Bas Jan Ader, poetry, presence, the body and risk

This weekend Frank and I had one of our customary coffee-fueled conversations about art and literature. This conversation was specifically about poetry and poetic forms. I told Frank that I used to enjoy poetry (both the reading and the writing) more than I do now. Though I wasn't quite sure why, poetry no longer satisfied expectations I've grown to crave in an art experience. Anymore I tend to seek out metaphor in other forms, mostly visual...

And that prompted me to think about the work of Bas Jan Ader, whom I hadn't thought about in some time. And then I searched around and found these documentations of Bas Jan Ader's Falling performances on you tube.

To me, Ader's work is satisfying in the way Peter Callesen's Dying Swan is satisfying. Here are some of my thoughts on Callesen's work. The performances have a quiet intelligence, humor and an emotional punch without sappiness. He can laugh at himself and his frail but aspiring human efforts without being self-deprecating or narcissistically spiteful. And while the pieces are concise and clearly articulated, they are also open-ended.

The work has qualities similar to other conceptual / performance-based work that resonates with the sensibilities in some of my own modest performances (example 1, example 2). Other artists that came to mind during our conversation were Vik Muniz's Pictures of Clouds, Yoko Ono's Painting to See the Skies and her Smoke Painting and Ana Mendieta's Siluetas.

Because Frank teaches poetry and other literature and has a personal stake in poetry and in me being friendly toward the form, he wanted to find out what it was that I was or wasn't responding to in the written poetic forms.

So what I was able to tease out that I'm not responding to in poetry is the formalism. It's both the formal and expressionistic mark – the literal mark of language or the expressive line – that doesn't hold my attention as it used to. On the other hand, an imprint, a surface or even Pollock's drips are, to me, far more interesting as a trace of absence than the expressive line of other abstract expressionists.

As we talked more, Frank figured that it was the presence and the body that had such resonance with me. And I think he's right. What remains important to me is that there is something always at risk with the body, and any attempts to get around that risk, whether they be willful aspirations for artistic immortality or claims of some promise of spiritual immortality, feels horribly deluded and false to me. It's the impermanence and the flailings that are relevant... at least in my mind.

That being said, I still have a high regard for prose poetry and for fiction that reads like poetry and for work written in present tense (as Frank remarked I often write in present tense myself). My favorite novel is still Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body. Curiously, even the title... It seems so obvious now.

The body is always at risk and carries with it the obvious social markers of race and sex... even class. Bodies with and bodies without medical or dental care carry very different evidence that becomes increasingly visible over time. Lack of education or proper nutrition leave their mark on the body as well.

All this is on my mind because today we had a meeting at the museum about an upcoming exhibit of Tim Davis' photographs of canonical paintings, Permanent Collection. I was struck looking at the catalog images of just how bodily and material Davis' photos of art historical "masterpieces" are. The history of each painting becomes embedded in Davis' photos – not just in the way the artist positions himself in a relationship between the museum lighting and the painting itself, but in the age and surface that is exposed with that relationship to the artist-as-viewer. Remarkable. I was really struck by these images and can hardly wait to see them in one of our galleries next week.