Tacita Dean
Kodak 2006 (still)
16mm colour and b/w film, optical sound
44 mins
courtesy the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris

Found Obsolescence 2006 is a small, framed work by Berlin based artist Tacita Dean, currently on display in her survey exhibition at ACCA in Melbourne. The work is an objet trouvé, a short length of 16mm film negative. Without the aid of projector or light, the film seems solid, opaque. In a way, this thin, non-descript, pinky-brown strip with a row of small sprocket holes puncturing its lower edge is quite mute.

For Tacita Dean, this found object is significant. As its title suggests, it is a specimen of a medium that she has much passion for, and which is becoming increasingly difficult to come by. Nearby, in a darkened room, her 44 minute film Kodak 2006 documents the process of film production at the Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône, France. The work is a film about film, and is also a memorial. Like many around the world, the factory has stopped producing film, leaving Dean to record x-ray film going through its production cycle.

The found and the obsolete are central to Dean’s practice, her love for the analogue boundless. Of digital, she has said in interview, ‘It just doesn’t interest me. No, it’s more profound that that. There’ll be a point probably very soon where that’ll be the only thing to shoot on, and I will be faced with a dilemma as to whether to abandon the filmmaking part of my work, or to film on digital.’¹ I’ve heard some photographers say this, too, with palpable sadness. It’s also a sentiment that has been expressed more broadly as the shrinking stocks of Polaroid and Kodachrome are mourned by a public who grew up using these photographic technologies to record their lives.² In this sense, Dean’s deep passion for and advocacy of analogue locates an abiding sense of loss and time passing, perhaps too quickly.

All of this is an intriguing counterpoint to the still and moving images featured in this second online issue of FLASH. Here, we encounter a myriad of practices and positions, including Rozalind Drummond’s quiet counter to Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’; a blurry snapshot most likely shot on a digital camera and gleaned from the internet by Christos Tsiolkas; Arlo Mountford’s adventures in Adobe Flash animation, currently on display at CCP; Rosemary Laing’s latest body of work in her ongoing dialogue with science and the technologies of photography and Lyndell Brown and Charles Green’s digital record of the surprisingly banal theatre of war, chosen by our guest On Show reviewer as the pick of recent exhibitions in Melbourne. Central to this tangled web of technologies and takes is the Anne Landa Award’s focus on video and new media arts, including digital prints, single channel video works and robotics which, as reviewer Bec Dean notes, is ‘reflective of a contemporary moment’.

It is especially interesting to think about Tactia Dean’s exhibition against Ross Coulter and Meredith Turnbull’s recent collaborative exhibition at Conical Inc, The Body Electric, which they discuss with Ulanda Blair in our Interviews section. Both of these exhibitions make much of the apparatus, the machinery of the medium. Upon entering the dark rooms of Dean’s ACCA exhibition, visitors find themselves accompanied by a constant whirring, the sound of 16mm film moving through multiple projectors. The projectors themselves are often in view, the film racing through them. It’s quite a mesmerising sight. In The Body Electric, an exhibition which addressed our relationship to a technology-saturated society, televisions were strung up, photographic images scrolled across digital photo frames and DVD players sat atop wooden platforms. Degraded analogue video was projected digitally onto a structure of abstract wooden shapes.

Most of this latter technology does not yet carry the nostalgic pull of the 16mm film projector (although, with the rise of the flat screen, CRT televisions are fast becoming objects of nostalgic desire). But perhaps something just as forceful, even emotional, is happening here. As Ross Coulter puts it, “I am very susceptible to the influence of technology. From the need for personalised hardware, to the presentation of technology as a status symbol, to the consumer desires it stimulates, to the way technology infects our behaviour and language: its sounds, shapes, colours, movements.  I am fascinated by the endless variety of possibilities in which technology offers itself up to be consumed by us – selflessly – always ever-present. Electro Magnetic Radiation is my body electric.”

We seem to like to build dichotomies around photography and moving image technologies. Endless battle lines are drawn between still photography and moving image, the analogue and the digital, so-called straight photography and the fine art print, light versus pixels… ‘new’ media versus ‘old.’ As many photographers mourn the demise of film others are just as avidly turning to their iphones as their chosen apparatus. As Tacita Dean argues, analogue may still be ‘the medium that keeps verisimilitude intact greater than any digital.’³ But slowly, the pixels are getting under our skin. To me, all of this means we live in exciting times.

¹ ‘Art Worker of the Week #60: Tacita Dean’, Kulterflash 171, 06 | 07 | 06. www.kultureflash.net/archive/171/priview.html

² A recent opinion piece in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper is the latest voice in this growing chorus. Geoff Strong, ‘Kodachrome helped make memories worth waiting for’, The Age, 25 June, 2009. www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/kodachrome-helped-make-memories-worth-waiting-for/2009/06/24/1245522879702.html

³ www.kultureflash.net/archive/171/priview.html