Francesca Gallo

Bas Jan Ader
I'm too sad to tell you
1971

Who was Bas Jan Ader?

Bastiaan Johan Christiaan "Bas Jan" Ader (19 April 1942 – 1975) was a Dutch conceptual artist, performance artist, photographer and filmmaker.

At the age of 19 he hitchhiked to Morocco, where he signed on as a deckhand on a yacht heading for America. 

The yacht shipwrecked off the coast of California, and Ader stayed in Los Angeles where he enrolled at Otis Art Institute. There he met Mary Sue Andersen, the daughter of the director of the school. They married in Las Vegas, where he used a set of crutches to symbolically prop himself up during the ceremony.

In 1970 he entered the most productive period of his career, beginning with his first fall film, which showed him seated on a chair, tumbling from the roof of his two-story house in the Inland Empire.

In 1975 Ader embarked on what he called “a very long sailing trip.” The voyage was to be the middle part of a triptych called “In Search of the Miraculous,” a daring attempt to cross the Atlantic in a 12½ foot sailboat. He claimed it would take him 60 days to make the trip, or 90 if he chose not to use the sail. Six months after his departure, his boat was found, half-submerged off the coast of Ireland, but Bas Jan had vanished.

I'm Too Sad to Tell You

"I’m Too Sad to Tell You", a frontal image of the artist’s tear-stained face, was produced as a postcard, a film (twice) and as an editioned photographic work. Each version has a slightly different feel and sense of purpose. Ader complained about the difficulty of making the work - of being in the right state of mind to perform the piece. The reason for his (real) crying is ‘a secret’ known only by close friends but it is apparently important we know that there is a reason. In fact, most of Ader’s work plies between the intensely personal and the incredibly arbitrary without ever being strictly narrative. In the video, his face is framed closely. There is no introduction or conclusion. Critics have said that it is hard not to be affected by the film, with its offering of “raw passion to anyone willing to watch”.