Doomed to Be Free

Triple Canopy is pleased to present Doomed to Be Free, an evening of readings, screenings, and conversation to celebrate the publication of Bas Jan Ader: Death Is Elsewhere, a new biography by art historian Alexander Dumbadze. He will be joined by artists Matthew Day Jackson and Xaviera Simmons, who will present selections of their own works that explore some of Ader’s preoccupations—the force of gravity, gradual disappearances, searches for the miraculous, and the artist’s agency. Triple Canopy editor Molly Kleiman will moderate.

The piece is expressly about freedom, about the will, about the ability to make a choice that has a corresponding nonchoice. Determinism lurks, but it is of a different kind, not something malicious like gravity or potentially random like God. Instead it is freedom itself that controls the situation; it is this quality that doomed Ader.
        —Dumbadze on Ader’s Broken Fall (Organic) from 1971, in Bas Jan Ader: Death Is Elsewhere, page 33.

Compelled by the act of falling, “volitional gestures,” and the eradication of artifice, Ader attempted to create unmediated works. And, as Dumbadze notes, “to an extent, he accomplished his goal, but only at the expense of his life”—Ader was lost at sea in 1975 at age thirty-three. Despite this, Ader’s work is distinguished, too, by a droll humor and physical elasticity that evokes Buster Keaton as much as Icarus. Matthew Day Jackson will share images from the maiden voyage of his self-fashioned, jet-black, unmarked dragster. “If you over-muscle or over-steer or slam on the brakes, your car’s going to buck and roll, and you’re going to total it,” Jackson has said. “You have to let the car do its thing. You have to let go.” Xaviera Simmons, like Ader, is interested in the boundaries between fiction, myth, and lived experience; and in creating “in-between spaces, with nonlinear narratives, with narratives that drop off and then continue, with shifting landscapes and shifting narratives, shifting characters and shifting histories.”