you may or may not know that there's this guy whose life and work i'm frequently given to bouts of mad raving about called Bas Jan Ader. i first came across him while writing a paper on Dutch conceptual artists and was immediately struck by a raw and powerful image of the artist in tears, captioned with the words "i'm too sad to tell you"
an explanation of his grief was never given, only the assurance that it was genuine and not a performance put on for the sake of the piece itself. and though this is image is powerful enough in its own right, for myself it carries a heavier effect after having learned a little about Ader's life and how it ended at the tragically young age of 33, while In Search of the Miraculous.
Ader was born in 1942 in Winschoten, close by the border with Germany. the son of a Dutch reformed minister, from an early age a sense of spiritual yearning was cultivated in young Bas Jan and this yearning continued as an underlying theme in much, if not all, of his artistic oeuvre.
although Ader never really gained a substantial following during his lifetime, he is now becoming something of a cult figure in the artworld and i think in part this is due to the very powerful sense of yearning prevelent in his work. other than "i'm too sad to tell you", he is perhaps most well known for employing gravity as an artistic medium in his performance series of falls - "fall 1", "fall 2" "organic", "geometric", "nightfall" - where he is seen falling from (among other things) the roof of his house in California (fall 1), into a canal (fall 2) and from a tree (organic) in the Amsterdamse Bos (about 10 minutes walk from where i used to live!)
there is the sense in this series of trying to capture, through repitition and replication, a brief moment of awareness of something greater than oneself. as a friend of Ader's put it, commenting on these pieces after his death - it's not the act of falling that is important, nor is it the anticipation of falling, nor the landing, but that split second having let go, just for the briefest moment before gravity pulls you back to earth.
throughout his work, this theme of the gap between the individual and something greater, the tension created by such a gap and the urge to bridge that gap, to pull towards oneself that sense of the Miraculous, fuelled Aders yearning, restless spirit. much of his work concerns this restless wonderlust, this sense of the Miraculous being out there, waiting to be found. it's there in works such as "yeh, i've been searching" and culminated in 1975, in what was to be his final piece - "in search of the miraculous" - an effort to sail the Atlantic in a twelve and a half foot sailboat.six months after his departure, the boat was found half-submerged off the Irish coast, with Bas Jan nowhere to be seen. there is a curious footnote to this tragic story - in his locker at the University of California where he taught at the time prior to his disappearance, was found a copy of the book "The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst". Crowhurst,a british buisnessman and amateur sailor, died at sea while competing in a single-handed round the world yacht race. evidence discovered after his disappearance suggests the attempt ended in insanity and suicide, Crowhurst believing he had stared into the face of God and throwing himself overboard.
certainly, Bas Jan's life had a tragic ending but he has left a deeply powerful legacy behind. i believe what makes this legacy so powerful is the level at which it speaks to this universal sense of spiritual yearning, the desire to bridge the gap, to go in search of and maybe, at last, find the miraculous.
namu amida butsu
lovely post
ReplyDeletethankyou :-)
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