Tacita Dean	The Vanishing
"We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light... And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by that very gloom." Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness	Edwina Ashton on Tacita Dean's pursuit of yachtsman Donald Crowhurst Disappearance at sea (Cinemascope) is a film of the sun setting. You look through to objects; a pair of lightbulbs, but at light coming from beyond them. The lenses which surround them seem to fragment and fracture, repeating concentric circles which catch and turn through the light. Their curving parallels the interior of an eyeball; a seascape is inverted on them, and in the next shot reformed as the view. Tacita Dean made this film in cinemascope 'to allow the action to move much more slowly through the frame' - to slow down the motion of light. Even when you have stared and worked out the mechanics of and differences in the film's structure, a residual expertise hangs heavily on the image. You understand it (a lighthouse, sea) but simultaneously you don't - that the light acts in this way - that the beam is blue, or is real, and that when the landscape behind has become dark, the light is a blind - that when you see it you can't see anything - and that you are looking at (and seeing because of) machines which project light, at a surface which is nothing but light and at the gradual disappearance of light. Disappearance at Sea is a hypnotic and beautiful film, made in response to the tragic story of Donald Crowhurst which has preoccupied Dean for several years. It is part of a collection of work she has made for the Maritime Museum: a phrase carved in wood, a series of photographs of Crowhurst's now-derelict boat as well as a book, which she has named after it; Teignmouth Electron. In July 1969 Donald Crowhurst disappeared after both faking his position in the round the world race (inadvertently taking the lead) and actually losing track of time and consequently of where he was. A few hundred miles from Britain he jumped overboard. The boat was found intact, a paintbrush still balanced on a mug. Tacita Dean devotes a chapter in her book to his dislocation and loosening grasp on time and to his relationship with his faulty chronometer; even 'a few minutes slow on the chronometer could mean as many as a few hundred miles out of position on the map.' He recorded the count down to jumping overboard on it and took it with him either to weigh himself down or because of a less tangible link. 'Once his sense of time became distorted, he had no other reference point in the shifting mass of grey ocean'. In her film, time is differentiated by sound. The lense's intimacy is reinforced by the clanks and burr of slowly revolving machinery counterpoised with the apparently wild sound of gathering sea and birds. The coincidence and interval between sound and image (lens [motor], view [motor], lens [motor], view [birds], view [sea, fewer birds], lens [night calls, etc.] makes the passage of time bearable - comprehensible. Other speeds are made visible ~ the time it takes for the sun to set, the film time in which this is shown (fourteen minutes) and the speeds of the machines - the revolving lens, the projector. In the last frames both mechanism and view become invisible - there is a lone beam of light and then darkness. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is set on the Thames. It is the story of a journey into the heart of the Congo and of a search and a meeting and a voice. The story teller, Marlow, describes his journey to meet a man he knows only as a series of emotive and breathless descriptions. His meeting with Mr Kurtz is so estranged and mediated by euphemism as to be more of a missing than a finding and ends in Kurtz' death. Tacita Dean's work has aspects of this quest. In a mixture of fabrication and documentation her earlier work explicitly visualised things which were missing - the girl stowaway aboard the Herzogin Celeste, or remnants - the relics of St Agatha and the shipwreck in Starehole Bay. In Trying to find Spiral Jetty she records an attempt to find Robert Smithson's now lost sculpture on the banks of Salt Lake. Spiral Jetty is not a single object, but also a film and an essay; Tacita Dean was intrigued by how it is actually known to most people: 'in art school - as a black and white slide'. Her search is, in effect, a homage to Smithson, a way of completing one circle between artwork, artist and audience, and a model of acquaintance. It is reformed -from Smithson's image and Utah Art Council's instructions on how to get there - as a mostly faked dialogue which ends uncertainly. It mimics her own work and Conrad's. There's an undeniable but mediated subject, and before or beyond that, the search-as-subject. These exist uncomfortably in time - projected and reconstructed simultaneously. It is a romantic endeavour which suggests itself both as incidental and central, yet beyond these terms the work seems to dissolve leaving no tangible subject at all (they were never sure if they had found the jetty). Donald Crowhurst 's story is tortuous and complicated not least because of its multiple representations - he took logbooks, 16 mm film and tapes with him. Initially his story was told via his own documentations but in two versions - he kept two log books, one of his fictional progress and one in which he immersed himself in private discourses on God and relativity. Eventually he believed himself to be floating through pre-history. Tacita Dean's initial search was for a postcard commemorating Teignmouth as "Devon resort chosen by Donald Crowhurst as the home port for his triumphant around the World Yacht Race". Crowhurst, hand on hip, is looking down, away from the camera, sort of at nothing. From the beginning, his attempt was punctuated by the intervention of the media. The race was sponsored by the Sunday Times and attracted interest from the BBC. Subsequently two books, two feature films and several documentaries have been made about him.	Tacita Dean found a particularly poignant bit of footage 'where he has a look of complete terror ... he doesn't know he's being filmed ... the press agent is saying "Come on Donald you've got to come and look at the camera" and the camera man is shouting "rolling rolling". ' Culpable, curiously banal and small minded institutions came to take on parts as protagonists. After his death the Sunday Times reporters implicated not only Teignmouth Council but also themselves in a report of minutes from the council meeting: '"Despite the sad end... the voyage has bought more publicity than this Committee has managed in fifty years. We have done this extremely cheaply, and I hope the town appreciates it". Donald Crowhurst would have been glad to know he did not die in vain.' In a further detour, in March, Simon Crowhurst (Donald Crowhurst's son) set up a meeting, to go to the Maritime Museum with Tacita Dean and a friend, a journalist from the Telegraph, who wrote an article on his reaction to her work there. Tacita Dean recalls 'It was very raw ... very very painful... It is very difficult - because you can work with something in terms of cultural memory, but at some point, when you take that dangerous step to get involved with people who were actually involved... .' After this she becomes responsible for, or is too near to interpreting other people's lives, emotion becomes direct, causes have effects and the real becomes insistent. There's a problem with actuality. On the one hand it is obvious and on the other absolutely inaccessible. Tacita Dean's work is haunted by this possibility of real experience. Her work masks off the material world through the authoritative mechanisms for reproducing it, but starts with and is immersed in the actual histories of other people. She has photographed Crowhurst's boat, now beached on Cayman Brac. 'When someone disappears at sea the boat is their last physical embodiment... I had to go... it was really important.' These are the photographs in Teignmouth Electron. As with other names, her title leads to an oblique view rather than a definition of the object. She describes the book as 'eccentric'. It is drawn from disparate sources - a mish mash of real and imaginary people, intricate anecdotes and indirect encounters; bits of writing which do not describe. There are chapters titled Bas Jan Ader, Simon Crowhurst, JG Ballard and Winston MacKenzie (the present owner of the boat). There are accounts of dreams and the tale of the boatmen who believed Crowhurst still haunted the boat, the story of how she came by the postcard of Crowhurst and descriptions of later films based on his death. By including so many reference points she interweaves her own life into that of Crowhurst's like a mirror whose reflection becomes a fact in its own right. Once he had broken off radio contact, after pages of mathematically devised claims about the nature of man, on the last page of his logbook, Crowhurst wrote: 'It is the mercy'. In Heart of Darkness Kurtz, in death, is reduced to a voice: 'He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision... - a cry that was no more than a breath - "The horror! The horror!" Tacita Dean has taken Donald Crowhurst's 'it is the mercy', and carved it, in his handwriting, into a handrail at the Maritime Museum. The words are made by physical absence and overlook the boat which actually won the race, Robin Knox Johnson's 'Suhaili'. They are also the first words of Teignmouth Electron. She likes the phrase 'because ... it's not understandable... you could say it's the mercy of the Sea, or the Mercy of the Benign God or whatever... the thing is, even though you don't know what it means, you know what it means...' Kurtz' last words do not end Heart of Darkness. The book ends with a lie. Marlow returns to Europe and meets Kurtz's "intended": 'She came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk... "Forgive me. I - I-have mourned so long in silence- in silence... You were with him - to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one near to hear..." '"To the very end," I said shakily. "I heard his very last words..." I stopped in fright...' '"Repeat them" she murmured in a heart-broken voice... 'I pulled myself together and spoke slowly. '"The last word he pronounced was - your name."' In Teignmouth Electron Tacita Dean relates this to Crowhurst's lie or lack of lying - his decision to leave the log books, which mapped out his fraud and his disintegrating sense of reality, on board. 'The truth was unbearable, and though it was, and still is for Crowhurst's wife and children, he told it and spared nobody... His story is more about integrity than forgery. It is a story about truth.' Her work is witty and considered and bizarre in its entanglement with other people, but draws upon the language of religion and morality. In Missing Narratives she writes of beginning 'to suppose sainthood to be the ultimate vanity'. She describes Donald Crowhurst as committing 'deceit that was unbearable. That was the sin: his sin of concealment.... He gave up his life as atonement for this Sin, so that we might have the truth.' She talks of the agony of the truth. This is the most difficult aspect of her work but she is concerned more with belief than certainty. A Bag of Air guilelessly establishes this preoccupation. This black and white 16 mm film (1995) opens with the shadow of a hot air balloon getting smaller and smaller as we (the camera) move further and further away from the earth. Distance in space contracts as close up hands fill a plastic bag. However, time is marked regularly by the repeated sound of gas released into the balloon. A voice over describes how 'if you rise at dawn on a clear day in the month of May they say you can catch a bag of air so intoxicated with the essence of spring that when it is distilled and prepared it will produce an oil of gold enough to remedy all ailments.' Beyond the initial feyness lies an elegant allegory of art-making, preciousness punctuated by anachronism and the holding apart of the apparent and actual subjects. What is pictured and what is talked of do not complete what the film, which takes air - nothingness - is its starting point, seems to be about. Tacita Dean is fascinated by the sea - its time and architecture - and by its potential for deferral. It 'is indefinable... you cannot control it... that makes it a totally different space... there's nothing in it that's identical, identifiable to the modern world... if there are no passing ships it's a prehistoric world.' Her work becomes romantic - not in a nostalgia for Tall Ships, or the psychological depths of the Crowhurst story, or the strange paraphernalia of the sea, but in her belief in the possibility of showing things without showing them, of allowing them to act for other more unwieldy ideas and in the possibility of showing things which cannot be told. The sea is a mass, an extended surface, invisible mostly except as surface. In all her work there is a profound split between what you see, what you know, what you hear - the moment and the registration of experience. Tacita Dean is acutely aware of the vicariousness of film, slides, stories, reproduction. Whatever is presented is in many ways an enactment of something beyond - an act of faith in the transformation of absence.
Tacita Dean • Floh		Edwina Ashton in "untitled", #19 london summer 1999