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Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Jean-Marc Bustamante: Private Crossing Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan. Jean-Marc Bustamante: Private Crossingby John McGee  Jean-Marc Bustamante, T.1.01, 2001, type
C print, 180x280 cm About a dozen people are standing in front of a delivery truck parked along a busy road in Buenos Aires. Most of them are facing away from the camera, looking down the road at something we can't see. A truck seems to block our view. Only one person's face is partially visible, a man in a suit being interviewed by a camera crew in front of the truck. Seeing, not seeing, supposed to be seeing, want to be seeing—this photo and others in French artist Jean-Marc Bustamante's 1997 series "Something is Missing" are like exercises in psychological projection. Most of the 80 works in this retrospective—including photos, silkscreen prints and sculptures—are similar: they seem to simultaneously withhold information and offer too much. In a 1998 interview published in Ryuko Tsushin magazine, the 50-year-old artist said he is "drawn by that state of being unfinished." Bustamante's clearest work, the "Tableaux" (1977-82) series, exemplifies this. Shooting around the suburbs of Barcelona, Bustamante finds incompleteness and transition in an asphalt street that awkwardly abuts a dirt road and a rocky cliff that seems to rise into the stone chimney of a Mediterranean-style house. 
Jean-Marc Bustamante, T.13.78, These photos, according to curator Taro Amano, influenced a generation of young photographers in the '90s to snap at non-specific, people-less landscapes. They also recall the late '60s-'70s work of American "New Topographics" photographer Richard Adams, who captured the encroachment of suburbia on the American West in images of tract houses perched on the edge of the desert. But Bustamante eschews value judgments in his photos—his locations are neither utopia nor dystopia, just permanent limbos where time is fixed. Bustamante's anti-dramatic approach—seemingly arbitrary compositions, flat lighting and lack of a focal point—helps engender the same instability in viewers. The artist's unusual silkscreen-on-acrylic "paintings" are interspersed between the photographs like pretty, graphic interludes. He creates these large, usually monochromatic abstractions first as pen drawings on A4-size paper, then enlarges them and silkscreens them onto the back of thick sheets of clear plexiglass. Some look like postmodern stained glass scribbled with jagged abstract forms. Others are cut into shapes like Roy Lichtenstein's cartoony, enlarged brush strokes punched through with holes. Another distraction from the sometimes disorienting photos is the lilt of three small mandarin birds warbling in separate but adjacent cages. For Bustamante, this sculpture is about isolation, one state of in-betweenness.
Jean-Marc Bustamante, Panorama Suspension,
1998, silkscreen on "There is something paradoxical about isolation, since, to take shape, it requires the presence of a multitude of beings, of things and of everyday events, without which we would not feel separated from what surrounds us. Being isolated is being separated from others, but it is also being separated with others," said art critic Jacinto Dageira. Several large black-and-white photos of public gyms, classrooms and other interiors in Bustamante's "Lumiere" series extrapolate this idea from caged birds to groups of people. Limbo is usually a waiting room en route to a state of transcendence. Bustamante's is a room with no exits, a stagnant, incompletable state where six enormous photos of tall, skinny cypress trees form a hedge along one back wall. Tightly spaced, you can only see them, not what's behind them. Maybe that's Bustamante's point: there is nothing more to see. _______________________________________The Jean-Marc Bustamante: Private Crossing exhibition was held Sept-Oct 2002 at the Yokohama Museum of Art in Yokohama, Japan. ©2006 John McGee |
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