Tacita Dean

Many who knew Mario Merz well have recalled how he could remain seated in silence for hours, without saying a word, perhaps with a scowling air, and wherever he was, at home, in a restaurant, in a garden, how he was able to focus all attention on himself, and then to emanate a sort of empathic energy to everyone. Some say it seemed as if the space were revolving around him (do houses move around us, or do we move around houses?). You could ignore him, but this required great effort, because his presence made itself felt, no matter what, especially when he remained silent.

Tacita Dean has left a wonderful “portrait of the artist as an old man,” simply aiming her camera at Mario sitting beneath a tree (and then in other places) in Tuscany.

Today, Tacita Dean says she pursued this image of Mario Merz because he seemed to resemble her father and she wanted to have a photo of the Italian artist, to compare it with the English magistrate: they have the same physical bearing, the same physiognomy, the same hands and, apparently, the same terrible nature.

That’s where everything started, from a desire to place one image near the other, to bring out the resemblance, it all originated from a reflection on her father.

They met in Bologna in 2000, at the exhibition “L’Ombra della Ragione,” which opened in May at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna. Tacita was a young English artist, perhaps the youngest in that show, and she asked the museum photographer to shoot Mario, perhaps while he was installing his work, and to send the photo to her, but this never happened.

Meanwhile, these artists, the young English woman and the two Italian masters, Mario and Marisa, often ran into each other, although they had few friends in common, given the difference in their ages. At a dinner at a magnificent spot on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, after a show at the gallery of Marian Goodman, who represented both Tacita and Marisa, everyone was complimenting Marisa, more than Mario, and at the end he shook hands with everyone, saying “Thank you for coming, but not for me, I don’t think...”

Immediately thereafter, the following day, they saw each other again, while eating in the Place des Vosges, and Tacita ended up feeling like a sort of involuntary stalker. Then again in Venice, and then in San Gimignano, for a group show that was part of a series of exhibitions entitled “Arte all’Arte.”

She had been invited to participate, and Marisa Merz was also in the show. The exhibitions in that series were held during the summer and were always devoted to site-specific works, in different spaces in different towns around San Gimignano, where the Continua Gallery, which functioned as the organizational hub, was located. That year, 2002, the curators were Vicente Todolí and Emanuela De Cecco. On each occasion, all the artists were invited to seek out a local space for exhibiting their work, a place that might act as an inspiration for a work created for the occasion. And so there were site visits; a few months before the event in San Gimignano, where Marisa and Mario had already settled in, a decisive meeting took place. It was hot, it must have been April.

Today, Tacita says: you were assigned a space in a town in the area. I went there to come up with an idea, because I was a bit worked up; I spent four days there, thinking about a suitable work for that context. I have to admit that it was at that moment that I resolved to film Mario, and so I went with the two of them to visit the spaces, including a church. He fascinated me, physically more that artistically at first. And then on the last day, I spoke to Vicente and to Jane Hamlyn, my gallery dealer in London, about my desire to shoot a film about Mario, and they all responded categorically that it was absolutely impossible.

It seemed like an unattainable project, but that same day Mario addressed me in English, saying “I have heard that you make wonderful films,” and I took that as a sign of encouragement, I felt we had an understanding. And then I bought an ice cream because he liked to end his meals with chocolate and berry ice cream, which he usually ate in the garden, and I finally asked him: “Can I film you?” and he replied, “Yes, but don’t make me talk.” Since he didn’t want to talk, I placed the microphone on the table, aiming it toward a tree, he still had a bit of chocolate at the corner of his mouth, the rest is all in the film. Then obviously, as you can see, he spoke and he picked up that pinecone, which he put in his lap... he decided everything, how he stayed seated and how to pose in front of the movie camera, I didn’t dictate anything. In the film he speaks but without saying anything important; he chats with my friend Peter about the shoes he is wearing, he asks if he is American, in other words, a prosaic conversation for the most part, I wasn’t able to understand much of what he was saying from the soundtrack because I wasn’t recording and so you only hear him faintly, talking to someone. But what is important in the film
is not what he says.

He was courteous and very amenable, quite different from the Mario others had described to me; it was as if he were letting things ride. I had only four rolls of film, each two and a half minutes long, and I used everything I had brought.

I took a chance right then, that afternoon, and then it started raining and he went back home.

The light came and went the entire day, you clearly see this, and so in the first roll, when he is seated, the image seems like it might end up in a fade-out, but this wasn’t my decision, it was the sun that came and went. In fact, you can clearly see his shoes, those large red and white shoes he is wearing, because the sky is luminous, while beneath the tree the image is more blurry. And then in the second roll, he is seated in another direction, while in the final roll the exposure is better. You hear the somber tolling of a funeral bell and he asks “What is this bell?” and Carolina Taddei didn’t want to tell him it was for a funeral because everyone knows how afraid he is of death, and so she responded something like “It’s for a celebration.”

It goes without saying that he has a very strong physical presence, but it also works in my favor that the film is low quality, from a technical standpoint. I succeeded in effectively conveying his presence precisely because in a certain sense he appears only partially, like a silhouette, sometimes you see only his hair.

I consider it an expressive work precisely because it is a disaster from a technical point of view. The light comes and goes, the exposure is terrible. Another cameraman would have chosen a better exposure for filming him when he was in the shade beneath the tree, while in my film you see only his hair, which is in the sun, and everything else remains in shadow, and so you only see his silhouette; I didn’t plan to do it this way and least of all to do a bad job.

It wasn’t a decision I thought through during the shooting, but while editing I decided to not cut anything, I felt that it was expressive just as is. And I’m happy that I made this eight and a half minute film in the garden. It says much more than what you see; he is there, in the garden, on that particular afternoon, at that particular moment.

He didn’t come to the film screening, as I expected. I made a copy for him, I am sure he viewed it. I wasn’t interested in knowing what he thought about the film because I know that people don’t like these things, in a certain sense. We all know perfectly well how difficult it is to see ourselves. You never see yourself as others see you.

When Mario passed away, he was at the height of his activity, making his mature works, from his old age, including “l’oeuvre ultime,” with large pieces and installations where sculptures appear along with “prehistoric” animals and large-scale, brightly colored canvases, audacious constructions that show no weakness and, on the contrary, constitute the fulfillment of a great creative intelligence, and almost presage its possible next steps.

For this Mario in the film “simply is,” as Piero Manzoni would say; behind his relaxed and somewhat ironic expression, you glimpse the grandeur of an effort that helped to subvert the canons of contemporary art, without even a hint of a lessening of tension, throughout his entire life.

Tacita Dean, who said that once she met Mario and made the film, his similarities with her father, her desire to liberate the two images, vanished: the true motivation for that encounter probably was something else entirely, it was the desire to confront the physicality of a person who, in old age, is still charged with vital energy, a force that is both existential and creative, and which seems to revolve, metaphorically, completely within him.

It is significant that the exhibition Tacita Dean presented in Milan, organized by the Fondazione Trussardi, appeared alongside a film Tacita made of Merce Cunningham, seated immobile in an empty room: “I am interested in the physical aspect of old people, especially old men more than women, because observing their bodies, you glean a great deal of information; for me it is more interesting to depict an old man than a young one, old age is an extremely important subject for me. I began specifically with Mario, he was my first portrait, if you want to call it that. However, I prefer the term senility to old age, I use this term above all to indicate the period when, in an artist’s work, you recognize radical changes, when the artist gets his courage back and is once again ready to take risks, this is what especially interests me. I am referring to the dimensions of the works, to all the colors of a new flowering, a sort of late flowering. In the film, Mario doesn’t actually do anything but it is extremely revealing about his work, and his energy. Maybe he isn’t always sincere, or the energy isn’t always positive, but it still has incredible power.”

Finally, we let Tacita Dean have this final reflection, which serves as an homage, hers and our own, to an entire generation of artists: “When I speak about Mario and Marisa I am referring to a generation of artists who knew how to misbehave, while things are no longer like that in my generation, we no longer know how to misbehave. In a recent text I wrote about Sigmar Polke, whose behavior was perhaps not the most unseemly, but who lived with an abandon that my generation is no longer capable of having; I point out how all this is typical of the generation that lived through the war and suddenly saw the world collapse around them, saw all the structures that regulated that world vanish, and who finally felt free to do whatever they wanted. Polke behaved this way in Germany and, within certain limits, Merz or John Cage also represented this avant-garde, or however you want to define it. It took a generation—or not even an entire generation—for the energy to burst forth freely, something that the preceding generation wouldn’t have been able to do, since the war had clouded over any attempt to question their world. It is only the generation immediately following the war that succeeded in giving free vent to its energy, breaking all the rules, including adopting transgressive behaviors. We, instead, are confronting the art world at an even later moment, when we are too formal, too obsequious with regard to the market—maybe I am not, given that I personally don’t pay too much attention to the market—but certainly many of my artist contemporaries are. For the generation that emerged from the war, there was no problem about earning a lot of money with your art, and for me as well, when I completed my studies at the fine arts academy, it wasn’t conceivable to make money from art, while now even the youngest artists allow themselves to be driven by the market and by possibilities for making money; and so I am particularly happy to at least have an image of a world that is gone forever and that expresses an irresistible energy.”