Itinerant Texts

[Various Artists]

Itinerant Texts

London, UK: Bookworks, 1996

8 x 11.5 x 6 cm.

Edition of 40 signed and numbered copies

Itinerant Texts is a set of original slide works by Judith Barry, Robert Barry, Angela Bulloch, Tacita Dean, Jimmie Durham, Tracey Emin, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Susan Hiller, Joseph Kosuth, Tracy Mackenna and Simon Patterson. 

Each have created works commenting on travel, transience and the nature of site-specificity.

The works were originally commissioned for Artist / Author: Contemporary Artists’ Books, a touring exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts. Itinerant Texts takes as its starting point the idea of the artist as itinerant worker, continually travelling on a kind of circuit and producing site-specific work.

Tacita Dean | Necklace Film Reels

Tacita Dean

Necklace Film Reels

London, UK: Studio Voltaire, 2012

80 x 4 cm.

Edition of 36

Produced as a fundraiser for Studio Voltaire, this unsigned, unnumbered edition features actual film reels from Dean's project FILM. 

FILM was committed by the Tate in 2011. It's an 11-minute silent 35 mm film projected onto a gigantic white monolith standing 13 metres tall at the end of a darkened Tate Turbine Hall. Read a review of the work at the Guardian, here. 

Derek Jarman's Home and Garden

“The word unique is overused, but this really is a unique environment, it’s a unique building,” said artist Jeremy Deller, speaking of filmmaker Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage. “Within it you can see his thought processes, you can see his work and it is all in such incredible condition . . . He deserves to have this kept as it was.”

Deller and fellow artists Tacita Dean and Wolfgang Tillmans have produced works available as incentives for the fundraising drive to help preserve the home and famous garden in Dungeness, a hamlet on the coast of Kent, England.

The National Heritage Memorial Fund has pledged $981,000 and there's another $654,000 from the Art Fund, and $327,000 from the Linbury Trust. This figure must be doubled to provide for the cottage’s long-term care, so that residencies and tours of the property can still take place.

Tillmans and Dean both provided prints and Deller produced a button based and sticker series, which are available for a donation of £25. Dean said Jarman was an artist who touched many, “whether we’re stone collectors or gardeners or gay activists or just activists, or film-makers or painters … he was remarkable.”

"Paradise haunts gardens, and some gardens are paradises. Mine is one of them,” said Jarman, who purchased the home in 1986. Following his death eight years later, it was maintained by his partner Keith Collins until his passing in 2018. The garden was made by arranging flotsam washed up nearby, interspersed with endemic salt-loving beach plants, both set against the bright shingle. Published posthumously, Derek Jarman's Garden features writing by the artist and photographs by Howard Sooley. It's available from Amazon, here.

“First and foremost, the cottage was always a living thing, a practical toolbox for his work,” said Swinton (pictured above) at the launch of the fundraising campaign. Jarman had given the actress her first role, in his acclaimed 1986 film based on the life of Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The film also provided the debut for actor Sean Bean.

Jarman's other films include Edward II, The Garden, Jubilee, and Wittgenstein. His final film, Blue, was produced after he was blinded from AIDs related complications. The seventy-nine minute film features a saturated blue still as it's only visual.

Jarman also produced music videos for Bryan Ferry, Marianne Faithful, Throbbing Gristle, Suede, The Pet Shop Boys and Patti Smith. His short film The Queen Is Dead, was later edited to provide The Smiths with videos for their songs "Panic", "Ask", "There is a Light that Never Goes Out" and the title track.

The fundraising drive will continue another 67 days. Pledge here:

https://www.artfund.org/get-involved/art-happens/prospect-cottage

Tacita Dean | Darmstadter Werkblock

Tacita Dean
Darmstadter Werkblock
Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2008
unpaginated, 15 x 26 cm., perfect bound
Edition of 1000 signed and numbered copies


"Darmstaedter Werkblock" contains film stills of Tacita Dean's film of the same title. "At the end of September 2007, the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt closed for renovation…[which was to include the] restoration of the seven-room installation by Joseph Beuys known as Block Beuys, 1970–86. The walls of the rooms are famously covered in brown and beige jute and the floors are carpeted. Beuys worked on the installation himself over many years, adding and changing things up to his death. The rooms continue to carry the aura of this activity and so the museum’s decision to remove the jute and carpet has caused great upset among lovers of Block Beuys worldwide. The controversy centers on the fact that Beuys never made particular reference to the jute walls, allowing the assumption that they are not relevant to any question of renovation. Just prior to the museum’s closure, Dean painstakingly filmed the walls, the carpet and any detail of the gallery décor, which was soon to be replaced, seeing them as analogous to the entropy in and of Beuys’s art, whilst carefully avoiding any sighting of the work itself."--Text from the publisher.

Tacita Dean | Floh

Tacita Dean
Floh
Göttingen, : Steidl, 2001
[176] pp., 30 x 24 cm., Smyth sewing, slipcase
Edition of 4000 signed and numbered copies

“I do not want to give these images explanations: descriptions by the finder about how and where they were found, or guesses as to what stories they might or might not tell. I want them to keep the silence of the fleamarket; the silence they had when I found them; the silence of the lost object. Suffice to say, that all the images were found over the last six or so years in fleamarkets in Europe and America. Only at a certain point did I realise I was making a collection, and nothing is more worrying to the collector than the prospect of ‘closure’; the realisation that there will be a ‘final version’ and a potential end to the collection. I have stopped going to fleamarkets for fear of finding an image that ‘should have been in the book’, or have distractedly turned my attention to collecting postcards: postcards that show frozen fountains or four-leaf clovers, or have seagulls in them, or have been scribbled on by someone. But now I have resolved to believe that there is no, and can never be, a final version to this collection; that FLOH exists in the continuum and will one day, I hope, return, ownerless and silent to its origins in the fleamarket.”

- Tacita Dean

The contents of the book can be seen in an animated video on vimeo, here.

Point D'Ironie #36: Tacita Dean

“ For a long time now, I have been going to the flea market and buying postcards. I have started several mini-collections of subjects that attract me, because as any junk junkie knows, once you have found that second version of something you have
already started your collection. So at a certain point, I began finding deformed trees; trees that were grown into personalities through age or freakery and had become subjects for those anonymous jobbing photographers of the last century. And then, it became about the pleasure of picking up a paintbrush again after a long abstinence.”
– Tacita Dean