Miguel Leal
FA(I)LLING
Try again. Fail again. Better Again.
Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw
up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all.
Samuel Beckett
In
the morning of the 18th of
April of 1976, while sailing 100 miles south of the Irish cost, a Galician
fishing boat spotted the semi-submerged hull of a small sail-boat that didn't
reach to 4 meters long. Adrift in the open sea and with no signs of recent
occupation, the boat was found at vertical position, with the bow underwater
and the stern out of water. In the interior, amongst many other objects, a
passport in the name of Baastian Johan Christiaan Ader was found. It was indeed
the Ocean Wave, the boat
in which, in July 9th of
1975, the Dutch origin artist Bas Jan Ader had left from Cape Cod,
Massachusetts, having has final destination the port of Falmouth in
Great-Britain. It wasn't the first time that Ader crossed the Atlantic in a
sail boat. Back in 1963, being 20 years old, after travelling by hitch-hiking
through France and Spain, he embarked in a sail-boat in Morocco that would take
him in a long and troubled 11-month journey to San Diego, California, with
passages in Martinique and the Panama Canal. Established since then in Los
Angeles, to Bas Jan Ader the Ocean
Wave journey was a sort of
more or less romantic return to the place from where he first took off, years
before. Yet, when he planned to face by himself the Atlantic Ocean in a risky
adventure – and never tried before under such circumstances –, Ader had the
objective of concluding his project In
Search of the Miraculous and
we can say, by that, that is constituted above all a radical aesthetic
experiment. Although there were some adaptations, the chosen boat, a Guppy 13 Pocket Cruiser, a
small pleasure sail-boat very popular at the time in California, didn't seemed
the most appropriate for the trip.
Challenging
the Atlantic alone in a nutshell was to Ader just another way to rehearse the
hard crossing between tragedy and farce, ultimate attempt to push to the limit
the confrontation with the ideas of risk, fall, fail or disappearance that seem
to dominate is work.
In
Search of the Miraculous was
then the radical gesture demanded to an artist that experimented in a very
particular way the so claimed fusion between life and work that marked the 60's
and 70's decades. Actually, Ader integrated the first generation of conceptual
artists from the East Cost but since early on his work showed a poetic
dimension that approached him to the long tradition of Romanticism. There is,
even though, an absurd and tragic-comic side that also allows to establish a
relation his work with the specific burlesque mechanics. Let us see, for
instance, how Ader faces gravity in two 1970 short films – Fall I and Fall II.
In
the first, we see him seated on a chair at the top of a roof from where he
finally falls down, suddenly and helpless; in the second, he's cycling along a
canal and then suddenly falls into water. With no evident explanation, the two
falls are absurd and are maybe closer to the Buster Keaton's slapstick comedy
than to the great romantic tragedy. For that same reason, tha way Ader combine
that tragic-comic dimension with the melancholy present in his lonely figure,
in movies like I'm Too Sad to
Tell You, 1971, in which he cries compulsively in front of the camera, or
in Broken Fall (Organic),
same year, in which he pathetically swings from a tall tree until he leaves
himself fall into the water, transform his work in a singular variant of
conceptual art and, at the same time, has someone claimed, in an uncommon
synthesis between Europe and America.
The
first part of the project In
Search of the Miraculous was
presented at Los Angeles few time before from the Ocean Wave departure and its second moment should
have resulted from the solitary Ader's trip, to which he was planning, already,
amongst others, an exhibition at the Groningen Museum in Holland. Well, Ader
ended to disappear somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, in a weirdly
topographic way to define the idea of interruption e maybe the only one that
could in good will complete a project that intended taking to the limit the
central ideas of his work. When the Ocean's
Wave stern was found, 10
months after departure, is was already covered with algae and molluscs and
therefore, it was estimated that it was adrift for several months. It is just
known that radio contact was lost three weeks after Ader left and it seems that
something happened after already had passed Azores. The signs found at the boat
were not sufficient to reconstitute what happened. The Ocean Wave was brought by the Galician Fishing
Boat to La Coruña port but it would mysteriously disappear a second time, not
long time after, and now for good. From the Ocean
Wave it remained not much
more than some pictures, helping to intensify the mystery in turn of the Bas
Jan Ader last trip.
At
the 2005 Biennale di Venezia Joachim Koester presented Message from Andrée, a play in
which we can find signs of his ghost
hunter vocation. The starting
point for Koester was the failed trip, in 1897, of the Swedish explorers
Salomon A. Andrée, Nils Strindberg and Knut Frænkel, that wanted to fly a
balloon over the North Pole. The balloon, baptised with an imperial bird name – Örnen (Eagle) –, left Danskoya, near
Spitsbergen, in the Arctic, at the 11th of July 1897, but, after three days, a
phew hundred kilometres far from the departure point, it felt in the ice, to
never rise again. Andrée, Strindberg and Frænkel roamed adrift on the
implacable ice of the Arctic during several weeks until they settled, with
intentions of passing the winter, in a small inhabited island – Kvitoya [White
Island] –, where they ended dying in uncertain day of the month of October. The
heroic disappearance of the expedition stood evolved in mystery during over
thirty years, until, in 1930, it was found, almost intact, the tented camp in
Kvitoya. There were the bodies of three man, their logbooks and the
photographic films in which Strindberg, the photographer, methodically saved
the group shenanigans. At that time, this unlikely discover had furor in and
outside Sweden, having the expedition adventures reconstitution helped to feed
the imaginary of many readers. Joachim Koester was not, therefore, the first to
interest about the fatality and contingencies of the fate of the expedition on
a balloon over the North Pole, but he did it in a very particular way.
Koester's work is filled with dark matters and awkward figures, moving itself
ambiguously between documentary and fiction; yet, the core of the instalation
in Venezia was not so much the history of the three adventurers but a 16mm
format video, a silent and almost abstract film. Of the recovered films
specially prepared by Kodak to the expedition, 5 were recovered in 1930,
already exposed, one of them still inside the camera. Surprisingly, after all
that time, it was immediately possible to unveil almost a hundred images. Some
of the films, covered by risks and stains, had stay almost illegible, but it
were precisely those physical marks of its fate that retained Koester's
attention. To Message from
Andrée, the artist filmed, frame by frame, the inopportune stains that
filled the one day immaculate white of the landscapes pictured in Nils Strindberg
photos. The final result is paradoxical, silent and abstract, something that
can be described like the noise that certain sound or visual spectrum
are able to produce. Koester chose to concentrate in the plastic qualities of
the images, in the precise sense of a plasticity that directly arises from the
opening to chance and change, to accident and contingency. In the video we are
confronted with that sort of plasticity autonomy of the photographic emulsion
that releases the images of a documentary function and devoid of any value of
indexing. So, it was more about the visionary and hallucinatory potential of
those stains than the reference of the photos to a tragic past, which attracted
Koester's imagination.
The adrift of the three man on the loose ice plaques, with all that has of
dramatic psico-geography and a game with chance, finds in the film a visual
emulating of telepathic and hallucinatory character. From the desolate
landscapes of the Arctic, pictured by Nils Stindberg, remain the unshaped stains
that chance produced, and
it is precisely that noise, that chance music many times interpreted as a
mistake or uncomfortable failure, that constitutes the substance of Koester's
intervention. There's an unconscious that hides in the old and used films found
at Kvitoya, an unconscious without which those images would not be what they
are and in those that appear in Venezia as an abstract and silent narrative,
simple homage not only to the disgraced adventure on the Arctic ice but also to
the self-poetic and imaginative potential of things, in particular those stains
that gained own life and re-appeared at surface as the ultimate message from Andrée. (1)
Beckett's
shadow and the circularity implied of the syncopated beat of the Worstward Ho (1983) – Try again, Fail again. Better
again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again... – pursues me for several years as
a possible mark of an ontology of the artistic practice. It is not something
from which you can write directly about and so I recurred to a dislocation
effect in which the reference to the Örnen fall and to the stains of Koester's
film are like a metonymy that allows me to keep talking about suspension and
the apparent failure of the Bas Jan Ader journey. With this method I hope to
allow the discovery that none of the trips truly failed because what matters is try again to fail again, just fail
better, once and for all still worse again...(1)
_______
This
text was in part motivated by the exhibition In
Search of the Miraculous: Thirty Years Later, presented between May and
September of 2010, at the Galician Centre for Contemporary Art, in Santiago de
Compostela. With Pedro de Llano as curator, the exhibition departed from the
random link of the story of the Ocean
Wave to Galicia to offer a
broad reading of the rarefied work of Bas Jan Ader. Note that the Örnen adventure has had already in the
1930's the book Med Örden mot
Polen, based in Andrée,
Strindberg and Frænkel journals and illustrated with some recovered pictures in
Kvitoya, even they are retouched, immediately published with success in other
countries (check the american version destined to a juvenil audience: Andrée's Story: From the diaries
and Journals of S.A.Andrée, Nils Strindberg, and K. Frænkel, found on White
Island in the Summer of 1930 and edited by the Swedish Society for Antrophology
and Geography, New York, Blue
Ribbon Books, 1930). More details on the play by Joachim Koester at Venezia see
the catalogue: Joachim
Koester: Message from Andrée, Copenhagen, The Danish Art Agency,
2005.
Notes
(1)
In Portuguese in the original text. [TRANSLATOR NOTE]
Images
1. Bas Jan Ader in the Ocean Wave (CGAC, 2010)
2. The remains of the Ocean Wave (CGAC, 2010)
3. The Örnen Station
4. The Örnen immediately after de forced landing at
14th of July 1897.
_______________
Miguel Leal (Porto, 1967)
Artist. Lives
and works at Porto. Founding member of VIROSE, an interdisciplinary structure
dedicated to media and the study of the relations between art and technology.
Professor at Faculdade de Belas Artes de Universidade do Porto, where he guides
atelier work and lectures art and contemporary cultures courses. http://ml.virose.pt
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