Eugenides Tacita Dean

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Tacita DeanAuthor(s): Jeffrey Eugenides and Tacita DeanSource: BOMB, No. 95 (Spring, 2006), pp. 30-37Published by: New Art PublicationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40427732 .

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33 sun rose above a very sharply defined cloud, and itwas the most extraordinary green ray. mean, notlike the one I have on myfilm, mean a real . . . andit lingered ... a second of emerald before the sunrose. I was so shocked, having this whole wait forit inMadagascar and then actually gettingto see itso vividly.To see such a full-blooded green ray-JE Does it ast longer fyou'reairborne?T D Probably.People see it at sea. I think ir pilots mustsee it more often.To see it from and is unusual.JE Does everybody ee the green raywhen theysee thefilm, rdoes ithappentoo fast?TD No. That's what's nice about it,because otherwisethe filmwould just be about a phenomenon. But inthe end it'smore about perceptionand faith, think.JE Didyou always see it?T D This is really nteresting,because I filmed t on thisbeach in Madagascar, and there was this couplewho were hanging around. They didn't see thegreen ray, and they'd videotaped the sunset todocument it. Then they replayed theirvideo to meforproofthat it wasn't there. But I was absolutelyconvinced that I had seen it,so it had to be on myfilm,which was optical and analog. When I got thefilmback, it was very,veryfaint, nd I had to reallypush it to get more color in the film,to bringoutthe green ray. But it's definitelythere. It's not afiction. Some people think the green ray is an illu-sion, but it's not.JE Therewas a Frenchfilmmakerwho spent weeks andmonthstrying o film tand couldn't.Then you wentdown there and got it n a couple ofdays-


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I put my bag, which had the book in it, throughthe hand-luggage x-raymachine, walked throughthe security arch, and then went to collect it,andthe bag had just disappeared. It was extraordi-nary. Then quite mysteriously and strangely, aweek later I got a phone call, while I was still inGlasgow, saying that my bag had been foundgoingaround and around the Aer Lingus luggage belt inDublinAirport.JE Was anythingmissing?TD Nothing was missing, no. I picked it up at theairport on my way back to London, and at first Iwas tryingto get some press attention on howunsafe itcan be to put all yourbest belongings intothat x-raymachine. But then I decided to write thenewspaper article myself, elling the storyof howmy stolen bag containing the stowaway's picturehad made its way to Dublin by this strange circu-itous route. I made and printed t in the style of theBritishnewspaper The Guardian. At the same timeI wanted to make a parallel article in the style ofthe period that I imagined she had stowed awayin. I had studied at Falmouth School of Art, so Ialready had a relationship to that town. I rang upthe Falmouth Packet, the local newspaper, andtold them I wanted to fabricate an article aboutthe stowaway, and they actually had a record ofher arriving n Falmouth on the Herzogin Cecilie in1928; her name was Jean Jeinnie and she stowedaway fromPort Lincoln inAustralia. So in myfake1928 article, I had her stowing away inorder to try JEto get to Dublin. So when you first ncounter these T Dtwo newspaper articles, you read that she wastryingto get to Dublin but you don't know if shemade it or not, but you do know her photographicself made it there nearly70 years later.

After hat, I decided to take it even further ndI fabricated a film with a windup Kodak camera ofher, mean of somebody who looked a bit like her, JEaboard my version of the Herzogin Cecilie. She'd TDstowed away in 1928, and I found out the ship hadwrecked in 1936. At that point I decided to go on asort of pilgrimage to find the place where the realHerzogin Cecilie sank, off Bolt Head in Devon, thecounty up from Cornwall. Ithad been a calm night, JEbut the ship hit a rock and let in a lot of water,and in its hold was grain, and grain when it meetssalt water goes rotten very, very quickly. At thatpoint the boat could still have been salvaged, butSalcombe harbor,which is protected on all sidesbythe wind, refused to let her in because the localcouncil were afraid the stench of rottengrain mightscare off heirtourists, so theytowed her into thislittle bay called Starehole Bay, which is exposedfrom he southeast, and the wind changed and theboat was immediatelywrecked.I went to Starehole Baywith a friend nd campedabove the wreck (which you can still see) whichyou're technically not supposed to do. We filmedthe wreck of the Herzogin Cecilie the next morn- TDing on this beautiful Julyday, and then left. Thena day or two later,we saw that on the very day we

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35 panicked about mentioning this particular coinci-dence, because, you know, it worked verywell formyown narrative,but-JE A little hard to get excited about an artistic coinci-dence when the reality s that a murder has beencommitted.TD Yes!JE Right. My view on coincidences is this: I think hatcoincidences are always happening, but whenyou're focused on producingsomething,that atten-tion makes you aware of them, and suddenly theystart to cohere. I let myselfbelieve in them to theextentthatthey keep me fromdespair overmywork.When they're happening, nd itfeels like the unseenpowers are on yourside, you actually have a betterworking ay.T D You have that manythen?JE I have them now and then, nd if hey happen I ust letthem sortof-T D -take over?JE Liftmy mood. The other day I was writing bout asection inmybook about Calcutta, 'mwritingbout aflock ofcrows, and as I was writing bout it, bunch

of crows appeared outside the windowof mystudio.I know it's obviouslya meaningless coincidence, butat such moments I get a very primitive eelingthatwhat I'mwritings manifestingtself n theworld. letmyself eel that for he day,even though don't reallybelieve it. Do youever use them as aids or as - ?TD -totally. Forexample, I'm just doing this researchinto old and deformedtrees at the moment. I madea photograph for an edition recently for Octobermagazine called Fontainebleau Postcard, and I hadto phone themup to check the title, nd itremindedme that I had found all these old postcards of TheForest of Fontainebleau when I was in Kitakyushuin Japan, and I remember thinking that's sostrange, why would they have so many postcardsof Fontainebleau? And then Iwent onto the internetand I looked up the Forest of Fontainebleau, whichtook me to the famous oak of Fontainebleau whichin turn ed me to look up old oak trees and then theoldest of trees in England, the yew tree. Before Iknew it,the tinyvillage where I grew up came upas the place where there once was a 1400-year-old yew tree. I always need that tinythread to getmyself going. I'm now shortly off to photographsimilar trees in the area fora new project.JE Well that's almost a methodology of producing awork,usingchance. You decided to work nthatfash-ion with the recentshow youcurated at the HaywardGallery nLondon,An Aside.TD Well, I didn't think, I'm going to create a showbased on an objective chance, it was just totallyassociative. I started with a slide projection workby one artist, Lothar Baumgarten, who told me astorythat led me somewhere else, and then that inturngave me a thought,which was probably abso-lutely tiny,almost too embarrassing to express,but it made me think of something else, which inturn guided me to the next artist I included, andso on. A series of coincidences something likeyour

crows, which are pretty mall compared to some ofyourMiddlesex coincidences.JE Yeah, the crows are small, but the Middlesex onesare big. My old teacher,GilbertSorrentino, sed touse these things he called "generative devices,"which were ways ofwriting, aking way anykindofintention fwhat you were goingto write. guess itgoes back to surrealism, n that he's trying o tap hisunconscious. And writestories,write fictionwithouthavingany plan in mind,because he thoughtthat aplanwould inevitablynd up as something ired.Doesthatstrike chordwithyou? Imean, I don'twrite hatway at all, get an idea and I plan it, nd then changethe plan. I let things change all the time,but I neverproceed incompletedarkness.T D I have definitelyworked in thatway. I tend to thinkthat the work by other artists that I am attractedto works because you seem to imagine that theyhad no real sense of their destination when theystarted. And I thinka lot of pre-imaginedworkcanbe quite inert.JE There's a greatpoem byFrank 'Hara,of course I don'tremember t, laughter) but,he's tryingowrite bouta fish, think.And when he's finished, he poem hasnothing o do with this fish, xcept the title remains"The Fish,"because that'swhere his thoughtprocessbegan. So as O'Hara wrote thepoem, it became some-thing lse, and finally ad nothing o do with hisorigi-nal impulse.The title s the only ign. I find hatquitetruewithwriting. 'll have an idea and as I work on it,the idea changes until here'snothing eft ftheorigi-nal idea. Nevertheless,while I'm writing, 'm awareof mybasic narrative ntentions. don't give up myrationality, avingso little, eally, o spare. I proceedina logicalmanner, ut italways takes me to illogicalconclusions.

TD And I proceed illogically. (laughter) But I'm veryformal strangely enough. The final manifestationisn't chaotic, although the process is, I think.JE I thinkyourfilmshave a classical order o them.Theydon't seem chaotic to me in the way they'refilmedor edited.TD But the thing is, with film, 'm totally uneconomi-cal. I cannot make decisions before the fact, so Iactually film far too much. I never know where I'mgoing when I cut myfilms. And that's why I haveto cut alone in a very solitary fashion; I need theactual medium, because I can't delegate or use acomputer. I need to have the spools piled up besideme inorderto work.JE But a lot of yourfilms are fairly tatic. For instance,Pie, the film bout the magpies roosting n the treeoutside your studio in Berlin,or even Fernsehturm,filmed n the revolving estaurant n Berlin'sTV tower.Yousay thatyoudon't know whereyou'regoingwhenyou begin filming. ut that's actually a fairlyimitedpossibility fyou'regoingto film tree and just havethemagpies comingand going.TD So I have to make some decisions. With,Fernsehturmforexample, I wanted to film a tran-sition fromday to night in the tower,which has amoving restaurantthat rotates 360 degrees in half

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an hour. I made one strict rule that the onlymove-ment in the entire filmwould be the movementof this restaurant, that there would be no cameramovement at all. So it looks like a slow pan, butthe camera is still mounted on the moving plat-form,and the filmcycles fromday to night. It allhappens in one evening, one sunset, and it takespart inside the restaurant so the view is not impor-tant, onlyhow the diners react to it. The filmbeginsindaylightwhen the windows are transparent,butas it gets darker they become more translucentas the lights get turned on inside, untilby the endtheyappear opaque and the view is totally ost andthe action veryenclosed. So using the cycle of theday with the cycle ofthe restaurant's 360 degrees,that's already quite precise. It's just that, when Icut it, didn't have any pre-imagined view ofhow itwould be ordered.JE How muchfilm idyoushoot forFernsehturm?TD We had three cameras when we filmed, almostcontinuously. We must have filmed six or sevenhours of filmfor forthe final edit of 44 minutes.Whereas Palast, filmed at the Palast Der Republikin Berlinwas about 10 minutes, and I must havefilmed at most double that. The smaller filmswhich are not anamorphic, I filmmyself.Then thedegree of unused material is much smaller. But forthe bigger anamorphic films, need a camera crewbecause I need more than one camera, and thenthe control is lost, so I have an enormous amountof material.JE Fernsehturmwas the first hingthat you did afteryou came to live in Berlin on the DAAD. And, am Iright hat you got the idea because you were at theCharit Hospital, and every day you would walk ina glass walkway and you'd see the Fernsehturm nthe distance?TD No, I had the idea because in 1987, when it wasstill East Berlin and I visited the tower on a collegetrip, I remembered it and immediately wantedto return there after I arrived in 2000, in Augustin fact. And it was a beautiful evening with a fullHarvest moon. That was the point when I thought:I have to film n here. And when I was editing- it'sfunny, was thinking bout this the other day andabout how much Berlin has changed-I workedin this little cutting room I used to have rightbyFriedrichstrasse S-Bahn station. And in the morn-ings I was in this bizarre Poliklinik in CharitHospital, veryclose by.JE You would meet everyday n a group to do physicaltherapy xercises,wouldn'tyou?T D Horriblething . . theymade me do these ludicrousdexterity exercises, making paper animals! Andthe thing about it was then, and this was in 2000,somehow the hospital was still so much the East.There were two sorts of day wards: one that waspacked full of women fromthe East, and one thatwas just me and this other woman who was fromTempelhof in the West. So they literally egregatedEast fromWest, and foreignwomen meant West.Everyone had to rise hideously early. I had to be

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there at 7:15 for breakfast. But it was an incredi-ble time because this was when the Florida presi-dential recount was going on, and I remember theonly thingthat made italrightwas that Iwould getout of bed and put on CNN to find out what washappening, to wake me up.JE Nothingmore excitingthan listeningto the Floridarecount-TD It was so gripping at the time, all these culturalthings that have already disappeared. Anyhow,there was this passageway between buildings inthe hospital, which I just walked down this morn-ing actually, where I could catch one last glimpseof the Fernsehturmbefore I had to spend all hoursof daylight in this surreal environment. I usedto call it my Bridge of Sighs. When the Poliklinikfinished, I would walk in the dusk to the edit-ing room, where I would spend my afternoonsand evenings editing Fernsehturmwhich also feltvery East. So the combination of it all made foraverypowerfulatmosphere. And at that point,evenaround Friedrichstrasse, the air smelled of thatcheap coal. Do you remember that, how the Eastand West smelled different?That's gone now.JE Yeah, I do remember t. In Schneberg thereare stillpeople who burn oal, but ess and less, you're right.T0 No, it was the smell of thatcheap coal theyused tohave in the East. It's extraordinaryhow rapidlyasa country or culture it's disappeared or changed.And now the Palast der Republik, an emblem ofthe East as the GDR house of parliament- they'resupposed to be pulling it down.JE So what's happening with that? I was just readingthat they'restillprotesting he demolition, nd I gotthe sense thattheymightdo it.TD The thing s, the Germangovernmentis under hugepressure, but they have to do it. It keeps gettingpostponed though. Recently, the artists ThomasScheibitz and Lisa Junghanss organized an exhibi-tion of internationaland Berlin-based artists insidea white cube that had been constructed inside thePalast der Republik. It was so popular that on thelast day of the show, there were hour-longqueuesto get in. It was really a lot about actually gettinginside to see the Palast. They can't afford o pull itdown really,but they're supposed to do it beforethe WorldCup, which of course is coming to BerlininJune.JE Oh, theywant to tear it down because of the WorldCup, I didn't realize that.TD They're supposed to have it totally flattened, justgreen land, and to put up a huge screen to projectthe World Cup on, exactly where the Palast is. Sotheyhave to hurry p.JE Thereare a lot ofplaces to putup a screen in Berlin. tsounds like he same kind fpopular uprising hat edto bringing own the wall is now happeningto keepup the Palast.TD Maybe, maybe, but it's an ambivalent thing,for alot of people.JE Well, was reading he "ABC'sofTCD,"and the authorMark Godfreydescribes the reflectivewindows of

Palast der Republik s the centerof the GDRgovern-ment,as keeping the oppressive regime concealed.But fromwhat I've heardabout it, t'salso wheretheyhad a lot of their festivals. I thought t was a placemanyEast Germansremember ondly . .TD No, it's not actually. They had a lot of culturalactivities there, but it was an enforced culturalthing. The government only ever met 28 times inthe Palast, but it is still very symbolic of the GDR.And even Thomas Scheibitz doesn't love what thebuilding represents, but I thinkwhat he wanted tosay was that Berlin lacks a decent contemporaryart space. So that was his politics, it wasn't himtrying o keep the Palast open out of fondness butperhaps saying, This building functions, why notuse it.JE You said once, "Everythinghat excites me no longerfunctions n its own time." I respond to that myself,because a lotofmywork s about obsolescence, aboutruins. I grew up in Detroitand so, at a veryyoungage, was put on intimate ermswithentropy. lacesof decay used to depress me incredibly, hen I wasnine to twelve years old. And sometimes I couldn'teven bare to look in junkyards nd vacant lots. Andfor ome reason now,nothingpleases me morethanlookingat a junkyard r a vacant lot or ruinedbuild-ing. I don't know how that changed, but when youspeak about that inyourworkand how you respondto Teignmouth lectron,Donald Crowhurst's eachedcatamaran on CaymanBrae or the abandoned BubbleHouse, I can completelyunderstandyourfascination.TD It's an amazing memory foryou to have, of thosesort of places that once depressed you. I thinkabout structures like the Bubble House or theTeignmouth Electron as futuristic.They were notof the normal build when they were constructed,so they were not contemporary.And I don't knowwhen theyever sat comfortably ntheirown time.JE So, you're ust going to stay in Berlinforthe rest ofyour ife?You'vesettledthere,youhave an apartment,you have a child.Goingto put some personal historyinhere.TD (laughter) Cram in the personal history.Well we'velost some of our major friends,who have gone offto far-flung laces likeChicago.JE But otherwise?TD Otherwise, forthe time being, it's nice. It's snow-ing here.JE We haven'treally alked about anything eally, xceptcoincidence,but we're overour time. Ifwe talk onger,thetranscriptwillget too long.T D Areyou at home?JE I'm at home inmy iving oom.TD Okay,so are we going to hang up?JE I think hatwould be prudent,laughter)T D Can't we end it a while ago?JE Endat somethingwe said a whileago? Yeah, I'msurewe will. don't wantmy nguishto be on tape.TD Your anguish?JE Myanguish,yes. I don't want it to be on tape, so I'mgoingto hang up.

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Eugenides Tacita Dean