Today we continue our Summer Reading series with an essay on Tacita Dean’s film Day for Night. Author Juana Berrío explains, “Day for Night is a term used to describe a cinematographic technique that uses a particular camera lens to turn a scene filmed during daylight into a night-scene. In other words, it’s about capturing an image and re-presenting it under a different ‘light.’ In that same sense, Dean’s film is an act of rereading the life and work of [Giorgio] Morandi.” This article was originally published on SFMOMA’s Open Space on June 1, 2015.

Tacita Dean. Day for Night, 2009; video still.

Over the past few years, I have been thinking about Italo Calvino’s short essay “Why Read the Classics?” from the perspective of contemporary art—rather than from its given subject of literature. Instead of providing us with a series of moralizing reasons why we should read the classics, Calvino lists fourteen definitions of what a literary classic might be. What he proposes is that the notion of the classic comes from the very practice of reading and—most importantly—from rereading. For him, the classics are books that resist being framed in a fixed time or intellectual context because they “have never finished saying what they have to say,” and because they “come down to us bearing upon them the traces of readings previous to ours, bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through.”

I like thinking about Calvino’s definitions as a means of understanding the way contemporary visual artworks are often also re-engagements with intellectual and aesthetic concerns from previous times and cultural contexts. In my opinion, what makes an artwork contemporary is not its date of production, or its “up-to-date” look, or its direct response to current issues and events. On the contrary, I believe that what makes an artwork contemporary is the way an artist rereads and re-contextualizes previous forms of cultural knowledge and makes them relevant to his or her own time. In this sense, the content and meaning of a classic—whether a book or an artwork—is an ever-growing series of re-readings of questions and observations that are inherent to our most basic human conditions.

For example, it is not uncommon to find contemporary artworks that reread other artworks or are in dialogue with other artists, either recent or ancient. We see this in works that are made after so-and-so, or that use appropriation as a means of aesthetic and intellectual creation, or that are made with the purpose of reinterpretation, opposition, distortion, tribute, or satire. The work I want to talk about is Day for Night (2009), a film by British artist Tacita Dean, which is in dialogue with Italian artist Giorgio Morandi and his lifelong painting practice. In this case, the conversation spans a century, as Morandi was born in 1890 and died in 1964, while Dean was born one year later, in 1965.

Read the full article here.