In dreams begin responsibilities: when Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader was lost at sea in 1975, he left behind a slim body of mostly photo-based work. Now posthumous editions of some of these pieces are raising provocative questions - Issues & Commentary - Critical Essay

Art in America, Feb, 2004 by Wade Saunders

I first saw Bus Jan Ader's work in Southern California in the mid-'70s and was transfixed. Ader had perfect visual pitch and courage. He was a Conceptual artist, or, more accurately, a "concept" artist: immateriality interested him mum than materiality. He focused on an idea, a noumenun, and then searched for its phenomenal forms. He made photographs, films, installations, performances, audio-and videotapes, books and works on paper. Sometimes Ader used the same idea to create related pieces in different mediums--a photograph and a film, for example. Though Ader worked in a range of ways, he produced little.

I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1970)--a black-and-white photograph of him crying, with that phrase handwritten in the lower right-hand corner of the image--is sad, funny, pathetic, dishonest, luminous. It is a piece that experience does not render familiar. I'm Too Sad to Tell You still makes me shiver, even in reproduction. Ader took something that was a lie--he had worked up his fit of tears---and made it more real than most news photos. For me, the picture conveys narrative time, like a movie scene, not a movie still. (Ader made three black-and-white silent 16iam films that shared this title and subject. He put aside the earliest try, shot in Los Angeles in 1970, as well as one of the two attempts he shot in Amsterdam in 1971. In group shows he exhibited a 214-second--including 16 seconds of title-version filmed in Amsterdam.)

Ader made anti-spectacular art, and his reputation spreads by word of eye. Although his work has been more widely shown in the last decade than in the two before, we artists remain his core public. We envy the simplicity of his pieces, which, like reflections on still water, appear graspable until you reach for them. We 'admire Ader for the little be did, for the much he preferred not to and for other reasons. His fans span several continents and artistic generations. For some of us, his oeuvre is not good or great; it is essential.

Ader was born on Apr. 19, 1942, in wartime Holland. In 1962, aged 20, he headed south from Holland and wound up in Morocco. There he was engaged as the only crew on the Felicidad, a 45-foot sailboat, whose skipper turned out to be dangerously incompetent. After a difficult 11-month voyage across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal, Ader arrived in Los Angeles. He lived in and around L.A. for the next 12 years, studying studio art and then philosophy, marrying Mary Sue Andersen, working and teaching. He also created artworks and exhibited in Holland.

Bastiaan Jan Ade5 Bas Jan's father, was a Dutch Protestant reverend. During World War II, he and his wife, Johanna, who had been working in Amsterdam for a publishing company before the war, hid Jews--at flint two acquaintances, then sometimes more than a dozen--in their home in the province of Groningen, in the north of Holland close to the German border. Bastiann also organized a network to bring Jews from Amsterdam to clandestine locations in the northern provinces and elsewhere. In 1944, he was arrested by German forces and their Dutch collaborators, tortured and then held in prison. His Resistance role was much greater than his captors were able to learn. On Nov. 4, 1944, his son Erik was born; on Nov. 20, 1944, the Germans shot Bastiaan Jan Ader and six other prisoners in reprisal for the wounding of a soldier by a Resistance group. Though Bas Jan's and Erik's remarkable father was dead, he remained very present to his family, and to an extended community.

On July 9, 1975, Bus Jan Ader, then 33 years old, headed out from Chatham, Mass., on Cape Cod, in his 12 1/2-foot-long sailboat Ocean Wave, bound for Falmouth, England. He intended to catch the Gulf Stream and cross the Atlantic in its flow. He anticipated the passage taking l0 weeks. Ader's craft was perhaps the smallest theretofore used in such an attempt, and both art and extreme sport figured in his planned voyage. His capsized boat was retrieved in the ocean off Ireland in April 1976; it was floating almost vertically with just the stern above water and appeared to have drifted in this fashion for at least six months. Ader's body was never found.

He had conceived this Atlantic voyage as the second part of his projected triptych In Search of the Miraculous, 1975. (He lifted the title from a book by philosopher P.D. Ouspensky.) He intended it to be a sort of transcendental Gesamtkunstwerk, which would surpass everything he had done till then and would give body to his metaphysical leanings. That increasingly important aspect of his work has been underestimated in the critical writing on him to date. The first part had been his show that opened on Apr. 22, 1975, at the Claire Copley Gallery in L.A. There Ader showed In Search of the Miraculous (One Night in Los Angeles), 1973. Two versions of the work exist. One is composed of 14 11-by-14-inch black-and-white photographs, the other of 18 8-by-10-inch black-and-white photographs; Ader culled the images for both pieces from the same one-night shoot.