Lost At Sea: The Art Of Bas Jan Ader
“All is falling.” — Bas Jan Ader (notebook entry)
Who was Bas Jan Ader? A man deliberately riding his bicycle into an Amsterdam canal, having a solo tea party under a human-sized rabbit trap, falling from a tree branch, rolling off the roof of his house or setting out to sail across the Atlantic Ocean on a boat so small as to seem a toy. Born in Holland but coming out of the LA art scene of the 60s and 70s, Bas Jan Ader left us a brief, five-year string of enigmatic performance pieces, filmed and photographed between 1970 to 1975. It was a very short career, given a powerful exclamation point by the startling finality of his last act. Ader revealed little about his work, and left no commentary save a few cryptic journal entries scribbled in pencil on a memo pad. Most of his work seems to involve an impossible struggle for identity and security, a pervasive sense of discomfort, grief and alienation, all sprinkled with an irrepressible melancholy glee. A sharp irony suggested by Ader’s work is that this glorious “Age of the Individual” might be more accurately labeled the “Age of the Insufficient Self.”
“Falling is failure.”
A large portion of Ader’s art involved falling and his Fall series could be described as part slapstick, part harrowing existential crisis. Fall 1 in 1970 was a short film and series of still photographs of Ader rolling off the roof of his Los Angeles home and falling into the bushes below. For Fall 2, he casually rode his bike into an Amsterdam canal. For Broken Fall (Organic), Ader filmed himself hanging from the far branch of a tree, kicking furiously, surrendering to motionlessness, then dropping off the tree into the water below. He also fell, after wavering in the wind, onto a sawhorse, and in images photographed in Sweden he seemed to be imitating felled trees. These portraits of the artist falling established Ader’s reputation for black comedy.
“The sea, the land. The artist has observed their change and stood with great sadness to know they will be no more.”
Though he sardonically referred to himself in the third person as “the Artist,” Bas Jan Ader was far from self-absorbed and showed great empathy for the falling of others. For The Boy Who Fell Over Niagara Falls, he read the eponymous Reader’s Digest true-life adventure story twice a day, for one week, sitting relaxed in a chair by a lamp and sipping from a glass of water after each line. In his 1970 installation Light Vulnerable Objects Threatened By Eight Cement Bricks, Ader showed his deep sympathy for everyday objects — pillows, a vase of flowers, a string of lights, eggs, a birthday cake — by suspending cinderblocks by rope above them. To end the piece, he cut the ropes and allowed falling blocks to crush the anxiety-ridden objects.
“I know a man ain’t supposed to cry.”
When tired of falling, Ader could often be seen crying. In his notebook Ader scribbled: “short film: I’m too Sad to Tell You — drink tea sadly and begin to cry.” I’m too Sad to Tell You was shot in silent 16mm black & white, showing a close up of Ader moving through a series of strange, sometimes comic expressions while rolling his head, then proceeding to cry. He later took a still from the film to create the I’m too Sad to Tell You postcard, quite possible the least popular postcard ever made, and certainly the saddest.
“The thought of our inevitable and separate deaths fills my heart with intolerable grief.”
Fallin’ and cryin’ were important themes in Ader’s life and work, but he was also consumed with searchin’. In 1973, he borrowed the lyrics for the 1957 Coasters hit, “Searchin’,” and inserted them on the bottom of a series of photographs involving a one-night Odysseyian stroll he took beginning at dusk along an LA freeway, passing through a desolate, poorly-lit concrete netherworld, and concluding mysteriously by the sea. In Search Of The Miraculous (One Night In Los Angeles) features eighteen photos of Ader as a slight, dark, solitary figure walking slowly and purposefully through a harsh, unwelcoming urban nightscape. In the first photo, Ader illegally plods along the freeway, cars roaring by, and the Coasters song begins, “Yeh, I’ve been searchin’…” He passes through tunnels, by dark buildings, across abandoned intersections, down alleys, by an eerie urban strip with a small sign announcing “Income Tax Service”, over the parking lot of a shipyard, past industrial wastelands, and eventually arriving at the end of his journey — the ocean. The final photo shows Ader standing far off in the predawn light, an almost imperceptible silhouette on the last strip of available land, having found no comfort, no solution, no rest.
“Rolling into a freshly dug grave.”
In Search Of The Miraculous was intended to be a trilogy. The last shot of the One Night In Los Angeles series is remarkably similar to a color photograph, Farewell To Faraway Friends, in which the artist stands on an outcropping of land before an ocean that extends into the horizon. “Goodbye” he seems to be saying before setting out on what would prove to be his final journey, also known as part two of In Search Of The Miraculous. This shockingly ambitious segment involved Ader, a sailor of moderate experience at best, crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a tiny sailboat, from Cape Cod to Falmouth, England. He sailed out of Cape Cod on July 9, 1975. If he had completed his unlikely trip he would have accomplished the miracle of setting a new world record (67 days) for completing a transatlantic voyage in a one-man craft. Before his departure, Ader staged a performance in which a nine-person choir of himself (looking curiously like Jesus) and eight UC-Irvine music students, accompanied by a pianist, sang sea shanties. The singers wore morose expressions, sang in a somber tone, and dressed in black. The mood was more funereal than “bon voyage” to a sailor attempting a heroic feat.
“Whole series of photographs on dead in ocean, being washed ashore. My body practicing having been drowned.”
Bas Jan Ader never made it across the Atlantic. His miraculous search ended in mysterious disaster. Radio contact was lost after three weeks, and nothing else was heard until the following April when a Spanish trawler discovered his capsized boat near Ireland. His body was never found. In a catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition, art historian Thomas Crow asserts that Ader’s trip was “undertaken with every expectation of success.” Yet the very notion of him surviving this perilous voyage, breaking a world record, and the ensuing celebrations and notoriety he would have gained all run counter to the themes he so meticulously established in his prior work.
Consistent with his reluctance to define or even comment upon his art, Ader left behind only a few abstruse clues as to the meaning of his final act. We have his five-year body of work, his cryptic scribblings, the diverse ponderings of art critics and the theories of his friends. We also have a book left in his UC-Irvine locker, discovered when it was clear that Ader was not returning to teach in the fall semester. This book, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, is the nonfiction story of a sailor’s effort to fake a non-stop, solo voyage around the world. Crowhurst sailed into the vast nothingness of the South Atlantic to hide, and send bogus radio reports regarding his progress. While sailing in circles in this deafening isolation, Crowhurst was consumed by megalomaniac delusions, became psychotic and apparently committed suicide.
“The earth will fall beyond where it will be tomorrow.”
So who was Bas Jan Ader? We enter the exhibit playing the part of FBI crime profile specialist, given a handful of puzzling clues. Ader was the son of a Protestant Dutch minister who was executed by the Nazis in 1944, when Bas was two years old. He was an art teacher at UC-Irvine, known for his love of navy blue nautical clothing and who sometimes moved his class to a bar across the street. He was a Chaplinesque conceptual artist, wobbling in the wind in a dark, grainy film before finally, and as always, falling. A conscientious objector to gravity. A distant, lone figure standing at Land’s End, saying farewell to unseen companions. An inadequate boat, capsized off the coast of Ireland. A body lost at sea. For some, this life is not creeping, but rushing forward to its doomed conclusion. Most people turn away, unable to face the inevitable, but an enigmatic few set full sail into its absurdity, like Bas Jan Ader.
Review of the Bas Jan Ader exhibit at the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery, University of California — Santa Cruz. Originally published in Artweek in June, 1999.
Gustavus Kundahl has written about film and media for Fandor, Kitchen Sink, Artweek, Release Print, see: a journal of visual culture and other publications.
