Here Is Always Somewhere Else

Finally a film about art that didn't bore me to tears. Nice balance between art and adventure, with a little philosophy tossed in on the side. The documentary is about Bas Jan Ader, an artist from California who would film himself doing extreme stunts like taking falls out of trees and from the tops of houses. At moments it almost resembles an earlier, artier Jackass.

When the film opens, we learn that Bas Jan disappeared into thin air, and the documentary then bit by bit pieces his life together, leading to some remarkable realizations that really make the film stand out as a cut above the rest. Most films would have treated his story in the same old, life to death biopic we've all seen a million times. This offers something fresh.

Highly recommended to anyone with a little intelligence and sense of adventure.

This documentary filled in a lot of gaps for me personally. I was a student of Bas Jan back in 1975. I actually was one of the performers in his final gallery performance at the Claire Copley Gallery, in Los Angeles. If you look at the slide documentary of the choir which was singing sea shanties, I was the lone Asian male on the left. Later, after that summer, when Bas Jan set out to sale across the Atlantic, me and his other students met for his next class in October of 1975. Bas Jan was a no show for several weeks. Finally they replaced Bas Jan with another professor. We were of course disappointed, but were never told the facts of his disappearance. We only heard rumors. Now, 35 years later, I finally learned the entire story, as told by his wife, and other friends and family in this documentary. You've heard the phrase, "life imitating Art" or "Art imitating Life." Bas Jans life was his Art. No imitations at all. It was true Art, lived as life. He was the ultimate Performance Artist. His integrity, his purity, his wholeness had no boundary to where Life ended and Art began. This is what he taught. This is how he lived. The documentary was a real honor to his memory.

Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader arrived in California in the late 1960s, created a small, potent body of lyric artworks, and then was lost at sea in 1975. He has received increasing attention in recent years, yet he remains a mystery. Here Is Always Somewhere Else: The Disappearance of Bas Jan Ader (2008), is an intelligent and insightful addition to the recent explosion of exhibitions and publications honoring the artist, and uncovering new material that helps shed light on Ader's fateful decision to sail across the Atlantic in the Ocean Wave (a twelve-and-a-half-foot sailboat).

Ranks up there with "In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger" and "How To Draw a Bunny." One of the great documentaries about art.