Fatigues By Tacita Dean Analysis

The quaint and obsolete buildings are the remains of some prototype air-raid warning structures built in 1920; by accompanying the images with ambient sound recorded in 1999, she doubles the act of preservation of those buildings, already saved from destruction in 1988. She was shortlisted for the 1998 Turner Prize.

Tacita Dean’s newest series of blackboard drawings, ‘Fatigues’ (2012), presents a discourse on the fragility of the human gesture. This vulnerability stands in the face of many things: it manifests in her delicate lines that describe the majesty of nature, in the almost insufficient marks that describe the epic troughs and crests of historical narrative. In this series of six multi-panel black boards, the Berlin-based British artist
At Marian Goodman, walking from the north room of the gallery to the south room proved to be just as effective. The drawings are a linear, cinematic voyage, which recall the ‘promotional’ paintings of the 19th-century artist Albert Bierstadt, who created his monumental oils partly as a paean to the untouched beauty of the American West, but also to encourage pioneers to fulfil America’s Manifest Destiny. Dean is more
Think of her subject matter: Donald Crowhurst's fated, faked round-the-world journey, which ended with the lone yachtsman losing his sanity in the Sargasso Sea and jumping overboard, clutching his chronometer. A jukebox with ambient sound recordings from around the world. The oceanic swell in a hydrophysics wave tank in Delft. An endlessly turning Berlin, seen from the revolving restaurant of the Fernsehturm television tower. A frustrated attempt to find Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in Utah's Great Salt Lake, following directions that are as deceptive as they are