Bas Jan Ader
Death Is Elsewhere
200 pages
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44 halftones
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6 x 9
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© 2013
On July 9, 1975, Dutch-born artist Bas Jan Ader set sail from Chatham, Massachusetts, on a thirteen-foot sailboat. He was bound for Falmouth, England, on the second leg of a three-part piece titled In Search of the Miraculous. The damaged boat was found south of the western tip of Ireland nearly a year later. Ader was never seen again.
Since his untimely death, Ader has achieved mythic status in the art world as a figure literally willing to die for his art. Considering the artist’s legacy and concise oeuvre beyond the romantic and tragic associations that accompany his peculiar end, Alexander Dumbadze resituates Ader’s art and life within the conceptual art world of Los Angeles in the early 1970s and offers a nuanced argument about artistic subjectivity that explains Ader’s tremendous relevance to contemporary art.
Matthew Jesse Jackson, University of Chicago
“Alexander Dumbadze is a wonderfully engaging writer. He concentrates tremendous psychological energy in the telling of a taut and revealing story. This is one of the most compelling pieces of art writing that I have yet encountered.”
Tacita Dean
“At last, there exists a well-researched and authoritative account of the life and work of the artist Bas Jan Ader, who has for too long resided in the romanticized shadow cast by his disappearance at sea in 1975. Alexander Dumbadze fleshes out Ader’s working practice, particularly in Los Angeles, giving detailed analysis of the context in which he was working and so bringing a more comprehensive perspective and understanding of both the man and the artist that has hitherto been missing.”
Andrew Perchuk, Getty Research Institute
“Bas Jan Ader offers a sophisticated examination of the debate around representation in seventies art, and Alexander Dumbadze offers one of the most theoretically compelling justifications for the use of an artist’s life in recent scholarship. Dumbadze skillfully provides an archival study of Ader’s work that corrects many of the mythic aspects it has taken on since the artist’s death. Thoughtful and meticulous, Bas Jan Ader points out why the terms that have characterized the recent reception of Ader’s work have such a powerful hold on contemporary discourse.”
Contents
Falling
Representing
Trading
Sailing
Dying
Representing
Trading
Sailing
Dying
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