Private Crossing

Drathen, Doris von. "Private Crossing," The Vortex of Silence: Proposition for an Art Criticism Beyond Aesthetic Categories. Charta, Milano: 2004. pp.83-92
UoA Fine Arts Library 701.3 D767

DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK (taken from the book jacket)
German art historian and critic Doris von Drathen has here produced a collection of 24 texts on 24 of the world's famous contemporary artists. In it, she proposes nothing less than a new method of art criticism: an anti-criticism that goes above and beyond aesthetic categories, and against the colonization of art.
For Doris von Drathen, aesthetic categories are inadequate for engaging the freedom of contemporary art. This internationally esteemed art historian and critic uses an unconventional approach to break the strictures of existing systems and ask a simple question: if art represents one of our most precious means of seeing and understanding the world, then why do we accept formal and normative commentaries that abolish what is quintessential -- the image itself and its emotional impact? In her monographic essays, Doris von Drathen has developed a new methodology that embraces the gaze of the beholder, examining an individual artist's practice as an intrinsic universe and respecting the art object as an entity of otherness.


Jean-Marc Bustamante (1952)
1952 Born in Toulouse
1990 - 1995 Professor at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam
1996 Professor at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris
Lives and works in Paris


Martin Buber's story about a little boy having a totally different perception on his habitual act of stroking his favourite horse shows the realisation of the breach between the experienced and the narrated world arises a self-consciousness that separates the self and the outside world. Dislocation caused by the lost of unity (the naive vision of the world) forces oneself to enter into emptiness and void. Viewed in these terms, the work of Jean-Marc Bustamante reveals quite different and dramatic dimensions to what it is generally regarded as enigmatic, remote and emotionally distant.

Bustamante's focus of interest is how an image that he carries within him and that changes in relation to how he himself changes; he describes the inception of his creative process as "a moment when I am at one with myself." In LP I 2000, a tableau from the Swiss series he produced in 2000, shows Bustamante's depiction raises ways of seeing and formulating composition and in doing so leaves the audience feeling in a loss of orientation. It seems as if a secret is kept unrevealed in the images of Bustamante's photographs -- his work often suggests a transactional space that engage the audience in a way that exposes both the artist and the viewer.

The titling of his photographs was also called into discussion during the reading group session:
In order to appreciate the wholeness in Bustamante's work, should the titling of the work be considered as a way of viewing? The way Bustamante titles his photographic work seems like a system adapted the index of a library card, it thus suggests that the work is in a series. 'Coded' titles acted as mute, objectified, and intensify information in the work, and is empty of narrative. Yet we also wonder if the 'coded' titling creates more powerful effect than 'untitled', as the title suggests no orientation and thus no focus for the viewer to follow -- it somehow signals "do not respond to the title."

I find the almost zero depth perspective in his L.P. series a significant difference to painting in the construct of image making. And not only the titling seems like codes, but the leitmotif of a transitional pictorial space caught between different worlds leads us to believe that cryptanalysis as a means of creating dialogue...

Keywords for follow-up:
conceptualism / subjectivism / romanticism
photography, installation, painting, sculpture
How are things perceived out of memory?

Further reading on Bustamante:

• "Où est Jean-Marc Bustamante ?" MAP 04
• Klapka, Ronald. "Renvoyer le spectateur à lui-même, à sa place dans le monde." remue.net. 3 février 2006.
  Je suis chaque jour blessé de voir que, dans un pays dit civilisé, l’art contemporain n’intéresse que si peu de gens. - Bustamante
  (Seeing that, in a so-called civilised country, only such few people are interested in contemporary art hurts me everyday.)
  
• McGee, John. "Jean-Marc Bustamante: Private Crossing." Metropolis Japans No.1 English Magazine