nothing for passover

The Bas Jan Ader exhibition is opening tonight at the Kunsthalle Basel, so my Easter plans have just gotten a little more complicated. There will be ongoing screenings of the silent I'm too sad to tell you (1971) and two short films I have yet to see, Fall I and Fall II (1970), in which Ader falls off the roof of his house in California and off his bicycle into a canal in Amsterdam. I wonder how this will jibe with Yves Klein's Leap into the Void. That photograph has always seen a little cheap to me, and Ader, while no less ecstatic, seems too much the hysteric. Sort of like Joan of Arc to Klein's Elmer Gantry.

The exhibition will also have all the material related to Ader's final In Search of the Miraculous (1975), his solo trans-Atlantic voyage in a tiny sailboat. He wanted to cross the ocean alone in in the smallest boat on record to make such a journey and was lost at sea. I have to look into it some more, but this conceit may be a deal-breaker.

This work, On the road to a new Neo Plasticism, Westkapelle Holland IV (1971), is on loan from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. A visit there is also in the works as it has taken on the Merzgebiete. Kurt Schwitters und seine Freunde exhibition with many more objects than the Sprengel Museum in Hannover was able to show. That installation was prodigious enough, but I will snatch at any excuse to go to Rotterdam again. Across the street from the Boijmans stands the Sonnenveld House, a completely restored Nieuwe Bouwen gem maintained by the rambunctious Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) next door. Nearly three years ago, I visited the house during its public hours and had it completely to myself. I could tell interiors were an incredible luxury (Bart van der Leck carpets!) yet everything was very modest, almost miniature. It was as if the objects were deferring to the wealth of light and sheer fancy of the color (bronze walls!).



In this picture, I especially like the afterthought of the desk by the window. From what I've encountered since, the De Menil house in Houston comes the closest to matching the color sensibility of these rooms, but the Philip Johnson building is more bunker-like. With the loss of light, the objects inside become more meaty. This difference has also has something to do with the willful reinstallation of the De Menil abode as it stood when I was last there (Brancusi's The Newborn as a doorstop!).