The British artist Tacita Dean is primarily celebrated for her films, yet the first major U.S. exhibition of her work—currently on display at the Menil Collection in Houston—takes a markedly different approach. Titled "Blind Folly," the retrospective spans over three decades and features an overwhelming focus on drawing, a medium Dean famously calls “the thread that connects everything.” Here, drawing is not a mere supporting act to her famed moving images—it is foregrounded as a field of exploration, resistance, and inquiry in its own right.
To understand this curatorial pivot from film to drawing, one must start by exploring Dean’s own reflections on process and medium. Dean has repeatedly underlined a crucial difference between analog and digital editing: the presence of what she terms “material resistance.” Citing the late filmmaker Harun Farocki, she describes the challenge of digital tools that offer “hardly any material resistance against the ideas.” For Dean, the time, friction, and labor involved in cutting and spooling analog film is not a hindrance but a generative force—it forces the artist to slow down, to think, and to consider. This logic threads through her drawings, too, where the resistance offered by her chosen materials—chalk, blackboard, slate, and found objects—shapes not only texture and technique but the very nature of thought itself.
Critically, Dean’s drawing surfaces are never “neutral.” Whether she uses the rough edge of a painted slate, the nostalgic gloss of a blackboard, or the timeworn image of a found postcard, the support always participates actively in the work. The medium is extended to include its support, and the physical artifact becomes inseparable from the conceptual intent. This material interdependence is especially apparent when chalk interacts with blackboard, or written notations merge with the visual field, underscoring an ongoing negotiation between presence and erasure.
Dean frequently includes writing in her drawings: notations that act as timestamps, records of thought, or fleeting glimpses into the making process. Dates, events, and cryptic remarks are interleaved with imagery, and their presence both anchors and disrupts the traditional timelessness expected of fine art.
Two telling references emerge—“hypnagogic” and “hypnopompic”—states of mind on the edge of sleep. Dean’s method, she suggests, operates in the liminal space just beneath full consciousness, where intuition and material accident can work together. This gentle touch with chance becomes a formal discipline, encouraging the viewer to follow along these uncertain, surprising “attentional paths.”
Analog, for Dean, becomes urgent not as an artifact of loss but as an endangered species. She frames the continued existence of photochemical film as a live question for contemporary culture, warning that digital supremacy carries the risk of “incalculable loss”—not just of aesthetic pleasure but of the complex, embodied attention that analog mediums require.
Scattered among the immense, atmospheric vistas are handwritten notes, dates, and allusions—sometimes clear, sometimes eroded or nearly illegible. These textual interventions don’t merely layer meaning; they breach the “timeless” integrity of the image, inviting viewers to consider the work in flux, connected to both the moment of its making and the present moment of its viewing.
Temporality here becomes material: words and phrases reflect not only the time in which they were written but the ongoing passage of time both inside and outside the gallery. In this way, Dean’s work resists the false security of art’s “timelessness,” instead offering an object with a pulse—a drawing that lives, ages, and possibly dies in front of us.
With the digital, Dean and sympathetic critics warn, comes more than just a new set of tools. There’s a real danger of becoming “digital subjects,” shaped and recruited—what Louis Althusser called “interpellation”—by the logics of algorithmic systems. Digital technologies, especially social media and AI, don’t just show us new content; they modulate the way we think, perceive, and argue. As novelist Zadie Smith points out, the architecture of digital debate even shapes our understanding of what it means to have or form a thought.
Dean’s wariness is well-founded and not strictly reactionary. She concedes the advantages of digital tools, but her deep unease stems from the possibility of drifting into a “bodyless, human-less world,” where attentional discipline and situated experience are sacrificed for immediacy, convenience, and platform-driven distraction.
The analogy of retracing—both in the literal camera movements in films like “The Friar’s Doodle” and in the drawn elements of her large works—offers a model for resisting the seductions of shallow digital glances. Retracing, like analog editing, invites viewers into an analog process, filled with unpredictability, resistance, and the potential for surprise.
Dean’s insistence on resistance—material, conceptual, and temporal—is a calculated refusal to capitulate entirely to digital thinking. Her drawings, for all their delicacy and openness to chance, are thus acts of preservation and resistance: declarations that the future must contain the possibility of analog experience, with all its risks, slowness, and durational intensity.
“Blind Folly” stands as a compelling argument for the continued, conscious embrace of analog forms—not in opposition to digital possibility but in defense of the manifold values, disciplines, and pleasures that only the analog can provide. In an era dominated by velocity, distraction, and infinite reproducibility, Tacita Dean’s slow, uncertain, resistant drawings urge us to reclaim the present—one line, one mark, one act of attention at a time.
Source: glasstire.com Review: Tacita Dean's "Blind Folly" | Glasstire
Drawing as Material Resistance
To understand this curatorial pivot from film to drawing, one must start by exploring Dean’s own reflections on process and medium. Dean has repeatedly underlined a crucial difference between analog and digital editing: the presence of what she terms “material resistance.” Citing the late filmmaker Harun Farocki, she describes the challenge of digital tools that offer “hardly any material resistance against the ideas.” For Dean, the time, friction, and labor involved in cutting and spooling analog film is not a hindrance but a generative force—it forces the artist to slow down, to think, and to consider. This logic threads through her drawings, too, where the resistance offered by her chosen materials—chalk, blackboard, slate, and found objects—shapes not only texture and technique but the very nature of thought itself.Critically, Dean’s drawing surfaces are never “neutral.” Whether she uses the rough edge of a painted slate, the nostalgic gloss of a blackboard, or the timeworn image of a found postcard, the support always participates actively in the work. The medium is extended to include its support, and the physical artifact becomes inseparable from the conceptual intent. This material interdependence is especially apparent when chalk interacts with blackboard, or written notations merge with the visual field, underscoring an ongoing negotiation between presence and erasure.
Temporality, Not Premeditation
Dean’s engagement with materiality is matched by a preoccupation with time. Her work renders the temporal spatial, translating fleeting events and ephemeral experiences into fixed, if fragile, forms. In pieces like "Magnetic (Aviary): Crows, Raptors, Fowl, Game, Water Birds, Ornamental, Vulture, Garden, Seabirds," she recorded the calls of various birds onto magnetic tape, mapping duration into the length of a physical object and annotating each stretch of tape with the corresponding bird’s name. This makes temporal occurrence into something visual and spatial—a timeline with the resonance of actual sound and memory.Dean frequently includes writing in her drawings: notations that act as timestamps, records of thought, or fleeting glimpses into the making process. Dates, events, and cryptic remarks are interleaved with imagery, and their presence both anchors and disrupts the traditional timelessness expected of fine art.
The Poetics of Blindness and Chance
A striking thematic throughline in "Blind Folly" is blindness—literal, metaphorical, and procedural. In the exhibition’s key installation, a sequence of drawings made using steam train windows forms an “L” shape in the gallery, one side showing the progressive phases of the moon, hand-annotated in white script. The progression from new moon to eclipse is not only an imaginative journey through space and time but a meditation on what remains unseen. As exhibition curator Michelle White explains, Dean associates the darkness of the new moon and the eclipse with “the blindness of nature,” a phenomenon that resonates deeply with her own embrace of the unplanned, the accidental, and the limits of foresight.Two telling references emerge—“hypnagogic” and “hypnopompic”—states of mind on the edge of sleep. Dean’s method, she suggests, operates in the liminal space just beneath full consciousness, where intuition and material accident can work together. This gentle touch with chance becomes a formal discipline, encouraging the viewer to follow along these uncertain, surprising “attentional paths.”
Embodiment and the Analog in the Digital Age
In her "steam train window" series, Dean juxtaposes the ancient and the contemporary—images of feet and film gauges, mirrored surfaces, and references to the analog past. By including mirrored elements, the works place viewers within the frame, urging them to acknowledge their own presence in both the “here” and “now” of the gallery. While themes of obsolescence and nostalgia often dog discussions of Dean’s work, she herself argues forcefully that her art is about the present. As she clarifies in interviews, her commitment to analog technologies—particularly film—is not a Luddite retreat but a crusade to protect the present’s capacity for nuance and resistance against technological flattening.Analog, for Dean, becomes urgent not as an artifact of loss but as an endangered species. She frames the continued existence of photochemical film as a live question for contemporary culture, warning that digital supremacy carries the risk of “incalculable loss”—not just of aesthetic pleasure but of the complex, embodied attention that analog mediums require.
Scale, Fragility, and the Sublime
Three monumental blackboard drawings in the exhibition—“The Wreck of Hope,” “The Montafon Letter,” and “Sunset”—underscore Dean’s deft negotiation between monumentality and fragility. These pieces, stretching over 24 feet in length, depict vast, sublime landscapes: an iceberg, an avalanche, a glowing sunset cloud. Yet their scale is belied by the extreme fragility of the medium—chalk not fixed to the support, susceptible to touch, time, and even the movements of gallery air.Scattered among the immense, atmospheric vistas are handwritten notes, dates, and allusions—sometimes clear, sometimes eroded or nearly illegible. These textual interventions don’t merely layer meaning; they breach the “timeless” integrity of the image, inviting viewers to consider the work in flux, connected to both the moment of its making and the present moment of its viewing.
Writing in Drawing, Drawing in Writing
Dean’s equivocation between drawing and writing is more than a formal conceit. Chalked notes on blackboard ground, legible or not, serve both as evidence of thinking and as visual marks—dissolving the barrier usually maintained between image and text. The question of whether a word is “drawn” or “written” is purposely left unresolved, an invitation to viewers to bridge the visual and the logical, the intuitive and the analytical.Temporality here becomes material: words and phrases reflect not only the time in which they were written but the ongoing passage of time both inside and outside the gallery. In this way, Dean’s work resists the false security of art’s “timelessness,” instead offering an object with a pulse—a drawing that lives, ages, and possibly dies in front of us.
Resistance, Attention, and the Digital Critique
At the heart of “Blind Folly,” and Dean’s broader practice, is a meditation on resistance—the productive, even essential, friction that materials and processes offer. Whether in the slow, deliberate editing of film or the powdery crumbling of chalk, resistance is a feature, not a flaw. It slows the artist and the viewer alike, forcing a kind of attention that digital technologies increasingly threaten to erase.With the digital, Dean and sympathetic critics warn, comes more than just a new set of tools. There’s a real danger of becoming “digital subjects,” shaped and recruited—what Louis Althusser called “interpellation”—by the logics of algorithmic systems. Digital technologies, especially social media and AI, don’t just show us new content; they modulate the way we think, perceive, and argue. As novelist Zadie Smith points out, the architecture of digital debate even shapes our understanding of what it means to have or form a thought.
Dean’s wariness is well-founded and not strictly reactionary. She concedes the advantages of digital tools, but her deep unease stems from the possibility of drifting into a “bodyless, human-less world,” where attentional discipline and situated experience are sacrificed for immediacy, convenience, and platform-driven distraction.
A Counter-Model of Attention
This predicament is underscored by contrasts in recent artworld practices. While some contemporaries have enthusiastically adapted their exhibitions for the age of smartphones and rapid-fire distraction—Cory Arcangel’s Wi-Fi-boosted gallery rooms, for instance—Dean subtly but firmly insists on slow looking, embodied engagement, and the discipline of “tracing attentional paths.” She doesn’t demand monastic withdrawal but offers her works as sites for choice: choose to attend carefully, to slow down, to trace not what is instantly apprehensible, but what emerges through effort and time.The analogy of retracing—both in the literal camera movements in films like “The Friar’s Doodle” and in the drawn elements of her large works—offers a model for resisting the seductions of shallow digital glances. Retracing, like analog editing, invites viewers into an analog process, filled with unpredictability, resistance, and the potential for surprise.
The Stakes of Resistance
So what, ultimately, is at stake in Tacita Dean’s art and in this exhibition? The stakes, at least for Dean, are existential rather than merely aesthetic. They concern nothing less than the cultural cost of relinquishing material resistance—of giving up on the analog, the difficult, and the fragile in favor of the digital, the frictionless, and the infinitely repeatable. The viewer is called to reevaluate not only what is lost in terms of medium and process, but also what is lost in terms of experience, discipline, and the self-possession required for deep attention.Dean’s insistence on resistance—material, conceptual, and temporal—is a calculated refusal to capitulate entirely to digital thinking. Her drawings, for all their delicacy and openness to chance, are thus acts of preservation and resistance: declarations that the future must contain the possibility of analog experience, with all its risks, slowness, and durational intensity.
Lessons for the Present and the Road Ahead
In the larger context of technological change, Dean’s work and the Menil’s curatorial gambit read as instructions for living in the present, not as paeans to nostalgia. The urgency isn’t backward-looking; it’s a challenge to hold on to ways of making, seeing, and thinking that the digital threatens to wash away. Her art and her writing challenge viewers to ask: What do we lose when we mistake frictionlessness for progress? What cultural and personal impoverishments are quietly accruing when attention itself becomes a scarce commodity?“Blind Folly” stands as a compelling argument for the continued, conscious embrace of analog forms—not in opposition to digital possibility but in defense of the manifold values, disciplines, and pleasures that only the analog can provide. In an era dominated by velocity, distraction, and infinite reproducibility, Tacita Dean’s slow, uncertain, resistant drawings urge us to reclaim the present—one line, one mark, one act of attention at a time.
Source: glasstire.com Review: Tacita Dean's "Blind Folly" | Glasstire
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