Tacita Dean
I wish I knew more about English artist Tacita Dean. She spoke at the Menil in 2019, which I missed, and the Menil has four small photographs by Dean that I’ve never seen on display. I feel like I can never really know an artist if I only experience their work online, and that has mostly been my experience with Dean. She seems like an artist worth knowing. Tim Adams in the Guardian described her this:
It is tempting to think of Tacita Dean as a witchy presence in the world, a diviner of hidden forces. Her chosen medium is an antique one: spooled film. Waiting is a big part of her method, and watching; there is also an alertness to chance and coincidence. She is a lifelong collector of four-leaf clovers; a sometime chaser of solar eclipses. One artistic quest saw her pursuing the three known sightings of the severed breasts of St Agatha among Italian relics. In another, she rose in a hot air balloon in the Alps before dawn to try to capture a plastic bag full of alchemists’ ether. She has long been drawn both to lighthouses and to shipwrecks.
Wow! If I were in Sydney, Australia, right now I could see what appears to be a huge exhibit of her work in a variety of mediums at the Museum of Cotemporary Art Australia, which would be an enjoyable afternoon on a epic pilgramage to the continent of my birth, but perhaps a bit extravagant on short notice.
Why did Tacita Dean suddenly pop into my consciousness? I have various Google alerts for various phrases and names, including “the great god pan is dead.” I was intrigued when this image popped up today—
This extremely modest artwork, The great god Pan is dead, is presumably named after one of the literary uses of the phrase, not this newsletter. Another thing I observe is that it is apparently available from Dean’s gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery. I don’t know how much they are asking (it says to inquire on their website), but it can’t be outragegous given that it is a four-by-six inch collage. I mention it because it’s the kind of Christmas gift a guy who writes a newsletter called The Great God Pan Is Dead might like.
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