PHOTO:Bas Jan Ader
Bas Jan Ader was a unique figure in the art of ‘60s and ’70s. Almost dangerous in its level of seduction, Ader’s work and life merged tragically in the second part of his trilogy “In Search of the Miraculous”, as he sailed off the coast of Cape Cod attempting to reach Ireland in a 4-metre-long boat, never to be seen again.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Metro Pictures Archive
An exhibition of photographs, films, and installation works by Bas Jan Ader is on presentation at Metro Pictures in New York. Included are complete sets of the original test photographs Ader made for his book “Fall I and II”, along with the working photographs for several other important works of the early ‘70s that have not been previously exhibited. Born on 19/4/42, Bas Jan Ader grew up in Winschoten, northern Netherlands. His father was executed in 1944 by the German occupying force for helping Jews escape The Holocaust. In 1963 Ader moved from Amsterdam to Los Angeles where he was associated with a group of artists whose work would define an important strain of Conceptual Art distinct to the West Coast. There he produced a small but extraordinarily affecting body of work. At the time Ader was working there was little awareness of the parallel between his art and his family history. The “Falls” a number of films and a series of photos encapsulate the frailty and vulnerability at the heart of much of Ader’s work. “Fall I” is a short film depicting the artist falling off a chair on the roof of his house and rolling down its slope to the ground. A second film, “Fall II” shows a view, shot across a canal, of the artist on a bicycle riding carefully down the street and then suddenly losing his balance and disappearing into the water. Referring to “Fall I and II”, “Untitled (Teaparty)” shares a similar sense of pointed conclusion. In a series of six colour photographs arranged in a column, the camera slowly zooms into a sunlit clearing in a wood where Ader, formally dressed, is taking afternoon tea – in the English style – under a large cardboard box propped up by a stick. The camera zooms out again and in the last frame the stick has come away and the box has fallen to capture the tea-drinker like a mouse in a trapIn the dual slide projection “Untitled (Swedish Fall)” Ader stands straight and thin amid a forest of similarly tall trees in one image, and in the second he lies collapsed on the ground in the same wooded scene with fallen trees lying around him. In the 18 photos constituting the first part of his trilogy “In Search of the Miraculous (One night in L.A)”, are included in the exhibition, in this photos, his body is as a blurred figure emerging from the darkness or standing far away, never showing his face. Hereby, presence and absence coexist. On 9/7/75 Bas Jan Ader set sail from Cape Cod, equipped with a camera and tape recorder, Ader planned to document his survival at sea as the second part of the trilogy. On 18/7/16 Months a Spanish trawler found the wreckage of his boat about 150 miles west of the coast of Ireland. The third part was to be an exhibition at the Groeningen Museum after arriving in Europe.
Info: Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, New York, Duration 22/6-/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.metropictures.com
