June 21 to August 5, 2016
519 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 7100

In 1975, Bas Jan Ader disappeared while sailing the Atlantic. This sail was the second part of his trilogy In Search of the Miraculous. Part one is comprised of 18 black-and-white photographs of the artist walking through various parts of Los Angeles at night. The third part never happened. Metro Pictures’ exhibition includes several photographs, two wall-drawing installation pieces, and two short films and reveals that Ader’s work is still relevant, pointed, droll, and strange — perhaps more so now than in 1970s California. The mysterious details of his disappearance create an added allure, even over 40 years after his death. However, it’s not necessary (and perhaps impossible) to separate the details of his death from his life and work, as his work is a confluence of autobiography and conceptualism wherein the viewer follows the artist while he walks, searches, and falls. While I was in the gallery, I overheard someone ask the attendant: “So what do you think, is he dead or not?” I couldn’t make out the response.

Ader’s work edges action and inaction. He illustrates what happens when gravity takes over: the elements get free and the body falls. This might be why his work feels so natural: it feels more like a practice than a performance. In the understated photographs of documented falls, I feel as if I’m watching a person practice falling. Another way of saying this might be: I’m watching a person decide to let gravity take over. Or, finally: I’m watching a person practice dying . It’s funny. Ader’s body is lean and tree-like, making the falls comical and graceful. He falls off of a roof, off of a bridge and into water (one frame depicts only the aftermath, a splash), and he falls from a standing position to a lying down position with no middle information. We never see him get up from the fall. Instead, the photographs end at the bodiless frame — all gravity.

These understated photographs line the walls leading to Please don’t leave me (1969). In this first installation, light bulbs and wire highlight the title’s words, painted on the wall. This politely sad command reminds me that Ader is the subject of his work and he is never not alone. And it’s not only the artist who falls, it’s everything. In Untitled (Tea Party) (1972), six color photographs are aligned vertically. In this first image, Ader sits outside under a cardboard box. The box is propped up by a stick and Ader sips from a teacup. The sequence shows the box’s fall after the stick’s removal. The final photograph depicts a box in the field. The artist is presumably under the box. He makes a situation and then allows for its undoing. He sets himself up as the subject and then leaves.

The gallery’s passageway holds a monitor, which plays a short color video, Primary Time (1974). The frame holds the middle section of Ader’s body. The artist is dressed in all black, arranging a set of flowers in a vase. The flowers are red save for a few yellow and one blue. This repetitive action creates a bridge to the second installation piece, Thoughts unsaid, then forgotten (1973), where a tripod, a vase filled with flowers, and a clamp-on lamp sit around the title words. The work is melancholic but is not weighted with gravitas. Untitled (The Elements) (1971/2003), depicts a large seascape with a cliff at sunset. Ader’s body stands in the approximate middle. He faces the camera and holds a sign reading “Fire.” He is pointing to the only element not present in the photograph.

The show toggles between revealing and hiding, searching and giving up. Hollywood tropes mix with Ader’s absurdist gestures. In thinking about the aftermaths of these practices — a big splash (Ader’s body is out of the frame, in the river) or an empty roof (Ader’s body is out of the frame, on the ground) or a cardboard box (Ader’s body is inside the box), I return to the idea of practicing falling — practicing leaving — the Earth. This is maybe the most useful practice one can engage in.

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June 24 to August 26, 2016
12 Berkeley Street (between Stratton Street and Mayfair Place)
London W1J 8DT, +44 20 7491 0100

The distinguishing feature of Bas Jan Ader is the way he brings personal feeling and its hinterland of autobiography into a conceptual practice. That’s what makes him a “Romantic,” topped off by the mysterious manner of his death. Add the counter-intuitive combination of Modernist art history (with Piet Mondrian as focal point) and slapstick à la Buster Keaton, and you have much of Ader’s context. That dovetails with both his Dutch origins and his American residence from 1963, including the final five years which yielded his oeuvre. That consists of just 35 mature works, so it’s unsurprising that Simon Lee has not unearthed the previously overlooked — indeed, the content here is close to Camden Arts Centre’s 2006 retrospective — but the gallery does make an exemplary presentation of seminal pieces, supported by still photographs which acted as studies towards the films.

The most potent biographical interpretation takes us back to the Nazi execution of Ader’s father, who harbored Jews. I’m Too Sad To Tell You (1970–71), the film in which Ader cries, gains from the possibility — but not necessity — that he might be recalling that event and what it says about humanity. Here, the silent black-and-white image is presented on 16mm through a clattering projector with the artist’s head projected to triple life size — factors which undercut the immediacy of the emotion. We’re reminded of the gap between art and life.

Ader’s famous “falling” films are presented as a continuous loop, again on the original 16mm, allowing their similarities and differences to come to the fore. Five times a fall occurs, and in each case the artist disappears from view as a result: in Fall 1, Los Angeles (1970), he tumbles from a chair on an LA roof and into the garden’s bushes; Fall 2, Amsterdam (1970) sees him vanish beneath the water after he and his bicycle tumble into a canal; in Broken fall (geometric) (1971), he ends up in a ditch at the side of the road following the failure of what look far from determined efforts to remain upright. Broken fall (organic) (1971), opens with Ader hanging to a tree, until he loses his grip — like a leaf in autumn — and again vanishes into a canal beneath. Nightfall (1971), not only introduces a pun but applies the process to an object, a stone which Ader drops onto the scene’s lighting, so plunging him into the invisibility of darkness. Ader is often seen as relinquishing control to gravity in these films, but his agency is clear enough in the action of Nightfall, and arguably in Broken Fall (geometric) as well. Moreover, he has set up the effects of gravity in the other three films. The more consistent themes in this set of works are absurdity (again emphasising the gap between art and life) and, given the final vanishing enacted in each, the implication of death. That makes it equally feasible to read them as versions of the fall of Ader’s father, shot in the woods; as plays on the biblical fall from grace; or as existentialist commentaries inspired by Ader’s favourite author, Albert Camus, and in particular his Amsterdam-set novel The Fall (1956).

Broken Fall (geometric) also reflects on Mondrian: the road, we can see, leads to a windmill which features in several of his early paintings. And Ader’s thin form, dressed in black, makes the vertical line Mondrian would have approved — before Ader falls into the diagonal apostolically introduced by Theo van Doesberg. And Mondrian takes centre stage in the remaining works. On the road to a new Neo-Plasticism, Westkapelle, Holland (1971) also shows Ader before “Mondrian’s windmill,” but this time imitating the structure of his classic abstract compositions as he lies— playing dead, perhaps — on a blanket on the ground. In the film Primary Time (1971), we see the black-clothed Ader successively rearrange a multi-colored vase of flowers by adding and removing blooms so that exclusively red, yellow and blue bouquets remain. This, too, is somewhat absurd, and a potentially Sisyphean task is implied. Primary Time could be regarded as a painting reversed into its constituent colors to underline the clichés in the traditions of Dutch floral art, or as a claim that nature can provide a purer outcome than Mondrian’s more artificial reductions.

This grouping of work brings Beckett to mind as much as Camus: Ader performs pointless tasks and sets himself up for failure. Yet the sense is that attempting the apparently pointless is better than giving up, and when he cedes control it comes across as a strategic decision, not a lack of engagement. In his last act, he ceded considerable control to the elements by taking on the Atlantic crossing in a smaller boat than had anyone before him — not fatefully, the rest of his work suggests to me, but experimentally.

All of which is to say: Ader remains poignant and relevant. And if this show fitted a little too well with the air of gloom which descended on London following the decision to leave the European Union, perhaps Ader’s embrace of the ridiculous could be read a message of hope.

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October 22 to December 5, 2015
528 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 315 0470

The English critic John Ruskin identified, in his book Modern Painters (1843-60), the “pathetic fallacy.” He described it as a form of anthropomorphism, where inanimate objects are given human qualities, emotions, preferences. As a negative demonstration of the fallacy, Andy Goldsworthy draws from the natural world a dense, corporeal show of new and old work, recently at Galerie Lelong. Like much of his work, Goldsworthy’s photos at Lelong document the artist interacting with found terrestrial materials: stones, leaves, flowers, mud, running water. Each work shows either the result of some manual intervention (a ray of light illuminated by dust) or the process of the intervention itself (Goldsworthy scattering dust, or casting a shadow, etc.). Goldsworthy’s work is balanced slimly between the large-scale land artists of the 1960s and ‘70s, and the performative documentarians of the mundane from the same era, such as Richard Long or Stanley Brouwn.

Straight away, viewers first encounter Poppy spits, Digne, France, 10 June 2015 (2015), a set of four photographs showing the artist somniferously spitting mouthfuls of poppy petals into the air. Other images show him releasing a seagull, hiding in a cave, covering himself in mud, digging a hole. The acts are totemic and often look both a bit silly and sensorially profound. Goldsworthy’s affect resembles a body as experiential meat, rather than explorer or biologist. His actions are minimal, abstracting the unrefined materials only as much as necessary to show their qualities in action, rather than an illustration or a means to some other distant end, such as minerals turned to pigment, to paint, to a picture.

The work here is split between work from the 1970s and ‘80s on the one hand, and new photographs and videos on the other. Formal allusions can be read into all of the images. Hazel stick throws, Banks, Cumbria, 10 July 1980 (1980), which features branches tossed overhead, creates lines reminiscent of Franz Kline. A video of Goldsworthy crawling through bare hedges — called Hedge crawl, dawn, frost, cold hands, Sinderby, England, 4 March 2014 (2014) — resembles early video art by people such as Paul McCarthy, or films by Maya Deren. The slime of Black sand, Morecambe Bay, Lancashire, October 1976 (1976/2006) and petals of Poppy petals, left hand wrapped by me, right hand by my daughter, washed off in the middle of River Sark, the border between Scotland and England, 12 June 2014 (2014) recall paint, or Kazuo Shiraga. But these are largely ancillary and, by themselves, a kind of pathetic fallacy.

Many of the earlier pieces call up allusions to that era, or the one that preceded it: grubby, back-to-the-land hippies; soldiers in Vietnam mire; or the recently discovered Tasaday tribe, a kind of catalogue of varieties of human relations to the natural world. Goldsworthy’s is a primitivist, animist, pseudo-anthropology. He approaches what the philosopher Eugene Thacker calls “the world-without-us,” distinguished from the domain of civilization (world as productive resource) and from the natural world (a subject of inquiry, classification, a source of knowledge). Instead, Goldsworthy records the mute interactions of one mass against another: body in tree, flower petals on water, dust in air.

Like Bas Jan Ader, Goldsworthy treats basically the body, either by slapstick or with more threatening physical danger. It’s meat and eyeballs in a landscape, rather than within a set of human relations and mechanisms. Goldsworthy shows a process of finding out what happens to a body within these spaces, how they affect him physically or what can happen to him there. The show’s eponymous photographic series, Leaning into the wind, Dumfriesshire, Scotland, 15 January 2015 (2015), demonstrates this precisely. The artist, standing on a Scottish ridge, leans far into a strong wind, canting at an angle greater than 45º. There’s not a lot to intuit from this, as all of the pieces are laid at the viewer’s feet. But that wind on a crag can support a man’s body — that such material forces can produce this effect — is shocking. The space and its possibilities are only present because they’re unreformed and untranslated by humans. Instead, Goldsworthy lofts his subjects into the air, high enough that we can get a glimpse of how little we know about what they are.

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