‘Search’: An Artist Meets Death in His Medium

On July 9, 1975, a slender Dutch-born artist said goodbye to his wife and set off in a 12 1/2-foot sailboat from Cape Cod, Mass., en route to Falmouth, England. The voyage, which Bas Jan Ader estimated would take 67 days, was part of a conceptual art piece he called “In Search of the Miraculous.”

Months passed, and the art department at UC Irvine, where he taught, had to scramble to find replacement lecturers for his courses. In April 1976, the hull of his boat was found off the coast of Ireland. His body was never recovered.

Ader, something of a legend in the annals of contemporary art, is the subject of a sparse but extraordinarily resonant exhibition at the Art Gallery at UCI. Sensitively curated by outgoing gallery director Brad Spence, the exhibition has a first-rate catalog of penetrating essays and elegant design--worthy of a major art institution.

The first piece in the show, which is part of Ader’s “In Search of the Miraculous” project, sets the tone for his quizzical yet grave work in an endearing way. A projected series of slides of a small chorus of UCI music students is accompanied by a recording of the sea shanties they sang at a 1975 performance at Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles.

Wafting through the gallery, soaring voices intone these foursquare ditties, rife with repetition. (Their rhythms originally were devised to accompany specific tasks, like raising a sail.) Even when the words are indistinct, the melodies suggest the monotony of life at sea as well as the sailors’ psychic ballast of faith and hope.

For Ader--who first came to the United States while a crew member of a Moroccan ship--seafaring had a deeply metaphorical dimension, linked to his persistent examination of the human body (and by extension, the human condition) as an indeterminate object subject to natural forces. All Ader’s work deals in some fashion with the tug-of-war between nature and culture, the doomed but often antic journey of a figure moving through an implacable universe on a personal quest.

Photographic sequences document some of Ader’s performance pieces from the early 1970s, also seen in his very brief films (shown in a curtained-off section of the gallery). In them, he couples the straight-faced pratfalls of a Buster Keaton with a philosophical, Europeanized sensibility distinct from the spirit of contemporaneous body-oriented pieces by Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci or Chris Burden.

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In “Broken Fall (Organic),” Ader sways from a tree branch above a canal in the Netherlands. His legs make scissor-like movements as if trying to secede from his body before his grasp loosens and he falls into the water. In “Broken Fall (Geometric),” he stands on a narrow, winding road next to a sawhorse, his body jerked from side to side--as if blown by the gentle wind wafting through the bushes--until he finally collapses over the sawhorse.

Dressed in a suit and tie, Ader sips tea inside a crude animal trap (a cardboard box propped up on a stick) in “Untitled (Tea Party).” Suddenly, the stick gives way, trapping him inside the box--a metaphor for the deadening rituals of civilized society.

Ader was fascinated by the theme of the romantic quest, a heroic self-propulsion into the unknown that is the subject of many epic tales. But, in line with the bumbling persona of the vaudeville clown (or the fateful stumbles of the modern antihero), his own quest was never fulfilled.

A few years before his voyage, he portrayed himself in a series of murky black-and-white photographs wandering through nocturnal Los Angeles. “In Search of the Miraculous (Los Angeles),” shows him walking through a tunnel, alongside freeways, past houses and city lights, until he reaches a spit of land facing the ocean. Accompanying the images are the scribbled lyrics to “Searchin’, “ by the Coasters (“Gonna find her . . . . And if I have to climb a mountain, you know I will”).

Ader, who had made plans to document the voyage at a Dutch gallery later in 1975, must have been aware of the perils involved. His solo seamanship in such a small sailboat had never before been tested. His UCI locker contained “The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst,” a nonfiction account of a doomed solo voyage around the world.

Coupled with the quest, itself, is the ritual of leave-taking, as in Ader’s poignant film, “Untitled (Waving),” from about 1970. In it, he is carrying a chair to a hill apparently overlooking a body of water (the sky is so bleached out, it’s hard to tell).

There he sits, his back to the viewer, waving, as if to someone heading out to sea. His initially energetic, figure-eight motion gradually slackens, growing smaller and smaller until the film ends. Given the knowledge of his disappearance, this gesture could be understood as a bizarre farewell to his future self, the would-be solo voyager.

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He even supplies us with a final catharsis--in his three-minute 1971 film, “I’m Too Sad to Tell You.” It consists entirely of his handsome young face in close-up, crying. Seductively cinematic, rife with narcissistic self-dramatization, it embodies a Romantic 19th century sensibility crossed with a sly 20th century awareness of the power of mass media and fictive forms of expression.

Ader produced postcards from one of the stills, wrote the title words as a message and mailed them to friends. Kitschy “souvenirs” of an emotion that may initially have been deep and genuine, the cards once again evoked the image of the journey--this time, to an emotional realm.

Emotion, even in a debased sense, kept its distance from the cool art of the ‘70s. But Ader’s work was closer to a kind of inspired clowning--the kind that inspired Samuel Beckett’s elemental view of a world of folly and failure.

* “Bas Jan Ader: In Search Of,” through March 20 at the Art Gallery at UC Irvine, Fine Arts Village (off Bridge Road). Noon-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday. Free. (949) 824-6610.

Please see Ader, F13