ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the Romantic topoi of seafaring and shipwreck are returned to within selected visual art practices from the 1970s onwards. Reflecting specifically on the work of artists Bas Jan Ader and Tacita Dean, it identifies within their respective practices a selective resurrection or salvage of Romanticism, whereby the potentiality of the failing and fragmented inherent in the topos of shipwreck is reconceptualized. The trope of shipwreck is most commonly associated with the Romantic tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The quest for a different kind of commentary which respects the fragmentary nature of shipwreck narrative underpins a number of Tacita Deans projects from the mid-1990s onwards. The semiotics of shipwreck provide a means through which to reconsider the different approaches used by Ader and Dean for recuperating the critical potentiality within the failing, fragmented, and resolutely open-ended.
