Looking Around the Corner for Bas Jan Ader (video 1)

The current name for this is: "Looking Around the Corner for Bas Jan Ader," playing on the words "around," "corner" and "for." The meaning of the word 'around' working as 'in the area of' and 'physically moving around something, ie. going around the pole or around the block etc;' 'for' as in 'looking for him because he disappeared, searching for him' and 'continuing the work for him, or continuing to explore what he worked with.' It involves me standing in the corner of a preferably white room (or gallery, though I haven't explored what connotation that might have), pressing myself as much as I can within it and actively trying to look both in the corner and 'around' it, as if I could look on one side of the corner (pressing to one of the perpendicular walls and looking along it and then switching to the other), searching for and into the seemingly unfathomable and endless depth of even the smallest and closest things. For him I believe this depth included the magnificent and mythical, or was the magnificent that was the expanse of the sea, the universe that is at once small and infinite, the world of atoms. It was this abyss, I think, that he wanted to cross when he attempted to sail his boat across the atlantic, back to the Netherlands, back to what one could read as 'home' or another identity he wanted to be accepted into or see himself as (coming from LA, a city of assumed personalities). And maybe he thought that there was in fact another side to find, that we can cross the abyss that supposedly separates individuals and our experiences from other individuals, that we can find a way to fully communicate and connect with as well as understand others. Could the abyss, the sea, the expanse, the unknowable, in fact be as complex and incommunicable as our selves? It seems that Ader looked into this expanse with fear, anxiety and desperation, and I can only hope that he came to peace with it on the sea. What I feel ready to do is to address similar concepts, but without being so overwrought, overwhelmed and saddened by them, accepting this "abyss", expanse, as our selves, not something that holds us apart. I have intentionally turned his horizon line, the unattainable boundary to be crossed, on its side; the vertical in my mind implies presence more so than the horizontal line in that we can face, confront and challenge this line with real dialogue and not chase an absent end. I do not assume that I will discover anything concrete, nor do I aim to form conclusions, but I have decided not to get lost in a melancholic desire, but to engage with my own curiosity about distance, relationships, discourse and presence.