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Searchlight and Shipwreck: On Tacita Dean
Ed Krcma
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[Again, please note that this talk was designed for a broadly non-academic audience. This synopsis is not footnoted, but I will suggest some texts at the end for anyone interested in following these ideas up in more detail.]
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Introductory Remarks
Tacita Dean is a contemporary British artist who has in the last ten years or so enjoyed a rare amount of exposure and critical interest. She was born in Canterbury in 1965, and attended Falmouth College of Art, Cornwall, between 1985 and 1988. From 1990-2 she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She exhibited widely throughout the 1990s, being nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998; in 2001 she was given a solo show at Tate Britain, at the age of only 36. My interest in her work was catalysed by the recent retrospective at Schaulager Basel (2006), the most extensive to date, which was entitled ‘Analogue.’ An unequivocal championing of analogue technologies (as opposed to digital ones) has consistently driven her practice, and she is best known for her anamorphic films, although she has also produced significant bodies of work in drawing, found objects and photography. Dean is also a subtle and astute writer, and it is with an account she has given of the story of doomed amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst that I began the talk…
Donald Crowhurst and Disappearance at Sea (1996)
Dean recounts the story of Crowhurst’s demise in the following way (in her essay Teignmouth Electron, 1999):
“In 1968, Donald Crowhurst was one of nine competitors who entered the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race to be the first to circumnavigative solo non-stop around the world. He was a family man with a struggling business and no profesisonal sailing experience, but his determination to enter and to win, set him on a path of delusion that swept up others and trapped him into leaving in an unfit boat, ill prepared and afraid. Crowhurst’s story is as much about his bravado and the politics of a small provincial town as it is about epic voyages and heroism…
He got mid-way into the Atlantic before realising he would not survive one day in the Roaring Forties let alone make it around the world. Something happened here; rather than give up, he set about faking his journey. First by estimating mathematically his supposed position and faithfully recording it in a different logbook, and then by breaking off radio contact so as not to betray himself by continually transmitting through Portishead. He hung around the Southern Atlantic, avoiding the shipping lanes, and at one point, put ashore for repairs at Rio Salado, a tiny settlement on the coast of Argentina, which was against the rules of the race. After a while he just started to vaguely guess his sight readings and make more and more incoherent entries in his logbook, immersing himself in Einstein’s theories on relativity and his own private discourse on God and the Universe.
Meanwhile, the world believed he was making great headway. His press agent in Teignmouth, became so exasperated with the radio silence, that he vastyly exaggerated Crowhurst’s progress. By June 1969, when Crowhurst’s fictional journey collided with his real position in the Atlantic, and he could once again radio through Portishead, he learnt he was officially winning the race. The BBC radioed through arrangements to meet him off the Isles of Scilly.
But Crowhurst no longer knew where he was. He had lost all track of time and developed an obsessive relationship with his faulty chronometer, the instrument that measures Greenwich Mean Time on board. He began to suffer from ‘time-madness’, a familiar problem for sailors whose only way of locating their position is through zealous time-keeping. Once his sense of time became distorted, he had no further reference point in the shifting mass of grey ocean. Overwhelmed by the enormity of his deceit and his offence against the sacred principle of truth, what he believed to be his ‘Sin of Concealment,’ Crowhurst ‘resigned the game’ and appears to have jumped overboard with his chronometer, just a few hundred miles from the coast of Britain…
For many, Donald Crowhurst is just a cheat who abused the sacred unwrittens of good sportsmanship. But for some, it is more complicated than this, and he is seen as much a victim of the Golden Globe as the pursuer of it. His story is about human failing; about pitching his sanity against the sea; where there is no human presence or support system on whih to hang a tortured psychological state. His was the world of acute solitude, filled with the ramblings of a troubled mind.”
This text was written to accompany a series of works Dean made in relation to the story – I discuss her anamorphic film Disappearance at Sea (Tate Modern, 1996). She refers to the texts as ‘Asides’ – as narratives indirectly or obliquely related to associated works. The film is by no means an illustration of the story, and both film and story can operate independently. Stories, photographs, films and drawings all interrelate, and all are in something of a supplementary relationship to each other, without there being a single prioritized work.
Disappearance at Sea was shot at Berwick Lighthouse in Northumberland, a last human outpost between the land and the ocean. The film begins with the beautiful and complex visual effects of the rotating mirrors and bulbs of the lighthouse machinery, recalling such avant-garde experiments as Moholy-Nagy’s Light Display – Black, White and Grey (1930). The landscape is bathed by the dying light of a sunset, and as the film continues, the lighthouse bulb is illuminated. Towards the end of the film, the lighthouse beam tracks a course across the cliffs and sea, barely able to trace any vein of visibility amid the darkness. The parallels with Crowhurst’s lost and bewildered position are obvious, but the story is only explicitly suggested by the title. As with (almost) all of her films, here there are no pans, zooms, or dissolves, and the static shots linger on a scene, imbued with a slowness that allows the rich visual qualities to saturate the viewer’s consciousness. When shown the gallery space, as in Tate Modern at the moment, the large projector of this film is stationed in the viewer’s space, making the physicality of the medium of film an important element in their meaning. Dean’s attachment to film, now becoming obsolete with the increasing dominance of digital technologies, is a significant aspect of her practice.
[The discussion following the talk at Stammtisch focused heavily on the implications of this attachment to the analogue, and some in the audience found Dean’s shunning of the digital to be problematic. However, I do not regard her championing of the analogue to be technophobic, but rather to be an attempt to recognise the potential and value of the analogue itself: a celebration of one technology does not necessarily imply a rejection of another, but a recognition of their different potentials…]
At Tate, the film is accompanied, in the next room, by seven blackboard drawings: The Roaring Forties: Seven Blackboards for Seven Days (1997). These chalk drawing depict a narrative of seafaring, storms and rescue. They are cinematic in their arrangement – like storyboards. They contain diagrammatic arrows and notes that specify atmospheric conditions, time, dates, and details of narrative incident. The viewer is provided with a narrative sketch, which he/she will complete. I return to the blackboards later…
[Dean’s drawing practice is significantly under-researched. The Schaulager catalogue is the most extensive engagement with this facet of Dean’s practice to date, and I am working too on this area for my thesis. You might visit the Tate Modern website for images of these blackboards].
Following her interest in the Crowhurst story, Dean then tracked down his trimaran, the Teignmouth Electron. She found out that it had been discovered and taken to the West Indies. It was eventually bought by Winston McDermott, who took it to the island of Cayman Brac, where it remains as a battered ruin, subjected as it has been to the barrage of the elements. Dean took photographs, produced a book and made a film of the boat (Teignmouth Electron, 1999). Whilst on the island, which she has described as a ‘prim tax haven,’ she by chance discovered another ruined structure, referred to by the locals as ‘Bubble House’. She took the opportunity to film this structure too (Bubble House, 1999). The building was built by a Frenchman and left unfinished (he was imprisoned for fraud before it was completed); of it, the artist wrote:
‘Deserted, and half-completed, the bubble house stood like a futuristic vision; like a statement from another age. We thought it was a temple belonging to a sect, or a church constructed by the Mafia… We knew we had come across something other-worldly; the perfect companion to the Teignmouth Electron.’
[Dean’s interest in ruins, anachronisms and obsolescence puts her in a relationship with Romanticism, another point that was brought up in the discussion…]
Chance Finds, Found Objects, Photography
I dwelt a little on Dean’s relationship with chance and contingency. It is a significant element of her working practice, both as an artist and as a curator, to follow slight and unpredictable threads as they arise. Dean constantly makes use of the chance find, the unexpected coincidence, the oblique connection (her early work, Girl Stowaway (1994) is perhaps the most explicit exploration of this – see also the catalogue to the exhibition ‘An Aside’ which she curated in 2005). This led me to thinking about her relationship with the found object and, specifically, the found photograph as it manifested in her 2000 project, Floh. Floh, meaning ‘flea’ in German, was a book produced by Dean of high quality reproductions of photographs found in fleamarkets around Europe and America. It is in an edition of 4,000 and addresses several interesting aspects of analogue photographic practice. Here I am indebted to Mark Godfrey’s recent analysis of the project (see Suggested Reading, below).
The idea of the collection is rather different from that of the archive. The collection has specifically to do with objects, whereas an archive has more to do with the cataloguing and ordering of information. Walter Benjamin once wrote of the collection: ‘possession and having are allied with the tactile, and stand in a certain opposition to the optical. Collectors are beings with tactile instincts.’ The variety of photographs gathered here is huge – both in the time at which they were made, the subject matter and the technical quality of the images. These largely amateur photographic endeavours open onto a huge terrain of potential narratives and memory material. We are set to wander how the photographs ended up in these markets, and to what experiences they refer.
In his 1980 book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes identifies amateur photography to be closest to the medium’s essence. Analogue photography operates indexically, being the direct trace of light rays onto photosensitive film. It is a moment captured, stilled – time halted. For Barthes, the photograph’s message is always in some way ‘this has been’ and therefore ‘is no longer.’ In short, photography brings a recognition of transience and death to the viewer, brings loss into the present. Barthes proposed two broad registers in which photography operates: the ‘studium’ and the ‘punctum’. The studium is that content which the viewer learns from the photograph concerning a particular narrative, historical time, or identifiable reference. It is concerned with what can be assimilated into language and understanding. The punctum, by way of opposition, is the small, piercing detail that hits or ‘pricks’ the viewer with a mysterious and ill-defined power, a jolt of recognition that escapes the fabric of language. This is a very personal operation – the punctum will be recognised differently by me than by you, and we will not necessarily find the same details revelatory or compelling.
Barthes also regards photography to be in something of a competitive relation to memory. Rather than supplementing or aiding memory, photography rather supplants it – it replaces our memories of events, so that the photograph becomes our memory as we actively weave (to a greater of lesser degree fabricated) narratives and associations around an image. But in Dean’s book, we have no memory of these incidents to replace – there is no competitive relation. However, the photographs are not without a significance for us. What Godfrey does it to use Barthes’s analysis but to attend to the marks and signs of use visible on the material surface of the photograph as object – not a detail in the image, but marks on it. These marks – the erasure of a face or the loving fingerprint placed over the figure of a child – convey a kind of ‘punctum’ – a wordless signifier of the affective use of these objects. These marks made of the photos, creases and writings, draw our attention to their physicality. The materiality of language is something that has been key to Dean’s practice in other ways also…
Analogue and Materiality
I spoke briefly about the blackboard drawings in terms of the analogue: they are full of erasure and re-drawing, suggesting the emergence and recession of text and drawings. This could be described as something of a diagram of mental processes – with ideas emerging, fading, persisting in incomplete form, resonating with new processes, being over-written. Freud famously elaborated on a palimpsest model for the workings of the psyche in his 1925 essay ‘Notes on the Mystic Writing Pad.’ This kind of temporal fluidity of emergence and recession is specific to analogue media, the digital being limited to combinations of 1/0 basic units: it is there or it is not. Dean’s fascination with erasure, language and absence is evident in a film she shot when in Prague in 1991. Recalling Marcel Broodthaers’s La Pluie (projet pour un texte) (1969), Dean’s Ztráta (Czech for ‘disappearance’ or ‘loss’), shows a teacher writing and erasing words on a blackboard. It ends with the rag containing the chalk from the erased words being flung out of the window, the material of laguage now dispersed into the atmosphere.
Dean’s engagement with the physicality of language is perhaps more pronounced in relation to sound. In 1996 she made a film entitled Foley Artist, which deals with the foley profession – making sound effects for films – a profession also becoming obsolescent with the onset of digital effects. In 1997 she made drawings with magnetic tape (Magnetics) – she would write in white chalk the name of the sound that was recorded on that strip (for example, ‘A Breath, a Sigh, a Word, a Whisper, a Cough, a Kiss, a Gasp, a Whistle, a Scream, a Sob, a Question, an Answer, a Chuckle, a Murmur, a Cackle…’). In 1999 she made a film entitled Sound Mirrors, which concentrated on the failed defence experiments near Romney Marsh, for which large structures were built with the aim of magnifying the sound of approaching enemy warcraft. The ‘sound mirrors’ do capture and magnify sound, but they do it in a confused and non-selective way, and they were functionally redundant.
Berlin, Architecture and Anachronism
Dean was awarded a DAAD Scholarship to Berlin in 2000; she has never returned to live in England. The move has necessarily had an impact on her work, and she has made several films focusing upon Berlin monuments with complex histories. As we have seen, Dean had already been interested in architecture and ruin in her film Bubble House, which showed a delapidated Modernist building, designed to cope with extreme weather conditions. Installed in Berlin, she has trained her attention on emblems of the city’s complex and controversial past. Fernsehturm (2001) is an anamorphic film of an icon of the GDR. Ascending into the air, the slim structure contains a restaurant which revolves as guests eat. Under the communist government, all employees had to be members of the Party, and it was something of a centre of Stasi activities. The structure made a single revolution in one hour, after which a new set of diners were welcomed in. The restaurant still exists in post-unification Berlin, although it is apparently not very popular with the West Berliners. Dean’s film captures the everyday activity of the waitresses and diners going about their business as the sun sets over the city. The only movement is that of the people and the rotation of the building. Dean has remarked upon the fact that now the rotations take only half an hour – something of an analogue for the way time speeds up with the growth of capitalist systems.
In 2004 Dean made another film trained on a Berlin building, Palast. The film, projected small and high on the gallery wall, is composed of shots of the reflective, coppery façade. The old GDR government building was then threatened by an unsure fate. It had been built on the site of a Baroque palace and was first opened in 1976. As a remnant of the communist regime, and itself becoming increasingly delapidated, its fate was a point of particular controversy. In the end plans to restore the old Baroque palace were accepted (2003), a project that attempts to erase the trace of recent history and restore an apparently more comfortable vision of Berlin. The Palast is now, therefore, a lost object – the demolition will be slow, but it began on 6th February 2006. Dean’s films are quiet, slow, visually rich and suggestive meditations upon these structures. They invite reflection on history, anachronism and progress, offering a quality of attention rather than an explicit judgement upon current developments.
Mediums and Endings
Dean consistently displays a fascination for that which is out of its time, that which is at the point of obsolescence, that cannot be functionally or efficiently inserted into a contemporary situation. These can be analogue tools (chronometers, wave machines), ruined utopian architecture (Bubble House, Palast, Fernsehturm), artistic mediums (blackboards, film, photogravure). Walter Benjamin wrote about the potential of a medium at the moment of its demise – that it releases a last gasp of the utopian promise that had once accompanied its initial emergence. Dean’s work can be related to this in her invitation to reflect upon the value and richness of those things that are in the process of departing – whether that be family members, other artists, utopian dreams, obsolete technologies, natural occurences, cherished objects. As Michael Newman has written, these ruins and anachronisms salvaged for the present like talismans of other possible futures. I finished my talk with a quotation from Simon Crowhurst, Donald’s son, who now works as a geologist and wrote a short piece for Dean’s 2001 Tate show (from which this extract is taken).
‘The scale of the distant past does not simply dwarf and ridicule the present; it can inform us, make us richer in understanding, and caution us with lessons about what might go wrong, where our home planet’s sensitivities lie. It is a privilege to work in such a domain. My father, alone in a small boat and struggling for a metaphysical position, was in a sense lost in time, obsessed simultaneously with eternities and seconds. It doesn’t do to be overawed by the expanse of time, or lost in its immeasurability. Just as a navigator can find his or her position on the Earth from the stars, we can learn something about where we are by the careful study of the traces of deep time. In the end, of course, it looks like time will swallow us and all our thoughts and works; but there’s more to time than the joke of its enormity. If all we do is laugh, we may miss much of the beauty.’
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Suggested Readings:
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Dean, T.: An Aside. London: Hayward Gallery, 2005.
Godfrey, M.: ‘Photography Found and Lost: On Tacita Dean’s Floh,’ October vol.114, Fall 2005, 90-119.
Royoux, J-C. et.al.: Tacita Dean. London: Phaidon, 2006,
Tacita Dean. Recent Films and Other Works. London: Tate Britain, 2001.
Tacita Dean – a box of seven books. Paris: Museés de la ville de Paris and Gottingen: Steidl. 2003.
Trodd, T.: ‘Film at the End of the Twentieth Century: Obsolescence and Medium in the Work of Tacita Dean,’ Object 6, 2003/4.
Vischer, T. and Friedli, I.: Tacita Dean. Analogue: Drawings 1991-2006. Basel: Schaulager, 2006.
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