Tacita Dean

Photo by Jim Rakete

Tacita Dean

Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, and Frith Street Gallery

Tacita Dean, "Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33’’ with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007" (2008)

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No, it’s new. The beautiful thing was I didn’t know what he was going to do until we turned on the cameras. I was told that he was going to “hold his position,” but I didn’t know what that meant. But what he did was just so brilliant. While you’re watching it you think about everything — about the room he’s in, about old age, of course, about him, about him and John Cage, and about silence. The complexity is amazing.

I’ve always thought that that was the point of 4’33”. How well did you know it before you made this piece?

I didn’t know that John Cage wrote it in three movements, which are marked by the piano lid going up and down. That was a revelation to me. How Merce did that was he just shifted his pose, which is really perfect.

What was the reason for doing six separate portraits?

Initially I was going to do just one take for Manchester, but Merce did six takes — six was the limit of his energy — and we all realized that he’d just done the first six performances of this work. Thank God I didn’t think of interrupting the dance! I had two versions of each — because I had two cameras — and I filmed each differently, so suddenly I had two-camera films of six different performances, and I had to do something with them. An installation became the perfect solution.

One of the reasons that you use film is its impermanence. How long will the film in this installation last?

These copies? Within a week they’ll get really trashed, because they’re shown for hours on end. We just have to change the copy. We’ve perfected this loop system as best we can. It’s a way of keeping film as film, which is my passion.

Why is that?

Because film is a medium of silence. It’s always mute. You can never film with sound, so sound is separate. And it’s also a medium of time, because with film you’re dealing with a roll of time. It makes you very decisive about light, about focus, about everything.

Is this an homage to Merce Cunningham?

Of course it is. But I’m refusing to have it be purely that because it’s also a performance.

Is it Cunningham’s homage to Cage?

That’s a very personal question. You’d have to ask Merce. But I think he’s definitely thinking about Cage. There’s something in the power of that stillness.