Bushara – Work is Art

Milton Glaser’s phrase defining art as “work” in the sense of practical application, provides a fitting entry point for approaching the “work” of my friend, the artist Mohamed Omer Bushara. Bushara belongs to the breed of “doers” for whom art cannot be disentangled from work. He is the kind of artist who can pore over a tiny miniature for hours on end – drawing, engraving, coloring, carving, etching, folding, unfolding, scratching, perforating, tearing, pasting, peeling, and so on. All this “work” endows his images with a peculiar quality that led the critic Tom Freshwater to conclude that “his work is about process as much as product.”

However, the more I contemplate Bushara’s work –across changing times and places – the more I am convinced of his deliberate effort to tip the scales in favor of the material unfolding of the work (the process) over the allure of the finished artifact (the product). The inclination to elevate craft or technique, above the final result – the artifact or, if you will, the masterpiece – is the greatest common denominator across all of Bushara’s work. This holds true for his small drawings made with coffee grounds and a ballpoint pen on cheap paper during his early days at the Ministry of Culture in the 1970s, as well as for the etchings and scorched scraperboard pieces published in the American magazine African Arts publishing in the same decade – works that blend scratching, burning, and a touch of ink – through to his zinc and copper engravings, and some of his paintings, and finally his later works that fuse engraving, collage, and drawing.

The critic David Lillington noted that “Bushara uses techniques so unfamiliar that the viewer is unable to tell how he made his pieces.” Lillington observation indirectly reveals Bushara’s aesthetic project as a complex exploration of the possibilities inherent in material and tool. This quest transcends the conventions of popular representational expression, venturing into a realm beyond the grasp of rhetorical language – a realm where materials speak through their tangible physical properties, serving as aesthetic portals for perceiving the world beyond the dimensions definitively branded by literary tradition. 

Bushara’s work in this context presents itself as an invitation to enter the realm of visual practice purged of the suspicions of religion – and religion, after all, is one face of literature. This is a difficult threshold for a viewer steeped in literary modes of seeing to cross. On this horizon – where the relationship with the visual artifact is grounded its material dimension as a discourse shaped by the means of materials and tools – Bushara is entitled to say: 

“I work from nowhere, without a preconceived idea … I approach the support, and the white loses its neutrality. A dialogue emerges between me and the support, and ideas begin to form. As I progress in the work, the composition evolves, things appear, and I take hold of the work’s destiny. The images are reveries and illusions – free and bound at once.”

To speak about Bushara’s work through words alone is a formidable challenge – perhaps because most of the available vocabulary in contemporary art criticism was coined by writers shaped by a now-defunct religious relationship with the visual artifact. We may well need to invent new terms and craft a critical discourse that mirrors the aesthetic nature Bushara’s work seeks to evoke. But that’s a task far beyond the scope of this brief note, whose sole purpose is to announce a new exhibition at the Oxford Museum featuring Mohamed Omar Bushara alongside two other artists: Madi Asharya-Baskerville and Helen Ganly (see the exhibition poster).

Bushara the ‘Paper Artist’

Abdul Majid

To our brother in the digital spheres,

Greetings, and thank you for your two thoughtful readings. A third reading would be most welcome – one that flings open the gates of the wind, so we might all benefit and find some peace – but alas, no such luck. I say “alas” because discussion on this subject – the entanglement and contradiction between the language of material and the material of language – remains fraught with various concerns: technical, aesthetic and political. And between aesthetic and political, you might also squeeze in religious (and there’s no peace to be found in any case).

The point is, my friend, I reread your reflections many times, and they spurred me to revisit this matter – before I could obtain additional copies of Bushara’s works that might help us anchor our concepts on the basis of the actual artifacts under consideration. My only goal with this brief note is to clarify some points that were unclear in your intervention and to shed light on what might have been obscure to readers in my hasty, short comment, in order to set the records straight.

You said:

“…But I see that Bushara, in many of his works, has a specific image in mind that he wants to force the material to convey. And we don’t know the extent of what he achieves in the final result because that is in his mind alone…” 

This statement is ambiguous because what is “in his mind alone” is the project or vision, with all its subjective and objective dimensions. What “is achieved in the final result” is precisely the visible portion that the artist presents to the public on the support.

Further in your statement, I was struck by your words: 

“But as soon as the decision is made to exhibit that work… there must have been some kind of acceptance achieved… This doesn’t allow us to be sure that he has completely broken through the barriers of the material” and “completely exhausted it”.

The idea of completely breaking through and exhausting the barriers of the material – you ask of the artist engaged in a struggle with material – conflicts with the proviso you yourself place in parentheses, where you say: “to exhaust what lies within a material, for me, is one of the ‘four impossibilities’”. The material is not merely a means to convey an internally generated literary image but, for Bushara – and for myself (if I may intrude upon the ranks of the ‘materialist’ visual artists) – the material is itself a sovereign image, possessing an authority of its own logic parallel to, or intersecting with the logic of the literary image on multiple levels. Material as image is a central subject of inquiry for many modern and earlier artists, whether they were conscious of it, and Bushara is fully conscious of the material/image inquiry as an aesthetic, exhaustive, and open-ended struggle. 

Of course, this is not to say that Bushara’s focused concern with material excludes the concerns of pictorial craftsmanship that reads “religion” in the scene; religion is behind and before us and there is no escape –it is “stuck to you like gum.” But our Muslim elders said, “The Sharia is concerned with the apparent” (what is in the heart is in the heart) – and this is a powerful saying that opens its own chapter in the aesthetics of pictorial modernity as a phenomenological matter. The “appearance” that Sharia refers to, analytically, is a conceptual shield that protects pragmatic Muslims from the burden of literary excess, allowing every sheikh the right to forge his own religious path, his “way” or if you will, his “message”. So, to avoid straying from the aesthetic issue posed by Bushara’s work, it is safer to approach it with an initial “existential phenomenology” that starts from what is evident to our sight, enabling us to rationalize it as a useful contribution to the economy of symbols exchanged between the artist and the public. 

From the “apparent of the Sharia,” Bushara’s images appear as a discourse on the manipulation of paper and ink. I place paper before ink because some of Bushara’s works rely on paper more than on drawing materials like ink. In his series of paper-based works, Bushara appears as a visual craftsman who can depend on paper itself, dispensing with the painter’s brush whose ink flows to draw the boundaries between the elements of graphic composition. He tears paper – paper from various sources he gathers from here and there. But his method of tearing is not random; in a sense, he doesn’t simply tear, but rather ‘draws’ through the act of tearing, performing the action so that the tear reveals a line whose color is that of the paper’s core, hidden beneath the surface of the printed color. This line, resulting from the tearing process is usually white, but Bushara sometimes colors it with ink as the situation requires. Tearing paper as a way of creating a line is not unique to Bushara; it is an old technique known to some modern artists, among whom I recall the Spanish-Catalan Antoni Tàpies, may God bless him. 

But Bushara is not satisfied with just tearing paper. He also draws in a distinctive manner that combines pasting, tearing, and carving. He begins by pasting his paper onto the support and then pulls it off after the glue has dried. The removed sheet leaves behind portions of its own torn surface, resulting in a new shape that Bushara integrates into the overall composition. Bushara’s aesthetic ideas about paper are too numerous to detail in this quick note, which aims to illuminate his exploration of the material/image. 

But Bushara does not stop at paper alone; he also employs traditional tools available to everyone – brushes, drawing pens, engraving tools, and so forth. In the work of Bushara the researcher-engraver, there is a great freedom that allows him to circumvent the “dogma” of the traditional engraver, presenting the engraving tools themselves as a sovereign, independent aesthetic image. In the exhibited work, Bushara does not simply display the images resulting from the engraved zinc plate; he also presents the engraved zinc plate itself as a component of the final image, in which metal and paper merge in a unique collage. 

I knew Bushara for his small-scale ink drawings on paper, but in the late 1990s, I witnessed him working with his pens on large sheets (about 150 cm high and no less than 80 cm wide). These drawings astonished me with the stark contradiction between the fine texture of their miniature-like lines and monumental scale of their visual composition. This is an age-old contradiction, reinforced by classical viewing methods that impose a particular distance upon each type (a photographic image’s illustrative value is spoiled if we examine its details with a magnifying lens). 

I believe the value of those works I saw in Bushara’s Oxford studio can be summarized in their ability to expand and contract before the eye of a moving viewer, according to the changing distance between the spectator and the support. In that contraction and expansion Bushara’s ink drawings remain faithful to their maker’s primary purpose: to reveal the outcome of the artist’s research into the possibilities of material/image. I dare say that in this complex arrangement, Bushara is, innovatively, employing a method that belongs to distinguished artists who contributed, each in his own way, to the matter of viewing distance. I refer to our esteemed teacher Ibrahim El-Salahi, the gracious “Oxfordian,” and our late great teacher Hussein Shariffe. Bushara came to know both of them closely and intimately, delving deeply into their aesthetic and existential legacies, from which he gained an artistic maturity that today is reflected in his work and grants it a distinctive quality – one that allows us to take pride in it in the face of periods of artistic discontinuity. 

To view Hussein Shariffe’s graphic works, one may consult the black-and-white pieces in Jamal Ahmed’s book Sali Fu Humr (University of Khartoum Press edition), which is an important landmark in the scene of contemporary book illustration and one to which we must return for a careful presentation as a major creative contribution to the tradition of bookmaking (see also Ali El-Makk, The Moon Sitting on the Yard of Its Home).

Yet Bushara did not stop at the stations of our two venerable teachers; he continued his free explorations into terrains far removed from the drawing and coloring concerns of El-Salahi and Shariffe. Bushara is a researcher in every sense of the word. He is a seasoned investigator who approaches drawing with the tools of inquiry, without neglecting the impulses of the artist and his legitimate eccentricities. Thanks to the tools of the artist-researcher, Bushara continues his complex trajectory and does not hesitate to pause at those neglected, forgotten corners that generations of artists have passed over and that the official visual art movement has ignored. He visits the oil painters’ terrain and turns aside to the engravers ground, benefiting from their techniques and old and new teachings in forging a wheel of his own, one uniquely fitted to his artistic journey, where the wheels of others can no longer carry him. 

In his path of pictorial research – between drawing, engraving and coloring – Bushara can stop at the photocopy machine and repurpose it as a new pictorial tool, inventing images in which the copied visual units are stacked toward a different composition. He can select a copy to draw on, print a new composition over it, tear it to reintegrate it into a new project, and so on. All of these manipulations, occurring between insight and hand/tool and support, are realized in a space of “non-literary” action – a material act powerfully free from the grip of verbal literature. Yet this “non-literary” reality does not negate the essential truth of the visual researcher’s manipulations as a language above, behind, beneath, beside the reach of words.