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Published in Sight & Sound, June 2010
Dean has a habit of chopping her wide screen into discrete-and a fearless willingness to let nothing happen in some of those segments for minutes on end. It’s a technique that pays off in some heart-stopping scenes: the sudden appearance of an exhausted dancer in the space beside a close-up Cunningham; the ponderous looming into shot of a huge ship in the harbour: the almost prissy movement of a thin mast behind the robust bodies of the dancers.
Related Exhibitions: Tacita Dean: Craneway Event
Published in The Daily Telegraph, May 2010
In November 2008, she recorded three days of rehearsals for one of his “events” – selections from his works specially staged. But he died the following year, aged 90, before her film was finished. That turns an artistic record of one of the most important figures in contemporary dance into something more: an elegy, an epitaph, a memorial to the genius of creation. It is 110 minutes long, shown at specific times, and though you can wander in and out, it is so magical that you won’t want to.
Related Exhibitions: Tacita Dean: Craneway Event
Published in The Observer, May 2010
Anyone familiar with Dean’s work will know that the rehearsal itself is not likely to be the main event. Rather, she notices the totality of the scene: the grids of the windows like hundreds of picture frames on the landscape beyond, the cavernous space, the liquid sheen of the floor with its ever-changing reflections. Her cameras drink in the sunshine. Occasionally, a dancer slides into shot, or a ship glides past, but it gradually becomes apparent that these are Cunningham’s preoccupations, too, precisely what inspire the wonderful abstractions of his choreography.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/may/09/tacita-dean-merce-cunningham-review
Related Exhibitions: Tacita Dean: Craneway Event
Published in The Guardian , April 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/apr/27/merce-cunningham-tacita-dean
Related Exhibitions: Tacita Dean: Craneway Event
Published in Flash Art , January 2010
In another work, ‘Still Life’ (2009), Dean filmed the sheets of paper where Morandi traced the position of his objects, moving them around in the search of the perfect composition. These sheets are crisscrossed with hundreds of marks and lines, showing the infinite possible combination that led to each still life. As far as I know, this is the first time they have been made public: an important contribution to art history, but also a unique testament to a lifetime devoted to painting. Morandi’s involuntary drawings - his “accidental Twomblys”, as Dean calls them- are the cartography of an obsession, maps of an immobile existence spent between the four walls of a studio, weaving arabesques in an attempt to sort out that infinite chaos that is life.
Published in The Guardian , December 2009
Tacita Dean is an artist I revere. This year, she’s done the Tate Christmas tree; it is typical of her unostentatious and honest art. An ordinary Christmas tree stands in the entrance hall of London’s Tate Britain. Its only unusual aspect is to be lit by real candles, instead of electric fairylights. Lit every day at 4pm, the candles burn down as the sun sets. Time visibly passes.
Published in The New York Times, November 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/arts/dance/05dean.html?_r=1&scp=74&sq=Alastair+Macaulay&st=nyt
Published in ARTFORUM, October 2009
Some time after we worked together on ‘“Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS”, Merce asked me to collaborate with him on an Event. Through CalArts, Merce and Trevor Carlston, the executive director of the company, had found this huge space in Richmond-a former Ford factory.
I didn’t want to film the performance but the rehearsal. I couldn’t even stay for the actual Event. I filmed for four days-the first day it was raining and Merce just looked at the space. The next few days, the dancers came. There were pelicans everywhere, and the craneway was surrounded by glass., it was stunning light. Coincidentally, we filmed November 3-6 last year to do it. Obama was elected on the first day in the film, but I resisted putting any reference to that.
Published in Art in America, 23 October 2009
I am in the unique position of still being able to work with Merce Cunningham. I encounter him daily, listening to him and taking my cues from him, as I spend my summer cutting the film we decided to make together last year. His death has meant I have lost the pleasure in imagining him watching it, so in that sense I have lost my muse, but the film cannot change as a result of this: it is about Merce and his dancers, in a particular place and at a particular time. I am just very sad that he will never see it.
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/a-tribute-to-merce/
Published in The Guardian, 10 August 2009
Tacita Dean’s film Presentation Sisters towers above everything else here. The 18th-century philosopher Denis Diderot argued that truly worthwhile art must reject the triviality of theatre – of conscious performance – and instead depict characters whose absorption in their activities makes us in turn forget ourselves. This was an Enlightenment definition of serious art, and Dean’s film, a portrait of women living in a religious community in Ireland, fulfils it. Presentation Sisters homes in on mundane daily activities and finds infinite beauty in them: doing the laundry, preparing breakfast, making a cup of tea.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/aug/10/art-edinburgh-enlightenment-eva-hesse
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