Anatole Notes (part 1) by Jane Bustin
with
Les Mystères du Château de Dé by Man Ray
presented by Artprojx
Testbed 1 33 Parkgate Road, Battersea, London SW11 4NP
29 August - 2 September 2012. 11am - 6pm daily
Private View: Wednesday 29 August. 6 - 8pm.
RSVP events@artprojx.com
The Anatole Notes project consists of assembled groupings of paintings, objects, paper and letterpress text. Each assemblage reflects on the unfinished fragmented poems ‘Pour un Tombeau d’Anatole’ by Stephane Mallarmé (1879), ‘a tomb for Anatole’ translated by Paul Auster (1983). These fragmented phrases are Mallarmé’s attempt to come to terms with the death of his eight year old son Anatole. The sound and the visual arrangement of Mallarmé’s poems were as important as the meaning. His most famous poem ‘un coup de dés’ was a major influence on hypertext and has been the subject matter for many artists including Man Ray, Marcel Broodthaers.
Bustin’s reflections on his texts attempt to combine the written words with visual equivalents to reveal the expansive meaning of the text. Each work consists of three or four painted objects arranged on the wall and floor; they are made of various materials e.g. wood, linen, paper, metal, oil paint and readymade chairs. The Mallarmé text has been hand letter-pressed onto paper or linen by New North Press. The use of the architecture and the derelict state of the exhibition space at Testbed, echoes the emptiness and barren nature of the Anatole texts.
Artprojx presents: Les Mystères du Château de Dé, 1929, film 35mm by Man Ray. 25 mins
(continuous screening as part of the Anatole Notes exhibition throughout the day). The longest of Man Ray’s films, Les Mystères du Château de Dé, follows a pair of travelers on a journey from Paris to the Villa Noailles in Hyères, built by the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens with a cubist garden designed by Gabriel Guevrekian. This modernist collaboration was made as an architectural document and inspired by Mallarmé’s poem ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’.
Jane Bustin has been selected for the 2012 John Moores Painting Prize and the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2012. Bustin has been in numerous group exhibitions including Kettles Yard Cambridge, Ferens Museum (Hull), Southampton City Art Gallery, Djanogly Gallery (Nottingham), Royal Academy (London) and recently at the B55 Gallery (Budapest). Bustin has had solo shows at The Eagle Gallery (London), Artprojx Space (London) and The British Library (London). Her work is in several collections including V&A Museum (London), Yale Center USA, Ferens Museum (Hull). http://www.janebustin.com
Contact: David Gryn david@artprojx.com +447711127848 http://davidgryn.wordpress.com
Press info, pricelist, images, more information all available on request
DRAFT TEXT FOR JANE BUSTIN
Anthony Rudolf
What could be less verbal than a Jane Bustin painting?
What could be more verbal than a Mallarmé poem?
"One does not write with ideas but with words", Mallarmé said to Degas, who fancied himself as a poet and had plenty of ideas.
As Borges might have said, we would expect the first livre d'artiste to have been created by Mallarmé (as translator) and Manet: Poe’s ‘Raven’, and we would be right.
Let me rephrase my first sentence: not what could be less verbal but what could be more silent than a Jane Bustin painting? After all, Debussy's La Mer is as wordless as a Bustin painting. Silent it is not.
(Debussy set one of Mallarmé’s most significant poems, ‘L’Après-midi d’un faune’, to music. Mallarmé told Degas: "I thought I had already set it to music").
My answer to the question posed above -- what could be more silent than a Jane Bustin painting? -- is a dead child whose absence his poet father commemorates, that “absence [which] is condensed presence” (the phrase is from a letter of Emily Dickinson, a poet well worth reading “against” Mallarmé).
The dead child is Anatole Mallarmé, whom Jane Bustin too commemorates and whose existence breathes into, inspires, Jane Bustin’s paintings, via a heart-rending posthumously published poem.
It is neither paradoxical nor ironic that Jane Bustin depends so heavily on words during the gestation of her work exhibited at Test-tube. Goya went further: he included words inside the visual image. (There is no artist more freighted with words than Kitaj, and I’m talking about his paintings and prints, not his writings.)
Mallarmé would have reacted to these paintings with silence. He was always eloquent.
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Jane Bustin has work featuring in the Jerwood Drawing Prize and John Moores Painting Prize – both opening this week.
Jerwood Drawing Prize 2012
12 SEPTEMBER – 28 OCTOBER 2012
The Jerwood Drawing Prize 2012 is the largest and longest running annual open exhibition for drawing in the UK. Judged by an independent panel of selectors; Stephen Coppel, Curator of the Modern Collection, Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum; Kate Macfarlane, Co-Director of The Drawing Room, London; and Lisa Milroy, Artist and Head of Graduate Painting, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, the Prize aims to explore and celebrate the diversity, excellence and range of current drawing practice in the UK.
From a submission of almost 3,000 entries, the selectors have brought together an exhibition of 78 works from 73 artists. The shortlist includes established artists as well as relative newcomers and students fresh from art college. The selected works will be exhibited at JVA at Jerwood Space, London from 12 September – 28 October 2012, and then tour to venues across the UK including the new Jerwood Gallery, Hastings and mac, Birmingham.
http://jerwoodvisualarts.org/3095/Jerwood-Drawing-Prize-2010
John Moores Painting Prize 2012
First held in 1957, the John Moores Painting Prize is the UK’s best-known painting competition and is named after Sir John Moores (1896 – 1993), the founder of the prize. The competition culminates in an exhibition held at the Walker Art Gallery every two years, which forms a key strand of the Liverpool Biennial.
The John Moores exhibition is held in partnership with the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition Trust, and although the appearance of each exhibition changes, the principles remain constant: to support artists and to bring to Liverpool the best contemporary painting from across the UK.
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/johnmoores/
http://www.janebustin.com
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