Her idea was to allow chance to be her guide. Dean researched randomly in the Getty Research Institute’s archives, picking out boxes from the collections without knowing their contents, meandering through objects and images from sources as varied as medieval alchemy books to 20th-century artist letters.
The result, an exclusive artist’s edition of 50 objects, was designed as “an exhibition in a box”. Among the 50 objects is a vinyl record of Dean reading a montage of text fragments collated from her working photocopies, a poster, an etching, a screenprint, a postcard, a cyanotype, and a newspaper. The edition also includes as its first object a small book, which acts as the key to the provenance and manufacture of the other forty-nine objects. Nearly all objects were conceived and made between March and December 2020. Dean notes, “Monet Hates Me has the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns as part of its fabric. It brought about constraint, which in turn brought about decisions that were inevitably contingent on the peculiarities of the time and circumstance.”
Conceived as a complement to the artist’s edition, Monet Hates Me (Getty Research Institute, $50) features a reprint of the first object and reproductions of fifty artworks Dean created for the artist’s edition, along with enlightening texts that expand on her method of research, and illustrate her encounters with the archive.
Tacita Dean will be speaking as part of Monet Hates Me: Tacita Dean in Conversation with Anne Rana on December 8, 2021. Register in advance for this online event.
