M406 Differánce

Jean-Mark Bustamante
In Doris von Drathen's book Vortex of Silence: Proposition for an Art Criticism beyond Aesthetic Categories there is a chapter on the photographer Jean - Mark Bustamante. [i] At the beginning of this chapter Von Drathen recounts a tale by the philosopher Martin Buber, who tells of going as a young boy to visit his favourite horse each day. He would put his hand on the animal’s neck beneath the mane and stroke it, and the horse seemed to respond. Every day he would visit the stable and do the same, savouring the pleasure of it. Then one day he looked at his hand on the horse's neck and realised that he enjoyed stroking it. The self became suddenly aware of itself as a thinking being.

Martin Buber regarded this as a turning point in the sense of awareness of himself, the child.

It is perhaps hard to see how this totally unconnected story at the beginning of the chapter could have anything to do with Bustamante’s images. But the story contained an understanding of a double sense of awareness, and this concept somehow opened a way of looking at these otherwise rather boring photographs, as Bustamante’s images also seem to contain more than one sense of awareness. The images included in Vortex of Silence were taken in Switzerland and Japan - somewhat exotic places for most of us. Originally in colour, these were reproduced in black and white for the book. In the first example (T. 10. 01/2001), we see distant mountains and a lake, trees and a large sky - all reminiscent of tourist shots. In the foreground is some sparse looking greenery that separates us from the mid-ground, where stands a scruffy industrial building with weeds and untidy objects across the front, power poles, a siren attached to the eaves, a large clock in one window and a broken pane of glass.

The photograph, initially seen as either uninteresting or puzzling, is revealed as holding a double reality. The distant ideal of tourist imagery, (which must remain distant as closer proximity disintegrates the ideal, which then becomes mundane). And within this tourist image, the ugly, mundane, and yet intimate, reality of working lives; the open door, the dark interior and the mess seem to invite a narrative; to portray the people who work and live there by their very absence.

The second photograph (LP1/2000) is similar. In the background a Swiss lake this time, with mountains and low clouds. In the foreground a barrier of ordinary grass and a wall; in the mid ground, a mess of buildings, tarmac, streetlights, road markings, gravestones and garden shrubs, and much other mundane minutiae with which we also live and which most of the time we ignore. The mundane within the tourist image, the non ideal within the ideal. Human traces within nature, the particular in the general, the organised within the non-organised.

The play of opposites and difference in these photographs is more interesting than the images, in my opinion. It leads to all sorts of interesting musings. For example, consider the nature of a newly hatched chick, and how such a thing can operate as a signifier of mortality.

Held in the hands, especially the roughened and insensitive hands of a farmer, a chick is so light, fluffy, and fragile that you can barely feel it. You see it there, but its weight and texture are almost imperceptible. If you try to hold it a little harder, press it with your fingers to get an impression, you will crush it. This is the sort of emotional experience that is caring, thrilling and ironic all at once. I have never experienced anything that contains the idea of both birth and death so profoundly and so evenly balanced. Perhaps flowers are the same, even faster to fade and more fragile than the chick. Which is no doubt why, in our culture, they make such ideal symbols at funerals.

One can balance against these soft images the hard theory of Derrida, Foucault and others, who suggest that language and thought work through contrasts and difference, and that we only know something by contrasting it with something else, that a word is only meaningful in contrast to an oppositional word. For example ‘male’ means nothing without ‘female’, and ‘loud’ means nothing without ‘quiet’ or ‘soft’. Derrida also writes that not only does the understanding of something require a grasp of how things relate to one another, it also requires a capacity to recognise the thing on other occasions and in different contexts. In other words we recognise and understand everything contrasted against everything else in endless combinations. These different contexts can never be exhaustively predicted - hence his invention of the word ‘différance’, which manages to hold the double meaning of ‘difference’ and deferral.

As a result, when an opinion or an argument is put forward, in the form of visual art, theoretical writing, or otherwise, it can only exist through acknowledgement of its opposite. A statement of any type contains implicit recognition of its opposite. Hence the chick.

Returning to an earlier subject of the ideal; if one accepts the proposition from semiotics that we only understand things by contrasting them to something else, it is not surprising that ideas like perfection disintegrate. The perfect is like a pinnacle; like Dante’s Beatrice, with no equal opposite with which to contrast it; only a multiple of imperfections.

Alternatively if the perfect were to be determined against an opposite non-perfect, as soon as the context shifts the definition is no longer valid. One ends up with multiple perfects when there should be only one. Perfection as a stable entity cannot exist - but surely the concept of perfection disintegrates if it is not stable, or ‘true’. Or alternatively - if our concept of 'perfect' contains its opposite - then perhaps it isn't.

[i] Doris von Drathen, Vortex of Silence: Proposition for an Art Criticism beyond Aesthetic Categories (Milan: Charta, 2004), 83. 'Jean-Marc Bustamante 'Private Crossing'.