Tacita Dean is an artist I revere. This year, she's done the Tate Christmas tree; it is typical of her unostentatious and honest art. An ordinary Christmas tree stands in the entrance hall of London's Tate Britain. Its only unusual aspect is to be lit by real candles, instead of electric fairylights. Lit every day at 4pm, the candles burn down as the sun sets. Time visibly passes.
Unpretentious, melancholy, exact, Dean's Christmas tree lightly brushes against themes of transience, reality and truth that are at the heart of her work. She has written that everything she likes is "analogue" – as opposed to digital. She adapts the metaphor of an analogue tape recorder to describe any form of art that exists in real time. Against the spirit of our virtual, ethereal age, she upholds the real. She makes films on real celluloid – and has lyrically filmed an abandoned film processing plant. From the start of her career she also made drawings: her blackboard drawings of an imagined film set on a ship on a stormy sea have become treasures of the Tate collection, their plain drawing style and belief in narrative effortlessly going against any fashion you can think of.
Dean's works on paper – photographs drowning in gouache or composed in cinematic visions inscribed with Twombly-like arcana – have since evolved into some of the most powerful works being made anywhere this century.
I first encountered her vision at the same museum where her tree now flickers and gutters. One of the first reviews I ever wrote was of her installation Foley Artist, in the Art Now room at the Tate (it hadn't yet become Tate Britain). Already, the idea of analogue recording seemed central to what she was doing. On film, two "foley artists" were recreating the sounds of a thunderstorm by waving pieces of cardboard and crunching gravel, while old tape machines were displayed in the gallery. It was a work of art that engaged your imagination and emotions – one of the truly significant works of 1990s British art – and since then she has only got better. She's one of the major artists of our time.
