Closer Look
Although it's tempting to read into his suicide too much, it's safe to say that Bas Jan Ader's work often dealt with the "disappearing figure," as described by journalist Catherine Wagley. In his performance art, documented by photography and film, he toppled off roofs and ledges or out of trees, or drove his bicycle into a canal. Rachel Kent has isolated in three works themes of "loss, frailty and failure." In his Fall works, Jan Ader hoisted a concrete block over a cluster of light bulbs until his grip weakens and the block crashes to the ground, crushing the scene’s source of light. In Fall I, he dangles from a tree branch until he loses his grip. Finally, in 1975, sailing across the Atlantic as part of In Search of the Miraculous, he never returned.
Catherine Wagley. "Bas Jan Ader, Zoe Crosher, and the Art of Disappearing People." LA Weekly. July 2011.
Canon
The artist is a seminal example of the Romantic Conceptualist movement, comprising artists who found sentiment in rigid panned gestures. Artists have made various updates and tributes to his final work, In Search of the Miraculous. Charles Ray sailed a boat in his memory, and Chris Burden, another artist known for his endurance, tipped his Ghost Ships in Jan Ader's honor in 1996. Photographer Christopher Williams created Bouquet for Bas Jan Ader and Christopher D'Arcangelo, linking these two artists so devoted to de-materialization in life (and death). Italian artist Piero Golia re-enacted Ader's disappearance by vanishing for three weeks, illegally crossing borders and leaving no trace of himself.
Rachel Kent. "Pun to Paradox: Bas Jan Ader Revisited." Parkett. 177.
Related Work
In Light Vulnerable Objects Threatened by Eight Cement Bricks, an installation from 1970, Ader suspended by means of eight ropes, eight cinder blocks over eight vulnerable objects (a birthday cake, flowers, light bulbs, eggs and so on). Periodically, during the duration of the installation, he entered the space and severed one rope with a utility knife, allowing a cinder block to fall and to crash into the vulnerable object below. The first of his Fall pieces also dates from 1970.
There is a significant difference between cinder blocks falling and Ader falling. Because it is falling that is the form and content of the work, not the vulnerable objects, and not their victimization at the hands of the block. In these pieces, Ader is the evidence of gravity. He surrenders to it. He doesn’t use it to smash vulnerable objects with cinder blocks. He surrenders.
Seth Kim-Cohen. "The Artist's Body as Gravity Makes Itself Its Master: Bas Jan Ader's Incompetence." Tate Modern. 2005.
In the Artist's words: on gravity
Bas Jan Ader located in the artist's body a metaphor for resistance, against entropy among other sources of oppression. “The artist’s body as gravity makes itself its master,” he said regarding his two Falling videos when they were first shown in Dusseldorf in 1971. The works are metaphors for the human condition, and the temptation and the aversion to failure. He said of these same works, “In the film I silently state everything which has to do with falling. It’s a large task which demands a great deal of difficult thinking.”
Tony Godfrey. "Conceptual Art." Phaidon. 1998. 215.
Jan Tumlir. “Bas Jan Ader: Artist and Time Traveler.” The Art Gallery, University of California. 1999. 26.
Related Work: I'm Too Sad to Tell You
Yet another failure in the world as described by Bas Jan Ader is the in ability to communicate. Perhaps the artist's most famous work, I'm Too Sad to Tell You, is a 1971 short film in which the artist silently weeps. We know not his reason for crying yet we empathize in a universal way. "When I cried, it was because of extreme grief, and when I fell, it was because gravity made itself master over me," said the artist.
Seth Kim-Cohen. "The Artist's Body as Gravity Makes Itself Its Master: Bas Jan Ader's Incompetence." Tate Modern. 2005.
