Although the Dutch-American artist Bas Jan Ader enjoys cult status in select artist circles—enhanced by the mystery of his disappearance at sea in 1975 at a youthful thirty-three—he remains little known in the mainstream art world, and thus occupies the strange position of being simultaneously overexposed and unrecognized. Alexander Dumbadze’s new monograph, the first and only book-length study on the artist, helps to fill in the scholarly gap by introducing a thoroughly researched and comprehensive account of the artist’s life and work. Although the relatively brief text refrains from addressing the larger contemporary critical discourse on conceptualism and cleaves so narrowly to its monographical focus that it is unlikely to be of great interest to general readers, it is a valuable resource for fans and scholars of the artist, and it likewise provides useful information about Ader’s Los Angeles compatriots Gerrit Van Elk and William Leavitt, about whom little has been published.

After a short introduction, Dumbadze begins with a discussion of some of Ader’s best known works—the Fall films and photographs in which the artist’s body is depicted literally dropping, plummeting, or collapsing in some manner. The twenty-four-second film Fall 1, Los Angeles (1970), for example, shows Ader seated on a chair tumbling off the roof of a house, whereas the even shorter Fall 2, Amsterdam (1970) portrays the artist atop a bicycle veering into a Dutch canal. Here, and throughout the book, Dumbadze integrates a retelling of Ader’s biography into analyses of his work, suggesting that the artist’s intense fascination with the notion of falling may have been rooted in his devoutly Calvinist family roots, specifically grounded in a metaphorical fall central to Christian doctrine, the Fall of Man. Ader’s father, who was murdered by the Nazis because of his involvement in the Dutch resistance when Ader was two, was a minister, and his mother remained a church leader, holding religious services in her home after her husband’s death. The artist’s early 1970s works, however, seem to have little to do with Protestant dogma; Ader renounced his faith in God when he was a teenager. Thus Dumbadze’s recounting of Ader’s religious upbringing does not so much illuminate the work but serves more to fill in biographical information about the artist’s life and to flesh out the idea of Ader as someone continuously searching for answers to existential questions.

Dumbadze ultimately maintains that the fall works should be understood as articulations of the philosophical positions regarding free will and determinism as proposed by Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt. Although Dumbadze lucidly articulates the positions of these two thinkers, he does not relate their theories to Ader’s work until the last two paragraphs of the first chapter, and only then in cursory fashion. It seems to come down to this simple mapping: if Camus and Arendt maintained that one’s apparent freedom or ability to exert one’s free will is itself predetermined and that one is thus confined to a certain (mortal) fate in spite of one’s freedom, then Ader’s works also reveal one’s inability to escape one’s destiny even though one is theoretically free. After Dumbadze’s lengthy regurgitation of these philosophies, I would have expected him to draw more complex and insightful conclusions when applied to Ader’s practice.

In the second chapter, titled “Representing,” Dumbadze addresses Ader’s grappling with issues of mediation and representation in the early 1970s and the difficulties he had reconciling the necessary mediation of art with his desire to create “concrete truths.” Dumbadze does not define “concrete truth,” nor does he clearly state whether Ader used this term himself (it appears that it was not the artist’s term, but one applied by art historian Paul Andriesse and artist Leavitt to Ader’s work). Although Ader’s non-use of “concrete truth” would not preclude Dumbadze from employing it, I would expect him to explain what he means by it, and to discuss in depth how an artwork might achieve this status of truth for Ader. In addition, Dumbadze does not address in one place the artist’s concerns over representation, but instead uses the theme as a touchstone to connect individual subsections of the chapter (each chapter is broken up into several numbered subsections). Because the text trails off in each subsection rather than coming to a conclusion, this central issue feels perpetually and unsatisfactorily unresolved.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating episodes in Ader’s life and the most thought-provoking chapter of the book concerns the artist’s turn to commodities futures trading in 1972, an activity that consumed him through the fall of 1973. Ader took on this speculative vocation with seriousness and rigor, carefully researching his investments and recording his trades and plans in a notebook. His trading activity also involved regular visits to an office on Wilshire Boulevard, where he would place orders with brokers over the telephone. Whereas the existing literature on the artist ignores this activity, Dumbadze supplies ample evidence that Ader considered it part of his art practice, even as he made no plans to disseminate or present the work as such. It was an artwork meant to be private and thus practically invisible. Ader’s piece is not so unusual at a time when Conceptual artists throughout California and elsewhere were producing art that closely resembled everyday existence, and when an artist’s simple declaration could designate a mundane activity as art. What is remarkable, however, is what the work represented for Ader: “His project was a claim for art at its most basic level, an effort to remove it from its context, to allow it to exist in a fully idealized form” (87). Dumbadze suggests that trading commodities was Ader’s answer to the doubts he began having with the necessarily mediated filmic and photographic representations of his work, which to Ader potentially seemed “unable to offer an unquestionable truth because of its detachment from presence” (44). In other words, commodities trading was a kind of art that simply existed in everyday life; it was not re-presented in an indirect, mediated form. Here, Dumbadze finally delves into existential questions about the status of art that Ader’s work invites. Based on what criteria does one recognize a particular activity as artwork and not another? Can an object or activity meaningfully obtain the status of art without any institutional or representational apparatus that defines it as such? Was art at its purest and most elevated form when it existed outside of any mediation and institutional framing?

In the final chapter, Dumbadze deftly analyzes the shifting values of the contemporary art world over the past forty years to account for the changing level of appreciation for Ader since his death. While Ader languished in obscurity in the 1970s and 1980s, he was “rediscovered” in the 1990s and 2000s—at least by certain artists and curators—and has since been the central subject of several museum exhibitions. Dumbadze attributes Ader’s rise in reputation to developments in the art world: while the dominant critical lens in the late 1970s and 1980s was a postmodern and poststructuralist approach that devalued the agency of the artist, the art world of the 1990s and 2000s has revolved around the presence and even celebrity of the individual artist. With this revaluation of artistic subjectivity and agency, Dumbadze persuasively argues, it is no wonder that a “mythic construction of Ader’s subjectivity” occurred.

Dumbadze might have also included in his account an observation about the change in the control of Ader’s estate in this period, a story first related by Wade Saunders in a 2004 article in Art in America (“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” Art in America 92, no. 2 [February 2004]: 54–65). In 1993, Ader’s widow, Mary Sue Andersen, transferred the rights of the estate from Andriesse, known for his devoted scholarship on Ader, to dealer and publisher Patrick Painter, who began to edition new photographic prints and to recreate installations of Ader’s projects, a practice that Saunders suggests was contrary to the artist’s intentions. The posthumous production of an artist’s work, whether principled or not, seems ripe for investigation by a historian like Dumbadze who could have shed some light on the role of the estate in advancing Ader’s legacy and his popularity.

The publication of this book and the rediscovery of Ader is part of the growing recognition of Los Angeles as a center of the postwar art world, particularly as seen in such international exhibitions as the Centre Pompidou’s 2006 Los Angeles 1955–1985: Birth of an Art Capital and the Pacific Standard Time initiative spearheaded by the Getty Foundation across Southern Californian institutions from 2010 to 2011 (click here for review). Dumbadze’s study highlights the conceptual strains that flourished in the state in the 1970s, while further attesting to the direct lines of communication between the West Coast and Europe that bypassed New York and the East Coast. Although the book could have benefited from a greater contextualization of Ader in critical discourses on Conceptual art that emerged on the East Coast in the late 1960s, the appearance of a Los Angeles-centric monograph deserves celebration.