 1997 the jetty had not risen and I never found it, but I returned from Rozel Point with something perhaps more important: pieces of salinated tumbleweed and unrequited desire" - Tacita Dean.


"First black, now pink due to salt encrustations, Smithson also immortalised the mysterious coil in a short colour film of the same name. Decades later in 1997, Tacita Dean would go looking for Smithson’s spiral, and unable to find it, created a soundwork entitled “Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty” that would reach the ears and eyes of the cult English author J.G. Ballard. The artist and curator of the exhibition, Jeremy Millar, became convinced that Smithson had read Ballard’s short story “The Voices of Time” (1960), where a character draws a mandala on the bottom of a disused swimming pool. Ballard and Dean, as friends and correspondences, discussed Smithson and the jetty, until Ballard posed her a challenge. Dean should “treat the Spiral Jetty as a mystery her film would solve”


"From here emerges Dean’s new film “JG”(2013), a triadic communication between three artists that looks at parallel times and landscapes, engaging with both the tactility of analogue film and that of salt crystal landscapes. In “JG”, a montage of lush saline landscapes and natural scenes break off into different vistas and viewpoints; sometimes the screen splits into two, sometimes into a sprocket-holed three panels. Mostly filmed in the Great Salt Lake of Utah and California, this is an almost empty world of moving water, crystallised salt and marbled stone. The only creatures that seem to wriggle through this are armadillos, their skin flaps unfolding like the mysterious diggers and trucks that drill the landscape, seemingly unmanned. Occasionally, the actor Jim Broadbent’s silky voice appears as a voice-over that reads sections from Ballard’s story, as connections are drawn between the unwinding of a spiral jetty and that of the film reel. As with so much of Dean’s work, this is a love letter to film stock, and you can’t help but drool at the unabashed aestheticism of the film’s tone and technique. At once urgent and dreamy, we see the sprocket holes of a strip of 35 mm Ektachrome film, itself a reference to Ballard’s own 35mm camera, which his long-term partner gifted Dean before starting the shooting of the film.

Much of these effects are achieved through Dean’s labour-intensive technique of “aperture gate masking”, and in this sense, JG is a sequel in technique to her 2011 project at the Tate Turbine Hall “FILM”. First developed for the FILM project, this technique involves using different shaped masks to expose and re-expose film negatives within a single frame. By running the film through a camera multiple times, Dean is able to superimpose different landscapes, making one reality look like it’s appearing at the same time as another."


“c/o Jolyon” is the second part of Dean’s exhibition and appears in a rather eerily empty concrete basement room. In it, Dean has assembled one hundred postcards of the old German city of Kassel from the decades before WWII, before allied forces bombed most of the baroque and medieval city. Painting over these old postcards after a visit to the town, Dean adds delicate details, imbuing them with the whispers of a new life. An exhibition in two unrelated parts, “JG” and “c/o Jolyon” reflect a continuation on the thematic approaches of Dean’s work, including the processes of memory and historical record, communication between artists, and the physicality of landscape and film stock."

https://vimeo.com/60693341 tacita dean interview (on JG and the medium of time)