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Digital film photography and video are immediate, functional and convenient, but they could never be called poetry, according to leading British concept artist, Tacita Dean.<\/p>\n
The pixels of the digital camera or video recorder are not of the physical world and those self-correcting filters and functions that help tidy up imperfections remove chance, mystery, and artistry from the format.<\/p>\n
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Tacita Dean in the fore of The Wreck of Hope (2022), depicting a receding glacier and the impacts of climate change.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Janie Barrett<\/cite><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not condemning it, but it just doesn\u2019t move me,\u201d Dean says ahead of her solo show, the Museum of Contemporary Art\u2019s summer blockbuster, which opens on Saturday.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is something so generic about an iPhone picture. The challenge has gone out of making an image and I think the younger generation feels that torpor, and they want the challenge of making something in a different way.\u201d<\/p>\n MCA director Suzanne Cotter regards Dean as one of the most important living contemporary artists of modern times for her extraordinary work, \u201caesthetically seductive and scintillating in its intelligence\u201d.<\/p>\n Her oeuvre encompasses photography, printmaking and monumental chalkboard drawings, but it is for her works made in 16 mm and 35 mm film that she is best known.<\/p>\n Such formats first allowed millions of people to make home movies in the 20th century.<\/p>\n \u201cVideo and digital is more like seeing, but film is more like looking because you have to think about it the whole time; whether you are going to run out of film, the focus and imprint of light.\u201d<\/p>\n For the past decade, Dean has been campaigning to save the threatened medium from new digital players who she says have \u201caggressively\u201d characterised the traditional formats as old-fashioned and end-of-life technology to boost profits.<\/p>\n Dean first raised the public alarm about the threats to analogue film in 2011 when her London film lab closed overnight, once comparing the loss of film stock to a painter suddenly losing access to their oils.<\/p>\n In 2015, she linked up with film-maker Christopher Nolan to convince Kodak to keep production of film going.<\/p>\n The success of Nolan\u2019s 70-millimetre release of Oppenheimer <\/i>vindicated their stand, the boutique format proving a success with audiences worldwide.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 70 millimetre projections were completely sold out, but the digital projections did badly,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cFour or five years ago we were saying we wanted people to cross town to see a film projected as film and that happened with Oppenheimer<\/em>. So it\u2019s coming back. [Quentin] Tarantino gets it too, it\u2019s building momentum. I\u2019m trying to let others do the fighting now because it took two years out of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n The passage of time, erasure and entropy are themes of Dean\u2019s Sydney show, which comprises 25 major works or series by the artist who spreads her time between Berlin and Los Angeles. Nine new works were made especially for the MCA.<\/p>\n Geography Biography (2023), comes directly from the Bourse de Commerce in Paris.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Janie Barrett<\/cite><\/p>\n Dean\u2019s most recent work, Geography Biography <\/em>(2023), comes directly from the Bourse de Commerce in Paris. It\u2019s created on her preferred medium of 35 millimetre film and comprises outtakes from her life over three decades collected from spools of footage she had haphazardly boxed in her basement.<\/p>\n The four-metre-high images are projected via two synchronised cinema projectors, their flapping mechanical gears forming the soundtrack to an 18-minute silent film loop that adopts masking techniques first pioneered by Dean in the 2011 edition of Unilever series set in the Turbine Hall of London\u2019s Tate Modern.<\/p>\n Dean values the distinctive quality of paper prints, early photographic techniques and the chance effects that come when light imprints on layers of film emulsion. A prodigious collector of vintage postcards, these appear in her film works as frozen frames for moving images.<\/p>\n Analogue film and photochemical photography, she says, are beautiful and rich mediums worthy of preservation.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s so physical. You can hold a second of time in front of you,\u201d she says. \u201cVideo and digital is more like seeing, but film is more like looking because you have to think about it the whole time; whether you are going to run out of film, the focus and imprint of light. Therefore, it\u2019s a decisive medium.\u201d<\/p>\n Film offcuts and wastage are goldmines for Dean\u2019s work. At Tate Modern, she used flash images \u2013 spot colour frames that appear at the end of film reels \u2013 for her homage to 35 millimetre film.<\/p>\n The MCA is to premiere a new film of the American pop artist Claes Oldenburg after Dean revisited footage she had left on the cutting room floor from a prior film portrait.<\/p>\n Apart from items of juvenilia, the MCA show has concentrated on works created by Dean over the past decade.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n