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NEW YORK DAWN™ > Blog > Art > Bas Jan Ader Made Destiny Into an Artwork
Bas Jan Ader Made Destiny Into an Artwork
Art

Bas Jan Ader Made Destiny Into an Artwork

Last updated: July 16, 2025 2:00 am
Editorial Board Published July 16, 2025
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HAMBURG, Germany — Solely July 9, 1975, the artist Bas Jan Ader, age 33, set sail from Cape Cod, aspiring to cross the Atlantic in a 12.6-foot vessel referred to as Ocean Wave after which mount an exhibition on the Groninger Museum in his native Netherlands.

The journey was, famously, by no means accomplished. The battered boat was discovered off the coast of Eire months later, however there was no hint of the artist past just a few private belongings. This now 50-year-old artwork world tragedy, which started as a part of the artist’s In Search of the Miraculous trilogy (a three-part efficiency, with the transatlantic journey meant because the second half), made Ader into the consummate artist’s artist and the topic of a lot research and dialogue. 

A half-century later, this and different works, all produced between the late Fifties and Ader’s premature disappearance, are the topic of I’m Looking out …, a uncommon solo exhibition on the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The present is commemorative and complete: Exhibited right here for the primary time are early works on paper from a portfolio not too long ago present in Drieborg, Netherlands. Additionally new is a fabricated model of a neon piece in main colours spelling “Piet Niet” — an homage to, and rejection of, Piet Mondrian, whose concepts Ader intently studied — which beforehand existed solely as a sketch for a deliberate set up. However viewers get the artist’s best hits too: his 4 “Fall” movies from the early Seventies and, after all, the poignant “I’m too sad to tell you” (1971), during which an unspeakably fairly, younger Ader — in a decent closeup on black and white movie — weeps inconsolably and inexplicably for about three and a half silent minutes. 

Nonetheless of Bas Jan Ader’s movie “I’m too sad to tell you” (1971) (picture Kimberly Bradley/Hyperallergic)

Im too sad

Nonetheless of Bas Jan Ader’s movie “I’m too sad to tell you” (1971) (picture Kimberly Bradley/Hyperallergic)

The present unfolds chronologically, and the earliest works are unsurprisingly in conventional mediums. Charcoal drawings, swirly drawings of bicycles, and abstracted minimalist portraits are clearly scholar experiments, made whereas he was on the Rietveld Academy (the place he enrolled at age 17), exposing the younger artist’s makes an attempt to discover a voice and id. However they trace at later forays into concepts like land- or seascape, stability, and sustaining or shedding management. Moreover exhibited for the primary time is a painted seascape Ader made whereas working as a farmhand within the Netherlands in 1961. In it, sea and sky meld in fields of gray-blue colour that he’d go away behind when he moved to California in 1962. 

After failing out of Rietveld, he earned an MFA from Claremont Graduate College in Los Angeles. Within the US, he shortly dove into images and movie, typically to doc his solo performances. Even in these early years the work was involved with existential points, together with failure and emotional vulnerability, in addition to longing, expressed in phrase items like “Please Don’t Leave Me,” that includes these handwritten phrases on the partitions of his storage studio. For “All My Clothes” (1970), the artist has unfold his clothes haphazardly on his small home’s shingled roof. Within the two small images titled “Study for Farewell to Faraway Friends” (1970), Ader seems each standing and sitting on a grassy knoll gazing over the ocean; the determine’s solitude maybe evokes the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Mist” (1819) or “Monk by the Sea” (1810).

Ader6

New fabrication of “Piet Niet” based mostly on Ader’s sketches. (picture Kimberly Bradley/Hyperallergic)

Falling as deliberate failing later turns into a recurring theme. The 4 now-iconic silent “Fall” shorts run on previous 16mm movie projectors in a single giant room at Hamburger Kunsthalle. In “Fall 1” (1970), Ader’s lanky physique rolls off his personal roof; in “Fall 2” (1970), he rides his bike right into a canal in Amsterdam; in “Broken fall (organic)” (1971) he hangs and swings from the department of a tree earlier than falling right into a stream. The motion is a mixture of slapstick and philosophical resignation. The 2 static projected photos that signify “Untitled (Swedish Fall)” (1971) present Ader standing in a Swedish forest in a single slide and on the bottom, as if a felled tree, within the different; students have instructed that this piece alludes to Ader’s childhood — in 1944, when he was two, his father was executed in a forest after it was found that he’d assisted Jews in escaping the Holocaust. 

Ader verlaesst Hafen 1975

Bas Jan Ader in his boat Ocean Wave in Chatham, Massachusetts, July 9, 1975 (© The Property of Bas Jan Ader / Mary Sue Ader Andersen / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025. Courtesy Meliksetian | Briggs, Dallas)

With its easy choreography and detailed however unsentimental wall texts, the exhibition avoids overtly romanticizing the artist’s work and finish, however the mythology surrounding him can’t assist however permeate the sequence of works. What may Ader have been pondering earlier than embarking on his remaining journey? For all of the philosophical underpinnings behind his follow (the “Fall” items riff on a line from Wittgenstein concerning gravity, and Ader took a duplicate of Hegel’s dense Phenomenology of the Spirit on his journey), did he fail to know the chance of what he was trying? He had sailed the Atlantic earlier than, as a deck hand, in an 11-month journey in 1963. As artist Tacita Dean asks in an essay from 2006, did he really feel protected as a result of what he was doing was artwork? In his stressed seek for transcendence, was he setting himself up for all too acquainted failure, or putting himself within the higher palms of destiny? Was there a second, as in his “Fall” movies, during which he selected to lose management, and be overcome by the forces round him? Within the 2007 documentary Right here Is All the time Someplace Else, directed by fellow Dutch California transplant Rene Daalder, Ader’s widow claims that the artist “didn’t expect to not make it.” He’d additionally mentioned he would sometime prefer to disappear for 3 years, after which return. She waited three years earlier than accepting that he wasn’t coming again.

Many conceptual artists of Ader’s period died younger: Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson additionally handed of their 30s. However as a persona, Ader was probably the most reclusive, inside, melancholy, and metaphysical — maybe merely probably the most Northern European. His small however highly effective physique of labor targeted on taking part in with and finally succumbing to the forces round him slightly than etching utopian visions on city buildings or pure landscapes. A lot of what Ader explored and produced was about surrendering to and even accelerating a sure future, however on the identical time about heeding sturdy inner calls — to journey, the liberty of open horizons, and the chic. Numerous later artists have taken his work’s and life’s existential themes as inspiration. His longings could (or could not) have remained unattained, however right here, they don’t seem to be forgotten. 

Abb 01 Broken%EF%BF%BD20fall%EF%BF%BD20organic%EF%BF%BD20Amsterdamse%EF%BF%BD20Bos%EF%BF%BD20Holland%EF%BF%BD201971%EF%BF%BD2094%EF%BF%BD20image%EF%BF%BD20BJA 011

Bas Jan Ader, “Broken fall (organic)” (Amsterdam, 1971), black and white 16mm movie, silent transferred to digital media, 1:44 min. (© The Property of Bas Jan Ader / Mary Sue Ader Andersen / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024. Courtesy Meliksetian | Briggs, Dallas)
Thoughts unsaid . date in copy

Bas Jan Ader, “Thoughts unsaid. Then forgotten” (1973/2023) (picture Kimberly Bradley/Hyperallergic)
Mary Sue Ader Andersen und Bas Jan Ader v.d. Kabinett f.aktuelle Kunst Bremerhaven 1972

Mary Sue Ader Andersen and Bas Jan Ader in entrance of the Kabinett für aktuelle Kunst, Bremerhaven, 1972 (© Jürgen Wesseler / Kabinett für aktuelle Kunst, Bremerhaven)
Ader Untitled %EF%BF%BD28The elements%EF%BF%BD29 1971 2003

Bas Jan Ader, “Untitled (The elements)” (1971/2003), C-Print, version of three (© The Property of Bas Jan Ader / Mary Sue Ader Andersen / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024. Courtesy Meliksetian | Briggs, Dallas)
Ader7

Bas Jan Ader’s handwritten directions for “Thoughts unsaid. Then forgotten” (picture Kimberly Bradley/Hyperallergic)
untitled SwedenSwedishFall 1971

Bas Jan Ader, “Untitled (Swedish Fall)” (1971) (picture Kimberly Bradley/Hyperallergic)

Bas Jan Ader: I’m Looking out… continues at Hamburger Kunsthalle (Glockengießerwall 5, Hamburg, Germany) by way of August 24. The exhibition was curated by Brigitte Kölle with curatorial trainee Julia Kersting.

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