Not long after I moved to New York in 2001, I was hired by a gallery on far west Twenty-second Street. At the time the curator (and now Greene Naftali Gallery director) Jay Sanders and the artist Richard Aldrich were working on the same block, and we comprised an unofficial Bas Jan Ader fan club. We passed photocopies of essays about him back and forth like contraband and eagerly discussing the finer points of his art and its interpretation. In the intervening years Ader has been definitively taken up by the art world at large. (I recognize, of course, that that process was well under way when I first discovered his work.) In 2005, as part of PERFORMA, Jay organized a screening of Rene Daalder’s then in-progress documentary about the artist. Unfortunately I missed the event, but that film, Here Is Always Somewhere Else: The Disappearance of Bas Jan Ader, was completed last year and has now been released on DVD. Unfortunately it is rather disappointing, as my review (just published on Artforum.com) makes fairly clear, though its faults are instructive. It was tempting to go on at length about Ader in this review, but eventually I decided that this wasn’t the appropriate venue. I still harbor the desire, somewhere deep down, to write at length about Ader’s work—or, rather, Ader’s work itself and the experience of encountering it directly after imbibing the myth that now surrounds him.
Tags: Bas Jan Ader, DVD review, Here Is Always Somewhere Else, Rene Daalder
