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Gravité
Bas Jan Ader
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Patrick Painter
Editions and the Bas Jan Ader Estate.
Presented by the Blackwood Gallery (University of Toronto,
Mississauga) at Hart House (University of Toronto, St. George
Campus) during the ScotiaBank Nuit Blanche on October 3, 2009.
Neutral Ground (Regina)
March 6 to April 3, 2010
Bas Jan Ader, or the Quest for an Existentialist Conceptual Art
 The gravity of a falling body. The gravity of emotions. Four very short films projected on a loop show Bas Jan Ader falling, trying to defy gravity: Fall 1 (Los Angeles), Fall 2 (Amsterdam), Geometric Fall and Organic Fall. Ader’s performances, created for the camera, provoke a state of expectation and contemplation, leaving the viewer on the watch for the moment when he will relinquish his hold on gravity. In addition to these images of falling bodies are two works playing on gravity in an completely different register: the famous I’m Too Sad To Tell You, a close-up of the artist in tears, and Night Fall. In every one of these works, Ader makes us accomplices to a tragedy of which he is the hero and which we fail to prevent.
Bas Jan Ader’s work brings together a historical depiction of classical Romanticism and its vernacular depiction in contemporary popular culture in a movement from the sublime to the banal; it is almost as if pure rhetoric was dismantled and then restored to an ordinary experience. Using conceptual strategies, Ader reframes, without ever seeking to validate them, the key motifs of Romanticism. In fact, he sets out to render a generic depiction of Romantic emotions through the conceptual experience of staging them, with the peculiarity that Ader does not describe all these clichés of the Romantic quest or try to convey them by means of interpretation. He truly experiences them. Ader’s work is not tragic; its subject is the idea of the tragic: between desire and doubt, experience and conjecture, he casts a critical look on Romanticism’s so-called authenticity such that an idea generates the work. In this way, even the most tragic ideas, the most heavily connoted on an emotional level, are rendered visually with an implacable, almost absolute logic. Anti-subjective, even iconoclastic, Ader’s work nevertheless demonstrates how much conceptual art owes to the aesthetic of the sublime, to the idea of experiencing emotion rather than depicting it. The images’ motifs and even media, while they are not entirely nostalgic, are, shall we say, non-contemporary. They amplify this connection to the aesthetic of the sublime. In this sense, curiously enough, Ader’s work turns in upon itself, encouraging a kind of Romantic cult of the objectivity of conceptual art.
And yet, through the conceptual experience of the truly carried out gesture, Ader succeeds in bringing out an emotional truth of the Romantic idea, without the impediments of heroism. His work depicts a logic of the dramatic climax which, evacuating any psychological interpretation, achieves an existential degree. Thus in the truth of the action carried out conceptually Ader’s work reveals itself as being existentialist. The fact that he himself assumes the role of the protagonist, the person who carries out the action, adds to the existentialist nature of his work, but also opens up another, almost paradoxical reversal. The exceptional aura of his tragic death, which is sometimes viewed as his final performance, his grand finale away from the camera, validates the work with a final heroic authenticity, engulfing it in a kind of apotheosis of Romanticism—precisely the critical topic of his entire body of work.
In this way, the shock and pain of his falls cannot be underestimated. The act of falling down affords a glimpse of a kind of rehearsal of dying.
France Choinière
Translated by Timothy Barnard
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Bas Jan Ader (1942-1975) was born in Holland. He settled in California in 1963 following an eleven-month journey by boat from Morocco. In the United States (Los Angeles) Ader studied art at the Otis College of Art and Design and philosophy at Claremont Graduate School, where he also taught. Ader became quite involved in the California artistic milieu, participating in conferences and teaching at various institutions, including the University of California, and through numerous exhibitions of his work. Most of his artistic output dates from 1970 to 1975, an especially productive period for him, giving rise to several exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Like many conceptual artists of the day, Ader was interested in the connection between art and life, and a significant body of work resulted from this very brief period of intense artistic activity. He began to study gravitational force in the early 1970s with his well-known series of video performances, Fall. Each performance was carefully documented: the work existed only through the medium used to record it, either video or photography. Tragically, he died at sea in 1975 while crossing the Atlantic in a tiny sailboat. He left behind an influential body of work whose conceptual influence is particularly vital today.
Over the past ten years, Ader’s influence has become increasingly acknowledged. His work has been shown widely, especially in Mexico, France, Germany, Holland and the United States. In 2007, the Camdem Arts Centre and the Museum Boijmans mounted a retrospective of his work. Gravité is the first major Bas Jan Ader exhibition in Canada since 1973, when the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, a fertile ground for conceptual art in Canada, presented his recent work.
Gravité is an exhibition prepared by France Choinière for Dazibao, centre de photographies actuelles and presented in collaboration with Patrick Painter Editions and the Bas Jan Ader Estate. |
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