A slightly wilted verdigris green dominates Thomas Buswell’s multicolored work. It appears in dense expressionist strokes, on metal tubes or, more diffusely, on mops. This ambiguous agent seems to leave its invasive mark everywhere. Like those ragwort flowers which, once we have learned to distinguish them from daisies, infiltrate our view of the countryside, along railway tracks. The pigment copper acetate arsenite, known as Paris green because it was used to kill rats in the city’s sewers, poisoned modern painters. Its fumes, as it dried, are said to have caused Cézanne’s diabetes, Monet’s blindness, and Van Gogh’s neurological disorders. This sickly green, repeated and wrung out by Buswell, draws us into a deranged Chthulucene era,1 in which single machines, beings, industrial and natural objects, and waste attempt to form an ecosystem.

Signs of life can be glimpsed. Bundles of organ pipes on life support emit occasional sighs or gasps. A blackish liquid bubbles in a shopping basket resembling a deep fryer, in a makeshift kitchen worktop module. Potentially activatable objects, such as clusters of megaphones, remain inert. However, the pine cone scales encrusted on their surface hint at a process of transformation, the transition from industrial objects designed to alert to silent, natural recovery. Forces of decomposition, calcification, ventilation, and regeneration combine and alternate in the chemistry of the exhibition. They echo a workshop where nothing is wasted, where stained rags become part of drawings, where scraps of wood are used as wedges, where the murky water in the painter’s sink becomes part of the work.

The sandpaper painting Coffee break, on which a mug filled with coffee has been sanded in a circular motion until the beverage spills out, leaving a dripping mark on the paper, is both an illustration and a diagram of this circular approach to art. The wear and tear of inert matter through repetitive gestures, resulting in uncontrolled brown splashes, traces a Zen ensō whose cosmic calm is disrupted by the energizing substance with scatological undertones.

In her Maintenance Art manifesto, Mierle Laderman Ukeles used psychoanalytical and cybernetic terms to distinguish the avant-garde driven by the Death Instinct: “separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path to death—do your own thing; dynamic change” and the life instinct of maintenance art: “Unification, the eternal return, the perpetuation and maintenance of the species; survival systems and operations; equilibirum.”2 Buswell stages these two antagonistic movements through his theater of objects, drawings, and paintings that accommodate his own detritus and the externalities of modernity. The continuity of life is maintained, but in mutant forms that provoke embarrassed laughter in the face of belching, slumped mops, and a pathetic quest for transcendence. A path to success is outlined for the forces of reproduction, as a phallic-shaped metal cage seems capable of attracting and trapping destructive impulses. Until they are exhausted.

(Text by Sylvain Menétrey)

Notes

1 A neologism coined by Donna J. Haraway (Staying with the trouble, Duke University Press, 2016) referring to H.P. Lovecraft's science fiction to describe a world of interconnections with terrestrial/chthonic powers.
2 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for maintenance art, 1969.