PRESENTATION: Bas Jan Ader-Thoughts unsaid…
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 on 9/7/75 attempting to reach Ireland in a 4-metre-long boat, never to be seen again. 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 Gallery Archive
The exhibition “Thoughts unsaid…” brings together Bas Jan Ader’s installations, films, photo works and ephemera, as well as a selection of early, never before seen paintings and works on paper. Around the theme of the landscape, the physical, external world and the interior, psychological realm, the landscape of the mind, the works are re-contextualized to give new insight into the artist’s practice. The landscape is both the physical site of many of Ader’s works exhibited, as well as a metaphor for emotional states. The influence of the philosophical thought of Wittgenstein, Camus and Kierkegaard, concepts such as determinism, free will and the absurdity of human existence, and the expression of emotional states such as loss, sadness, longing and forgetting, come to the fore and are made concrete in Ader’s works. The centerpiece of the exhibition is the 1973 installation “Thoughts unsaid then forgotten”, first exhibited at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, a hotbed of Conceptual art in the early 1970s. Melancholy and poetic, deploying text, light and sculptural, durational elements, specifically a vase containing cut flowers that slowly decay over the course of the exhibition, the work emphasizes many of the above themes. This presentation is the first time that this work has been installed according to the artist’s original hand written instructions. Another key work in the exhibition, “Untitled (Swedish fall)” (1971), one of the artist’s most tragic and poignant works, is a two-part photo piece embodying the internal and the external. One part depicts Ader in a pine forest standing next to a tree and the other, the artist in a prone position next to several felled trees. Ader’s father, a minister who provided safety for the Jewish community, was executed in a forest as a collaborator by the Nazis during World War II for hiding Jewish refugees just 10 miles from the German border. Although Ader was only two years old at the time, this event certainly had a profound impact on his psyche growing up. Here, the comical aspect of earlier Fall works is missing. Without being overly anecdotal, the Fall in this work is emphasized as tragic and absolute. With this in mind, the striking landscape, and the artist’s position within it, has an ominous specter looming over it and takes on an atmosphere of pain, loss and fatality. Romantic notions of the Sublime run through many of the works in the exhibition, where powerful emotions, both awe and dread, engendered by the landscape, are internalized on a personal, emotional and subjective level, unable to be easily expressed or comprehended in purely rational terms. A selection of never before seen early works of Ader’s, including paintings and works on paper are also featured. The works show the artist’s creative trajectory and the transition from Modernist stylistic influences, such as the CoBrA group, de Kooning and Pop Art, towards his confident embrace of the new conceptual approach to art making that was coming to the fore in the late 1960s and of which Ader was a seminal part.
Photo Up: Bas Jan Ader, Thoughts unsaid, then forgotten, 1973 / 2023, Oil stick, tripod, clamp-on lamp, flower, vase, Dimensions variable, Installation view at 150 Manufacturing Street, © The Estate of Bas Jan Ader / Mary Sue Ader Andersen, 2023 / The Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo Credit: Todora Photography LLC and Evan Bedford, Courtesy Meliksetian Briggs Gallery. Photo left: Bas Jan Ader, Implosion / The artist contemplating the forces of nature, 1967, Offset lithography on paper, 16 3/4 x 10 3/4 in / 42.6 x 27.3 cm, © The Estate of Bas Jan Ader / Mary Sue Ader Andersen, 2023 / The Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo Credit: Todora Photography LLC and Evan Bedford, Courtesy Meliksetian Briggs Gallery
Info: Curator: David Quadrini, Meliksetian Briggs Gallery, 150 Manufacturing St., Dallas, TX, USA, Duration: 14/1-15/2/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.meliksetianbriggs.com/
