ART CITIES: Los Angeles-Bas Jan Ader
Born in Holland but coming out of the Los Angeles art scene of the 60s and 70s, Bas Jan Ader left us a brief, five-year string of enigmatic performance pieces, filmed and photographed between 1970 to 1975. It was a very short career, given a powerful exclamation point by the startling finality of his last act. Ader revealed little about his work, and left no commentary save a few cryptic journal entries scribbled in pencil on a memo pad.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Meliksetian | Briggs Archive
Bas Jan Ader’s “Light vulnerable objects threatened by eight cement bricks” is the first time the installation / performance has been presented since its debut at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts) in June 1970. The installation is comprised of eight cement cinder blocks suspended, slightly off kilter and precariously, from the ceiling by lengths of rope. Below each of the blocks sits a grouping of fragile objects: an oil painting, a transistor radio, a string of illuminated lightbulbs, two pillows, a group of empty beer cans in brown paper bags, a sheet cake with the inscription Happy Birthday on it, in its box, a group of eggs, and three pots of flowers. The blocks loom ominously above the objects, casting shadows on the objects be-low and threatening to fall on top of them and crush them at any moment. At the end of the exhibition, the artist, or in this case a stand in, adds a performative element, cutting each of the ropes causing the cement blocks to crash into the items below, destroying them. The installation was first presented in 1970 which was an important and prolific year in Ader’s career. The theme of the Fall was a major concern of the work at this moment. It was at this time he made the seminal films “Fall 1, Los Angeles” and “Fall 2, Amsterdam” among other important works. The installation presages the 1971 film work “Nightfall” in which the artist struggles to lift and ultimately drops concrete slabs on to illuminated light bulbs below from shoulder height, extinguishing them and falling into darkness. The themes of the Fall, used metaphorically as well as literally, precariousness, failure, the futility of resisting forces of nature like gravity, as well as ideas of impending danger, doom and risk are apparent in these works including Light vulnerable objects… where Ader puts these ideas into three dimensional, sculptural, and material form. Where this piece differs from the mentioned above works is that Ader himself is not the protagonist around which this looming threat revolves. Instead, this tension is focused on the objects and Ader himself becomes responsible for their destruction when he cuts the rope in an act of imposing his will upon the environment. The re-presentation in Meliksetian | Briggs gallery is staged under the supervision and direction of the artist’s wife Mary Sue Ader Anderson, who assisted with the original installation along with artist William Leavitt in 1970. The original installation is documented by 14 slides and 16mm black and white film footage. A selection of color prints of the original installation are exhibited alongside the current installation of the piece in the gallery. The final act in the presentation of the work, the cutting of the ropes, will take place in the gallery on January 22, 2022.
Photo: Bas Jan Ader, Light vulnerable objects threatened by eight cement bricks, 1970 / 2021, Installation view Meliksetian|Briggs-Los Angeles, 2021, Courtesy Meliksetian | Briggs Galley
Info: Meliksetian | Briggs, 313 N Fairfax Avenue, West Hollywood, CA, USA, Duration: 4/12/2021-22/1/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-17:00, www.meliksetianbriggs.com
