SIGAL BUSSEL
Speaking for Humanity
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Essay by Peter Frank, Former Senior Curator Riverside Art Museum and Art Critic, Angeleno Magazine and L.A
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Throughout her oeuvre, Sigal Bussel has employed the human head as a visual leitmotif. Bussel’s focus on this powerful image, however, is complicated by ambiguity. The head -- in particular the face, but the whole human skull and its attendant organs -- is probably the most potent image in art, indeed in all image-making, as it reflects all our social, psychological, sexual and somatic sensations back at us. But Bussel presents us not with portraits, not with fully fleshed out humans, but with highly stylized, nearly identical renditions of nearly featureless heads, invariably seen in profile. These ciphers are empty enough to contain us and full enough to exclude us, full enough to represent us and empty enough to confound our associations. They do not speak about humanity or even to humanity, they speak for humanity.
In their almost diagrammatic abstraction, Bussel’s heads determine a kind of social choreography. In the absence of other markers, their positioning takes on a telling dynamic, as if they were visages on a totem. Their coloration, their situation on the canvas, their repetitive frequency in any one painting or sculpture and throughout all the works in the series, all these normally bland considerations become crucial components of our reading of them. In the absence of identity, the heads become vessels for our own anxieties. While continuing a modern tradition of the anonymous figure, a tradition going back to cubism and the Bauhaus, Bussel allows her faceless faces to inhere a post-modern – or perhaps neo-modern – sense of displacement.
Do these heads, then, exist in a vacuum? Are they without context, without meaning? Bussel accompanies them with various abstract markings, and often found objects, all of which bespeak an intuition-driven process of decision making. But, however informed by intuition, even spontaneity, Bussel’s process is not gratuitous. It serves to flesh out, as it were, the human references. It gives depth to the heads without burdening them with specific characteristics. It thrusts the profiles to the foreground but does not cast them in any distinct drama. Bussel’s renditions remain abstract. Indeed, involved in pictorial (rather than theatrical) structures as they are, the heads have been abstracted that much further from their human associations.
Of course, they never lose those associations. Such associations remain the primary factor in our comprehension of the works, no matter whether painted, sculpted, or installed. For some of us, these associations give an imagined particularity to these thoroughly generalized visages. For others, the heads absorb and diffuse all the associations thrown at them. However stable their position on the canvas, in the room, or anywhere in real or fictive space, the non- or anti-faces with which Sigal Bussel populates her art exploit our need to endow them with meaning, even as they elude that meaning.
Conversation with Humanity
Director's Forward
Essay by Irina Moutafchieva, Director, National Gallery for Foreign Art, Bulgaria
Art is a context, not an achievement. Marcel Duchamp
After having witnessed the professional mastership of the artists in the ‘Colour Lithographs from the USA” exhibition, held at the National Gallery for Foreign Art in 1989, and the tendencies in American visual culture until present days, now the Bulgarian art spectator is offered the opportunity to see a new event - an aesthetically balanced, thought-through and monumentally embodied artistic project. Its mental space, unfolding in the real, turns it into a new social sign and, at the same time, in a metaphor of timelessness. This is the idiom of Sigal Bussel, a young American woman artist who, in her approach to the culture of abstractionism, minimalism and the Cubist principles, has arrived at a distinct voice of her own. It is a voice which prevails over the noise and even the shrill of our ‘commercialized’ environment, impressing us as a silent antithesis of the poster-like images. In this sense, the autobiographically experienced passes over into a procession of signs, dominated by the impersonalized human image. The artist manages to impart this idea at all levels of the plastic treatment, including the dimension of the work turned into an ambivalent element of art. The lively dialogue of the image with the surroundings, in the artist’s words, involves the consciousness of the viewer allowing him “to derive meaning or impose meaning based on the situation in life”. Her images and symbols - signifiers - shift or lose or gain their content when put in different contexts revealing or deconstructing the process by which expression is constructed.
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In the process of self-discovery, disregarding the transitory, she actually constructs one single evolving picture - a postmodern transcription of the fresco. This fresco, a mute trace of the ‘Conversation with Humanity’ on the walls of time, can live in various architectural settings precisely because of the minimalist concision and universal poetry of the images. After the spacious halls, where it has been hitherto exhibited, we hope that the idea has found resonance in the specific, more intimate space of our museum.
The art of Sigal Bussel impresses by the pure combination of the composition’s linear rhythm with the emblematic force of colour and the relief-like texture of found objects in the enigmatic anonymity of the profiled silhouette.
The innovative spirit of this exhibition, in itself an art work, prompts us to reflect on the philosophy of contemporary modes of exhibiting, but above all it helps us in the search for a guideline amid the ‘ever-changing’ currents in nowadays art.
Manifestations of this kind open the prospect of gaining further and deeper insight into what is happening in contemporary American art as well of open and enduring cultural relations.