“I’ve always been
slightly afraid of actors,” Tacita Dean says, midway through talking about
Woman with a Red Hat, her enticingly named exhibition that forms the
Fruitmarket Gallery’s contribution to this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival. Given
that Woman with a Red Hat, which opens hot on the heels of a trilogy of solo
exhibitions running concurrently across London, is based entirely around
theatrical performance, this sounds like an odd thing to say. Especially as its
centre-piece, Event for a Stage (2015), is an hour-long film featuring a solo performance by Tony award-winning
actor Stephen Dillane in a black box theatre space dressed as Oedipus.
“Working with
Stephen was a huge learning curve for me,” says Dean, whose artistic career
began with the YBA generation, and who was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in
1998. “I don’t think I work with actors in a functional way, and that’s all to
do with my inability, willfully or otherwise, to work within linear narrative
cinema. I tell stories, but I struggle with linear narrative, and I wonder why
I can’t go there.”
Event for a
Stage was commissioned for the Sydney Biennale and filmed over four nights in an
auditorium where Dean hands Dillane pages of a script one by one from the front
row. There are reminiscences about Dillane’s family, lines from Shakespeare’s
play, The Tempest, and story-telling, while the actor also
announces the changing of film reels for the two cameras filming him.
Actors feature
in three shorter films on show. In A Muse (2017), Ben Whishaw reaches out
through space and time to poet and essayist Anne Carson. Providence (2017) sees
David Warner transported to a field of hummingbirds. As a kind of grand finale,
His Picture in Little (2017) brings together the three actors, who have all
played Hamlet, a line from which gives the film its title. The oldest piece in the
exhibition is Foley Artist (1996), a sound-work which in part features Tim
Piggot-Smith performing lines from Henry IV Part Two.
“I used Ben
and David in the tradition of art and not in the tradition of acting,” says
Dean. “It’s a bit like asking them to sit for a portrait. Actors are
uncomfortable if they’re not being directed, even in a small way.”
While in no
way calculated, a sense of theatre has permeated throughout much of Dean’s
work. It was there perhaps most explicitly in her film of Merce Cunningham and
company dancing to John Cage’s composition, 4’33 (2008). It was there again in
Play as Cast (2004/2005), which enlarged a monochrome production shot of a play
onto the safety curtain of Vienna Opera House as part of an ongoing series of
work by contemporary artists. Then there is Die Regimentstochter (2005), a
group of thirty-six vintage theatre and opera programmes she found in a German
fleamarket. There is drama here too.
“There’s
something cut out of the front page of each of them, so you can see the next
page coming through,” Dean says. “They look like found collages, until you
realise that someone’s cut the swastika from each of them. You don’t know if
that was an act of rebellion, or an act of obedience when the swastika became
illegal, so there’s this ambivalence to them.”
Dean sat on
them for a while, showed them at her 2006 show at Tate St Ives, and the work
now belongs to the German government. This is why they won’t be seen at the
Fruitmarket. Two other works will. The blackboard-based When first I raised The
Tempest (2016) is a storyboard for an imaginary film. The Russian Ending (2001)
reimagines a set of found postcards as stills from fictitious disaster movies.
“I’ve always
used theatrical language,” says Dean, her words a series of unrehearsed
fractures that eventually connect into mini monologues. “Even early on with my
blackboard pieces, I used stage directions like ‘exeunt’. When I write about my
work as well, I call them asides, so it must be there somewhere.”
Dean’s
grand-father was Basil Dean, a pioneering film producer who co-founded Ealing
Studios, and went on to make films with the likes of George Formby and Gracie
Fields. Given that he died when Dean was eleven, there is no direct influence,
but “maybe hearing about all that left its mark.”
Dean’s latest
film, not being shown in Edinburgh, is called Antigone. She began working on it
more than twenty years ago, visiting the Sundance Film Festival to learn how to
write scripts from some of the greats. The result is more arthouse than
multiplex.
“It’s about
stage fright,” Dean says, “and came out of what happens when you lose your
way.”
With the theatrical
beginnings, middles and possible endings presented as a body of work in Woman
with the Red Hat, might Dean ever go the whole hog and make (+italic)movies(-italic) rather than (+italic)films(-italic).
“No,” says
Dean the reluctant auteur. “I’ve always resisted that, and I think I always
will. The whole process of making Antigone after going to Sundance and all of
that confirmed to me that I need the blindness of working as an artist rather
than a film director. I have to get it all from underneath rather than left or
right.
“With
Antigone, for twenty years I was carrying around this idea of writing a script,
but I came back from Sundance, and even with everything I’d learnt there, I
couldn’t do it. I write, and I make films, so why can’t I do that?”
She answers
herself.
“Probably
because I don’t want to. I need to be blind. I need to not know where I’m
going. If there’s one thing I understand about my work is that I don’t want to
know the entry point. I need to be blind.”
Tacita Dean – Woman with a Red Hat, Fruitmarket
Gallery, Edinburgh, July 7th-September 30th.
The List Edinburgh Festival Guide 2018, July 2018
ends
Comments