- Artist
- Tacita Dean CBE born 1965
- Part of
- The Russian Ending
- Medium
- Photo-etching on paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 450 × 685 mm
support: 540 × 790 mm
frame: 625 × 870 × 30 mm - Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by the artist 2002
- Reference
- P20264
Summary
Beautiful Sheffield belongs to a portfolio of twenty black and white photogravures with etching collectively entitled The Russian Ending. The portfolio was printed by Niels Borch Jensen, Copenhagen and published by Peter Blum Editions, New York in an edition of thirty-five; Tate’s copy is the fifth of ten artist’s proofs. Each image in the portfolio is derived from a postcard collected by the artist in her visits to European flea markets. Most of the images depict accidents and disasters, both man-made and natural. Superimposed on each image are white handwritten notes in the style of film directions with instructions for lighting, sound and camera movements, suggesting that the each picture is the working note for a film. The title of the series is taken from a convention in the early years of the Danish film industry when each film was produced in two versions, one with a happy ending for the American market, the other with a tragic ending for Russian audiences. Dean’s interventions encourage viewers to formulate narratives leading up to the tragic denouements in the prints, engaging and implicating the audience in the creative process.
The grainy black and white photograph that provided the source material for Beautiful Sheffield depicts a series of dark chimneys emitting black smoke into a grey and heavy sky. Soot obscures the roofs in the foreground, rendering the bottom half of the image almost completely black.
Dean’s interest in narrative and the mechanisms of the film industry are also evident in her other work. Her installation Foley Artist, 1996 (Tate T07870) depicts cinematic sound engineers recording acoustic effects for a short soundtrack. The Roaring Forties: Seven Boards in Seven Days, 1997 (Tate T07613) is a series of chalkboard drawings that use the conventions of the filmic storyboard to suggest dramatic events taking place in tempestuous waters of the southern Atlantic Ocean. The Uncles, 2004 (collection of the artist) is a film about the artist’s own family connections to the first two Chief Executives of Ealing Studios, Basil Dean (1888-1978; Chief Executive 1931-37) and Michael Balcon (1896-1977; Chief Executive 1937-59).
Dean’s detailed notes cover much of this print. She describes her fictional film as ‘a nostalgic film about the loss of pastoral England’. She details the effects that would be used to replicate the image in the postcard: ‘neon fx to exaggerate pollution ... smog backlit ... bucolic bliss crossed out’. She specifies that this final image would be accompanied by a soundtrack of a local choir singing Jerusalem, and reproduces in full the poem by William Blake (1757-1827) on which the hymn is based. The industrial horizon in the image is unfavourably compared to the rural landscape it superceded: ‘the Russian (pastoral) Ending ... we must weep for the past’.
Further reading:
Clarrie Wallis, Sean Rainbird, Michael Newman, J.G. Ballard, Germaine Greer, Susan Stewart, Friedrich Meschede, Peter Nichols and Simon Crowhurst, Tacita Dean, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London, 2001.
Dorothea Dietrich, ‘The space in between: Tacita Dean’s Russian Ending’, Art on Paper, vol.6, no.5, May-June 2002, pp.48-53, reproduced on cover (detail), p.48.
Jordan Kantor, ‘Tacita Dean’, Artforum, vol.40, no.7, March 2002, p.138.
Rachel Taylor
August 2004
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