A Dutch artist sets out to make a three-part masterpiece. Part one is a lonely nighttime search by flashlight. Part two is crossing the entire Atlantic in a 13-foot boat. Part three never happened, because he disappeared. Nine months later his empty boat was found floating bow-down in the open ocean.
This episode explores the haunting life and work of Bas Jan Ader, the conceptual and performance artist whose art blurred the line between vulnerability and existence itself. We trace how childhood trauma shaped his obsession with surrender, and ask whether his vanishing was a tragic accident or the ultimate work of art.
How his father, a Calvinist minister executed by the Nazis in 1944 for sheltering Jewish people, anchored a lifelong meditation on loss of control
The 'falling films' in which Ader deliberately tumbles off roofs, drops from tree branches, and rides his bike into a canal
The raw, contextless three-minute weeping film 'I'm Too Sad to Tell You' and the postcards he mailed to friends
His satirical magazine Landslide, which mocked the pretentious art world with fake artists and a sculpture that was just five packing peanuts
The 1975 voyage 'In Search of the Miraculous,' the empty boat found near Ireland, and the eerie theft of that boat from a Spanish port
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