Biography
Bas Jan Ader has made falling his subject: falling from a tree, a chair, a roof, falling off a bicycle into an Amsterdam canal, without the gesture ever being grotesque, funny or insignificant. Falling like a tear rolling down a cheek, checking the drama of gravity. In his notebooks, he even writes that his body was training to be dead.
‘Life treated me a bit like an organism treats a foreign body: it was visibly trying to encyst or expel me,’ wrote René Daumal in Le Mont Analogue. And in one of his rare accessible interviews, Bas Jan Ader wrote: ‘I want to do a play where I go to the Alps and talk to a mountain. The mountain will talk about things that are necessary and always true, and I will talk about things that are sometimes accidentally true’.
Having produced very few works, just a few rare performances filmed by his wife Mary Sue, his approach bears witness to a manifesto in which art and life are intertwined. It is a radical and silent quest, marked by the dissolution of the artist's presence in the world.
Works
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Untitled (Tea party), 1972
Exhibitions
