Tacita Dean: Staging Merce Cunningham’s Still Moments
Tacita Dean Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances; six films) 2008 Installation view Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery and Frith Street Gallery
Our natural inclination is to “tie into” history, and yet in a gallery space our preference is to look at the work of art and not what we have left out by chance or omission. In her installation work Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007, Tacita Dean helpfully draws out our natural inclinations so that we may better investigate what is natural to us with all the ardour and wonder we would give to an unrehearsed first-time encounter.
Before coming to the work in the museum, we can pass through Tricia Middleton’s installation Dark Souls or navigate Francine Savard’s mid-career retrospective. We might view this theatrical framework as a send-up of the Martha Graham contraction-and-release method, introducing us to Merce Cunningham’s formative years. Or as we enter into the steady, streaming noise of six projector fans that fill the room, we might have no view in mind.
Like good students, we are drawn empathetically to Cunningham, who sits meditatively in his chair, lulling us into performing with him to John Cage’s silent score 4’33”. Like bad students, however, we are only good until his attention is drawn somewhere else or until we “sense” his disinterest, which occurs frequently enough that it soon becomes a prescient effect.
In this strangely intimate environment, we become amused by our individual “leanings,” and by how much we time we spend participating in the silliness of waiting for director Trevor Carlson’s fingers to move in a countdown to the piece’s next movement.
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Tacita Dean Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances; six films) 2008 Installation view Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery and Frith Street Gallery |
As we make our way across the wood floor and again into play with our projected self—on the screen we appear as a silhouette figure, a black cutout—we begin to see the screen again. It would seem that, until we meet Cunningham at his eye’s vanishing point, we are in the process of “becoming.” Throughout the process, do we regain the clarity of a spectator when the projector, intercepting our involvement, suddenly shuts off?
At this point we become aware that the projectors are too large for their stands. They sit on them rather awkwardly. And they are now spinning and clicking as opposed to whirring as we slip in and out of their line of vision. But now our attention is tied entirely to Cage’s score, composed as the barely audible sounds of the street—a clank, a horn, a building business.
Too often the rush to construct a narrative wrenches us away from its lived experience. Here, we enjoy the incipient stages that the artist attends to in the creation of a work. Dean calls our attention to these stages and with extraordinary analysis and insight into her own work underscores our understanding of the artist as irreproachable.
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Tacita Dean Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances; six films) 2008 Installation view Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery and Frith Street Gallery |
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