Cine qua non

We speak of video artists but of film makers. Why? Video emerged within the milieu of art and is accorded unrestricted privileges there; whereas the origins of cinema lie in the theater of popular spectacle. So when I first saw a group of Tacita Dean's chalkboard drawings at the Drawing Room in New York in 1997 and was told they were the work of a young English filmmaker, I just assumed her real work was narrative features - "art films," perhaps, but not artworks. Bad assumption. Trained as a painter, Dean operates within the art world rather than the film industry, yet her use of film as a primary medium puts her at an equal remove from the conventions of art and film - a distance that allows her to reflect critically and nostalgically, but above all curiously, on both.

Not that Dean is alone in this. Steve McQueen, Liisa Roberts, and Marijke van Warmerdam, among others, have significantly worked the boundary between art and cinema. But as shown by a recent survey at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (traveling to the Madison Art Center in Wisconsin in March), Dean's work is unusually lucid and self-questioning, as well as quietly eccentric. While she was one of the nominees for last year's Turner Prize, her work seems infinitely distant from YBA clamor, and one can hardly imagine it being included in exhibitions with names like "Sensation" - although her art is certainly a profound investigation of sensations, lower case and plural: visual, aural, and underlying both, sensations of time and its rhythms. In fact, Dean cites precisely the difference between what she sees as the "mechanical" handling of units of time in film and their more "abstract" handling in video as a primary reason she prefers the older medium: "With film, it's very physical. You cut out pieces of time."

The approach to sound, in particular, as a phenomenon occurring in the form of discrete material bits manifests itself in even the simplest works on view in Philadelphia, a pair of framed, drawing-like pieces consisting of segments of magnetic sound tape inscribed with china markers. The bits of tape making up Seabirds (Magnetic), 1997, are each marked with the name of a bird. The length of each presumably corresponds to the temporal length of the particular bird's call, as taped. Mosquito (Magnetic), 1997, by contrast, consists of just a single, very long piece of tape - a mosquito's buzz can last a while. The construction of a film out of temporal units is also the subject of Foley Artist, 1996, the most elaborate of Dean's installations - an homage to the behind-the-scenes craft of making sound effects for film, a paean to the apparatus of cinematic hocus-pocus that slyly presents itself in a guise of deadpan analytic sobriety.

Many of Dean's earliest films are allegories of the art object. (These works, some of them student efforts, were not shown in Philadelphia.) The most consummated is probably the simplest, A Bag of Air, 1995. Fewer than three minutes long, it is a sort of instructional film based on the conceit announced in a voice-over that, rising in a balloon at dawn in March, "you can catch a bag of air . . . intoxicated with the essence of Spring" - that is, the rising dew that is "both celestial and terrestrial" - and that after patient gathering and distillation, "they say you will have transformed your bag of air into a golden elixir . . . capable of treating all disharmonies in the body and soul." The film's imagery includes the launch of a hot air balloon and a shot of the balloon's shadow coursing the landscape, but mostly what we see is a pair of hands holding out a plastic bag in the air high above the ground. Of course, the idea that the art object need not be made of intrinsically noble materials but can be the most ordinary thing in the world, as long as it has been transformed by some inspired aesthetic intention, is a mainstay of modern art. Wittily yet lyrically, Dean's film satirizes this commonplace - sends it up, so to speak - while the dreamily soft yet precise black-and-white photography and succession of beautifully framed shots fulfills it.

By contrast, The Story of Beard, 1992, and The Martyrdom of St. Agatha (in several parts), 1994, imagine the aesthetic object as a relic of sorts (with a peculiarly sexual slant) as well as an item of commerce. The central scene of The Martyrdom shows a group of nuns sitting around a table preparing plaster breasts for packaging and sale (Agatha was martyred by having her breasts cut off); The Story of Beard, which concerns a (female) shopkeeper who deals in disembodied beards, ends as the film suddenly switches from black-and-white to color for a takeoff on Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe with both women sporting beards. The finale might well be an incongruously lighthearted gloss on something out of an old copy of Screen. In a broader sense, though, what counts is the idea of the object of fantasy and desire, something fabulously elusive and alluring - the unobtainable beard, the mystifyingly peripatetic severed breast. If anything unites Dean's early films, in fact, it is their giddy, playful atmosphere - "intoxicated with the essence of Spring," indeed.