Jean-Marc Bustamante Builds a Home for His 'Fourth Daughter'

When the architect Charles Zana first entered the former Église Sainte-Croix in Arles, he felt something “sacred” had survived – even if little else of its original character remained.

Since its deconsecration during the French Revolution, the 12th-century church has passed through several incarnations, latterly operating as a furniture store and, for a time, a hotel. Its interior had been repeatedly subdivided and altered.

“There was not one regular floor; everything was destroyed,” Zana tells The Art Journal. His response was deliberately restrained. Old stone walls and arches remain visible alongside contemporary interventions. “We began the very humble work of trying to get back the sacred feeling of this place,” he says. “Everything that we have done is visible: we didn’t hide the destruction, we didn’t hide the electricity.”

The restored church is now the home of Fonds Bustamante, an institution dedicated to the work of the artist Jean-Marc Bustamante, a noted artist in his native France. He represented France at the São Paulo Biennale in 1994 and the Venice Biennale in 2003, and was director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris for four years.

Project for the end of my life

The new space opened in conjunction with the ongoing Les Rencontres photography festival. Its creation brings Bustamante back to the city that hosted one of his first exhibitions at the Musée Réattu, during an early edition of the festival in 1973, when he was studying in Provence with Denis Brihat, best known for his ‘photographic paintings’.

Now 74, Bustamante describes the Fonds as “the project for the end of my life”. It is intended to preserve his works, books and archives, and may support the creation of a catalogue raisonné. But it will also present exhibitions, classes, performances and seminars involving other artists and disciplines.

Fonds Bustamante exterior, copyright Hervé Hôte, courtesy Fonds Bustamante

The immediate reason for creating such a structure is familial as much as institutional. “I have three daughters,” Bustamante tells The Art Journal. “I said to them: ‘You are not three, you are four, because there is another one, my work.’” He hopes the Fonds will act as “a kind of structure, as a shelter”, placing his work in order before responsibility for it passes to them. “It’s heavy to be the child of an artist,” he says.

Bustamante had previously attempted to establish a similar institution in Toulouse, where he grew up as the son of an English mother and an Ecuadorian father, but the plan fell through. The opportunity in Arles emerged when the Sainte-Croix building became available. It was acquired with the involvement of the project’s initiator, Myriam de Picciotto, and transformed by Zana in an unusually compressed period: according to the Fonds’ director, Alicia Vaïsse, the main building work took only around four months following the initial demolition work.

A Generational Project

The result is a private foundation, but one not conceived as a conventional single-artist museum. Penelope Curtis, the former director of Tate Britain and a member of the Fonds’ supervisory board, describes the inaugural exhibition as “a very personal opening show”, one closely connected to Bustamante’s life as an artist. Yet only around a third of the works are his; the remainder are by artists he has known, taught, exhibited alongside or followed. “It’s a cross-generational project,” Curtis says.

Its inaugural exhibition, En Miroirs, makes that distinction visible. Bustamante’s work appears alongside that of artists including Thomas Schütte, Franz West, Rodney Graham, Tatiana Trouvé and Cristina Iglesias, whose four-metre sculpture was commissioned for the building. Some belong to his own generation and exhibited alongside him in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands; others are younger artists he encountered through teaching at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and the art academies in Paris and Munich.

Although not described as a retrospective, the exhibition functions as a form of intellectual autobiography assembled partly through other people’s work. Bustamante says it evokes a period at the end of conceptual art when a loose constellation of European artists sought “to come back to the object”. He tells The Art Journal, “It was not really a group; it was not a school”. Nevertheless, shared affinities developed through exhibitions, friendships and sustained encounters with one another’s work.

For Bustamante, recovering that history has acquired some urgency. “I see that with my students – there is no memory,” he says. “Artists [who were] very interesting 15 years ago can completely disappear.” With En Miroirs, he has tried to recreate something of the atmosphere surrounding European art in the 1980s and 1990s, selecting works that enter into specific relationships with his own work.

En Miroirs Installation View. Copyright Grégoire D'ablon, Courtesy Fonds Bustamante

Echoes, Correspondences, Conversations

These encounters are not necessarily ones their makers would have anticipated. Vaïsse describes the exhibition as a network of “echoes, correspondences, conversations – sometimes between people who ignore each other”. The breadth of Bustamante’s own practice is crucial to the selection. Although still frequently identified as a photographer, he abandoned photography as an exclusive discipline relatively early, moving between photographs, paintings, sculptures and architectural-scale installations.

“Sometimes people are a little bit lost with my work because I’m not always doing the same thing,” he says. “Art is art. There are different tools, different means.”

Curtis similarly argues that Bustamante’s photography has always been concerned with painting and sculpture. She first became interested in works in which photographs were placed within frame-like structures resembling furniture. “A lot of the work I did [at the Henry Moore Institute] was about showing how sculpture touched other media,” she says. “In a way, he’s doing the same, but with photography and how it touches other media.”

Sainte-Croix gives those concerns an architectural field. Zana preserved the height of the former nave in some areas while creating smaller galleries and more intimate cabinets elsewhere. A double-height space contains Cristina Iglesias’s four-metre cast-aluminium and glass sculpture, made for the building. Bustamante is alert to the way its ecclesiastical volume changes visitors’ behaviour: “When you enter through the façade, suddenly, as a spectator, you decide to talk lower.”

Lumière 6, 1991, courtesy Jean-Marc Bustamante

Not Legacy, but Survivance

The challenge now is to distinguish the Fonds within an increasingly crowded Arlesian cultural landscape. Bustamante admires Luma Arles, which he calls “magnificent”, but has neither its resources nor its appetite for spectacle. Instead, he wants to establish something “more human, maybe closer to the people”, situated between Luma’s monumental contemporary-art programme and the more popular, high-traffic Rencontres. A café, bookshop and terrace are intended to embed the Fonds in the everyday life of La Roquette, the historically working-class district in which it is situated. In recent years, rising property prices, tourism and short-term rentals have transformed a district historically characterised by a notably mixed population, including longstanding Romani and North African communities.

Two exhibitions are planned annually, coinciding with the springtime Festival du Dessin (festival of drawing) and the Rencontres, alongside winter activities for schools and local audiences. Bustamante is planning a symposium on the increasingly precarious economics of art-book publishing and is considering helping to establish a sound-art festival.

Much remains unresolved, including the long-term funding model and precisely how Bustamante’s archive will become available for research. Curtis sees these uncertainties as fundamental questions: “How much work will he bring here? How will it be used as a place of study? And how will the exhibition programme develop?”

Bustamante himself does not pretend the outcome is assured. He wants the institution to present an artist’s perspective, supported but not governed by curators and other professionals, and to show what museums and galleries overlook – or show familiar art differently. “We will see in one or two years if I succeed in my challenge or not,” he says.

The telling word in Bustamante’s description of his ambition is not “legacy” but “survivance” – the continuation of his art through the works, relationships and ideas in which it developed. His answer to the conventional single-artist foundation is to make his own history only one part of the institution. The fourth daughter has been given a home, but she will not live there alone.