A monumental film installation by Tacita Dean is the latest Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern.
Frieze Week kicks off in traditional fashion this week with the unveiling of the latest Turbine Hall commission for Tate Modern. The twelfth commission in The Unilever Series is the work of contemporary art film-maker Tacita Dean, and is the first to be devoted to the moving image. The work – entitled simply Film – consists of an eleven-minute silent 35mm looped film projected onto a gigantic, imposing, thirteen metre-high block.
Film is an instantly impressive piece of work. The whole Turbine Hall has been plunged into darkness, and the only light comes from this colossal presence at the far end. Dean has neatly solved the problem of how to present moving image work in this context by up-ending the usual dimensions of the cinema screen: the resulting edifice also forms a structural echo of Tate Modern's own lofty vastness.
This focus on structure and height is reminiscent of Gothic architecture, and serves to reference the (more or less satirical) idea, present in a lot of current thinking, of Tate Modern as the cathedral of contemporary art: all silence and scale and reverent contemplation. The film itself was shot largely inside the Turbine Hall, and makes use of the gallery's interior through a variety of playful, inquisitive effects: dancing colours, escalators, an all-seeing eye. Occasional shots of Gothic church windows echo the strong verticals in Tate's own interior architecture.
Framed by film-strip sprocket holes, Film eschews post-production or digital trickery in favour of Dean's much-publicised process of laborious hand-editing and colour tinting. Her espousal of analogue aims, she says, “to show film as film can be – film in its purest form”. I'm not convinced by this, and the lengthy credits list suggests that Film is no purer than any other film; it's merely a pose. But nonetheless, a pose that's powerful and genuinely beguiling.
But take a walk around the back of it, and something different emerges. In the darkness, between twin shafts of light, there's that combination of something both illicit and profoundly respectful that you get behind the altar inside a great cathedral. Film is both a monument in film and a monument to film. It's an exploration of film's documentary power, and an acknowledgement of the threat posed to its own archive by the imminent demise of 16mm film, something about which Dean herself has been campaigning vociferously. Like any monument, its future is always looking backwards.
There's a niggling sense that Film is a little too clever in its cyclical self-referencing (it even references this circularity in its looped presentation). It sometimes feels like it's got you at every turn, but then maybe that's the point: so too does religion, so too contemporary art.
The Unilever Series - Tacita Dean is at Tate Modern from 11th October 2011 to 11th March 2012.
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Photo credit: Lucy Dawkins. Courtesy the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris
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