Elegiac Images Set To Make Debut At the Guggenheim

Making her way through the Guggenheim Museum, British artist Tacita Dean eyes a swarm of tourists gathering in the lobby. “Is it always like this?” she asks.It’s a reasonable hope, coming from an artist who works in the burgeoning medium of celluloid film and whose debut show at the Guggenheim opens Friday. Ms. Dean — who won the 2006 Hugo Boss Prize, a $50,000 award for achievement in contemporary art — turns everyday objects, often plucked from flea markets in her current home base of Berlin, into the unlikely subjects of multimedia art.Of the four works in her Guggenheim show — all of which are being presented in America for the first time — the centerpiece is “Kodak,” a 44-minute loop of film shot at the recently defunct Kodak paper stock factory in the rural town of Chalonsur-Saone, France.The factory’s evolution from depressed industrial leftover to celluloid installation is a typical product of Ms. Dean’s unique process.Ms. Dean discovered the factory via the Internet as she searched for camera supplies. After researching the plant, with its assembly lines of multicolored film, vast darkrooms, and insistence on photosensitive red light, she recognized its untapped potential as visual art.The piece, she says, “is elegiac,” a reflection on the demise of cardstock film, a form of paper obsolete in the era of digital photography. Last spring, Ms. Dean persuaded the factory’s caretakers to allow her unprecedented access to the bowels of the building.She and her four-member crew filmed for two days straight, just months before the factory closed. The elements of industry within the factory made for the central images in the work, and the eerie red light surrounding it all proved good for filming. One hypnotic moment in the film involves a feeding of film into a machine. To the eye, the pink film changes to a brown color, which can be interpreted as a metaphor for the soiling of purity in everyday life. “There were loads of labels spooled and cascading, and machines with their hearts ripped out,” she said.Ms. Dean is quick to add that her filmed pieces should in no way be confused with the entertainment industry’s documentary features. “It’s not didactic,” she said of “Kodak.” “There’s no voice-over. It doesn’t tell you anything. It’s very visual. It’s more a document.”The factory employees also made for part of the project. “These guys were making the [paper] which film is printed on,” she said. “But some of them had never seen it loaded into a camera. They were fascinated watching us.”It’s a sentiment with which Ms. Dean is familiar. In her younger years, her lack of serious interest in painting was generally met with raised eyebrows. “I was always a dysfunctional painter,” she said. “When I was in painting departments at school, I would never make a singular image. I would always make a series.”After undergraduate work at Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall, a year of study abroad in Athens, and a postgraduate stint at Slade School of Fine Art in London, she came to favor drawing and film as her main outlets, though she still dabbles in painting.“I’m a bit of a hybrid,” she says. Now 41, she has had solo shows at the Tate Britain and Schaulager art space in Basel, Switzerland. She was featured in last year’s Sao Paulo Biennale and will show her work at Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery next month.Phaidon Press has published a monograph of her images, and in 1998 she was nominated for the Turner Prize. A jury of curators and museum directors in New York, Milan, Miami, and London selected Ms. Dean — from a field of seven international artists — to receive the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss honor. She used some of the award money to buy a 1943 drawing by an old artist friend, whom she declined to name: “I wanted a manifestation of the money, because it goes so quickly.”In addition to “Kodak,” her Guggenheim show has three other works. “Noir et Blanc” is a smallscale film installation, also about the obsolete medium of photographic film. “Majesty” is a hybrid of photography and painting, and its subject is a giant oak tree found in her home county of Kent. And “Found Obsolescence” is the ultimate found art: strips of film paper pulled out of a sprocket machine at the factory in Chalon, which Ms. Dean has framed and mounted.After the opening, Ms. Dean will return to Berlin, where she plans to continue to look for her next project, whether it be at a flea market or in an industrial wasteland. “Artists,” Ms. Dean said, “always go to the place where no one else wants to go.”

Elegiac Images Set To Make Debut At the Guggenheim

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