Rarely Seen Bas Jan Ader Film

A layered work of appropriation and myth-making by the California conceptual artist David Horvitz (b. 1978), published as the nineteenth title in 2nd Cannons Publications' artist book series in 2009, in an edition of 500 copies.

The flipbook comprises 152 sequential stills extracted from a brief black-and-white film uploaded to YouTube in 2007 under the title "Rarely Seen Bas Jan Ader Film." The video depicted a figure biking into the ocean and claimed to be footage discovered in Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader's locker at UC Irvine following his mysterious disappearance at sea in 1975 during a solo transatlantic sailing voyage. YouTube removed the video after a third-party copyright complaint, rendering Horvitz's flipbook a significant archival trace of this contested footage. Each copy originally included a two-sided newsprint produced for Horvitz's exhibition at the 2nd Cannons project space. The work operates in the ambiguous terrain between documentation and fabrication, raising questions about authenticity, artist mythology, and the circulation of images in the digital age.

David Horvitz is known for conceptual projects that explore time, geography, distribution, and participation across photography, performance, digital media, and artist books. His practice often involves unconventional sites of presentation (billboards, airports, public spaces) and ephemeral or networked actions. This flipbook engages directly with the legacy of Bas Jan Ader (1942–1975), whose disappearance while attempting to sail from Massachusetts to England solidified his status as a legendary figure in conceptual art, and whose final work In Search of the Miraculous remains one of art history's most poignant unfinished pieces.