TACITA DEAN AT GEMINI G.E.L. LA Exuberance, 2016
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TACITA DEAN: BLUE SKIES SMILING AT ME
Hunter Drohojowska-Philp
How many blues make up a sky? Tacita Dean found blues within blues while searching for the celestial in her series of fifteen lithographs published by Gemini G.E.L. Titled LA Exuberance, the series emerged following her move to Los Angeles, after decades of living in Berlin or London, to be artist in residence at the Getty Research Institute in 2014. Like many English émigrés before her, she felt uplifted by the broad, untroubled sky. She wasn’t expecting to see clouds, but realized that each whitish wisp only intensified the startling quality of blue that surrounded it. Of course, skies are blue anywhere that air molecules disturb the shorter rays of sun, but L.A. is legendary for not only the quality of its light but also for the consistency of its availability. Dean explained,“What surprised me most about Los Angeles was the one thing I had imagined there would be little of, and that was clouds. These clouds differed from their European counterparts because they were nearly never gray but extremely variable and white; they appeared unconnected to rain, as in Europe, but instead to the imperceptible activity of winds high above the earth’s surface.” After completion of her Getty residency, Dean elected to remain in L.A. with her husband, artist Mathew Hale, and her son Rufus. The impact of skies, the depth of their color emphasized by the occasional wisp or bands or puffs of white clouds, colonized her imagination. In acknowledgement of her fiftieth birthday, she created A Concordance of Fifty American Clouds, a collection of fifty works depicting clouds that were shown at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, in the spring of 2016. The title of her exhibition, “…my English breath in foreign clouds,” taken from Richard II, is a phrase found in A Complete Concordance to Shakespeare that she discovered when clearing out her father’s study.
She was further inspired to find numerous references to clouds in the writings of the Bard. For the Goodman show, she made chalk spray drawings of clouds on Victorianera slates, and used blue chalkboard paint around the edges of her mounted photographs of clouds. These techniques contributed to her concept for the Gemini lithographs, except that those proved to be an exceptional challenge even for the expertise of master printers. It is almost impossible to print the non-color of white—the absence of color must come from the paper itself. Consequently, the deep blues had to be printed around her fragile, fluffy forms. Dean, born in Canterbury and raised in the Kent countryside, has long looked to the natural world for inspiration in her art, which has been dedicated largely to working in the medium of 16 mm and 35 mm film. One can’t help but think that her own family history has been another crucial resource: her father Joseph Dean read classics at Oxford (her siblings are named Antigone and Ptolemy); her grandfather Basil Dean was founder of Ealing Film Studios. A determined if indirect approach to history underscores virtually all of Dean’s production. Though most artists now operate with digital technologies, Dean continues to work with film, using a 1970s editing machine to cut her films, whether short or long. By treating film as a valued medium, like painting or drawing or lithography, she hopes to save it from what she calls “technological determinism.” Unlike the fast-paced digital world, Dean valorizes the passage of time and the importance of history in her films. The film industry was established in Los Angeles because of blue skies, occasional clouds and long hours of bright sunlight. Geographically and aesthetically, Dean has made her way to the epicenter of film history. Her prints of clouds and vapor trails on a blue sky certainly recall that history, but they also reference the ways in which other artists have responded: David Hockney’s richly blue-skied cityscapes; Joe Goode’s skies that appear be torn open; James Turrell’s
rooms of atmospheric light. The list of artists using L.A. light and space as source material is lengthy. Dean has been uncommonly curious and heavily involved in acknowledging —and working from—the conditions of other artists, including Joseph Beuys, Mario Merz and Merce Cunningham. While in L.A., she made a small film of Hockney smoking cigarettes, forming little clouds with each exhale. Dean’s prints of clouds pay homage to all of this multivalent history—her own family, old Hollywood and Southern California art. Upon first viewing, the Gemini G.E.L. prints appear to be photographs—large colored versions of the Equivalents made by photographer Alfred Stieglitz in the 1920s. When he pointed his camera at the sky, eliminating the horizon so that the shapes of clouds were abstract forms, Stieglitz said that his black and white prints were metaphors for feeling—“equivalents” to the many emotions he felt, especially during the summers at his family home in Lake George, New York. Dean has made prints with Niels Borch Jensen since 2001, and many are based on photographs or film, though combined with drawings and notations. In Dean’s new prints at Gemini, the soft white spume appears too delicate to be executed by hand. Yet, though loosely based on Dean’s own photographs of clouds, the nebulae are handdrawn from her imagination and memory using spray chalk. The sequence of the fifteen images is set precisely by Dean to avoid suggestions of rising or setting sun. They are lifted out of time to exist on their own. Perhaps Dean’s lengthy acquaintance with the pleasures and tribulations of a larger history allows her to look away from daily dystopia and look upwards to the unknown future. White clouds in blue skies are ever outside of the trajectory of anthropocentric time. LA Exuberance can live up to its title.
LA Exuberance, LA Exuberance, 2016 2016
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LA Exuberance Fifteen hand-drawn, 3-color blend lithographs, each 29 7/8 x 29 7/8 " (75.9 x 75.9 cm) Editions of 36 LA Exuberance
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WORKSHOP NOTES Tacita began her collaboration with us in August 2015. She wanted to capture the clouds which are typical to the Los Angeles sky, being fascinated especially by the peculiar “con trails” that are visible throughout the day. It was important to Tacita that all the imagery be hand-drawn, not photographic. Through months of trial-and-error experimenting with different drawing materials, Tacita found a method of working with spray chalk to achieve the soft visible appearance of a cloud. We laid Mylar out on a flat surface while she stood above it, drawing ethereal lines without hard edges. Tacita made 40 to 50 drawings during these sessions which ultimately she edited down for the 15 editions. The challenge from the beginning was how to have the clouds Tacita had drawn not print, so that the cloud imagery would reveal the white of the paper and everything surrounding her drawing would be printed in blue. At the start of this project we had access to only positive photo-litho plates, and during the initial proofing we created several work-arounds to achieve a negative process, whereby we had her Mylar drawings scanned and reversed to make actual-size negative film. With the negative film, we were able to use positive plates which were readily available. Fortunately, after sustained research, we found a supplier that could provide negative photo-litho plates that could maintain the subtle quality of Tacita’s drawings; this breakthrough gave us the ability to go directly from Tacita’s drawing on Mylar to a negative plate, thereby streamlining the process. Tacita introduced the idea of “controlled serendipity” by having us proof her images in as many different combinations as possible. She would then narrow it down to
what she liked, eliminating the images she didn’t and exploring which combinations and orientations she wanted to see. It was important for her to find the drawings that could be combined in layers, where certain areas overlapped to form a diffused appearance while other areas would allow for bare paper to show through. Once the image met with her approval, we would then focus on adjusting the color. She referred to an inventory of photographs she had taken, and would also call us when the sky was a particular color so we could step outside, look upwards and match that color. Additionally, she sometimes left it up to us to propose imaginary sky colors. In the color proofing she decided to incorporate “blends” into all of the runs in order to create an atmospheric quality. She found that layering different blends reinforced this effect. Because the plates need to be printed as a “flat” with a single pass of the roller each time, a special roller was constructed. The roller, weighing over 40 pounds and measuring a roll-out of 40 inches, requires two printers, one on either side, in addition to a third printer sponging the plate to keep it moist. Despite looking beguilingly simple and photographic, each of the 15 images is built from between one and three different layers of cloud imagery drawn by Tacita, printed with blends for the skies of up to six different colors for each print run. Considerable thanks go to James Reid and Solita Harder-Montoya who assisted us in the proofing and edition printing.
Rachel Reid and Jennifer Turner August 2016
Design: John Coy, jmcoy.com Photography: Luna Imaging, Sidney B. Felsen Printing: Lithocraft Company