In the years since the passing of the conceptual and performance artist Bas Jan Ader (1942-1975), critics and art writers have concerned themselves just as much with the darker undertones of the artists’ outwardly humorous works as with the tragedy of his later disappearance into the Atlantic Ocean. While the artist himself never seemed to have sought out fame nor garnered any major attention during his lifetime, there seems to have been a sudden increase in interest for his work since the 1990’s, nearly thirty years after the creation of his works. (1) Given that Ader (albeit posthumously) was also one of the invited artists for the 2017 Venice Biennale, this essay will attempt to uncover is if there are there any reasons why or in what ways his work should still be of concern in contemporary artistic developments. (2)
To find answers to these questions, I propose to dissect the artist’s work in three ways. First, I will attempt to contextualise Ader’s artistic practice by analysing what concerns his work addressed during the artist’s own lifetime. I will then focus on the context that has been ascribed to him retrospectively; why or what was appealing in his work after his presumed death; how is his work conceived of when compared to that of his contemporaries? Finally, I will discuss how both the contemporary and retrospective meanings attributed to his work can still benefit from fresh perspectives by the individuals working within the wider scope of the artistic circles active today. Artists like Ader, who died at a relatively young age, have been portrayed as trying to embody seemingly contradictory concepts like authenticity and romantic mysticism. I argue that the attraction the artist garnered in later years from the art world could be attributed to the malleability of the small and introspective body of work he left behind. I therefore propose that contemplative interpretations of his works are to be understood as institutional frameworks that ought to be bypassed should artists wish to derive new and personal meanings from these types of works.
A RESISTANCE TO ART THEORY
Bas Jan Ader was born in the Netherlands in 1942 and grew up during the post-war era in a small town near Groningen, a city that had been heavily occupied by the Nazi regime during the Second World War. He was the son of Calvinist ministers, a religious doctrine of reformed Protestantism that characterises itself by austere ritualistic sobriety and a rejection of material excesses and idolatry. Ader grew up without his father who, like many Calvinists in the Netherlands, was an organiser in the Resistance movement and helped a large number of his Jewish compatriots escape the Holocaust only to be executed in 1944 by the Nazi occupiers. (3) His cultural background during his formative years, one that has dealt with forms of ideological and social resistance, might have had some influence on some of the earlier works of the artist. (4) Indeed, in his earlier work the artist appears to holds a cynical stance on the formality of institutionalised art theory, having studied the works of iconised artists like Piet Mondrian at the Rietveld Academy of Art. He references Mondrian specifically in a series of photographs titled On the road to a new Neo Plasticism, Westkapelle, Holland (1971), where the artist lays on the ground wearing a black suit in an attempt to mimic the grid of a Mondrian painting and add a new primary-coloured element in each photograph (Fig. 1). (5)
His critical stance on art theory was geared towards current art movements as well, something that became more evident when he eventually moved to the West Coast of the US to attend Claremont Graduate University. The disdain his new artistic milieu in California expressed for the state of the art world at that time is apparent when looking at the works from the artists he associated himself with such as Ger van Elk, another Dutch artist who resided in Los Angeles in the late 1960’s. Van Elk stated what Ader wanted was a realistic portrayal of unrealistic situations, thereby solidifying his belief that every depiction of reality in art is untrustworthy by nature. (6) His work La Pièce (1971), which consists of a simple white wooden bloc placed on a red velvet cushion, is an intended critique at the purified abstraction early 1960’s Minimalist artists like Sol LeWitt sought to represent (Fig. 2). (7) Likewise, a lot of the early works by Ader made in Los Angeles could be interpreted as critiques of the perceived megalomania of the art world, which had become sensationalised repetition in traditional forms of representation. Ader collaborated with his friend and fellow artist William Leavitt on a series of issues of Landslide, a title that pointed to the publication as a satirical platform for revolutionising the mainstream of post-minimal style. It parodied the more mainstream art magazines prevalent at the time like Artforum, which alongside Willoughby Sharp’s Avalanche had become leading forums for the promotion of ‘new’ critical and theoretical writing about art with in depth articles and photographs of artists working in-situ. (8) In the seven issues that were produced, Landslide featured articles and reviews on made-up artists and happenings, fake guest editors like ‘Brian Shitart’, as well as correspondences from a scandalised fictional public (Fig. 3).
When considering the apparent distaste the artist seems to have held for artistic idealism and pretence, at first it can be hard to conceive of why he chose to reside and work in Los Angeles. Indeed, the city was arguably the most famous capital at that time for its material excess and cinematic romanticism. When examining works made in his later career however, Ader appears to reflect more on this modernist city life by contrasting it to the popular culture it produced. This can be seen in one of the last works he created (1973) In Search of the Miraculous (One Night in Los Angeles). The work consists of a series of black and white photographs taken of the artist walking from the hilltops of Los Angeles to the shoreline in one night (Fig. 4a). Words from the 1957’s hit song Searchin’ by The Coasters are inscribed on each one of the images, providing a narrative structure to the journey depicted in the work (Fig. 4b). Indeed, while the song revolves around a man looking for a woman, Ader seems to present himself as a man on a quest in the pursuit of someone—but gives a humorous perspective on the practicality of this romantic ideal by placing it in the context of the reality of a fast moving and modern city. He is a pedestrian in a city delineated for the use of cars, set out at night when people are more likely to isolate themselves in their homes, alone while guided by a popular hymn that is more commonly heard at social gatherings. (9)
Ader thus seems to have stood against forms of social idolatry as well as against models of formality and purity dictated by conceptual art. (10) He therefore developed a style that was inherently linked to the location and locution of his surroundings, while at the same time extracting them from their given context in order to prove his point.
Figure 1. Bas Jan Ader, On the road to a new Neo Plasticism, Westkapelle, Holland (1971). Performance, the Netherlands. Photographs courtesy Bas Jan Ader Estate & Meliksetian, Briggs, Los Angeles.
Figure 2. Ger van Elk, La Pièce, 1971. Painted beech wood, velvet cushion. Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands.
Figure 3. William Leavitt and Bas Jan Ader, extract from Landslide No. 1 (1961). Eight mimeographed sheets (including cover) in acetate sleeve with mimeographed letter in envelope, overall dimensions 30.5 × 22.9 cm. Collection the Museum of Modern Art, New York (632.2017.1.a-j). Courtesy of William Leavitt and MoMA.
Figure 4a. Bas Jan Ader, In Search of the Miraculous (One Night in Los Angeles), 1973. Eighteen black and white photographs with white ink, each: 20,3.3 x 25.4 cm. Collection of Philip and Shelley Fox Aarons, New York. Courtesy Bas Jan Ader Estate and Patrick Painter Editions. In Pacific Standard Time, Peabody, Perchuk, Phillips, Singh, and Bradnock (eds.), pp. 294-95.
Figure 4b. In Search of the Miraculous (One Night in Los Angeles), detail of a photograph.
READING THE ARTIST: COMEDY AND HEROISM
In Ader’s mixed media work I’m too sad to tell you (1970-71), the artist appears crying in a series of photographs and on a silent film without ever stating the reason behind this act (Fig. 5). The work thus raises an issue relating to the authenticity of the emotion he portrays: is this a real moment of emotional despair or is he rather just portraying an elemental state of grief? (11) When taking into consideration the resistance the artist expressed at any forms of social and artistic idolatry, it can be easy to interpret his works as parodies of human endeavours, exposing them by lacking the emotional depth they pretend to convey. The overtly caricatured tone of his works has thus earned him comparisons to John Baldessari, another West Coast conceptual artist. (12) In the video performance Teaching a Plant the Alphabet (1972) for example, Baldessari displays flashcards of the letters of the alphabet to a house plant (Fig. 6). He uses a form of deadpan humour to juxtapose the roles of the instructor to that of an uncomprehending student, thereby mocking the importance attached to sense-making in conceptual art. Likewise, Ader seems to prove a point about the artist’s role in relaying their feelings or invoking a thought process to their audiences through his grotesque and almost humorous display of emotionality. At times, Ader even displays outright referential material to traditional slapstick comedy, like the burlesque films of Buster Keaton where the comedian always finds himself safe after being involved in a series of unlikely accidents. (13) In his video Fall 1 Los Angeles (1970) for example, the artist sits on a chair on a roof, slowly rocking it forwards and backwards until he loses his balance and tumbles off the roof into a bush (Fig. 7). Much like a comedian would want his audience to laugh at their failures and not the reality of the pain they may have sustained while performing them, Ader’s fall is not intended to make his viewers care for his fate as they can rest easy in the knowledge that it was all an act. (14)
Comparing Ader’s falls and failures to archetypical dramatic characters of Western culture, for performance researcher Francisco Sousa, Lobo Fall 1 is not intended as a simple act of comedy. He specifies that the act of failure also references the idea of presenting the artist as a sacrificial vessel for society and has connotations to figures like Ulysses and the adversities he encountered on his journey home. (15) Emma Cocker, an artist and art writer, suggests Ader might have found himself locked in a Sisyphean paradigm: that in practicing the act of falling continuously, the artist has become like the mythological figure whose ordeal consisted of relentlessly trying but failing to push a rock up a hill. (16) Ader’s use of his own body in acts of apparent self-endangerment have also been paralleled to acts of pathetic heroism. The writer and critic Jörg Heiser highlights similarities between Ader’s activities and the performative works of Chris Burden. (17) In Shoot (1971), Burden had himself shot in the arm by a friend to challenge audiences to the reality of pain at a time when he deemed people had become desensitized to violence due to televised images (Figs 8a and 8b).
The critical discourse surrounding Ader’s work thus primarily seems to portray the artist as torn, consistently seeking to achieve two seemingly opposite goals. He is simultaneously described as a radical proponent of realism and as a character comparable to those found in Western classical mythology—hopelessly seeking to achieve romantic idealism. Heiser argues that Ader’s work therefore differs from that of his American contemporaries: if Chris Burden, who consciously tested the limits of his body, displayed a sense of ultimate tragic ‘heroism’ in his performances and John Baldessari formulated a tone that qualified him as the ultimate parodist of the West Coast conceptual art movement; Ader does not appear to disfavour either of these practices (should he ever even have had them in mind). Instead, he worked around them by elevating both the pathos and the irony in his works. (18)
Figure 5. Bas Jan Ader, I’m Too Sad to Tell You (1970). Black and white photograph with black ink, 27.7 x 35.5 cm Collection the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the Estate of Bas Jan Ader and MoMA.
Figure 6. John Baldessari, Teaching a Plant the Alphabet, 1972. Performance, United States. 18:40 minutes, black & white video with sound. Video licensed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York. Source: https://www.eai.org/titles/teaching-a- plant-the-alphabet, last accessed on 03/04/18.
Figure 7. Bas Jan Ader, Fall 1, Los Angeles (1970). Black and white film, 16mm, duration: 24 sec. Courtesy Bas Jan Ader Estate & Meliksetian, Briggs, Los Angeles
Figures 8a & 8b. Chris Burden, Shoot (November 19, 1971). Performance, F Space,
Santa Ana, California (USA). Photographs courtesy of the Berkeley Art Museum.
UNFULFILLED PROMISES
On July 9, 1975, Ader set sail alone from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for the city of Groningen in the Netherlands to complete what would have been the second instalment of his triptych work In Search of The Miraculous. The artist, who at that point had been based in the West Coast of the US for a number of years, named the series in reference to Pyotr Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous that recounts the author’s experiences in learning alleged ancient philosophical teachings for self-development. (19) The artist was to complete his work, which begun with a series of photographs of him wandering by foot through the city of Los Angeles at night to reach the ocean shore, by recording his crossing of the Atlantic to have a similar nocturnal journey captured in his native country of the Netherlands, thereby merging what he had gathered and learned from the New World and the Old. (20) Ader never made it to his intended destination however and was eventually declared to be lost at sea later that year.
In the years since the artist’s presumed passing, the mystery surrounding the disappearance came to be at the centre of attention for many of critics and art writers when discussing Ader’s work. The apparent psychological depth and comedy that have come be used as the staple descriptors of his work seemed to have primarily served as a basis for speculations about the artist’s life and to mystify his intentions. Due to the resurgence in interest for conceptual art during the 1990’s, the themes of irony and romanticism he explored in his seems to have led to a cultish fixation about the fate of the artist. (21) Some have argued that the artist might have voluntarily chosen to disappear and is in fact still be alive today, believing his works to be part of a larger conceptual piece. Others have also theorised that he might have even tried to intentionally end his own life when he decided to undertake the—seemingly—impossible task of journeying alone in the Atlantic Ocean. Critics like Heiser on the other hand make the argument that his demise was an unintentional kind of failure, one that is rendered even more tragic by the fact Ader seemed to have sought out the possibility of being simultaneously a rationalist and a romanticist. He bases his argument on the fact that the artist had apparently convinced his wife (the artist Mary Sue Ader), as well as his fellow sailors that he was capable of completing the journey alone. Ader had indeed previously completed the crossing of the Atlantic to come to the US with another sailor and had made prior arrangements for his comeback to the Netherlands. (22)
What seems more interesting than the question of whether or not his death was intentional is the fact that these writers felt the need to focus their attention on this matter at all. Almost no one questioned whether or not Chris Burden’s had considered to end his life when he made the decision to stand in front of the barrel of a shotgun. The longstanding tradition for performance artists to put their own life at risk for the sake of their artworks seems to be bypassed in favour of a more idealistic narrative, one that tells the tale of youthful idealism and either a naïve or desperate attempt at tragic heroism. Jan Verwoert explains that the role that has been bestowed upon the artist is what elevated him to cult status in his critical investigation of the artist’s body of work Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous. In an almost ironic twist of fate, the very concept of romantic ideology in art that Ader questioned—and sought to disprove during his artistic career—are also at the basis for much of his authentication today, to the point of obscuring his work altogether. (23) His early death meant that there was only a small amount of work for people left to dissect. As a performer, most of his works also focus on the artist’s own body, which in turn presents a personal front for his works and creates the possibility for audiences to feel like they might be interacting with the artist in a more direct manner.
CONCLUSION
While contemporary art writers have since acknowledged the role that has come to be bestowed upon him, the allure to portray Ader as the victim of a quest for artistic truth seems to persist to this day. Many of the descriptions of the artist in theoretical art writing still echoes Tacitca Dean’s 1996 portrayal of Ader as a tragic character, an artist who went too far to achieve his goal much like Icarus falling into the sea when he flew too close to the sun. (24) Throughout this essay, I explored various ways in which to review the artist’s work both by giving insights into his personal background and by providing a theoretical framework to uncover the key themes that have come to define his work retrospectively. I have found that the artist’s personal ideologies and themes led to more in-depth psychological interpretations of his work as well as a cultish fixation on the artist’s life and death. The intimate and deliberately ambiguous aspects of his work indeed appear to have amplified the potential for audiences to project their own ideas onto the artists’ intentions, an appeal that perhaps correlates to the ‘selfie’ culture of self-promotion and curated personal presentation that exists in our contemporary society. For an artist like Ader, this is especially apparent in that his disappearance has led to a large number of speculative theories that merged the artist’s life to his work. Maybe the way to find meaning in his works then lies in the potential for today’s artists and critics to not look through the lens of the artist’s life and his own motivations, but rather to look beyond the character he has become in our collective cultural consciousness and see his works for the images they are and appreciate the significance they hold for them on a personal level.
NOTES
Front Image. Bas Jan Ader, I’m Too Sad To Tell You, 1970. © 2016 The Estate Of Bas Jan Ader, Mary Sue Ader Andersen, and Artists Right’s Society (Ars), New York/Courtesy Meliksetian, Briggs, Los Angeles. Source: http://www.barbarafaessler.com/writing/content/bass-jans-aders/
1. This is evidenced by the number of Ader’s retrospective exhibitions since 1988 in major institutions such as in the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam (1988), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1994), the Kunstverein in Munich (1994, 2000), and the Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo Santiago de Compostela (2010), as well as the release of recent documentaries about the artists’ life like Rene Daaler’s Here Is Always Somewhere Else (2007).
2 Andrew Russeth, ‘Here Is the Artist List for the 2017 Venice Biennale,’ ArtNews (02/06/17), http://www.artnews.com/2017/02/06/here-is-the-artist-list-for-the-2017-venice-biennale/ (retrieved 17/04/19).
3. Redactie Historiek, ‘De executie van dominee en verzetsman Bas Ader’ on Historiek, https://historiek.net/de-executie-van-dominee-en-verzetsman-bas-ader/46438/, last accessed on 19/04/19.
4. Herman Münstermann, ‘Waarom Bas Jan Ader in de Gracht fietste’ interview
(October 18, 2018), retrieved via on NPO Radio 1 https://www.nporadio1.nl/cultuur-media/12608- waarom-bas-jan-ader-de-gracht-in-fietste (last accessed on 21/04/19).
5. Jörg Heiser, ‘Curb Your Romanticism: Bas Jan Ader’s Splaptick’ (2006), The Artist’s Joke, edited by Jennifer Higgie, Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2007), 85.
6. “What I want is a realistic depiction of unrealistic situations.” Ger van Elk, interview, 1977. Quote obtained via Ger van Elk’s obituary, Artforum (20/07/2014), https://www.artforum.com/news/ger-van-elk-1941-2014-47926, last accessed on 19/04/2019.
7. Natalie Zonnenberg, ‘In Memory of Ger van Elk,’ in Metropolis M, Magazine for Contemporary Art (20/08/2014), http://www.metropolism.com/en/features/23633_in_memory_of_ger_van_elk, last accessed on 20/04/2019.
8. Bennett Simpson, ‘William Leavitt: Colloquial Conceptual in Los Angeles,’ William Leavitt: Theater Objects, exhibition catalogue, edited by Ann Goldstein, Annette Leddy, and Bennett Simpson (Los Angeles, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011), 88-86.
9. Wade Saunders, ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, Bas Jan Ader,’ in Art in America, Vol. 92, N° 2 (February 2004), p. 54.
10. Francisco Sousa Lobo, ‘Theology After Bas Jan Ader’ (2013), Performance Research, 18:4, 69-72, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2013.814346, 70.
11. Jamie Sterns, ‘Bas Jan Ader : In Search of the Miraculous : Jan Verwoert : Afterall 2006’ review on YaYaYa (April 4, 2011), http://www.yayayagetarty.com/2011/04/bas-jan-ader-is- probably-my-favorite.html (last accessed on 18/04/19).
12. Heiser, ‘Curb Your Romanticism’, 88.
13. Sousa Lobo, Theology After Bas Jan Ader, 70-71.
14. Heiser, ‘Curb Your Romanticism’, 86.
15. Sousa Lobo, Theology After Bas Jan Ader, 69.
16. Emma Cocker, “Over and Over, Again and Again” (2010), Failure, edited by Lisa Le Feuvre, Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2010), 155, 157.
17, Heiser, “Curb Your Romanticism”, 86.
18. Heiser, “Curb Your Romanticism”, 88.
19. See: Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an
Unknown Teaching (First publication in Orange County, United States: Harcourt Brace,
1949).
20. Jan Verwoert, Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous (London: Afterall Books, 2006).
21. Tiernan Morgan, ‘In Search of Bas Jan Ader, the Artist Who Disappeared at Sea,’ Hyperalleric (November 30, 2016), https://hyperallergic.com/336146/in-search-of-bas-jan- ader-the-artist-who-disappeared-at-sea/ (last accessed on 21/04/19).
22. Heiser, “Curb Your Romanticism”, 88.
23. Verwoert, In Search of the Miraculous, 96.
24. Tacita Dean, “And He Fell into the Sea” (1996), Failure, edited by Lisa Le Feuvre, Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2010), 130.
New Minds Eye 