In Tacita Dean’s Sublime Drawings, Climate Change Is No Distant Disaster

When Tacita Dean made the pilgrimage to see Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the ’90s, she got lost. Then, she turned the minutiae of trying to find that deliberately remote work of land art into an artwork in its own right: a sound work titled Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty (1997). The piece is characteristic of her aleatory approach to art-making, a selection of which is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney. Like Smithson, she makes work about time, environment, and ways of placing oneself in the world. But while his work can feel far away, hers is up close: intimate, ordinary, felt.

And yet, Dean herself can be hard to place, especially the Dean that in Geography Biography, a 2023 film installation she calls a self-portrait. Two side-by-side portrait-format 35mm films compile outtakes from more than 40 years of her own work, cut and collaged together in ways that emphasize the materiality of celluloid. Watching it can feel like getting lost: images and scenes recur but in different contexts, generating the disorienting sensation that we have been here before. Geography Biography was originally made for the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, and in responding to that building’s imperial architecture, Dean also tracked her own status as a British citizen in the wake of Brexit. The abstract terms of the title feel far removed from a vision of 22-year-old Dean, smiling on a quay in Falmouth, silhouetted against a postcard of a frozen Niagara falls, or a clip of Dean wearing a false beard against an array of European foresails (the British one notably obscured by her image). But it is here, in this gap between the deeply personal and the universally resonant, that Dean thrives.

Most often, she does this by making portraits of others—including a new film featuring artist Claes Oldenburg, comprising outtakes from her 2011 Manhattan Mouse Museum. The 20-minute-long 16mm piece shows Oldenburg drawing a slice of blueberry pie, carefully selecting his pencils and using his finger to blur the lines against the grain of the paper. Dean has made a number of films focused on individual artists (others include David Hockney, Cy Twombly, and Merce Cunningham), but she resists the term “film portrait.” Instead, she uses these particular studies to get at something shared. Another work in the show is a 2020 filmed interview between artists Luchita Hurtado and Julie Mehretu, who share a birthday and would have a cumulative age of 150 in 2020 (hence the work’s title, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting). In the course of a roaming conversation, Hurtado—who was on the cusp of turning 100—remarks on the difficulty in being terrestrial.

Dean’s work too wrestles with terrestrial problems. A chalkboard drawing of a melting glacier could be a heavy-handed metaphor for the fragility of our environment, but in Dean’s hands, it becomes something far more poetic. The Wreck of Hope (2022)takes inspiration from Caspar David Friedrich’s painting of a capsized ship in a sea of ice. Paired with Chalk Fall (2018), a scene of dramatic white cliffs in the midst of collapse, the works make large-format, sublime landscape paintings feel surprisingly intimate. Textual annotations layered within the images indicate specific dates, names, events, and even temperatures. That those references are mostly illegible seems to be part of the point—our world is made of details that can appear insignificant on their own but that contribute to a much greater whole. She discloses in an interview that some of the dates in Chalk Fall refer to moments in her friend Keith Collins’s illness, which is to say she threads her diaristic account through a landscape showing not a distant (and thus avoidable) disaster, but a current reality, wrecked but not without hope.