The young Bas Jan Ader

LIARS are in guest editing power and we SUPERSWEET prostrate in front of their regal selves. We do as you command, your majesties. Jump off the roof; ride in into a canal; or sail out into the angry Atlantic Ocean never to set foot in LA again! Well, we aren't taking that last command too seriously, we are just fooling around impersonating Liars’ much beloved artist Bas Jan Ader, who, no pun intended, has been lost at sea since 1975.

year-long sailing, Ader found himself marooned on the Californian and found his way back into art enrolling at Otis Art Institute. There he met his soon-to-be wife Mary Sue Anderson, who happened to be the daughter of the school director. They married, eventually, and Ader took up a teaching career at several colleges and university in the West coast.

Ader’s artist career is at its peek in the 70s and his works are conceptual by nature. Mastering a 16mm, Ader started creating short, black-and-white films that would later become the landmarks of Ader’s artistic career. Talking about the subject matter in Ader’s filmic works, SS would say it centres on a fall - more precisely, the act of falling. In his films, Ader was captured falling on a roof, falling from his bike into a canal, dangling from a tree branch and subsequently falling into a stream, or letting bricks fall onto cakes, flowers and eggs.

Movements, actions and consequences play a vital role in Ader’s films. As the camera angle is always fixed and non-moving, the audience is allowed to view the actions pictorially, though with no power to intervene. Ader also plays up his viewer’s expectation. In Fall II (1970) a cyclist is spinning down a narrow lane adjacent to an Amsterdam’s scenic canal. In a swift second, he seems to have lost control, or perhaps he deliberately does so, and rides onto the bank, then into the water. The simplicity of the action - a man riding a bicycle - disrupts the viewer’s expectation of a tragic incident that subsequently incurs. There, too, is this very subtle sense of sadness, despair and tragedy.

Interestingly, Ader’s works are never overtly and fatally tragic. Fall I (1970) depicts Ader seated in a chair on top of a roof; he twists and slowly rolled down falling to the ground. In Nightfall (1971) Ader carries some heavy cement block tiptoeing over strings of lights; then no longer to bear the weight, Ader drops the cement on the glimmering lights one by one, imprisoning himself in darkness. Both scenes incite suspense, discomfort as well as unknot those tensions at the end. As a performer in his own works, Ader is subject and object, the performer and, at the same time, the performance. He acts upon himself, re-positions himself in an unlikely situation, essentially making himself vulnerable, subjected to the force of nature and challenging the authority of an artist and his control over his oeuvres. Also, Ader’s works explore the relationship, and the difference, between art and documentation of life. Yet, life and art are intertwined, as Ader becomes an active agent in his own artistic performances.