A shared fixation with the passing of time inspired the British visual artist to make a film about veteran painter Cy Twombly
In Tacita Dean's new filmed portrait Edwin Parker, the painter Cy Twombly is espied in his everyday life. Edwin Parker is Twombly's given name, Cy an inherited family nickname. The title of Dean's film implies intimacy, an encounter with the man behind the myth. It is indeed a rare insight. There are no classic old South Bank Show interviews with Twombly to watch, or anything like that, for he has always shunned publicity. Yet in Dean's film he seems totally unselfconscious as he thinks, quietly speaks, and contemplates his sculptures in a cramped studio looking out ? through blinds ? on trees and traffic in Lexington, Virginia, where he was born in 1928 and now spends part of each year.
The question is ? why does Twombly matter to Tacita Dean? Why does a veteran American painter fascinate a British artist best known for her film work? For Edwin Parker is evidently the fruit of Dean's deep interest in his work. She even contributed to the catalogue of Twombly's Tate Modern exhibition, writing about his drawing Pan, which also appears at Dulwich Picture Gallery. What connects them?
Pessimism for one thing, a preoccupation with time running down. Edwin Parker is filmed and edited with a Stygian lassitude, as if the projector were gradually running out of power, and everything had to be kept quiet and slow to conserve what survives. An eerie shot of Twombly sculptures in a dark room feels funereal. Twombly is an artist who always seems to be looking back, whose works preserve desire and longing as phenomena both unresolved and lost in time. The sombre beauty of Dean's filmed document reminds me of the collection of his works in Houston, Texas, in a building that feels like a classical mausoleum, where you can lose your mind in the melancholic emptiness of his achingly sensual painting Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor.
Dean, like Twombly, is fixated with time. She has photographed a ruined modernist house on an overgrown island, filmed nuns eking out their days in a dying religious community, and recorded the last days of a Kodak factory. Her portrait of Twombly is a study of an elderly artist's day: of how he exists in time. She has said she believes in everything that is "analogue", as opposed to virtual, and you cannot get more analogue than the art of painting.
But there is another connection. Tacita Dean is not just a film-maker: she draws, creates collages and makes ambitious prints derived from photographs. These works on paper are her most powerful creations, and there is a rich affinity between her graphic pieces, such as the sublime T&I, and Twombly's large paintings and collage-drawings.
Twombly has carried a serious and meaningful idea of art into this century; Tacita Dean is shouldering the same burden. Her commission for the Tate Turbine Hall is really something to look forward to, even as time runs down, as the film unspools.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/jun/29/tacita-dean-cy-twombly
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