Tacita Dean
There is an inextricable link between our perception of time and our lived experience of the world. This is something Tacita Dean seems to instinctively understand. Her recent survey show at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne revealed a practice defined as much by its material specificity as by its engagement with the forces of history and the artefacts that are scattered in its wake.
Within Tacita Dean’s art, time appears to us not as an ever-forward moving current, but as a slippery and largely illusive field of relations that is always of the present. For Dean the very materiality of the world itself attests to this condition. Objects and images used in her art appear to embody both their essential presence and, just as importantly, a negotiable though nevertheless inescapable temporal significance. Across a range of work that uses photography, drawing, found objects and most tellingly 16mm film Dean revels in the power of these forms themselves to speak with a haunted illusiveness of the recent past.
It was this sense of the illusive past and the dormant potential it contains that Walter Benjamin identified as central to the surrealist’s engagements with the recently outmoded, the dispossessed and the forgotten. Listing a series of sites and objects ‘…the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct…’1 Benjamin observed of the surrealists that ‘They bring the immense forces of “atmosphere” concealed in these things to the point of explosion’.2 While the visual and conceptual approaches that Dean employs are far removed from the disruptive psychic spaces of surrealist art there is at work a resoundingly similar recognition of the ‘immense... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline