Bas Jan Ader | Mirroring Gravity | art magazine | input 1

Bas Jan Ader | Mirroring Gravity

VANINA SARACINO

In the years 1970 and 1971 Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader realized a series of videosthat were repeatedly staging an act of falling. In these works, he drags a chaironto the roof of his house and he sits on it until he loses balance and falls off; herides his bike into a canal; he hangs from a narrow stream until falling into thewater below; he suspends a heavy rock onto a few light bulbs lying on the floor,all switched on, and he lets it fall. I find it a remarkable coincidence that the firstman had landed on the Moon only a few months before he came up with thisidea – to realize a series of works around the fall. This undeniable concern andfascination toward gravity can serve as a conceptual thread to connect not onlyAder’s work in the years 1970-5, but also to link it to other artists’ practiceswithin the historical period he was witnessing.

Defined by the duo Otolith Group as a “vertical force”, gravity is the firstcondition experienced by the body from its first moment on Earth, a force welearn how to deal with from the start. Incessantly grounding us to the field, itbuilds a common ground for every form of life on our planet, a shared conditionaround which the experience becomes more uniform. Considering thesepremises while curating an exhibition one year ago, I found myself wanting togeneralize gravity as the main reference that gives us an initial orientation uponwhich we build our verbal communication and our entire understanding of theworld. Thanks to the direction of this force, we can in fact differentiate the Northfrom the South, the left from the right, the balance from the unbalance. As anunderstanding of our experience develops, also the language becomes morecomplex, and we connect these opposites to their figurative condition,associating the metaphor of lightness and weight to the mood, the wealth, thepositions of power. Gravity, eventually, builds our entire relation with oursurroundings and, as a consequence, the way we express our knowledgethrough language. Following Otolith Group’s thought one could easily point outthat, in a hypothetical absence of gravity, our entire system of knowledge andreferences would almost completely lose its meaning.

If language mirrors gravity, the act of falling in Ader’s videos is thereforeinextricably connected to the condition of failure, as descending or moving

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downwards is usually a metaphor of worsening or even decay. The fact that theleaves fall in a season bearing the same name as the act of falling, indicates aconnection with both the physical and metaphorical connotation of gravity, aphase suggesting the prelude to death in the yearly cycle. Jan Verwoertobserved that it is impossible to tell how or why Ader got himself into thosesituations, but it is clear that there is only one possible outcome: sooner or laterhe will fall, same as a leaf. In any case, the most relevant moment in these videoscan not be found in the fall itself but in the letting go: Ader only falls when he cannot resist any longer.

In 1969, italian artist Gino de Dominicis engaged in a similar act. His videoTentativo di Volo shows him on his back, widening his arms and moving them asfast as he can, hopelessly jumping ahead in an attempt to fly that will only makehim fall shortly after. He repeats the operation five times, but the video suggeststhat he will not stop until he gets a different result. In de Dominicis’ work in fact,gravity is mostly a medium to explore absurd probabilities, like throwing dozensof stones in the water expecting them to form a square on the surface, instead ofa circle (Tentativo di far formare dei quadrati invece che dei cerchi attorno ad unsasso che cade nell’acqua, 1969), or placing a slightly squashed sphere on theground pretending that the time had freeze for the object exactly in the instant


before it bounced off. Behind this last sculpture, written on a wall, the sentenceappeared “Così come il disegno e la pittura la mia scultura non è condizionatadalla forza di gravità” (“like drawing and painting, my sculpture is not affected bythe force of gravity”). De Dominicis also explored the invisibility as a form ofimmortality first by exposing invisible sculptures and objects whose only opticalcharacteristic was the tape mark on the ground; afterwards, he sarcasticallyemployed the void as a disorienting element by leaving his sole hysterical laughreverberating in an empty room.

Far from de Dominicis’ approach, Ader’s take on art had been deeply influencedby his idealistic parents and their tragic story. Furthermore, shortly after hisfather was murdered by the Nazis because he helped hide Jews, his motherwrote a book in which she refers to gravity by stating that this planet keeps usbound to the Earth to prevent us getting lost. She also complains that there is nospace for the miraculous anymore. It was 1947 and Ader was still a child, but themiraculous would later become a pivotal quest in his artistic practice, at leastfrom 1973 until the end. In Search of the Miraculous was the title he chose for aseries of works culminating in his masterpiece. On July 9th, 1975 he sat sail fromChatham, Massachusetts, on his Ocean Wave, a thirteen foot sailboat whichwould have been the smallest boat that ever attempted to cross the Atlantic. Hewas heading to Ireland. Having no way of communicating with other people,alone with his one-way radio, he was completely isolated in a journey whichwould have taken approximately 3 to 5 months to be completed. Significantlyenough, by watching the fall series later on, a sailor argued that the moment inwhich Ader lets go should certainly be associated with the instant in which heleaves the dry land behind him and faces the ocean.

Less than a year before Ader’s sail, another artist engaged in a dangerous workdealing with gravity. On August 7th, 1974, French high-wire walker Philippe Petitwalked the distance that separated the Twin Towers on a 200 ft steel wire. Hehad planned this walk for six years or so, collecting all the articles he could findsince 1968 on the yet-to-be-constructed Twin Towers in order to find a way to(first) get into the buildings and (second) string the wire between them dealingwith several physic issues like the strong wind blowing at 1,368 ft high, whichwould have wildly shaken the wire making his walk impossible. Falling, in thiscase, is a constantly lurking danger that the artist manages to avoid thanks to hisexpertise.


These artists are “masters of gravity”, in Tacita Dean’s words. But if Petit’spractice as a high-wire walker entirely relied on his presence on the wire, it hasbeen argued that Ader could have hypothetically faked his cross of the Atlantic,due to the conceptual nature of his work. After all, Yves Klein had realized hispiece Le Saut (“the jump”) in 1966, in which he falls off the roof, throughphotographic retouches. Or even de Dominicis had attempted to fly only byjumping a few centimeters below. Loosely speaking in fact, conceptual art reliedon the basic idea that the work itself – namely the result shown to the public –was less relevant than the idea behind it and than the process the artistundertook to achieve it. Therefore, the artwork becomes a mere vehicle tocommunicate the artist’s idea, and it partly loses its autonomy as an object to becontemplated and experienced for its formal aspects or the skills involved in itsexecution. However, Ader was not a conceptual artist and, furthermore, heprogressively became more skeptical toward any form of representation orartifice. His incursions in Philosophy had brought him to consider the arts notonly as a medium to intervene into reality, but also as a privileged tool to engagein the search for Truth. As stated by Hegel in Phenomenology of the Spirit, this


was the artist’s main philosophical challenge, and – representatively enough –Ader was carrying this book during his cross over the Atlantic. He did not believethat this Truth, whatever that means, could be found in the fake, or in any form ofsemiotic construction. Instead, the physical experience entails the conditions toachieve it. This explains why the cry in I’m Too Sad to Tell You, the fall series andthe ultimate sail In Search of the Miraculous are all staged but never faked. LikePetit, Ader was aware of the dangers he would face undertaking this sail, but hedid not dwell on it. At this point, dealing with death was to be understood as afurther sign of his commitment and determination to escape the mediated worldin order to find something bigger than an image.

At the same time, however, the uncertain distinction between artistic practicesand daily life experiences had become a central issue in the late ’60s and early’70s. Shortly after the Moon landing, Allan Kaprow wrote his Essays on theblurring of art and life, undoubtedly one of the most valuable interpretations ofthis subject. To prove that the beauty of life at the time had come to exceedevery artistic result, he brought as an example the spacecraft Apollo11 – anobject belonging to an outer reality that nonetheless broadly overcame everyeffort of contemporary sculpture. Also the dialogues among cosmonauts,according to Kaprow, were undoubtedly better than most contemporary poetry.Clearly enough this approach opens other problems, namely the risk of art losingits autonomy and becoming completely enveloped by life. How to make art wheneverything can be art? Or when, in Kaprow’s words, “nonart is more art than Artart”? “Magnificent desolation”, stated Buzz Aldrin as he faced the Moon for thefirst time.

Ader’s attempt to escape the mediated world progressively translated into amovement towards invisibility, that is far from his works, only a few years before,when he had repeatedly filmed his body falling. But the employment of the bodyas an instrument was an idiosyncrasy of video art, at least in its first years, andthis consideration brought art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss to recognize itas the peculiar and endemic condition of the medium in the essay Video: TheAesthetics of Narcissism, published on October in 1976, shortly after Ader’sdeath. She argued that most of the work produced in the brief period of videoart’s existence at the time has used the human body as its central instrument –videotapes would employ the body of the artists; video installations the body ofthe viewer. But the degree of representation in the works Krauss brings as


examples is notably higher than in Ader’s works, which are almost mere,homemade recordings of the situations he staged.

Once Ader engaged in his series In Search of the Miraculous, it is easy toobserve the artist’s struggle to remove his presence from one work to the next.In the 18 pictures constituting In Search of the Miraculous (One night in L.A),1973, his body is as a blurred figure emerging from the darkness or standing faraway, never showing his face. Hereby, presence and absence coexist. The artistis deprived of his identity, only participating as a witness of the never endingdialogue between these opposites, exactly as the city does, with its unidentifiedcorners and shores only partially revealed by the artificial city lights. Adergradually disappears in his last pieces, first by leaving only a trace of hispresence and then vanishing completely. His effort to remove the artifice fromthe work, the elegant irony he often employs and the movement towardinvisibility are all operations suggesting a resistance to gravity and and attemptto recover a weightless dimension through art.

Afterwards, Ader began to work on a homonym trilogy he could never complete.The first piece was the song A Life on the Ocean Wave performed by some of his


students (1975), and the second one would have been the sail across theAtlantic. However, 11 months after he sat sail from the US his boat was foundhalf-submerged on the Irish coast, surprisingly close to its foreseen destination.Shortly after, under uncertain circumstances, the boat disappeared as well, livingno trace of Ader’s last work. His body was never found.

In the last weeks of his life, completely alone in the ocean, isolated from the restof the world, sole sailor wandering on a quest for the sublime, witnessing hisultimate failure, Ader accidentally succeeded in eluding not only the twists of anysemiotic construction, but also every possible layer of representation. In Searchof the Miraculous, apparently lost as a work of art, became instead Ader’s mostaccomplished piece exactly because it is never closed or finished, but itconstantly develops as an open artwork, a weightless story endlessly re-signified by whomever brings it to mind.


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Bas Jan Ader | Mirroring Gravity | art magazine | input 1