Here is Always Somewhere Else: The Disappearance of Bas Jan Ader

After starting this review, the theme of suicide kept popping up in my movie rentals and in my podcast folder. In the space of a week, I rented Louis Malle’s bleak and beautiful The Fire Within, which chronicles a self-destructive writer’s last 24 hours, alongside Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S Thompson. I pulled How to Draw a Bunny, the doc about drowned enigma Ray Johnson off the shelf, while podcasts about Spalding Gray and a French philosopher whose last book—a love letter to his ailing wife that turned out to be a mutual-suicide note— showed up in my iTunes. I’ve been transfixed by Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker on DVD while Joy Division and Philip Glass’s score for Mishima wound up on heavy rotation, prompting one friend to ask if I was feeling ok. For the record, I’m fine.

That said, the legacy of any artist who voluntarily takes leave from this mortal coil can spawn much in the way of veneration. I’ve quipped before that some of my favourite creatives have died early, and some by their own hand—which is not to say that suicide should be a measure of quality or bump up their legitimacy. But legend invariably gets embedded into the work, and in “The League of Artists Who Offed Themselves,” Bas Jan Ader seems to have a lot of romantic and cosmic significance for some.

The story, if you’re unfamiliar, goes like this: young Dutch artist, son of preachers who hid Jews in their house during the Holocaust, father executed by the Nazis, studies at Rietveld Academy, hops a sailboat America-bound, settles and gets married in LA, produces a small but significant body of performative works. Later, despondent with a bout of existential flu, he endeavours to sail across the ocean back to Europe in a tiny sailboat armed with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, as the third part of a larger artwork. He is never heard from again, and his boat is found months later, half-capsized, bobbing off the Irish Coast. Cue the mythologizers.

The unresolved nature of his disappearance and resultant legacy has been one that has hung over corners of the art world for a while now. And for good reason. Partially a Kurt Cobain for the third-year art school set—tall, handsome, chiselled European features, romantic and sensitive, making earnest work in a time of Pop and proscriptive conceptualism, willing to cry on camera—Ader’s icon status falls neatly into place. I can’t be counted among the ranks of the cult of Ader, but he is one of few artists where once you get into his work—or more so the biographical angle— ideas of what actually constitutes a work in material, philosophical or theoretical terms may shift a little: spin it one way and his exit ups the ante for what art is, isn’t or may be. The other side of the coin: Tell that to those he left behind.

Seen through the eyes of fellow Dutch expat Rene Daalder, and at the behest of Bas Jan’s widow Mary Sue, Here is Always Somewhere Else attempts to reconnect the dots with scant material with which to work. The narrative is filtered through the filmmaker’s own parallel life story—moving to LA, marrying an American, joining the art hustle, etc.—and examines how one negotiates place, past, culture and identity, and the spaces between them. It’s a somewhat cluttered affair at points, but given Ader’s small corpus of work and early exit, Daalder can be forgiven for inserting himself into the film as intermediary. He manages to go back and forth between his own story, Ader’s, nautical themes, interviews with friends and former students, a short art history lesson with glimpses of the cultural landscape in Holland and America in the ’60s, a montage of other artists who fail to fly or tumble and, most tellingly, the tragic story of Ader’s father, which powered his output.

It’s the biographical detail that activates the film and, in turn, Ader’s work. On the surface, it’s deadpan grainy conceptualism—Buster Keaton meets Fluxus or Gutai in his choice of gravity and performance as his medium: Ader hangs and falls from a tree, tumbles off his roof, rides his bike into a canal, drops a cinderblock on a cluster of lightbulbs, and so forth. Ader’s exploration of the line between slapstick and pathos/bathos through falling seemed rooted more in the transcendent moment where—like being on a swing set and going too high— momentum, inertia and gravity meet. Background that with a prodigal son’s pressure to take up the pulpit, a father who rode his bike to Jerusalem and was later marched to the forest to take a single bullet to the head, and whose mother was ejected from their home, German soldiers throwing their belongings out the windows, Ader’s other works—a photograph of all of his clothes on the roof of his house, or the documentation of one of his fall pieces in the forest for instance— and gravity meets gravitas and become inseparable.

It’s the darker side of his personal history that dovetails with a series of meditations on the significance of the sea in his life and work to give a fuller picture. Thoughtfully illuminated by Tacita Dean in particular, the film runs through a list of sailors who renounced the land for this other realm and then cast themselves overboard into legend.

Meanwhile, the most human moments in the film lay not in Daalder’s piecemeal approach but in his collaboration with widow Mary-Sue Andersen-Ader. Daalder is granted full access to his estate— most of which remains packed away in her house in California, untouched for years. In one segment, she opens a dresser drawer in a roomful of junk to find a rat, and her embarrassment is palpable, but also telling and ultimately heartbreaking: she admits that she may not be fully recovered from her husband’s disappearance. Mary-Sue is not treated as an afterthought, but I would have loved more screen time with her: she seems to carry Ader not just as a hyphenated surname but his legacy as part albatross. In light of disappearance, there’s a sense that closure was on the agenda, especially since people would expect her to be a conduit or spirit medium. While writing this, I listened to an old “This American Life” radio piece of a young artist’s audio-diary of her pilgrimage to la to meet Mary-Sue, where she hoped to get close to the tragic-romantic legend and gain some sort of insight or wisdom about artistic purity. Instead, her naïveté was revealed, highlighting what I find most problematic about Bas Jan Ader: the legacy and romanticization of what was essentially a well-orchestrated suicide.

And that’s what makes the film tick: the legend is what is at play here, and the film does an interesting job of questioning the mythology while propping it up at the same time. On one hand, we see a tortured soul with Daddy issues and a marriage on the rocks who makes work borne of psychic wounds, sensitive enough to be traumatized by a bad review back home in Holland, looking for escape. On the other, his search for the miraculous was intended to be nothing less than epic and mythopoetic while private and personal at the same time. If Ader’s intent was to return from the abyss with something profound, like Donald Crowhurst, the yachtsman who sailed across the world and then threw himself into the ocean, acting it seems as a sort of mentor for Ader, his magnum opus was a pilgrimage in search of the cosmic wow that other sailors have spoken of.

Either way, a “transcendental gesamtkunstwerk” was the intention and result. In this case, he left behind a lot of questions and a grieving wife. Suicide—the grandest existential gesture—can make one a selfish jerk. To go out in a mytho-poetic way, presumably by accident at the mercy of the ocean, stands to get the artist’s intent hijacked and re-moulded.

Daalder’s film does a good job of trying to sort through the clutter. His method of disappearance may not have been as simple or heroic as one would think but similar to Ray Johnson or Spalding Grey, who chose their grand gestures in the form of gentler exits. Perhaps they’re all hanging out in Atlantis together. ❚

Here is Always Somewhere Else: The Life of Bas Jan Ader, directed and written by Rene Daalder, American Scenes, usa , 78 minutes.

Christopher Olson is a frequent contributor to Border Crossings, Vancouver Review and Front magazines.