Fotograf Magazine

”If you were a conceptual artist in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, it scarcely mattered what you did, as long as it wasn’t much, and you documented it,” critic Peter Schjeldahl once said. On the cover of Audun Mortensen’s second poetry collection Aaliyah (2011), is the image of such an artist given a prominent place: Dutch/Californian Bas Jan Ader left a tiny, yet influential and perfectly documented oeuvre when he disappeared at sea in 1975, in an attempt to cross the Atlantic. The journey in a 12 ft lightweight sailboat was a performance that would constiute part two of his work  In Search of the Miraculous.