BAS JAN ADER AND HIS ARTISTIC RECEPTION
Maike Aden received her doctorate with a thesis on Bas Jan Ader and his contemporary reception by artists such as Elke Krystufek, Jonathan Monk and Haegue Yang. Below a selection of projects, presentations and contributions which were carried out within the framework of this research.
A FOOTNOTE RIGHT AT THE BEGINNING
In her dissertation on the work of Bas Jan Ader, Maike Aden focuses on the artist's oeuvre without referencing direct biographical details. However, her father, Menne Aden, was a friend of Johanna Adriana Ader-Appels, the mother of Bas Jan Ader. Johanna Adriana Ader-Appels and her husband, Bastiaan Jan Ader, were pastors in the Dutch province of Groningen, who, during the German occupation, helped hundreds of Jewish families go into hiding, also in their own parsonage. Bastiaan Jan Ader was executed in 1944 by the Germans, even though he could not be proven guilty. Bas Jan Ader was two years old, his brother Eric just two weeks old.
The resistance activities and dramatic experiences of the Ader family—movingly recounted by Johanna Ader-Appels in her book Een Groninger pastorie in de storm—as well as her remarkable desire for reconciliation with her German neighbors after 1945, were recurring themes in Maike Aden's childhood. In a new book currently in progress, she reflects on her academic work on Bas Jan Ader in the context of her father's friendship with Ader's mother. Yet, this connection alone is not what prompted her to write. Maike Aden also seeks to explore how her father's friendship with Johanna Ader-Appels might be rooted in his upbringing in a pastor's household within the Confessing Church. This also was a milieu shaped by resistance to the Nazi regime's violent policies and by threatening repression, but it did not result in the dramatic consequences experienced by the Ader family.
Such biographical contexts, with all their intricacies, may never be fully untangled in hindsight. The same applies to the often-repeated thesis that Bas Jan Ader's daring artistic experiments are directly tied to the traumatic death of his father. Maike Aden offers a more nuanced perspective on this too.
LECTURES
Various international venues
Almost all works of Bas Jan Ader, including his last project In Search of the Miraculous, involve the letting go of self-control. Those moments imply an equilibrium between inhaling and exhaling, between holding and falling. For Jochen Vogl, they evoke a kind ecstasy, which give rise to a kind of "drunkenness of the will". The dissolved ego refuses anything to do or to be, and this “with increasing efforts”. All reality is suspended, all resistance is gone. Body and mind are provisional. Everything happens in the subjunctive. Everything seems possible. The sky is the limit. Or the horizon! To speak with Albert Camus, to whom Bas Jan Ader referred not only once, we must imagine him happy there, far out at the wide endless sea...
BAS JAN ADER ALS ABSURDER HELD. DIE MODERNE IM UND ALS FALL
In: NEUE kunstwissenschaftliche forschungen: Utopien der Moderne, Oktober 2014
"... Bas Jan Ader is often seen as a melancholic and tragic figure, who performed his own experiences in extremely risky self-presentations without making any distinction any more between his art and his own life.
In this essay, the exciting and complex œuvre of Bas Jan Ader will not be reduced to this myth. Instead, it will be complemented by some mostly neglected, but crucial aspects. In doing so, the repeatedly emphasized assertions of his biographical and life-negating tendencies are contrasted with opposing considerations. Against this backdrop, Bas Jan Ader's works are presented as an extension or questioning of overly-rigid modern utopian concepts..."
IN SEARCH OF BAS JAN ADER
Berlin 2013, 312 Seiten, ISBN 978-3-8352-2295-7
Buch / E-Book (DE): Logos Verlag
Leseprobe: In Search of Bas Jan Ader
Having spent many years in the shadows of the artistic mainstream, Bas Jan Ader (born 1942, missing since 1975) was rediscovered in the 1990s by a young generation of artists who were inspired by him to create their own works. Meanwhile, his admirers are no longer limited to insiders of the artists' scene. Numerous solo and thematic exhibitions as well as publications have contributed to the fact that he is in the limelight of an unparalleled cult of the artist that is second to none. In this book, the mystified artist's figure Bas Jan Ader, his exciting oeuvre, and their current status undergo a careful revision in order to question the romantic legend of the eccentric artist, in whom art and life merge into an art of failure, from an art-scientific point of view. The reflections are based on current artistic approaches to Bas Jan Ader's work by Jonathan Monk, Elke Krystufek and Haegue Yang. But the general trend of recycling existing names, motifs and styles of so-called "undiscovered artists" in art is also critically examined.
JONATHAN MONK UND SEINE BECK'S-TATISCHE HOMMAGE AN BAS JAN ADER
In: M. Glasmeier (Hg.): Künstler als Wissenschaftler, Kunsthistoriker und Schriftsteller. Köln 2012
Buch (DE): Salon Verlag
Download essay: PDF
Anyone who undergoes a frenzy experiences a kind of being beside oneself and moments of timelessness. In a stimulated state, be it by music, dance, alcohol or whatever, the consciousness creates a separate world of experience beyond the everyday-perception. This can be a wonderful source of inspiration, stimulation and imagination, of which - according to their reputation - especially artists make excessively use. In his exhibition-homage "Ocean-Wave", curated by Susanne Pfeffer at the Künstlerhaus Bremen, Jonathan Monk invites the visitors to an alcohol- and music-stimulated experiment. A lot of beer is offered while listening to the wonderful song "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed. Jonathan Monk uses the exhibition space as a space of experience for the more or less intoxicated visitor who can develop his own 'reception performance' in view of works by Bas Jan Ader. The inner fetters which suggest a sober and rational art experience can thus be released. Art-historical generalizations can be literally brought to dance. The ecstatic state may transform the myth of Bas Jan Ader upon a concrete, personal level. The to the point of boredom emphasized dramatic, tragic aspects of Bas Jan Ader's aesthetic experiments can finally be relativized to realize also their lustful and ecstatic moments. By letting loose the self-imposed apparatuses which coerce us might paradoxically bring a more precise reflection on Bas Jan Ader's art. Perhaps it might even make mysterious disappearances a little easier to bear...
