In July 1975, Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader set sail from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for In Search of the Miraculous, the second installment of a proposed three-part work in which he would document his sixty-day sea voyage to Falmouth, England. A Spanish fishing trawler found his capsized boat nine months later, drifting off the coast of Ireland; the thirty-three-year-old Conceptualist, photographer, and performance artist was never found. Now, fifty years after his disappearance at sea, a major exhibition of Ader’s work is on view at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. To mark the occasion, Artforum revisits Bruce Hainley’s feature essay on the artist’s melancholic work, published in March 1999; Ader’s 1972 photograph, Untitled (Tea Party) appears on the issue’s cover.
 
“The sharpness of Ader’s Conceptualism is often the result of his relentless and humorous exploration of the metaphorical, comical, and performative consequences of a single movement: the fall,” Hainley writes. “Ader gestures toward the mortal risk and failure inherent in any search for the miraculous or experience of the sublime.”
—The editors

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan