Tacita Dean, JG, 2013. 35mm colour and black & white anamorphic film, optical sound 26 1/2 minutes. Courtesy Frith Street Gallery
By Sophia Satchell-Baeza
In April of 1970, the American sculptor Robert Smithson travelled to the Great Salt Lake of Utah with tonnes of mud and rock to build a jetty. The result was a curved spiral earthwork sculpture that jutted mysteriously out of the lake. Soon to become one of the world’s most famous examples of land art, “Spiral Jetty” would later make an impression on the Berlin-based British artist Tacita Dean, becoming the impetus for her new film “JG” (2013), currently on view at the Frith Street gallery in London.
“However, in 1997 the jetty had not risen and I never found it, but I returned from Rozel Point with something perhaps more important: pieces of salinated tumbleweed and unrequited desire” – Tacita Dean.
First black, now pink due to salt encrustations, Smithson also immortalised the mysterious coil in a short colour film of the same name. Decades later in 1997, Tacita Dean would go looking for Smithson’s spiral, and unable to find it, created a soundwork entitled “Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty” that would reach the ears and eyes of the cult English author J.G. Ballard. The artist and curator of the exhibition, Jeremy Millar, became convinced that Smithson had read Ballard’s short story “The Voices of Time” (1960), where a character draws a mandala on the bottom of a disused swimming pool. Ballard and Dean, as friends and correspondences, discussed Smithson and the jetty, until Ballard posed her a challenge. Dean should “treat the Spiral Jetty as a mystery her film would solve”.
Tacita Dean JG, 2013 35mm colour and black & white anamorphic film, optical sound 26 1/2 minutes. Courtesy Frith Street Gallery
From here emerges Dean’s new film “JG”(2013), a triadic communication between three artists that looks at parallel times and landscapes, engaging with both the tactility of analogue film and that of salt crystal landscapes. In “JG”, a montage of lush saline landscapes and natural scenes break off into different vistas and viewpoints; sometimes the screen splits into two, sometimes into a sprocket-holed three panels. Mostly filmed in the Great Salt Lake of Utah and California, this is an almost empty world of moving water, crystallised salt and marbled stone. The only creatures that seem to wriggle through this are armadillos, their skin flaps unfolding like the mysterious diggers and trucks that drill the landscape, seemingly unmanned. Occasionally, the actor Jim Broadbent’s silky voice appears as a voice-over that reads sections from Ballard’s story, as connections are drawn between the unwinding of a spiral jetty and that of the film reel. As with so much of Dean’s work, this is a love letter to film stock, and you can’t help but drool at the unabashed aestheticism of the film’s tone and technique. At once urgent and dreamy, we see the sprocket holes of a strip of 35 mm Ektachrome film, itself a reference to Ballard’s own 35mm camera, which his long-term partner gifted Dean before starting the shooting of the film.
Much of these effects are achieved through Dean’s labour-intensive technique of “aperture gate masking”, and in this sense, JG is a sequel in technique to her 2011 project at the Tate Turbine Hall “FILM”. First developed for the FILM project, this technique involves using different shaped masks to expose and re-expose film negatives within a single frame. By running the film through a camera multiple times, Dean is able to superimpose different landscapes, making one reality look like it’s appearing at the same time as another.
Tacita Dean JG, 2013 35mm colour and black & white anamorphic film, optical sound 26 1/2 minutes. Courtesy Frith Street Gallery
“c/o Jolyon” is the second part of Dean’s exhibition and appears in a rather eerily empty concrete basement room. In it, Dean has assembled one hundred postcards of the old German city of Kassel from the decades before WWII, before allied forces bombed most of the baroque and medieval city. Painting over these old postcards after a visit to the town, Dean adds delicate details, imbuing them with the whispers of a new life. An exhibition in two unrelated parts, “JG” and “c/o Jolyon” reflect a continuation on the thematic approaches of Dean’s work, including the processes of memory and historical record, communication between artists, and the physicality of landscape and film stock.
Tacita Dean Frith Street Gallery Until October 26, 2013