Tacita Dean, Fernsehturm (two stills), 2001, 16MM color anamorphic film, optical sound, 44 minutes. All images courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

Formidable!

This is a nickname. It is also a description. A few summers ago, I was in Paris during the run of a show by Tacita Dean. Many of the journalists I was meeting had seen the show and I asked them what they thought of it.

What’s the opposite of a Gallic shrug? A shrug that indicates not resignation but amazement? This is what the journalists did. Lifting eyes heavenward, spreading arms wide, the journalists cried, “Tacita Dean. Formidable!”

That was how Tacita got her nickname.

Let me tell you why it fits.

At 40, Tacita Dean has accomplished a lifetime’s worth of work. At her upcoming retrospective this May in Schaulager in Basel, no less than 24 of her films will be shown. She has also exhibited chalkboard drawings, photographs, sound pieces and found-object installations. Though mainly a filmmaker, Dean is driven by ideas rather than a particular medium. Her talent is polygamous and prolific.

There is something formidable even about her hair. Its frizzy electricity puts you in mind of Golda Meir overseeing the Knesset. Her eyes exert a Rasputin or Madame Blavatsky force. (Meanwhile, her lips are forming a joke.)

Dean’s Berlin studio occupies part of a warehouse alongside the Hamburger Bahnhof. Her fellow tenants are the artists Thomas Demand and Olafur Eliasson. Demand and Eliasson have huge, hangar-like operations. Tacita works in a cramped, second-floor office, alone, editing her spools of film.

She works long hours and always arrives late for dinner. She comes in smiling, and limping. For years now Tacita has suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. Her right leg is very bad, also her left wrist. I know this mainly from observation, because, though she’s in constant pain, she never complains. It’s difficult for her to walk, to climb stairs, to carry her one-year-old son (my godson), Rufus.

None of this slows her work or dims her humor.

I agree with the French.

“Tacita Dean. Formidable!”

She is an overpowering force and I cower before her in admiration.

 

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