Tacita Dean Installations Honoring Merce Cunningham on View in Montreal

Written by Clark Bastide Tuesday, 13 October 2009 22:27

MONTREAL.- How to choreograph silence. That was the challenge issued by artist Tacita Dean to the great American choreographer Merce Cunningham, who revolutionized modern dance. Through January 3, 2010, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal presents the exhibition Tacita Dean. Merce Cunningham, the American choreographer who was among a handful of 20th-century figures to make dance a major art and a major form of theater. He died at 90 and lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Cunningham ranks with Isadora Duncan, Serge Diaghilev, Martha Graham and George Balanchine in making people rethink the essence of dance and choreography, posing a series of “But” and “What if?” questions over a career of nearly seven decades.

In 2007, British artist Tacita Dean invited Cunningham to choreograph John Cage’s composition 4’33’’. That piece—a 4-minute, 33-second silence “performed” in three movements—was highly influential in twentieth-century music and very emotional for the choreographer: Cage, who died in 1992, was his long-time collaborator and life partner. Cunningham, who was 88 at the time and in a wheelchair, accepted the challenge. On the afternoon of April 28, 2007, in the New York studios of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Dean filmed a total of six takes. Seated on a chair, before a wall of rehearsal-room mirrors, Cunningham performed silence by remaining immobile, adjusting his pose slightly between each of the movements in response to a signal from Trevor Carlson, the company’s director.

The show consists of an installation of six projections on screens arranged around the exhibition space, entitled Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33’’ with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007. Each projection corresponds to one of the six performances presented by Cunningham and filmed by Dean. With 4’33’’, Cage set out to compose a piece made of unbroken silence. In Stillness, Cunningham transposes this silence into immobility and Dean uses a still camera, shooting each performance from a different angle. The screens’ dimensions are calibrated so that the choreographer, whether seen in close-up or long shot, is life-size. Here, music, dance and film simultaneously share a common space-time with the visitor.

Merce Cunningham has been fascinated with movement all his life. His mother once described him dancing down the aisle of the family church when Cunningham was just four years old. The renowned choreographer established the Merce Cunningham Dance Company the summer of 1953, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. For Cunningham, movement is not just a means of expressing  a story—movement itself is the subject. Rather than examining character psychology or plot through choreography, Cunningham’s work focuses on dance for dance’s sake.

With his collaborator and life partner John Cage, Mr. Cunningham’s most celebrated achievement was to have dance and music composed independent of each other. His choreography showed that dance was principally about itself, not music, while often suggesting that it could also be about many other things as well.

Tacita Dean
Born in 1965, in Canterbury, England, Tacita Dean explores various media, including drawing, photography and sound, but made her name internationally with her films documenting the passage of time. She has taken part in many solo and group exhibitions since 1992, at Dia:Beacon (2008), Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007), Schaulager, Munchenstein/Basel, Switzerland (2006), National Gallery of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway (2006), Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2003) and Tate Britain (2001), among others. Closer to us here, she participated in the 2000 Biennale de Montréal. She has won the Kurt Schwitters Prize (Germany, 2009) and the Hugo Boss Prize (United States, 2006), and was nominated for the Millennium Prize awarded by the National Gallery of Canada in 2001 and for the 1998 Turner Prize. Tacita Dean lives and works in Berlin.

The presentation at the Musée d’art contemporain is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Canada.

Tribute to Cunningham 1919-2009  /  This work examining silence and the passage of time takes on added poignancy with the death of Merce Cunningham this past July. The exhibition Tacita Dean was curated by Mark Lanctôt, curator at the Musée.

Canada's Premier Contemporary Art Museum

The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal was founded by the Québec government in 1964. At first, the museum was a department within Québec's ministère des Affaires culturelles. In 1983, the government changed the museum's status, making it an autonomous body with its own Board of Directors. Our mission is to promote and preserve contemporary Québec art as well as Canadian and international contemporary art, through exhibitions and numerous other cultural activities.

The Musée moved to the heart of downtown on May 28, 1992. Truly a museum for the twenty-first century, the Musée d'art contemporain is part of the Place des Arts, Canada's only cultural complex devoted to both the performing and visual arts.

Visit the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal at : http://www.macm.org/en/index.html

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