Bas Jan Ader

Death Is Elsewhere

Alexander Dumbadze

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780226269856, 9780226038537
• eBook ISBN: 9780226038674
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

On July 9, 1975, Dutch-born artist Bas Jan Ader set sail from Chatham, Massachusetts, on a thirteen-foot sailboat. He was bound for Falmouth, England, on the second leg of a three-part piece titled In Search of the Miraculous. The damaged boat was found south of the western tip of Ireland nearly a year later. Ader was never seen again.

 

Since his untimely death, Ader has achieved mythic status in the art world as a figure literally willing to die for his art. Considering the artist's legacy and concise oeuvre beyond the romantic and tragic associations that accompany his peculiar end, Alexander Dumbadze resituates Ader's art and life within the conceptual art world of Los Angeles in the early 1970s and offers a nuanced argument about artistic subjectivity that explains Ader's tremendous relevance to contemporary art.

 

Bas Jan Ader blends biography, theoretical reflection, and archival research to draw a detailed picture of the world in which Ader's work was rooted: a vibrant international art scene populated with peers such as Ger van Elk, William Leavitt, and Allen Ruppersberg. Dumbadze looks closely at Ader's engagement with questions of free will and his ultimate success in creating art untainted by mediation. The first in-depth study of this enigmatic conceptual artist, Bas Jan Ader is a thoughtful reflection on the necessity of the creative act and its inescapable relation to death.

INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate figures.

absorption concept, 64–65

absurdity: apprehension vs. condition of, 29–30; Ruppersberg’s use of, 135, 136–37; in Van Elk’s films, 57–58

Acconci, Vito, 84

Ader, Bas Jan (Bastiaan Johan Christiaan)

—art concerns: concrete truths in, 7, 33, 44, 51, 54, 66, 68, 140–42; double identities, 82, 115; ideas conveyed through material qualities or medium, 54; light/dark duality, 99–100, 100, 117, 119–20; milieu of, 60–61 (see also Los Angeles art scene); organic/geometric and passive/active tension, 99; part and whole/real and illusory, 13; philosophy embodied in, 6–7; presence and absence, 117–18, 119–20; self-doubts and struggles, 105–6, 112; tabula rasa nature of the scene, 56. See also dying; falling; representing; sailing; trading

—characteristics: cigar smoking, 45, 61; ego, 9; humor, 9–10, 37, 45, 47; risk taking, 75. See also privacy

—education: circle of student friends, 9; class disruptions by, 9–10, 160nn19–20; master’s thesis exhibition at Claremont, 10, 11, 12–13, 14–15; at Otis, 8–9

—life and family: birth, 24; childhood, 3, 12; father’s death and, 17, 25; homes, 73; love affair, 122, 171n27; marriage, 10; mother’s later relationship with, 173n10; political activities, 167–68n29; postwar childhood home, 25–26; renunciation of faith, 28; war protests of, 167–68n29; WWII’s impact on, 24–25; youth delinquency and manual labor, 26. See also Calvinist Protestantism; commodities trading; Leavitt-Ader friendship

—teaching obligations, 45–46, 99. See also University of California, Irvine

—works: appreciation reemerging for, 149, 150–52, 155, 175n38; aura now surrounding, 154–55; book format projects, 12–13, 14–15; disappearance of himself from, 99–101; hesitancy to talk about, 5, 76–77, 80, 86–87; horizontal self-portrait, 46; lack of attention after death, 145, 149; reluctance to show in Lost Angeles, 77; self-consciousness about status as art, 45; separation from viewers in, 44, 77–78. See also exhibitions (Ader); philosophy

—works, specific: All of My Clothes, 164n28; The Artist as Consumer of Extreme Comfort, 13, 160–61n26; Artist Game, 106; Broken Fall (Geometric), Westkapelle, Holland, 49–50, 50, 51, 60, 62; Broken Fall (Organic), Amsterdamse Bos, Holland, 31–33, 32, 44, 45, 62; 473 Reader’s Digests Digested, 66; Humpty Dumpty—Fall Guy, 13; Light Vulnerable Objects Threatened by Eight Cement Bricks, 8, 18, 20–21, 44; Niagara Falls, 13; Piece G (with Leavitt), 6; Pitfall on the Way to a New Neo-Plasticism, Westkapelle, Holland, 47–49, 48, 51, 62; Please Don’t Leave Me, 164n28; Primary Time, 106, 170–71n11; ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Falling
• Representing
• Trading
• Sailing
• Dying
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index