the line of fate
Leo Steinberg gave
me one hour, and
I understood why.
He was trying to
complete his book
in the face of the
inevitable and nonnegotiable deadline
that is one’s own
death. Aged ninety,
shrunken and
bearded, and irascible
in his overheated
and cluttered
apartment on the
Upper Eastside, he
made it clear that
all interruption was
intolerable. He had been writing his book
on Michelangelo’s early circular panel
painting, Tondo Doni for ten years. A
small print of it was propped up in front
of him as he wrote, without computer or
typewriter, unmediated and by hand.
I had been attracted to Leo Steinberg
through his essay, The Line of Fate in
Michelangelo’s Painting where he studied
the significance of the diagonal in the
work of Michelangelo, particularly
in the Last Judgement in The Sistine
Chapel. He saw in the fresco a hidden
diagonal trajectory stretching from the
vault of Heaven to the furthest corner
of Hell, with the flayed skin of Saint
Bartholomew and its distorted self-
rozel point, great salt lake, utah
portrait of Michelangelo, at the exact
centre point. Michelangelo was painting
his own line of Fate, placing himself at the
centre of judgement, for the individual
is humanity judged. His prose style was
straightforward and simple, and his ideas
lovingly wrought from years and years
of thinking and looking. I told him how
much I loved his essay, and that it was a
relief to read something so clearly put.
He replied that it took great effort to
appear effortless.
My purpose was to photograph Leo’s
hands as he wrote, which I could see he
saw as utterly pointless. Stealing myself
against his impatience, I took three films
— two in colour and one in black and
white, snapping fast as the clock ticked
away time. As he got up to bid us leave,
he talked of Eckermann’s account of
Goethe, and that the greatest misery of
old age was that one loses the right to be
judged by one’s own peers.
Back in Berlin, I put the photographs
aside feeling that perhaps Leo had
been right, and that the exercise had
been pointless. Then, recently, as I
shuffled them around, I caught sight of
a serendipitous diagonal across five of
the images — the appearance of a Line of
Fate in the writing hand of Leo Steinberg.
Tacita Dean, “The Line of Fate,” in Tacita Dean:
Seven Books Grey, Selected Writing 1992-2011,
(Göttingen: Steidl/mumok, 2011).
In New York, someone mentioned that
the Spiral Jetty had risen, and that was
enough to set me off on a journey to try
and find it. Although it prefigured in my
imagination as a black and white slide
projected on an art school wall, it became
an icon for me that summer; a virtual
reference that beckoned me away from
the unfamiliar but exhilarating world of
the Sundance Screenwriting Lab. I set
off with directions from the Utah Arts
Council and a friend from the Lab. We
took the i-80 north from Salt Lake City.
He had no idea what we were looking for.
The journey to Rozel Point, more than
any journey I can consciously remember
taking, led me back into my imagination.
I feel I often go there: to the primeval hill
formation and the thick red lake, where
all the vegetation is covered with a ¼
inch of salt and where the air at dusk is
so full of mosquitoes that they sound
like rainfall hitting the car windscreen.
It has become a place of time travel,
of prehistory and the future, of the
sedimentation of thinking and the very
matter and fabric of film.
Robert Smithson has become an
important figure in my working life,
not because I depend on him in any
way, but because his work allows me
a conceptual space where I can often
reside. Artists don’t talk about this very
much, because it is hellishly difficult to
describe. It’s like an incredible excitement
and attraction across time; a personal
repartee with another’s thinking and
energy communicated through their
work. Looking for the Partially Buried
Woodshed was about visiting one of
Smithson’s delegated places; one of his
crosses on the map. Personally, I don’t
believe the woodshed is where Kent State
University say that it is. I believe it is
beneath the tarmac in the car park where
you leave your car in order to approach
the wooded mound described as ‘Earth
Sculpture’ on the campus map.
Contrary to current mythology,
Smithson didn’t want his works to
disappear. In fact they are talking about
rebuilding up the Spiral Jetty so you
can walk along it. So it will have risen
again, no longer submerged in some
prehistorical state in the Rozel Point of
my imagination.
tacita dean was born in 1965 in
Canterbury, Kent and studied art at the
Falmouth School of Art in England, the
Supreme School of Fine Art in Athens,
and the Slade School of Fine Art in
London. In 1998 she was nominated for
a Turner Prize and was awarded a daad
scholarship for Berlin, Germany, in 2000.
She has received the following prizes:
Aachen Art Prize (2002); Fondazione
Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy
(2004); the Sixth Benesse Prize at the
51st Venice Biennale (2005) and the Hugo
Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York (2006). Dean also
participated in the Venice Biennale in
2003 and 2005. Recent solo exhibitions
include Film, The Unilever Series, Turbine
Hall, Tate Modern, London (2011/12); Line
of Fate, mumok, Vienna (2011); Tacita
Dean, Australian Centre for Contemporary
Art, Melbourne, Australia (2009); and
Tacita Dean, Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York (2007).
This exhibition is made possible in part
through the generosity of Mr. and Mrs.
William J. Soter, Mr. and Mrs. Leonard
Korman, and The William and Sarah Ross
Soter Photography Endowment.
All images © Tacita Dean. Courtesy the artist,
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris, Frith
Street Gallery, London, and Niels Borch Jensen
Galerie, Berlin.
hours
Tuesday
10 am / 5 pm
Wednesday 10 am / 5 pm
Thursday 10 am / 9 pm
Friday
10 am / 5 pm
Saturday
10 am / 5 pm
Sunday
11 am / 5 pm
closed Mondays / New Year’s Day / Independence Day /
Thanksgiving / Christmas
admission
Members free / Adults $12 /
Students $5 / Age 12 & under free
Tacita Dean
Tacita Dean, “Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty:
Robert Smithson,” in Tacita Dean: Seven Books
Grey, Selected Writing 1992-2011, (Göttingen:
Steidl/mumok, 2011).
1451 s. olive avenue, west palm beach, florida 33401 | www.norton.org
“Nothing is more frightening than not
knowing where you’re going, but then again
nothing can be more satisfying than finding
you’ve arrived somewhere without any clear
idea of the route” — Tacita Dean
Tacita Dean (British, born 1965) is like
many contemporary artists who resist
easy categorization. Emerging in the last
decade as one the most important artists
of her generation, Berlin-based Dean
is primarily known as a filmmaker who
also works with other media including
painting, drawing (on various surfaces—
blackboards, alabaster and photographs)
print making, sound and, especially,
photography. From her earliest artworks
in the 1990s Dean has used the medium
of photography to produce lyrical works
that explore notions of loss, history,
memory, and serendipity. The works in
this exhibition have rarely, if ever, been on
view collectively. Ranging from a solitary
35 mm slide projection of the site of
Robert Smithson’s submerged Spiral Jetty
to more than 100 postcards from the
early 20th century illustrating the yet-tobe-built Washington Cathedral, it is the
first to focus solely on Dean’s photobased artworks.
These “photographs” often comprise
images Dean finds — postcards at flea
markets, for example, and images based
on her films. And, of course, she also
creates images she herself “takes.” Yet,
it should be noted that, for Dean, the
found image is of equal importance as
a photograph she herself has produced.
Surfaces of photographs are painted or
collaged; words or phrases are overlaid in
the printmaking process.
It is Dean’s embrace and dependence
on the traditional, yet soon-to-be
outdated analogue, silver-based (as
opposed to digital) process as well as
the inherent lens-based vision of still and
movie cameras that affords the segue
from her celebrated 16 mm film works
to the photo-based artworks in this
exhibition. And like her compelling films,
Dean exploits the reality afforded by
the camera with all its partial truths and
slices of fiction in works such as Fernweh,
a combination of four found images she
describes as “…an improbable landscape
made of cliffs, forest, and dunes.”
Photo-based artworks became
more common for Dean nearly a
decade ago after she completed the
suite of 20 photogravures titled The
Russian Ending. These prints marked a
beginning, of sorts, of Dean’s altering
the found or discovered photographic
image. Unsurprisingly, this pivotal work
references filmmaking, specifically an
anecdote told to Dean about the Danish
film industry having to produce films with
two endings: one upbeat, and another
for Russian audiences that was more
somber.
Dean has grounded much of her
artistic practice with the camera with
imagery that is poetic, compelling, and
deceptively simple. From the small
to the truly monumental photograph,
Dean’s artworks require foregoing limits
or expectations — as one might in a
daydream — to go where we are unaware
we are going.
charles stainback
Assistant Director
the russian ending
‘What happened is that The Russian
Ending (pd3) was a sort of breakthrough
in making new drawings that left the
subject matter of the sea. It’s almost like
in order to leave the sea and therefore
leave that very particular way to make a
drawing, I needed the support of other
images, and I began to combine them
when I started to work on The Russian
Ending series. That was with Niels Borch
Jensen.’ Dean had the idea of making a
photogravure dedicated to the sea. She
had explored the qualities of gravure in
her work on the Fernsehturm (Television
Tower) series a year previously and
hoped that by combining it with the
theme of the sea she could take up
the thread again that she had dropped
when she had given up her blackboard
drawings. ‘Niels Borch Jensen told me
this anecdote about the Danish film
fernweh
industry having to make two endings
to films at the beginning of the 20th
century; it had to make a happy ending
for the American market and a new
ending for the Russians which is called
“Russian Ending”, which was when
everything ended in tragedy, because
the Russians weren’t interested in happy
endings.’ Dean set about looking for
old postcards showing catastrophes.
From these, she chose twenty scenes.
Then, in the manner of her blackboard
drawings, she made tiny notations on
them in white, transforming the images
into a series of twenty different Russian
Endings.
Theodora Vischer, “The Story of Linear
Confidence,” in Tacita Dean: Analogue, exh. cat.
(Göttingen: Steidl, 2006).
painted trees
Fernweh is an improbable landscape
made of cliffs, forest and dunes. I
created it from four small discoloured
nineteenth century photographs that I
found in flea markets some time ago.
The craggy horizon is a famous outcrop,
called Sächsische Schweiz —Saxony’s
Switzerland, which is near Dresden. The
foreground is unknown sand and scrub.
Finding a path amongst the vegetation
and boulders of the photographic
distortions, I imagined Goethe’s voyage
to Italy, particularly his parcours south of
Rome on his way to Naples.
‘Fernweh’ is discontinued parlance
for a longing to travel, an aching to
get away. Different, I imagine, from
‘Wanderlust’, which is a more spirited
desire to be in the landscape. It is the
etymological opposite of the German
word, ‘Heimweh’, which means
homesickness. We do not have a single
word in English for this more considered
desire to be gone. This work should be
approached through its title.
Tacita Dean, “Fernweh,” in Tacita Dean: Seven
Books Grey, Selected Writing 1992-2011,
(Göttingen: Steidl/mumok, 2011).
I began by collecting postcards of
deformed trees — strange mutations
with rogue branches or outsize trunks,
not consciously knowing why, but just
adding them to my collection of images
that I found in flea markets. And then
idling in the studio, I began outlining the
tree shapes with white — highlighting
their forms and monumentalising
their grotesque beauty. It was very
satisfying, denying all the chaos of the
background.
Later, researching Fontainebleau
for a project in Japan, I began reading
about its famous oak, and this made me
think about England. I have chosen to be
estranged, living in Berlin, but I do not
love the soil here or the trees: the soil is
sandy and the trees are evergreen. So
I researched English oaks and English
yews, and monkey puzzle trees because
I have always loved them, and wondered
why they crop up indiscriminately in
suburban streets, on school playing
fields, or in unlikely back gardens.
I imagined a Victorian commercial
salesman dispersing the seeds across
England. They all seem to be of the same
generation and, quite suddenly, they have
all started dying.
I found Majesty on a private estate
near my childhood home in Kent. It is
the largest intact trunk of any oak living
in England. Next to Majesty, in the same
field, was its sister tree, Beauty. Two great
oaks — named by others generations ago
— that experts can only guess the age of.
The old yew in the churchyard in the tiny
village of Crowhurst in Surrey, I chose, of
course, because of its name. It has a door
into its trunk and is slumped over on its
supports. They guess it to be well over
1,300 years old. Time made manifest.
I then printed the trees on obsolete
photographic paper and mounted them
again on a paper support — done by
experts who are among the last left in
their trades. I did not court obsolete
materials or outdated techniques but
what seemed appropriate and attractive
to me had just gone that way. I then
hand-painted around every branch with a
small gauge paintbrush in white gouache
paint, delighting in my proximity to even
the tiniest and most inaccessible of
branches on these mighty trees.
Tacita Dean, “Painted Trees,” in Tacita Dean:
Seven Books Grey, Selected Writing 1992-2011,
(Göttingen: Steidl/mumok, 2011).