Tacita Dean’s waiting game

Tacita Dean is a master of the long game. Apart from when, as I’m currently observing, she’s getting her portrait taken. I’m at Frith Street Gallery’s space on Golden Square, waiting for my interview. Dean is fresh from a delayed flight from Berlin airport (cyber attack), and emits a cool, charismatic impatience, sparkling with wit. She gestures ‘five’ with her hand, the number of shots our photographer, Gabby Laurent, has left. The mood is jovial, the pressure is palpable. And if Dean can exert this on one of her own, I imagine she’ll eat me alive. I was wrong about the eating, right about the wit.

When the shoot concludes, I walk with Dean towards a fishbowl office to conduct the interview in view of the entire gallery workforce. Someone turns on a fluorescent light, but it’s too much – Dean, wearied from a rough flight; me, sleep deprived from a night spent neurotically re-watching Tacita Dean interviews. “We like being in the dark”, she says.

I’m unsure where to begin, so I open with a remark about blank canvases; something about how, for some, they’re an opportunity for renewal, and for others, they’re loaded, pregnant things. For Dean, the idea of working on a surface manufactured for the application of art is akin to stage fright. She prefers working on found objects, like slates, the less clean the better. She’s been working on grey school slates for around a decade and recently salvaged some that had been painted green (a 20th-century trend in schools thought to reduce glare). “Sometimes they’ve got ‘fuck’ written on them, but I’m not a fetishist. I’m not really interested in the history of it. I’m interested in the marks,” she says. There’s one of these in the show, Snail-slow, overlain with coalescing white and blue tendrils of chalk and powdered pigment.

Elsewhere on the walls are Dean’s Locomotive works. The majority depict classical subjects – Promanteia, Pan and Hermes. The drawings are beautiful, delicate, but again, I’m more interested in what they’re drawn on – this time, it’s Victorian train carriage windows. Dean liked their scratches and how they mirror the format of a film frame; along the edges, she added translucent squares suggesting sprocket holes. We discuss the parallels between the advent of film and innovations in the speed of train travel in the early 20th century; train windows, she says, seem to “cut up the landscape” like frames.

Last year, to mark the 30th anniversary of the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil Collection, Houston, Dean was commissioned to take up a residency. A “total fan” of the American painter and sculptor (she even wrote her university thesis on him), of course she agreed. She spent a month in Houston, planning to write a book about Twombly, trying to “trap her fleeting thoughts,” but nothing came. “I don’t know what it was, but nothing went through my head. I just couldn’t behave in the way I thought. The only thing that I could do was bring it to a sort of crisis point, you know, where I had to do something. So I asked if I could spend the night there. I had to make it urgent. I had to have parameters and have something to agitate the thinking, because it wasn’t happening.”

No one had slept over in the Cy Twombly Gallery before, but after many layers of permission, the museum granted Dean’s wish. She wandered around, made a bed on a hard bench, didn’t sleep, and copied Twombly’s handwriting in her notebook. Exhausted, she finally got her camera out and started spinning it around chaotically on a low exposure. She liked to imagine this was a little how Twombly worked in paint. “I realised it was an impossible commission, so I started to play around with what I call a sort of lassitude, a sort of indolent laziness,” she says, flicking through the book, Why Cy, which resulted from the residency. It’s filled with full colour and black-and-white images capturing Twombly’s spirals and vortexes – somehow even more frantic and intoxicating – alongside Dean’s hand-written notes. “Only at the end of this protracted process can you go to the lab, process it, and see what you’ve done.”

In her 16mm film, The Green Ray (2001), Dean sought to capture a different phenomenon: the splash of green light that occurs just before the sun dips into the horizon. Few have seen it, fewer have captured it. As the story goes, Dean was on a beach on the west coast of Madagascar, gazing across the Mozambique Channel, pointing her film camera at the sunset. Beside her were two others doing the same, but with a digital camera. When they played their footage back, the green ray was not there. For them, it was proof that it had also eluded Dean. Of course, she’d have to wait until she got back to the lab to fight her case. When she did, there it was, nestled between celluloid film frames “having proved itself too elusive for the pixelation of the digital world,” as she said in an accompanying text. For Dean, this was proof that analogue photography has the capacity to capture things digital cannot. “I think there’s tremendous power in not seeing everything,” she tells me. “I don’t think everything humans do is great, and to allow the medium to do something that you can’t control, is pretty wonderful, and it rewards you, but people are terrified of it”.

Dean has captured many an eclipse in her career, on a trip to Eagle Pass, Texas in 2024, she just wanted to watch it. She sat on a deck chair looking at the sky, taking it all in. But when the moment came, she caved and got her camera out, but like she did in the Twombly gallery, she didn’t look through the viewfinder, she just spun, snapped, and waited. The results are high on the walls of Frith Street Gallery, dancing loops of light seared onto black. “These were just miraculous. I thought, my God, this is drawing with the sun – you can see the bite of the moon.”

More recently, Dean says she’s “gone off photography” and takes her camera with her less and less. Polaroids are different and they also appear in the Frith Street show. They mostly depict feet and hands; I’m most drawn to a hand-drawn note that reads, “Oh God.” The medium seems to evoke the same sensibility as the found surfaces for Dean: “[Polaroid] is somehow trashy and kind of suits me better,” she says. “I got this piece of shit camera, and I suddenly found out that it does double, triple and quadruple exposure. It’s like how I drive a Rent-a-Wreck in LA. No one can understand why I do that, but it’s just so much more relaxing to drive a car that is trash than a car that is not trash.”

Dean is one of the most prominent advocates for the preservation of analogue film as an artistic medium. Her argument is that digital should not be considered an inevitable replacement of film, but another medium altogether. “Veracity and truth are things that have become so slippery. If you take a photograph with an analogue camera, no one has interfered with that. It’s an authentic act. What authentic acts are left? Increasingly very, very few”, she says. I note the renewed interest in film photography in recent years and ask if she thinks this is nostalgia, or something else. “It’s to do with materiality, I think. Nostalgia is such a misunderstood word. We are all a bit nostalgic for a time before. I have a friend who said this great thing: soon nostalgia will be a thing of the past. I’ve been saying for years we need to rely on young people, because at a certain point they are going to get so frustrated with the digital universe – they already are,” she sighs. “And AI is so unreliable… It’s just going to keep eating itself.”

I ask if Dean’s ever fallen victim to AI’s talent for turning rumour into record. “It’s criminal!”, she exclaims. “I just became a YBA. I was never one before. They’ve also got me in the ‘General Release: Young British Artists’ show [Venice Biennale, 1995] – I was dropped!”

Before my interview, I’d spent an hour in Frith Street’s downstairs gallery with Dean’s new film, If I were in the Adlon, which documents one hot afternoon with Ukrainian artist Boris Mikhailov (who Dean first collaborated with in 2013), and his wife, muse, and collaborator, Vita, at Berlin’s Adlon hotel.

The project came about when a friend of Dean’s won a night’s stay at the hotel in a Tombola. “She said to me, ‘do you want it?’ And I thought maybe I can ask Boris and Vita there, because I was trying to think of something, like my night with Cy that would offer, as you say, a parameter.”

It’s a captivating piece of filmmaking. The couple, from Kharkiv, speak in Russian, and there are no subtitles. Even if you don’t speak Russian, you may find yourself smiling along regardless, because beneath all that heavy symbolism is just a couple in mundanity; bickering, messing around with loo roll, playing Dada-esque dress-up, embracing – communicating in ways that words don’t. “I’m glad you say that, because I was under some pressure to translate it”, says Dean. “But the nuance, you don’t get from a translation.”

In one scene, Boris hangs a work from If I Were a German over the balcony of the hotel, a collaborative project made with Vita and other members of the Ukrainian contemporary art collective Fast Reaction Group in which they dressed up and acted out scenes from the German occupation during WWII. The significance of dangling such an image in view of the Brandenburg Gate and the Russian Embassy is not lost, nor is the fact that this was also the hotel where Michael Jackson dangled his baby, Blanket over the balcony.

Later on, Boris climbs into the bath and reads a text in Ukrainian next to a beaten up copy of Jacques-Louis David’s painting The Death of Marat. The scene is laden with symbolism – how those experiencing war use bathtubs to shelter during bombings, how journalist and politician of the French Revolution, Marat was assassinated in his bathtub, how photographer Lee Miller was photographed in 1945 taking a bath in Hitler’s tub on the same day of his suicide. “Everything made sense, in a way. It was weird. If you trust, things happen.”

One of the only creative decisions Dean made from then was to bring her partner, Mathew Hale into the film, and to arrange the delivery of a vodka and honey cake (At 60 Frith Street is a concurrent exhibition, a kind of behind-the-scenes of the film). “I didn’t give them any ideas about what to do,” says Dean. “You don’t know what they’re saying to each other, and it never matters.”

Some might see aspects of Dean’s process as reckless, long, unnecessary: making use of awkward, discarded surfaces, driving a “trash” car, going in blind, dedicating herself to analogue – not because she’s nostalgic, but because that way, she sees more. Dean appears to actively choose what others might consider the hard way, and that’s why her work moves, even when it’s still.

I see Dean tiring a little and draw the interview to a close. Before we part, she returns to the earlier drama in Berlin airport, explaining that when the IT system packed in, airport staff resorted to reciting passengers’ boarding passes via a convoluted phone system. She sighs, “Why couldn’t they just print them?”