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Legend of the fall
ArtForum, March, 1999 by Bruce Hainley
The artist is crying and too sad to tell anyone why. A postcard with the dated note - "Sept. 13 1970. I'm too sad to tell you." - shows Bas Jan Ader racked by tears. Whatever caused the tears to flow (the artist never publicly stated the reason) is ultimately beside the point. And yet Ader reenacted his private sadness, restaged it, photographed it to mail to others. While his piece retains a "real" sadness, it keeps vital the artifice and melodrama inherent in placing himself before his own camera while crying. Almost all of Ader's work pulsates with a crisis of some personal intensity. His sincerity is sincere - until it's not only sincere. Certainly connections exist between the postcard's sad note and the ominous and purely theatrical qualities of some of his early, simple wall texts ("Please don't leave me"; "Thoughts unsaid then forgotten") and carefully chosen titles, like Farewell to Faraway Friends, a photograph of a lone Ader standing on the coast, framed by the setting sun on the horizon - a photo whose sincerity is toyed with by the kitschy, touristy "sunset" colors. To look at this another way, consider for a moment: If I told you that during the month I've been thinking about Ader I cried several times, and that I'm crying right now, would you buy it?
Maybe it's just easier to admire a dead Conceptual artist than a living one, but that doesn't account for the intense, cultlike following of Ader and his work, particularly in Southern California. There's a dream logic in considering that Charles Ray navigates his sailboat in part for Ader. Christopher Williams has hauntingly memorialized the artist in Bouquet for Bas Jan Ader and Christopher D'Arcangelo, 1991. Ader's rigorous poetics can be felt in Martin Kersel's excellent explorations of gravity, attraction, and repulsion. Artist Collier Schorr has written lucidly and lovingly about him. Even much younger artists acknowledge Ader's quiet power. Jennifer Bornstein, whose own complexly simple and mysteriously accurate photos and films recall the best of Ader's gifts, told me: "His subject matter is so banal, but the fact that he does it anyway and how it is transformed in execution continues to amaze. Is it manipulated or is it real? He walks such a fine line."
Ader's obscurity is, at least in part, due to his dying young, at age thirty-three, while undertaking the second installment of a proposed three-part work, In Search of the Miraculous. The first part consisted of still photographs of Ader noirishly wandering the freeways, back alleys, hills, and coastline of Los Angeles at night with a flashlight. Each frame of the nocturnal perambulation contains a line from a 1957 Coasters song, "Searchin'," in Ader's hand. When this initial part was first shown, Ader displayed a bulletin done with the Dutch alternative space Art & Project and had a choir sing sea chanteys - in part as a way of announcing the imminent voyage that would comprise the next stage of the piece: an attempt to sail from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to Falmouth, England, in a thirteen-foot sailboat, a trip he projected would take around sixty days. He planned to document the entire journey. Ader took off on July 9, 1975; three weeks into the voyage, radio contact failed. His brother, Erik, reported the following: "On about April 10 [1976] a Spanish fishing trawler found his boat about 150 nautical miles west-south-west of Ireland. It was two-thirds capsized, with the bows [sic] pointing down. Judging by the degree of fouling, it looked as though the boat had been drifting around in this position for about six months."
At the time of his sailing away, Ader was teaching at the University of California, Irvine. Because of the dual and slyly duplicitous nature of his explorations (is he really crying? is he really sad?), many of his students thought his disappearance at sea was staged. In his foreword to the catalogue accompanying Ader's just-opened exhibition at Irvine, the first retrospective of the artist in the United States, curator Brad Spence relates that when Ader's faculty locker was opened, it contained "a copy of the book The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. . . . At the time, this text seemed to offer a possible clue to Ader's disappearance, for it gives a non-fictional account of a sailor's attempt to fake a non-stop, solo voyage around the globe and his eventual loss of sanity and life to the sea."
A man sits in a chair next to a small table with a lamp, a glass of water, and a copy of Reader's Digest. He proceeds to read a story about a boy who survived tumbling over Niagara Falls in a small boat, punctuating each line of the story with a sip of water from the glass. When the story is concluded, the glass has been emptied, and the man rises to leave.
Ader presented The boy who fell over Niagara Falls in 1972 at Art & Project; then the props were reduced to the Reader's Digest at the Kabinett fur Aktuelle Kunst in Bremerhaven (documentary photographs show Ader seated next to a moderne table and gallery filing cabinets). The boy who fell over Niagara Falls contains most of what has come to be identified with Ader's mature work, especially his witty use of the pared-down poetic metaphor (the sips of water contain the cataract in a glass; the suggestion of the watery falls recapitulates the pratfalls that make up a number of Ader's best projects as well as the tears he cried, and the ocean he drowned in). Ader gestures toward the mortal risk and failure inherent in any search for the miraculous or experience of the sublime: Just as the boy might not have survived the forces of Niagara, so the glass of water contains the intimate possibility of drowning.
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