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Bas Jan Ader: Retrospective "All is falling." -Bas Jan Ader I like art that deliberately courts my unease, and deftly skirts what I know in order to get at what I don't. Bas Jan Ader made this kind of art. It is romantic, tragic, and engaging, but it is also unstable, self-conscious, and uncertain. It's located in spaces between places: between irony and sincerity, between intellectual concept and heartfelt emotion, between the heroic and the pathetic. In addition to being difficult to define, Ader's art also lacks the weight and authority of a lengthy career. He was born in Holland in 1942, resided in Los Angeles, and disappeared at sea in 1975, cutting his art production short. Thus, this retrospective seemed more like evidence than art-an ephemeral collection that doesn't point to any sure answers. The work is powerful despite, or perhaps because of, these difficulties. At its most primary level, Ader's art is concerned with falling and failing, searching and sadness. But in dealing with these tragic themes, the artist always remained a detached participant, manipulating his media and his body. He remained aware of his ultimate inability to express the sadness he found in the sublime. This failure, which may have deterred him, instead became the focus of his work. At a recent lecture in Chicago, video artist Bill Viola spoke of "falling" as the state in which an artist makes the best art. The implied loss of control that comes with falling, and the creative space it opens up, are the driving force of Ader's work. He was a master of falling. He filmed himself falling off a tree, falling off his house, riding his bike into a river, falling On the Way to a New Neo-Plasticism, and executing a "broken geometric fall." He took pictures of himself in front of a forest, standing and then lying down among fallen trees. He suspended cement bricks from the ceiling above various "vulnerable objects", including cakes, flowers, and eggs, and then cut the ropes so that the bricks fell. In his garage he filmed himself holding blocks above strings of lights. He held them until he could no longer bear their weight, and then they fell, smashing the lights, drowning the room and himself in darkness. In the film and series of photographs Untitled (Tea Party), a tea set lures a man under a human-size animal trap, which then falls and traps the unsuspecting tea drinker inside. Perhaps even more telling, in another performance he repeatedly read from a Reader's Digest article called "The boy who fell over Niagara Falls," as he slowly sipped from a glass of water. Then, while sailing across the Atlantic In Search of the Miraculous, he fell out of our field of vision. Although Ader's preoccupation with falling implies something tragic, it avoids being overtly dramatic. His falling is human size and expresses a human-size failure and despair. He didn't leap from tall buildings, he fell when dangling from a tree branch. He didn't throw TV sets, he cut ropes to let bricks fall on eggs. The distinction between leaping and falling, throwing and letting drop, are important ones: Ader allowed the forces of nature to act upon him and on other "vulnerable" objects. In this way he identified himself and his art as subject to forces outside his control. Ader kept everything scaled to his own size, even in works that didn't address falling. In a work titled I'm Too Sad To Tell You, Ader filmed himself drinking from a cup of tea, then collapsing into tears of grief. He then made postcards of pictures of himself crying, with the sole inscription "I'm Too Sad To Tell You," and mailed them out for everyone to witness. Even though the performance was a public display and confession through the mail, it remained private, a solitary person's unidentified grief. In the piece titled In Search of the Miraculous (One Night in Los Angeles), Ader took pictures of himself walking inland through the city toward the sea. He wrote the lyrics from the Coasters song Searchin' across the bottoms of each photo. By integrating the clichˇ of pop emotional expression with his searching walk, Ader forced the work back from transcendental romanticism, and kept it grounded in the realm of the mundane. In this and other works, he communicated his ultimate frustration in attempting to connect with the sublime. Most of Ader's work
contains some premonition of loss, and a predilection for failure. His
final project was a voyage off to sea in a tiny 12-foot boat, which he
sailed without much seaworthy expertise-two likely reasons for his journey's
failure. I don't think that he intended to make his sailing journey a
success. The impossibility of truly transcending existential facts was
central to Ader's project, as was succumbing to forces beyond his control.
The sea, with all its mythical and romantic associations, and all its
real threat and power, would serve as an appropriate landscape for Ader's
final act of falling. Of course, I'll never know what his exact intentions
were, and I'm okay with not knowing. This element of mystery, this space
outside of what I know and can describe, continues to exert its force
and draws me back to Ader's work. Cindy Loehr |