Tacita Dean Wrestles With the Ghost of Cy Twombly

Three decades ago, British artist and filmmaker Tacita Dean burst onto the scene as part of the Young British Artists. She’s since enjoyed long and successful career—but never, until now, a major U.S. museum show. That changed last month in Houston, where the Menil Collection opened “Tacita Dean: Blind Folly,” a striking new exhibition highlighting her impressive, if lesser-known, drawing practice.

“The way Tacita thinks about drawing is as a way of making and an analogy for her belief in and love of all things analog, which ties to film and the preservation of film, which is what she’s primarily known for,” Michelle White, the Menil’s senior curator, told me during a tour of the show. (The Menil, of course, has its own Drawing Institute celebrating the medium.)

“It’s very nice to do a show about the drawings,” Dean told me in a phone interview, calling from her studio in Berlin, noting that the two halves of her practice, film and drawing, have always coexisted. “Generally the museum shows I’ve done always have included drawings.
But of course, the films sort of become more prevalent, or dominate the spaces, because they take up so much room.”

At the Menil, however, the drawings have plenty of space to breathe, with four spacious galleries, compared to a single darkened theater down the hall where four different films will screen, rotating roughly every month and a half. The show’s opening room features a trio of monumental photographs of trees that the artist has painstakingly drawn on in colored pencil, lending them a painterly feel.

Dean began this body of work “a long time ago,” she said, first working in a much smaller scale on found postcards of trees with unusual shapes that she would isolate by painting around them. (A selection is also in the show.)

That led her to find the oldest oak tree in the U.K., which is in Kent’s Fredville Park, and nicknamed Majesty. , the 2006 work that opens the Menil show, features and is named after Majesty’s also-venerable neighbor.

The other two trees are a purple jacaranda tree from Los Angeles, titled and printed in negative so that its vibrant flowers appear green, and an ancient cherry tree from Japan, its blooming branches carefully propped up by crutches, titled . The latter is a black-and-white photograph taken for the Menil show, the background painstakingly colored a pale pink, like the blossoms would have been.

“It’s this idea of human mark-making on the surface of time,” White said. “And she’s so interested in aging surfaces, surfaces with history, surfaces that bear this beauty of something that’s dying, something that’s ephemeral, something that will go away.”

But the works are also imbued with a certain sense of optimism, depicting these towering living beings that endure despite war, climate change, and all the other issues that plague our modern world.

“Hopeful is a good word. When this blossom comes out each year, that’s something that’s reliable in an unreliable world,” Dean said.
”The fact that they are so old and cared for
is a beautiful thing.”

But then again, at the same time she was working on , Dean was also making , an even larger, 12-by-24-foot chalk-on-blackboard drawing in the next gallery that depicts a glacier collapsing.

“It’s just the opposite—how this ice that had been accumulating for millennia was disappearing in an afternoon,” she said of the work, which is named after Caspar David Friedrich’s famed painting of an icy shipwreck.

The work itself is actually at risk of disappearing. To maintain the naturally dustiness of the surface, the artist has chosen not to apply any fixative to the delicately rendered landscape, one of four absolutely massive works in the space created in the medium. (Dean had to retouch the drawings, two of which are on loan from the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, for the installation.)

“It’s this idea of the form and content coming together,” White said. “All the works are as precarious and fragile as what they depict. A fleeting celestial phenomenon. A melting iceberg. The clouds.”

Naturally, I had to ask Dean if the works were at all related to the famous blackboard paintings of Cy Twombly, who has been a major touchstone in her career and inspired a new suite of works at the Menil.

The answer was a resounding “no.”

Dean made her first chalk-on-blackboard works during her master’s studies at London’s Slade School of Fine Art from 1990 to ’92. She bought some Masonite because she was having difficulty hanging her drawings on the school’s Hessian weave walls, painted it black with paint she found at home and began drawing on it with white chalk.

When she applied for “New Contemporaries,” the annual U.K. exhibition for emerging art students, in 1992, it was with her makeshift blackboard, with the idea of remaking the drawing for each of the show’s five venues.

“They weren’t actually related to Twombly at all.
And they’re not even very Twombly-like,” Dean said, noting that Twombly’s famed series doesn’t actually use chalk  blackboard, but wax crayon. “[My] blackboards came from a different place.”

But her connection to Twombly has been a touchstone since she first encountered his work at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1987, and decided to write her undergraduate thesis on him.

“He’s a hugely important artist in my life and I have filmed him,” Dean said. (Her 2011 piece , taken from the artist’s given name—Cy was a family nickname—documents him at work in his studio, and will be the third film screened at the Menil.)

When she began working with White to organize the current show, Dean immediately knew she wanted to make some work in response to the Menil’s dedicated Cy Twombly Gallery, installed to the artist’s specifications and celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2025.

“What always interested me was where your mind wanders when you’re sitting in front of somebody else’s artwork. It would be great to note those wanderings down and see where it takes you,” Dean said. “I went and I sat in there, but I
made myself too self-conscious. I was too aware of trying to trap those thoughts and therefore the thoughts weren’t real.”

The solution, she decided, was to stage an artist residency in the gallery, staying overnight in the space. The Menil had never done anything like it, but the museum was game.

“They sort of locked me in for security,” Dean said.
”I didn’t sleep.
I was awake the whole time, just really experiencing the work and starting to be a bit more playful and trippy in a way,”

Photographs Dean took that night are being made into a new artist’s book, , due out next year.

And Twombly’s spirit is felt in the show in more ways than one. In preparation for the show, White accompanied Dean on a trip to a junk shop, where there was a folder of vintage postcards. Dean reached in, and out came a photo documenting the aftermath of a natural disaster. In the center, in handwriting remarkably like the artist’s own, was the word “Cyclone.”

“Twombly’s father was a Major League Baseball pitcher who had a very fierce pitch, so he was nicknamed Cy Twombly after Cy Young,” White said. “Cy Young was named Cy because his pitch was so forceful it was as fast as the cyclone—so, in fact, Twombly’s name derives from the word cyclone.”

The serendipitous postcard became a work in the show, , that Dean has donated to the Menil.

And in the hallway outside the exhibition are new works that Dean made in response to her gallery residence. The paintings are done on found slates that were painted green for use in classrooms, with Dean’s gestural mark-making adding richness to their aged surfaces.

“These became a way of conversing with Cy Twombly,” White said. “You get these kind of trailing passages. She’s using primarily her finger to smudge into the surface.”

The show’s title comes from one of these works. “Blind Folly” is a Britishism for foolishness, but here it’s a reference to how Dean listens to the medium as she works, leaving the results to chance rather than struggling to realize a predetermined vision.

“Tacita often uses the term blind to describe how she begins a work of art without knowing where she’s going and letting the journey of the process lead her,” White said. “And that’s also about the materials themselves guiding how she approached the works.”

This interest in experimentation and unexpected material outcomes is why Dean is so committed to analogue film, rather than digital, with its predictable results. It’s also why she doesn’t like starting from scratch from a pristine, blank sheet of paper.

“It gives me performance anxiety sometimes. I’m really bad with any art paper, so I started to just work on things that were already dirty,” Dean said. “I seem to find more pleasure in surfaces that have a history.”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com