Tacita Dean and Still Life

This article explores the relationship between the work of Tacita Dean and still life painting, focusing upon two recent films made from footage shot in the re-installed bedroom studio of Giorgio Morandi (Day for Night and Still Life, both 2009). I argue that the history of still life painting dramatizes three of Dean’s key concerns: with transience and finitude; with a heightened attention to the textures and surfaces of the material world; and with forms of formal, historical and conceptual self-reflexivity. Ultimately, what is at stake in Dean’s return to the genre of still life, I argue, is the negotiation of art’s conditional and precarious autonomy, which is dependent upon yet resistant to powerful heteronomous forces dominated by exchange value.