Tacita Dean’s Truth in Materials
Instead of the slick stream of internet and AI imagery, the moving pictures projected onto a 31-foot-tall column are insistently material.
LOS ANGELES — There is a certain irony to the formal correspondence between the endless scroll of a social media feed and a spool of 35mm photographic film. But what Tacita Dean’s monumental 2011 installation, FILM, makes clear is that the similarities end there. Instead of the slick, frictionless stream of homogeneous imagery circulating the internet, polished by filters and increasingly artificially generated, the moving pictures projected onto a 31-foot-tall column are insistently material: grainy, flickering, mottled by dust and interrupted by flashes of overexposure.
Sit for a moment in the pool of light reflected off the polished floor, head tilted upward, listening to the projector’s low whirring, and you’ll understand why the artist argued that transitioning from film to digital would mean changing artistic mediums completely. “It is not only emulsion versus pixels,” Dean wrote in an op-ed for the Guardian, “or light versus electronics but something deeper — something to do with poetry.” The simmering shots of cathedral windows and vine-ripe tomatoes feel sensuous, even vital.
First commissioned for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, the 11-minute silent film makes its United States debut in the similarly cavernous Theater Gallery at the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles. The towering, vertical image, achieved by turning an anamorphic lens 90 degrees, looms like a colossal doorway in the dark. Sprocket holes that advance the celluloid through a projector border the composition, turning the screen into a massive film strip. Film is both Dean’s subject and her medium.
