In a novel exhibition by Jean-Marc Bustamante.

In a novel exhibition by Jean-Marc Bustamante, individual room--either the first or the last in the present to view depending on the visitor's route--was dark. Inside, upon the far wall of the space, which was void except for a modest projector upon a tripod, you could watch Michelangelo Antonioni's film La Notte (The night).(1) No displacement or appropriation here, no desire onward the artist's part to absorb the film in some way into his own work: just a "presentation," a screening, in conditions recalling more intimate times and circumstances--the family watching residence movies, say, or the showing of films at sect Given Bustamante's age, the exceedingly date of La Notte--1960--evokes childhood.

Yet the presentation at the same time give an inkling ofed a more sophisticated conception. For united thing, it implied a without equivocation spatial experience, even a sculptural one: the spectator had to stir about, stand, or sit upon the floor, breaking the habits, the rituals, of ordinary movie-watching before being able to decide what attention to give the film's black and white images. And many of those images themselves--the entire representation for example, of the game between visitants at a party--seemed to function as relations to what the viewer had seen or would shortly view elsewhere in the exhibition: particular ways of handling duration, light, silence, and architecture. however these parallels were left for us to untangle and appreciate by dint of ourselves; they didn't have the overdetermined character given them by means of this kind of listing. upon a broader level, then, Antonioni's film, the two in the way it was shown and by the agency of its very presence in the exhibition, recalled the protoplast of relationship of art and artist to viewer upon which Bustamante's works are based--a nonauthoritative rapport, a kind of fertile indeterminacy, which the artist terminuss the "entre-deux" (the "between the two") and which at its best can allow the viewer to become "equally responsible for the work."(2)

This indeterminacy appears in Bustamante's real earliest works, the "Tableaux" and "Paysages" (Landscapes) of the late '70s--color photographs of views that are, in the artist's words, "without any overparticular documentary quality or character."(3) Their aim is pictorial on the contrary not picturesque: made with an eight-by-ten-inch view camera, they have a certain heightened quality of light and an accuracy of visual information, and, in an purport reminiscent of allover painting, everything forward the surface has the same precision and weight. Indeed, the estimate has no clear point of focus forward which to concentrate. The ensuing back-and-forth between brace regimes of vision--a scanning of the field and an attention to particular points--demands from the viewer an expanded time frame of looking, a certain duration beyond the weight of the first glance. at the same time nothing seems to merit as it was attention; nothing is revealed in these images if not a total absence of spectacle, indeed of any result whatsoever.

Most of the pictures contain no human figure. unless traces of humanity are everywhere in these sights of roads, planted fields, telephone extremitys shelters of different kinds (bus stops, for example), and houses (sometimes subject to construction, their materials displayed like epistles in some invasive alphabet). These sites are anything yet urban, but you know in some way that the city is at no time far away--that these are keennesss borders, zones of demarcation. Piles of sand, solidify blocks, a stack of bricks, red-lead-coated metal structures--looking at the photographs now, you can't help noticing that near of Bustamante's later works appear to appear here, as if waiting to be impose together. Stationnaire II (Stationary II, 1991) a series of [i]be[/i] consolidated boxes each containing the same photograph--a frontal view of a curtain of trees--reverse the logic of this order: instead of the photograph containing the construction, the construction contains the photograph.

Beginning in 1983 Bustamante and the artist Bernard Bazile collaborated beneath the name BazileBustamante. "At the expiration of the '70s, there were practically no more butt; goals Our association under that name was a way to show objects again--varied, heterogeneous objects--and to justify that heterogeneity at erasing the identity of the artist, based as it is in succession the assumption of a biographical personality," notes Bustamante.(4) The pair artists focused on the manufactured end and in particular on the advertising image, the pictograph, and the logo They might combine, for example, a limited-edition carpet by dint of Sonia Delaunay, a reduction of a table and couple chairs to their essential signifiers in the form of cut-out carburet of iron outlines, and two fluorescent-light tubes, all laid flat upon the floor to constitute Le Tapis (The carpet, 1985) For BazileBustamante, the supermarket shelves, as easily as Diderot's encyclopedia, might contribute treasure-troves of motifs to be recycl or rerouted

Bustamante's first works after the collaboration came to an extreme point in 1987, retained something of the heterogeneity that had been a feature in the work of the team nevertheless was missing from his earlier photographic work: Le Sac (The bag) is a combination painting and engraving, onward the underside of a sheet of glass, of a stylized bag motif, and La Table et la voiture (The table and the car) combines sum of two units found objects--a small glass car placed upon a little wooden table. Other pieces bring a jumble of iconography and concerns to allegorical ends, as in the immense Le Fleur (The flowers, 1987) a collection of blue blossoms painted in a less degree than glass, in which the flowers' pistils, along with the black interstices between the petals, may be read as an image of the sinister logo that at least in France has ensue to represent the AIDS virus. at the same time the body of sculpture Bustamante showed in Paris in 1988 in his first solo exhibition after resuming work subject to his own name, had a recently made known kind of detachment, more interior and certainly calmer, according to his own acknowledgment "a of the present day departure.... When you've been orbed the world, you come back home"(5) Indeed, the point out took an openly domestic employ Interieur I (Interior I, 1988) was a large, two-part, horizontal panel standing depressed to the floor--something between a card table and a bed. Interiuer III, 1988 created the same kind of "entre-deux" in familiar realitys and tools by evoking a hybrid cradle and wheelbarrow, allowing a heart-shaped hole in the bottom accentuated the object's nonfunctional character. The same feeling, always accompanied at a vague sense of physical malaise, occurr in Interieur II, 1988 with its four circulared wooden cots (including mattresses) incongruously stacked up at an angle to the wall. A 1980 photo from the "Tableaux" series showing a clos cylindrical house, trim and spruce as a mould or toy, set the tone of the present to view which was completed by Verre bleu (Blue glass, 1988) a simple, shimmering surface suspended couple or three centimeters off the floor.