The two works exemplify a long-standing creative relationship between the artist and Getty.
Dean has long been an outspoken champion of 16mm analog film that became popular among documentary filmmakers during the second half of the 20th century. Combining the deeply saturated colors yielded by the medium’s photochemical emulsion with long takes and tight framing, she creates contemplative films that have become one of her signature forms of expression.
“My year spent at the Getty Research Institute introduced me to Los Angeles, where I have chosen to continue to live part-time. My memory of first driving up to the Center was my surprise at seeing deer grazing beneath olive trees. Pan Amicus pays homage to this feeling of ‘elsewhere’ that the landscaping that surrounds the building creates in its visitors,” explains Dean. “Monet Hates Me is the result of many pleasurable hours spent in the Research Institute’s extraordinary and seemingly bottomless collection. I allowed chance to be my guide and it took me to places I didn’t know to even look for…”
The film Pan Amicus (2021) was commissioned in celebration of the Getty Center’s 20th anniversary and will be exhibited to coincide with its 25th anniversary this year. Inspired in part by J. Paul Getty’s interest in the classical world, Dean filmed views of the flora, fauna, and terrain that surround the Richard Meier-designed campus while deliberately avoiding signs of contemporary life, including the distinctive architecture. The presence of sculptural fragments—drawn from the Museum’s antiquities collection and placed in the landscape—helps to conjure the mythologized land of Arcadia, a pastoral realm the ancient Greeks believed to be Pan’s domain as the god of wilderness.
“It is moving to see Getty and its collections through Tacita’s singular lens, which poetically connects aspects of history and mythology. These two works, while very different in form and presentation, highlight the complex and inventive processes by which an artist like Tacita draws inspiration. With a dynamic visual language equally based in research and chance, she brings to life stories from Getty’s collection and its unique site,” says Arpad Kovacs, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs, Getty Museum.
Dean has described Monet Hates Me, a portfolio of 50 objects inspired by her exploration of the Research Institute’s Special Collections, as an “exhibition in a box.” The individual objects of this clothbound editioned work, installed in several cases and on the walls, are the first of the two Getty-related projects that visitors will encounter when they enter the gallery space.
While an artist in residence at the Research Institute (2014–15), Dean explored the collections and initiated a research project titled “The Importance of Objective Chance as a Tool of Research.” Allowing chance to be her guide, she randomly selected boxes from the GRI’s holdings that examined materials ranging from medieval alchemy books to 20th-century artist letters. She came across a letter Claude Monet wrote to Camille Pissarro containing a fragment of handwriting in French that appears to say “hate tacita,” which inspired the title Monet Hates Me. All the objects Dean selected were then photographed and their sources carefully documented.
Dean and longtime collaborator Martyn Ridgewell began compiling the various components of the portfolio during COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. Among the eclectic objects inspired by Dean’s findings are a reproduction of Piet Mondrian’s business card, a seven-inch red vinyl single that contains her reading of text fragments collected during her research, and various playful montages created from individual objects found in special collections. To realize many of the objects included in the portfolio, Dean and Ridgewell made use of vintage card and paper stocks that she collected at flea markets while living in Los Angeles, in addition to others sourced across Europe.
About Tacita Dean
Tacita Dean was born in Canterbury, England in 1965 and currently divides her time between Berlin and Los Angeles. After completing a BA in art from the Falmouth School of Art in Falmouth, England, in 1988, she went on to complete her postgraduate studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1992.