Time and motion

Andy Warhol would probably have been surprised to learn that his 1964 film ‘Empire’ had given rise to an entire genre. This work comprises eight hours and five minutes of slow-motion footage of the Empire State Building during which nothing much happens. Warhol remarked that it was a way of watching time pass or, you might say, the Zen of boredom. Much the same could be said of the films in Tacita Dean’s two exhibitions, Portrait and Still Life at the National Portrait Gallery and National Gallery respectively.

The most ambitious of these, ‘Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS’ (2008), on show at the NPG, is composed of six separate films, each five minutes long, of the late dancer and choreographer enacting a balletic version of Cage’s celebrated (or notorious) composition 4’33’’ (consisting, of course, of a silence lasting for that interval). Cunningham — who was by then wheelchair-bound — interprets this by being almost entirely motionless.

So far, you might think, so minimalist. But in one way Dean’s work is almost baroque. The biggest gallery of the exhibition is filled with six large screens, on to which are projected moving images of this motionless, aged man, shot from multiple angles. The whole piece piles paradox on paradox. To see it, you move around the space, while he barely shifts. Dean is devoted to the medium of 16mm colour film, now as outmoded as oil pigment. So the only sound is the quiet whirr of projectors.

‘Portraits’, another of her works at the NPG, consists of 16 minutes of David Hockney in his studio, doing what he spends a lot of time doing: smoking, contemplating, musing on his own pictures. Again, nothing much eventuates. Hockney puffs away and at one point laughs at his own thoughts.