Today more than ever, we are used to speed up to increase the number of things to do in the shortest time possible, trying avoid stopping in the name of productivity. It seems that going faster – being always active, without resting – is an inestimable source of pride for people. The collective unconsciousness is clearly livened up by the efforts of maximizing performances. Maybe for achieving our goals we run into something very similar to self-mistreatment. Is it really worth it? Who knows? What is certain is that the over-activity is leading us to loose the ability to stare, to take a slow look and extend the observation, turning a glimpse into a close contemplation.
Among the contemporary artists who consider and reflect on the importance of stillness and contemplative immersion, Tacita Dean (b. 1965, Canterbury, England) – who works in a range of media, but primarily with video – is certainly one of the most effective ones. Member of the second wave of the Young British Artists, or YBAs, Dean is mostly recognized for her 16mm analogue films, shot and projected with anamorphic lens, which creates rectangular panels that enhance her meditative and penetrating works. From the forty-minute static shot across the restaurant interior of the Fernsehturm (2001), the iconic television tower that dominates Berlin, to the long narrative work Kodak (2006), where Dean showed us the manufacture of the film – providing a rare opportunity to see the machines fully illuminated, without the darkness needed to prevent exposure – using the same medium, just before it went out of production; from the documentary intimate portraits of artists such as Mario Merz and Merce Cunningham to the black and white restitution of Giorgio Morandi’s Bolognese studio in Still Life and Day for night (2009) for the exhibition arranged in Milan by the Trussardi Foundation in 2009; passing through the repertoire of natural landscapes and eclipses shot in real time as in The Green Ray (Il Raggio verde, 2001), the fruition of Tacita Dean’s work ‘imposes’ to slow down.
Her endless pauses on almost still bucolic overviews, atmospheric events, expanses of water and skylines work as a kind of training to get eyes more accustomed to calm and patience: slow and lengthened pedagogical exercises that help us to linger on details, appreciate the time expansion and repossess our contemplative aptitude, because on the contrary of mass belief, “not doing” is an active practice where new ways of thinking and creating actually lie.
