RESEARCH - ARTIST BAS-JAN ADER - PERFORMANCE

Ader’s art grappled with the notion that our individual experiences cannot always be adequately captured or conveyed. The artist was searching for something “miraculous,” but even if he were to have found it, who’s to say whether he could adequately convey it? It’s a theme that recurs throughout Ader’s small, but remarkably consistent body of work. His oeuvre presents an affecting blend of Sisyphean struggle, absurdist humoUr, and humanist concern.

Aside from his final piece, Ader’s best known body of work is a set of 16mm films known as the Fall series. Each film was recorded in a single static take. “Fall 1, Los Angeles” (1970) opens with Ader sitting on a chair on the roof of his home. The camera is set at a distance, with only the house and Ader occupying the frame. The artist suddenly leans to his right, loses control, and begins to roll off the roof and into the bushes below. The work’s levity is bolstered by the artist’s use of slow motion. In an extra-comic twist, one of Ader’s shoes flies off before he hits the ground. Another film from the same year, “Fall 2, Amsterdam” (1970), is presented at normal speed. The camera overlooks a road beside a canal. Ader enters the frame on a bicycle, cycling steadily. He abruptly swerves into the water a few seconds later. Crucially, both sequences are cut before we see Ader remerge. He essentially vanishes.

Heralded for its Keatonesque humor, the Fall series oscillates between farce and tragedy. The films embrace the themes of failure, determinism, and fate. In a 1971 interview with Avalanche magazine (issue 2, winter 1971) Ader stated:

I do not make body sculptures, body art, or body works. When I fell off the roof of my house, or into a canal, it was because gravity made itself master over me.

 Ader’s remark explains his decision to commence each film shortly before the falls occur. The emphasis is on the act of falling itself, as opposed to the situation depicted. It is meaningful that we do not see Ader climb onto the roof of his house (footage which was excised from the final version of “Fall 1”) or mount his bicycle, as this would undermine the apparent spontaneity of each action. If the films could be said to have a flaw, it is that Ader is required to activate the falls himself — a fact that threatens to undermine the work’s determinist themes. Ader resolved this problem with “Broken Fall (Organic)” (1971). The film opens with the artist dangling from a tree branch above a creek. In this instance, Ader has placed himself into a scenario where a fall is inevitable. The artist is no longer in control. The viewer knows that Ader’s strength will eventually give way. Here, the Sisyphean quality of the work is both fully articulated and exercised.

The sense of failure and tragic inevitability that Ader conveyed so effectively in his Fall series would later be conflated with the mystery of “In Search of the Miraculous.” The thematic continuums are almost impossible to ignore, and numerous viewers and critics have fetishized it, perhaps without even realizing it. Consider this passage by Cathleen Chaffee in the catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art’s 2009 exhibition In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976:

[Ader’s] early, dramatic death shaped [his] posthumous reputation as a tragic daredevil and an anachronistic, poetic wanderer. The artist himself also encouraged this kind of response to his work by employing in this final project old fashioned themes such as death defying risk, the lust for adventure, and the pathos of homesickness.

The very themes that Chaffee describes are, for the most part, already present in Ader’s earlier work. The artist’s falls, though not exactly “death defying,” presumably involved a certain degree of personal risk. Likewise, Ader’s off-screen disappearances in “Fall 1” and “Fall 2” preempted his later interest in presence and absence, themes that Ader would later explore with “In Search of the Miraculous.” These thematic continuums readily lend themselves to retroactive readings of the artist’s work. It explains why Yeomans jumps from discussing “I’m Too Sad to Tell You” to “In Search of the Miraculous.” When Yeomans analyzes the former, she identifies a sense of longing in Ader’s expression — “A searchingfor something.” Her language demonstrates that she has conflated the two works. You get the sense that Yeomans is looking for answers in Ader’s earlier work; that “I’m Too Sad to Tell You” might somehow account for Ader’s state of mind or purpose prior to his disappearance.

These connections, more psychological than art historical, explain the intensity of Ader’s mythic status. It’s all too easy to read Ader’s absence at the end of “Fall 1” and “Fall 2” as some sort of grim foreshadowing of his death. It’s therefore unsurprising that so many of Ader’s students devised alternative theories, chief among them that Ader had staged his disappearance. One imagines that Ader’s students preferred to treat “In Search of the Miraculous” as one of his Fall films — as if Ader was merely off-camera, quietly devising his next scenario.

Bas Jan Ader, “In Search of the Miraculous (One Night in Los Angeles)” (1973), one of 18 silver gelatin prints with handwritten text in white ink, 8 x 10 inches