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Bas Jan Ader disappeared at sea in 1975 while attempting to sail from the east coast of the United States to Europe as part of a project titled In Search of the Miraculous.
The circumstances of his disappearance have led many interpreters to identify Ader with the role of the tragic romantic hero. This identification has obscured the fact that Ader’s art was a critical investigation of precisely those romantic motives his persona has now come to be associated with. In this book, Jan Verwoert highlights the specific ways in which Ader’s cycle of works explores those motives with an artistic approach that is as conceptual and analytic as it is poetic and existential.
