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Tacita Dean: Portrait review

  • Art, Photography
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
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Time Out says

3 out of 5 stars

If you tug at the threads of art genres hard enough they’ll all eventually collapse into a knotted, indistinguishable mess. Does a portrait have to feature a person? Does a still life have to be still? Does a landscape have to be oblong? No, none of those things. And now, over the course of the spring, three major London institutions are giving themselves over to British-European artist Tacita Dean, a serial artistic thread-puller, each focusing on a different genre. But with all those boundaries being overstepped, is this trio of shows going to make any sense?

In ‘Portrait’ at the National Portrait Gallery (‘Still Life’ at the National Gallery and ‘Landscape’ at the Royal Academy are the others), the corridors are lined with photos of the great abstract painter Cy Twombly’s studio. There are endless little details; brushes, sponges, marks and mistakes. It’s still life photography as portrait, the remnants of a man’s work as a vision of himself.

The rest of the works are made up of her film portraits, all analogue celluloid creaminess and fluttering projectors in pitch-black rooms. There’s David Hockney cackling and having a fag, Julie Mehretu painting a mural, Mario Merz holding a pine cone. They’re nice and all, but is anything extra given to them through the movement of film that you wouldn’t get through a static portrait? You get a sense of falseness, of faking it for the camera, or of a sort of BBC 4 documentary aesthetic. Hockney’s laugh gives a shudder of sadness to his piece, and the works function neatly as things in themselves, but it’s hard to see them as effective portraits.

The only piece that really works is the room of five screens dedicated to choreographer Merce Cunningham holding poses in response to his partner John Cage’s iconic silent ‘4:33’. The projectors’ flutter turns to a roar in here, you’re swallowed by the film and the darkness. Cunningham is doing this as a performance intended for the camera, it’s a portrait through his art. It’s intentional, not false, and it’s overwhelming. His body seems to creak, his bones seem to crack, there’s heartbreak and quiet sorrow snapping through the air. It’s a stutteringly brilliant portrait.

@eddyfrankel

Eddy Frankel
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Eddy Frankel

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