Legend of the fall

ArtForum, March, 1999 by Bruce Hainley

Ader did not invent the fall, and its connections to failure are as old as the Bible. While Ader's use of falling as an overriding theme or device summons the grand themes - the fallenness of man, existential human abasement - it's also his homage to vaudeville and early film, particularly Buster Keaton. Until there is a thorough, scholarly history analyzing the connections and divisions among art performance, avant-garde theater, and dance in New York and Los Angeles, it will be difficult to gauge how, when, and in what ways Ader's work influenced and was influenced by others working in the late '60s and early '70s. It is interesting to consider that while Yvonne Rainer explored ordinary movement - certainly the fall is one of the most ordinary of movements - and Charles Ludlam staged something like his version of Wagner's Ring cycle, his own absurd sequined Gotterdammerung, artists in California were more concerned with the agon of gravity: In the Bay Area storefront he was renting, Bruce Nauman fell to his floor after Failing to Levitate in the Studio, 1966; Howard Fried accrued in heavy piles garments weighted down by dirt in All My Dirty Blue Clothes, 1970; Paul McCarthy practiced hurling his body in "missile-like trajectories" in Leap and Too Steep, Too Fast, both 1969; instead of searchin' the LA byways, Chris Burden dropped to the street and crawled through glass in Through the Night Softly, 1973. Yet for all the postwar effects and residues of macho heroism pervading LA during Ader's time there, the tonality of his project is entirely different. Spence pinpoints "a sense of tension in Ader-the-director and Ader-the-actor in the production of his own tragedy: he dramatizes the exalted elements of self-invention and self-destruction." He took a gentler though no less agonistic approach than others. A notebook entry reads: "My body practicing being dead."

In a series of quotations by Ader collected by his friend, artist William Leavitt, there is a line from one of Ader's favorite songs - "It's not just a feeling, it's a philosophy" - followed by a proposal for a project never completed: "I want to do a piece where I go to the Alps and talk to a mountain. The mountain will talk of things which are necessary and always true, and I shall talk of things which are sometimes, accidentally true." Perhaps Ader's predilection for contingency, his steering into things that are "sometimes, accidentally true," is his quiet contribution and one reason his work resonates with more assuredness today than when it was conceived.

The balance that Ader attempted to strike between irony and romantic quest is one that many are searching for today. His many works confronting the history of Dutch art - from Vermeer and Rembrandt to Mondrian and the followers of De Stijl - position his belatedness as something to be considered and rifled on rather than something to become stultified by. As he wrote on a Christmas postcard in 1970: "I'm making a subdued work. On the film I silently state everything which has to do with falling. It's a large task which demands a great deal of difficult thinking. It's going to be poignant. I like that. I'm a Dutch Master." Ader's search for the miraculous, his journeying in and around the sublime - caught on a postcard or in a Coasters tune - acknowledges even as it anticipates a contemporary yearning for the heroic, for art to tap into something greater and grander than the self-weary self, yet he managed to treat this desire with a healthy dose of irony: If he knew that his strivings were grand, he also knew that they might fail - or that he may fail them - yet he ventured on anyway, winnowing the materials of his art until it would go on without him, winnowed so that even the irony fades, only to return in unexpected ways. In his notebook he once planned: "Whale series of photograph on dead in ocean, being washed ashore. My body practicing having been drowned." Did he complete or fail to complete this project?