The numbers 20.02 2002 derive, in fact, from numbers that the wonderful Belgian conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) had stenciled on a wall of his studio in Düsseldorf. Dean's Chère petite soeur is based on a Broodthaers film of a postcard he found that shows a boat in a storm. The film combines positive and negative versions of the same image and uses the salutation and text as title and subtitles. Dean names the boat Chère petite soeur and transforms the scene into a sequence of two scenes drawn in chalk on two enormous grids of blackboards, with the boat going down in the right half of the diptych as in a storyboard for a film.

One and two; there are no other possibilities. Is three that the boat would go down even farther, or that it would come up again? Those are only possible refinements. The tragedy occurs despite the structure, but is also suspended by the structure, the boat itself being a structure, like the cathedral and the newspapers, that makes its way, or not, through adversity.

Then there is a 13-minute 16mm movie Dean made in Broodthaers' Düsseldorf studio and called Section Cinema, 2002 after Broodthaers' name for his imaginary museum. It is a sequence of several-second shots of walls and corners of the windowless basement interior in which the only remains of Broodthaers are his stenciled signs for his demonstration of the world: the numbers 0, 1, 2, 4, and 12; Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 4; the words "Silence", "Museum", "Musée". A lightbulb in one take is like the sun of this solar system. But there are ship models here too, which Broodthaers no doubt would have liked, and furniture being stored by a local museum.

The film continues in a loop, as does another film, called Fernsehturm, shown in another space, which takes place over 44 minutes inside the restaurant of the famous TV Tower erected near the Alexanderplatz in eastern Berlin in 1969. It is only barely perceptible that the restaurant itself revolves within the spherical shape elevated high above the city, and that the view keeps changing for the patrons seated so satisfyingly at tables around the outer edge. But we see the outside only vaguely, and only from the inside in panoramic shots usually set up to take in several tables and the slanted structure of the windows, then moving occasionally to waiters in their routines, a performer playing an inane tune on an electronic organ, individual groups of people at their tables. It is difficult to make out faces or words, but there is a general din of voices, clatter of dishes, and background of generic music. Though the film shows continuously, there is a beginning, when a waitress sets the tables, and an end, when the same waitress clears the tables. There is daylight at first, then sunset, as the interior gets darker, then night, and finally closing time, when the interior lights come up and the patrons leave, all as the restaurant slowly turns. The restaurant is a structure, like a ship, a cathedral, or a museum, that accommodates human desire and passage.

The experience is a completely familiar European one in all its details of movement, sequence, interchange, and gesture. The gathering of people is warm and comforting, not particularly alienating. Nothing surprising or out of the ordinary happens; the schedule is followed. The space goes around and returns to its past. Yet the restaurant is totally divorced from its surroundings (which only vaguely exist through the windows), raised up high into the air above the earth just as Broodthaers' studio is lowered into the earth. The tower represents a curious, contradictory sense of community in a "socialist" society of the later 20th century extended into the 21st century, just as the Washington Cathedral represents a contradictory sense of community in a "democratic" society of the early 20th century, extending from the 13th century. Both are fortresses against the trepidations of history.

Donald Goddard © 2003