The North Atlantic water plied by Greta Thunberg in 2019 was around one degree Fahrenheit warmer and 30% more acidic than that which claimed Bas Jan Ader’s life in 1975. The Arctic sea ice has reached record lows, and soon the combination of cold melts and sun-warmed open ocean will negate the currents that carried Bas Jan’s boat to the tip of Ireland. Greta made it. Bas Jan didn’t. It had to be so.

At the end of film and at the beginning of film and at the heart of film is Tacita Dean. A pioneer of the medium at the time of its projected extinction by the accelerating rise of the digital, Dean maintains an artistic practice deeply rooted in film and its specificities. Her most recent work, JG, commissioned by the Arcadia University Art Gallery in Glenside, Pennsylvania, and recently exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, is a 26-1/2 minute, 35mm film named after the iconic science fiction writer J.G. Ballard and taking as its subject Robert Smithson’s monumental earthwork, Spiral Jetty (1970).