Nakadate through Ader

An early 70's art school dinner date (okay, pizza) was interrupted by sudden tears over a mysterious friend that was leaving the country for good. “I can't cry like movie stars do” cautioned Martha down from Bennington. The relationship progressed and months later I stood in a hallway at her parents home in Connecticut looking at a family picture on the wall that included her and another older boy. “Its my Brother, he was shot down in Viet Nam, he's dead” she answered. Not one tear.

Around the same time a group of international artists began to transfer the performative elements of post minimalism and Arte Povera from the gallery space onto their own bodies now deemed a site for rigorous physical and psychological interrogation. The adventurous yet mercantile gallerists of the soft 70's art market implored1. these artists for ‘something to sell’ which took the form of schemata, humble black and white photography or nascent video when available. Artists as diverse (and notorious) as Yoko Ono, Vito Acconci (my instructor at SVA), Cosey Fanni Tutti, Gina Pane, and Chris Burden in both public and private submitted themselves to often harrowing regimens of physical and mental extremes captured by the camera's merciless eye in the production of documentation or ‘bi-product’, a period term. In hosting ‘body art’ ‘white cube’ art contexts here and abroad were adapted into behavioral laboratories open to the pubic for the observation of artist/performers.

Some 40 years later I picked up Laurel Nakadate's publication ‘365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears’ and was intrigued by what I interpreted as a grounding in the above artists and specifically to Bas Jan Ader (1942-75?). I had first encountered his single image of an anguished man in Lucy Lippard's ‘6 Years’ an early bible of conceptual art that included his ‘I'm Too Sad To Tell You’ a document of a performance or, like Nakadate's series, an action whose sole purpose is to generate a picture.*(2) While body artists tested the w