It was Tacita Dean’s response to an enigmatic but relatively obscure personal history that helped to solidify her emerging but distinct presence in the art world. In the late 1990s, this British artist, filmmaker and collector of found objects, made a sequence of films in response to Donald Crowhurst, an amateur sailor with a family and small business, who embarked on a solo navigation of the globe, to which was attached significant acclaim and a cash prize. Dean’s initial interest was in the intertwining of fact with fiction in the history of Crowhurst’s misguided endeavour, but also with his character and with his plight on the open ocean, which combined personal hubris with a genuinely existential experience.

Over a period of four years, Dean created several works in a sequence of obliquely angled responses: each engaged with a constellation of themes and evocations that preoccupied the artist during her research into Crowhurst. The film Disappearance at Sea I  takes as its subject a lighthouse situated near the Scottish border on the UK coast. Shot in anamorphic format, enabling a wide-angled perspective, the film depicts the large, single globe of the lighthouse as it slowly revolves, and day changes to night. The film draws a viewer’s notice to the passage of time as the globe lights up and the darkness settles, allowing us to see subtle shifts in the light as it refracts against the globe and across the glass of Dean’s lens. In the film, the globe emerges as the single point of reference before the darkness and the sea—a place, Dean writes, without measure—and as the film culminates an external soundtrack takes precedence, featuring the call of a large number of wildly clamouring seagulls. This sound, Dean has suggested, carries a narrative, being evocative of dissolution and of a loss of reference points and meaning—an experience akin to that of Crowhurst’s, she has intimated, when alone and disoriented on the Atlantic Ocean. ¹

The film bears no literal reference to Crowhurst, nor is it important to know his history, when viewing it in the gallery. Although his story both surrounded and informed the film’s making, the sound and imagery of the film are only obliquely connected to it. It is not unusual for Dean’s work to reach out in this way, forming vital but tangential connections to varied subjects, allowing the histories of others as well as the contingency of analogue filmmaking to inform a work’s making as well as possible receptions in the gallery. How are we to understand the renown of an artist who is drawn so often to the histories of others? Whose work forms multifarious and tangential connections to both major and minor histories, through the difficult medium of analogue?

The most recent, acclaimed film exhibited by Dean forms a network of associations with two eminent male figures; the artist Robert Smithson, of Spiral Jetty and other land works, and the writer J.G. Ballard, who in a letter posed Dean the inscrutable challenge of responding to the mystery of the Spiral Jetty ‘with her film’. ² The resulting film, JG , is as concerned with the idea of the jetty as much as the present form of Smithson’s jetty itself; its myths and cultural histories, evocations of difficulty and quest, and engagement with notions of a creative outcome and artistic process. The film emerged from a series of chance interconnections. Dean had been engaged with Smithson’s work since beginning a sound piece during an attempt to find the Spiral Jetty in the late-1990s—an attempt which, in the simplest sense, failed, although a sound work drawing on the process emerged later. Ballard, meanwhile, also interested in Smithson, had corresponded with Dean since she had sent him a photograph of an upturned trimaran rusting and abandoned on a Cayman beach. He had responded that it looked like a downed WWII aircraft, of the type still discovered in the jungles of the pacific. ³ His observation, Dean felt, cut to the heart of his own work, and its concern with the object marooned in place and time.

At the same time that JG responds to the idea of the jetty and the myriad strange connections formed in Dean’s search for it, it is also the companion piece to Film , Dean’s monolithic response to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. With the same luminous colour, similar gate masking and aperture work, JG attests to the formal potentiality of film, like this earlier work, whilst forming a conversation with the labour intensive process, repetition and hallucination that must have informed the jetty’s own making. In JG , a spiral mask is laid over a shot of the salt-flats, then exposed and re-exposed, conversing with the jetty’s loss and re-emergence. Shots of water swirling into the ground recur, alongside rocks encrusted with salt, redolent of time, process and ruin. The small animals in the film—metallic, hard-backed creatures that are both archaic and futuristic, seemingly evolved for the salt desert—converse with the creatures in Ballard’s short story Voices of Time , and with the out-of-time and place object, recurrent in Ballard and Dean. The formal challenge of working solely with analogue, where all occurs on site and in the moment of filming, brought together with Ballard’s enigmatic premise, ensures that this work courts not only process and labour, but also uncertainty, chance and failure.

Very often this multivalent interest in chance is conjoined with Dean’s interest in biography and fiction—these three poles gravitate toward different coordinates in her filmmaking, influencing her formally, as well in the choice of subjects she films. Contingency and chance as well as history and biography manifest in the Crowhurst films, for instance, which each form differing, at times tangential relationships to this figure, through the subject of a lighthouse, the materials of chalk or analogue, or by following in his footsteps to a remote location. History drew Dean to Crowhurst, in the first instance, a history combining fact with imagination, loss with bravado. History has surmised that soon after departure on his global navigation Crowhurst realised he could not complete his voyage: instead of returning he remained in the open ocean, cutting off his radio contact and avoiding the shipping routes. As Dean has recounted, he began to fabricate his voyage in a series of logbooks, salvaged later from his boat the Teignmouth Electron ; these document his strange and gradual slide into confusion, as, cut off from human contact, he loses all orientation. ⁴ It is likely, Dean writes, that he finally failed to wind his chronometer and jumped with it into the sea in confusion and despair. In this history, received in its time as the story of ‘a cheat’, Dean glimpsed a more complex and ‘existential’ personal history: an incident of pitching human ‘sanity’ against the sea, which is a ‘shifting mass, which you cannot date, you cannot time’. ⁵

For Dean, Crowhurst’s is a story about vision, chance and failure. The fault of Crowhurst, Dean writes, was that he had ‘an imagination’, and there is an implicit sense in the statement that she links this imagination with that of the artist. Dean’s film Teignmouth Electron , showing Crowhurst’s wrecked and upturned trimaran, constitutes her most direct response to this history. This film traces Dean to the shore of one of the Cayman Islands, where she found the wreck of Crowhurst’s boat still existent—Ballard would later liken the wreck to a downed WWII aircraft. Dean’s film depicts time’s effects on the decaying and rusted boat. With its slowly moving frames tracing the boat’s decaying surface, her film conjures the time that has passed since Crowhurst’s voyage as well as the time which passes in the process of filming: a microcosm, if you like, of the larger historical time in which the ruin of the boat is also situated. The wrecked, marooned boat has a quality of pathos but also, in Dean’s account of it, a quality of aura, ascribing a dignity to an out-of-time object, by-product of both a quest and failure.

Although they differ, radically, in structure and technique, both JG and the Crowhurst films bear a fascination with others. They are also concerned with chance and failure and respond, with and through analogue film, to these themes. Why is it that chance, biography and analogue form such an interwoven conversation in Dean’s filmmaking? What is that draws Dean to the histories of others, and inspires her response through the medium of 8 or 16mm?

Another cycle of films allows us further insight into Dean’s preoccupation with analogue, biography and contingency, a cycle responding more directly to its subject matter, and better described in this respect as filmed portraits. Made again in response to enigmatic male figures, more eminent successes than failures in the vein of Crowhurst, these films attest to the presence and bearing of these figures whilst affording us insight into uncertainty and vulnerability. Each of the four figures in the cycle are known for a lifetime’s work in the arts: Mario Merz was an influential Italian artist of the Arte Povera movement, Michael Hamburger an esteemed poet and translator of German literature, Merce Cunningham a renowned dancer and choreographer, and Edwin Parker the famous painter better known as Cy Twombly.

These films closely observe more than acclaim their subjects, often depicting them at rest, in between projects, in unstructured time. The analogue medium bears out their age and ruin, more palpably registering time passing in the film and the duration of its projection. The film Mario Merz is grainy and overexposed, vividly capturing the light on Merz’s lined face and white hair. Eight and a half minutes long in a reference to Fellini, the film was cut together from only four two minute reels Dean managed to shoot before Merz left the frame. Merz remains seated for almost the entirety of the film, occasionally fanning his face or swiping away a fly, speaking in a broken stream of Italian that is mostly drowned out by the sounds of the environment. The simple framing emphasises his shifts in position and the unstudied, but occasionally concentrated quality of his attention as the time of the filming passes and the weather changes during the filming. Dean has remarked that her film ‘traps something…disappearing’, namely the presence of Merz himself, who at times appears vulnerably pensive and uncertain, at odds with his reputation for ‘bad’ behavior. ⁶ Dean’s film of Merz acts in this way as a record, even as it registers time passing and the immanence of ruin—both in the age of the figure and the material vulnerability of the film. It is a record as evocative of the contingency of its medium and the closeness of its subject’s absence, as of memorial or permanence.

The passing of time, porosity and presence are also conveyed in Michael Hamburger , by Dean. Commissioned, originally, to make a film about W.G. Sebald, Dean responded obliquely with a film about Hamburger, Sebald’s colleague and translator, whose house he often visited. Dean’s shot of the inside of Hamburger’s study, piled with books, spectacle cases, and papers, refers to the extended response to and photograph of Hamburger’s study in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn . An immediate response to the demands of the subject informed Dean’s filming. It was largely on account, Dean has written, of Hamburger’s preference for discussing the apple orchard over any other topic of conversation that Dean chose to make it the film’s motif. He ‘wouldn’t be drawn’, Dean has reflected, on ‘his experiences as a refugee’ or his emigration as a child from Nazi Germany to the UK, a history fascinating to Dean on account of the links with Sebald’s writing. ⁷ Rather, he speaks extensively about the apples trees—old English varieties and newer strains developed from crossbreeding, some of which are native, others sourced from the continent. In response, Dean developed a filmic thematic of temporality, experience and relocation to a new place, focusing on the half-wild and cultivated spaces of the orchard, and the incessant wind blowing through the trees and grasses. The footage was edited more dramatically than was habitual for Dean, a response, she has written, to the requirement of filming Hamburger, who was physically restless, moving through rooms and outdoor spaces, as well as overly formal in his mode of talking about the apples. There is the sense in this film, as the artist Jeremy Millar writes, that Hamburger is ‘translating’ himself through the orchard, unable or unwilling to speak of his history, but a hair-breadth away in talking about apples, and the process of raising foreign varieties. ⁸

Such a fascination for filmic biography and portraiture, of eminent male figures in the arts especially, might initially strike as homage or reverence, or more neutrally, as a desire for record. Similarly Dean’s interest in analogue film has been described and interpreted by viewers as nostalgic. But such readings are to miss the questioning revision and careful observation contained in these film documents, for there is something both subtle and provocative at play, in Dean’s work with both biography and contingency in filmmaking, a strand of practice concerned with art history and process, with examining myths and searching, through her subjects, for different ones.

In an interview with Marina Warner, Dean addressed a recurring theme in her filmmaking. Her depiction of ‘male figures’ who are on the point of ‘obsolescence’ is more concerned, she resolved, with the ‘restoration’ of subjects than with their loss. ⁹ Perhaps Dean is also concerned with something further, entailing a revision, and a subtle deconstruction; a questioning of the myths that have been built around artistic practice, in the process building new ones with the medium of analogue film.

Dean’s work does not merely affect as homage, but rather as the subtlest of interrogations and observations, bringing to the surface a questioning of creativity and intention via the notions of chance, process and biography. This framework also informs her commitment to analogue, which is a theoretical as well as formal and artisanal one—in film Dean has found a formal means to pursue her fascination with process, difficulty and contingency. Contingency and process are the themes she draws out in her filmic portraits, which via their subject matter, form subtle conversations with art history. In the film Edwin Parker, the canonical painter is not shown engrossed in the moment of painting; rather he is shown moving about his studio or reading the paper, looking out a window, or boiling water for coffee. The film shows the creative processes of this artist as shot through with a notable porosity and silence, open to moments of inertia and quiet as he and his assistant organise the studio and its materials. In Merce Cunningham performs stillness , Dean’s film reflects upon the age of her subject. Cunningham’s performance of John Cage’s 4’33 reveals not his famed physical agility, but only subtle shifts in his facial expression, and we become privy to these slight changes as he performs in stillness and silence to 4’33 . In conjunction with Edwin Parker, it is a film that constructs a very different myth to that of the artist and the creative act projected traditionally; a revisioning that recurs throughout Dean’s work in varied ways, where the fragility of a creative gesture is often juxtaposed with the grand tradition.

The inscrutable premise set by Ballard for JG is perhaps not impenetrable at all, for Dean. The mystery or question of the Spiral Jetty is not solved, but rather is mirrored, echoed and played-back in her filmmaking; channeled into process, labour and obtuse biography in a constellation that subtly revises intention and creativity. Dean’s films form a patient provocation to art and history via a pursuit of biography, chance and process, a recognition complicating readings of her work as either simplistically nostalgic or reverent. A contingency present in both process and medium, informing her choice of subject, thematic interest in chance and commitment to analogue processes and medium, strengthens this quiet counterpoint to art history and its internalisation of individual, heroic gestures. At the same time that these films subtly question and provoke, they also return in a state of fascination to their subjects, building new myths of art and creativity more porous to other histories, process and contingencies.

Lily Cameron studied in Melbourne and now lives in London.