Wandermude - Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean, courtesy of Frith Street Gallery

On a sunny October afternoon I find myself in the Frith Street Gallery looking at a huge photograph of an oak tree.

 It’s not anywhere near life size but the immensity of it can’t help but induce a feeling of awe.  Indeed, Tacita Dean has named it, Majesty.

She has painted out the background with white gouache making the spindly branches all the more like a spiderweb which pulls you in, and leaves a ghostly impression as the paint is not quite opaque. 
In fact, Tacita Dean’s great strength is in bringing to our attention the everyday, the mundane and pointing out the details - and often the beauty - of things we take for granted.  

 She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998 and it was her film of a lighthouse beacon in continuous rotation (both light and film) called Disappearance At Sea which left a deep impression on me as an art student. 

You could say, in almost a perfect contradiction, that she creates still lives with film.

 And so I go downstairs to a darkened room where one of her new films, Darmstadter Werkblock, is showing.

 Interestingly, I am the only one watching the film and, having deliberately not read the press release, I have to make sense of abstract shots of some kind of interior. 
It turns out to be the inside of the Hessiches Landesmuseum where the artist Joseph Beuys displayed his art. 

The film is stark and motionless which makes you want to keep watching despite it being – for want of a better word – boring. 
You want something to happen but it never does. 
We never even glimpse the Beuys installation, which is housed within the museum’s walls, but we know it is there.

 I emerge into the daylight to watch the next film, Michael Hamburger. 
There is sound and movement in this film, and unsurprisingly, it proves the human mind’s need for narrative because this room is full of viewers.

 It focuses on Michael Hamburger who is a poet in his own right but is most famous for translating the work of writer, W. G. Sebald. 
Quite unexpectedly partway through the film - which feels purely observational -  he begins to talk and the rich timbre of his wizened voice fills the room. 
He tells a poignant story about his friendship with Ted Hughes and a particular variety of apple that Hughes had in his Devonshire garden, the seeds of which Hamburger took and grew in his Suffolk garden. 
There is something about apples and Hamburger’s love of them which is very English but seemingly at odds with his heritage as a German who escaped Nazism in 1933. 
It is really rather a moving portrayal.

The show is called Wandermüde which is a German word that describes a tiredness with wandering.
If you get tired of wandering around London take a moment to watch these films which will make you see with new eyes.

Frith Street Gallery, 17 - 18 Golden Square, London, W1F 9JJ
Until October 26th


 

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