JANE BUSTIN – SISTERS
I’ve been searching for the daughter of the devil himself
I’ve been searching for an angel in white
I’ve been waiting for a woman who’s a little of both
And I can feel her, but she’s nowhere in sight
One of these nights
The Eagles, 1975
In 1975 we weren’t obsessing about algorithms and the degree to which we were being coerced and hopelessly conditioned and manipulated by big tech. In 1975 bands existed, radio DJs as diverse as Casey Kasem & John Peel were certainly shaping our listening patterns but they did through advocacy and enthusiasm.
Popular culture was popular… it hadn’t yet corroded into populism and become the tool of grotesque manipulation and division that it has become now. Yet inside the lyrics of most bands, from The Beatles to the Doors, even the determinedly middle of the road lyrics of The Eagles, lay a broad set of pervasive assumptions about sexuality and role play.
Much of Minimalism, despite and because of its denial of narrative and sentimentality, reinforced certain stereotypes about masculinity. The shiny obdurate materiality of Carl Andre’s copper or Donald Judd’s milled aluminium refused the form, psychology and tactility of Barbara Hepworth, Eva Hesse and Ruth Asawa to name but a few. Despite this determination to resist organicism in favour of material essentialism, Judd’s aluminium and Andre’s copper retain a shimmery sensuality that is at odds with apparent ambition.
Jane Bustin’s newest paintings continue to explore a very personal vocabulary of minimalism with her clear crisp geometry and material choices but she does so, not to avoid narrative, rather she uses her material and colour as a neo-symbolist, drawing our attention to their potential for intimacy, for reflection and for the play of light whilst opening their potential up as a support for meaning.
Bustin’s arrangement of distinct panels into diptychs and triptychs infer something of 19th century Japanese traveling mirrors in terms of scale and intimacy. Bustin draws the viewer in very close to inspect the multiple faces, edges and adjustments that she makes to the composition. This has the impact of keeping us mobile as we are compelled to move so as to experience the dimensionality of the works.
The colours she uses carry a boudoir blush about them and then just when you understand that these rest on yet another set of assumptions, Jane has inserted small 70s lenticular images, mostly on to the flanks of the works, where nightgowns slip magically to the floor depending on your movement.
There is humour, irony and provocation in these retro-sexual images, but the reality is that these qualities infuse the entire composition with myriads of contradictions.
Bustin has then taken the step of setting this material symbolism against the backdrop of art history and the history of Joan of Arc in particular. It is almost as if we are seeing her paintings themselves through a historical lenticular lens, one that with the most modest shifts opens them to vastly differing readings, interpretations that reveal the persistence of the dichotomous view of women but signal a newer form of resistance.
