Tacita Dean: Clouds, 2014

Tacita Dean. Detail, Sunset, 2015. Courtesy the artist; Frith Street, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen

Tacita Dean. Insstallation view, Sunset, 2015. Courtesy the artist; Frith Street, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London. Photo: Fredrik NilsenTacita Dean, on a residency at the Getty in 2014, produced a number of very large drawings of clouds: chalk on blackboard paint on 4 x 8 sheets of masonite assembled to wall-sized 8' x 16' panels.  Some are written upon: Sunset has a phrase from Lord of the Flies,  'fading knowledge of the world' written across a Constable-like sky of clouds illuminated not by the immanent presence of god or nature, but by sun on the ocean off Los Angeles.  Thinking of Constable, there is something quite dead, thunderous, leaden, ominous about these clouds.

This is such meditative work, done by hand, slowly moving chalk dust around – lots of time to think.  Does the antithesis of action painting mean figurative work?  One is working slowly to some visual end, which seems different than working physically in some process that ends when the action ends.  I might be saying it badly, but drawing a cloud is very different from drawing an existential shape, previously un-visioned.  We know what clouds look like, even though they are never the same.  

And then to undercut the cloud-like nature of the cloud drawings, they are written upon – these are blackboards – flattening the spatiality within the drawing.  These aren't clouds, they are diagrams. Of course. In this they are like Keifer's mountains, Twombly's Greek myths: annotated marks on a surface.  

Does the annotated drawing reveal a distrust of the image, and the images, manufactured, photographed, designed and assembled, that swamp our visual field? Estimates of how we see thousands of ads a day makes images in general unreliable; there is no such thing as the innocent image, it all means something.  How does one make a drawing then that is without reference?  Perhaps it is to reference something abstract in itself, such as a cloud, draw it with care and then make your own notes on it that keep it from being a palimpsest for other people's projections.  

I only think this way because I like reduction, stripping away, limitations, abstraction – early training in modernism that launched me totally unprepared into a world that was layered, complex, rich with contradictions and reference.