<p>With films, drawings, photographs, audio recordings and installations, Berlin-based English artist Tacita Dean explores the ways that chance and coincidence influence daily life, constructing narratives that connect past and present, fact and fiction, private histories and larger events. Across one archipelago of works - Disappearance at Sea (1996), Disappearance at Sea II (1996) and Teignmouth Electron (1999) - Dean documents the tragic account of Donald Crowhurst and his attempts to fake a solo voyage around the globe, which culminated in his eventual loss of sanity and his death at sea. The works tell the story through various fragments and landscapes, including a magnificent sea vista from a lighthouse beacon that produce what the artist refers to as a 'missing narrative' reminiscent of an atmospheric nineteenth-century seascape painting.<br>Art and cinema theorist Jean-Christophe Royoux uses his Survey to dissect the multiple layers of time - durational and historical - at play in Tacita Dean's work. In the Interview, writer and art historian Marina Warner talks to the artist about the remarkable origins of several of her works, highlighting their charmed relationship to chance. Literature and culture critic Germaine Greer uses the Focus to examine the man and the building at the heart of the three-part film installation Boots (2003). For Artist's Choice, Dean has selected a 1939 poem by W. B. Yeats and a passage from a 1995 novel by W. G. Sebald that both capture the elegiac spirit of her own work. Artist's Writings range from a reflection on the distant South Atlantic Island Tristan da Cunha to a very personal obituary Dean wrote about the Italian artist Mario Merz. Also included are project notes on a half dozen of the artist's key works.</p>

Tacita Dean (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Arts & Photography

WARNER, Marina

Royoux, Jean-Christophe

GREER, Germaine

History & Criticism

Phaidon Press

“Often in a cosmogram there's an aim that goes beyond mere description or depiction: it's often a redescription, in the conditional or future tense: not the world as it is but the world as it could be. There can be a utopian intention, the goal of projecting new possibilities into a world which seemed fixed. Or to use a recent example, Philip K. Dick's novels map points where the standard ontology slips, where there are cracks in reality, out of which a new, more complete world can emerge.” John Tresch, Humanities Institute, University of ChicagoCosmograms is conceived as an extension of Melik Ohanian's film Seven Minutes Before (2004), a cinematic allegory of both the exhaustion of a certain narrative form and the new privilege accorded to space over time. Collecting twenty-three texts by authors from diverse fields of investigation and research, Cosmograms attempts to map the multiple coordinates of this new spatial paradigm. In his conversation with the editors, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk claims that “we are now living an epoch in which a more or less satisfied and luxurious conscience is learning the art of arranging its space. Modern man is a sort of 'curator'... which is to say, an exhibition planner of the space that he himself inhabits. Every man has become a museum curator. We could say that installation art is the common meta-profession that everyone is obliged to practice. The innocence of the traditional habitat is lost for good.”ContributorsCecil Balmond, Gilles Clément, Beatriz Colomina, Tacita Dean, Richard Drayton, David Elbaz, Patricia Falguières, Medard Gabel, André Gaudreault, Paul Gilroy, Edouard Glissant, Anna Halprin, David Held, Pekka Himanen, Bruno Latour, Charles Musser, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jane Poynter, Jean-Christophe Royoux, Saskia Sassen, Peter Sloterdijk, John Tresch, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Robert Whitman

Cosmograms

O'Hanian, Melik

Sternberg Pr

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