Bas Jan Ader

I couldn't think of a better way, personally or logically to start this text off than with Bas Jan Ader. His work is largely overlooked, even still today. Here is an excerpt from a piece I wrote last year:

The trouble with being a martyr, in the classical sense, other than dying, is that one’s life is so closely associated with one’s death. Before Sebastian was pierced with innumerable arrows or Joan perished in a pyre, the narratives of their lives are filled with divine communication and lucid movements toward their own demise.

So the ‘chosen’ ones can't really be separated from their suffering - it irrevocably constitutes their mythic persona in a historical context. If the term ‘martyr’ is not too specific and over-aggrandizing, you could also talk of certain artists whose untimely deaths play heavily into the posthumous readings of their works. Like Eva Hesse and Blinky Palermo - or more recently, Jeremy Blake - some have been spoken of in terms of their prolific and prodigal youth, but in a bigger way, what they could have done if they had not prematurely perished; what they might have become. As a qualifier, they seem to have been taken down by the very attributes that set them apart. The James Deans (Jane Dean?) of Modernism - is that silly?

Ader’s biography figures into much of contemporary interpretations of his work. No event more so than his death in 1975. In July he set out to cross the Atlantic in a twelve-and-a-half foot sailboat called The Ocean Wave in 67 days – a record for such a small vessel. The feat was to be the second part of a triptych titled In Search of the Miraculous. Three weeks into the voyage, radio contact was lost and the boat wouldn’t be found for another year, drifting off the coast of Ireland. Official reports of the craft’s retrieval estimate that the boat had been capsized for around six months. His body was never found, and initially his closest friends believed that Bas Jan had planned the whole thing.


This final work would remain unfinished and is now considered his tragic ‘opus’, ironically ending a career that explored the same notions of falling, failing and disappearing. It is no wonder that his death at sea has engendered such difficulty to separate the man from the work. In many ways, the reading (or misreading) of Ader has informed the practice of artists in the last decade and the contemporary dialogue around sincerity and a return to a humanist sentiment in art. His oeuvre and biography make it so easy to discuss him in sentimental terms of sadness in the face of the sublime. While sentiment and the sublime are rampant in his work, they are elements Ader consciously and consistently used to call into question kitsch, sincerity and the very role of the artist himself.