Solid, Liquid, and In Between: The Frag Sculptures of Joe Bussell By Barbara O’Brien
Joe Bussell: Frags at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art continues the institution’s forward-facing practice of bringing the art of our time into conversation with the ideas and challenges of the same. Museum Director and Chief Curator Bruce Hartman has selected twenty- one of more than fifty works in the Frags series by Joe Bussell, who holds a BFA in painting from the University of Kansas and MFAs in both painting and ceramics from Washington University in St. Louis. Both traditions are boldly present in this body of new work that is formally dynamic, emotionally complex, strangely compelling, rich in ideas and allusions to modernism, postmodernism, the culture wars, and the histories of sculpture and painting.
While as a people we stand under the hulking form of COVID-19, a terror so large and newly present that we cannot yet identify the size and shape of its shadow, how might we approach, experience, and understand the dark beauty of the Frag sculptures by Joe Bussell? Bussell has shown a willingness and an ability to use expressive abstraction as a profoundly emotional form, one that uses fragments of his own history to interpret our time and place, our culture and challenges.
Crafted from the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary life, each Frag reveals the strata of its making; each is a fragment of a memoir, told with bravado formal and wrenching personal authority. The artist is both painter and sculptor, but also diarist and seer, actor and commentator, patient and analyst. “Having this opportunity at this stage of my life—it’s time that all the secrets
are told. It’s an opportunity to have enough work so that they can play together. They share the secrets with one another.” The dynamic of “two” is central to how Bussell is inspired to begin these complex objects. “The juxtaposition of things is very important to me. A piece could start from two things that are very discordant, but how they ‘fit’ and tell a story matters.”
Each Frag disguises its reincarnation, masquerading as layered concrete, stone, or plaster. What we are looking at is an object formed from layers of acrylic house paint discarded at the Johnson County hazardous waste facility where the artist volunteered and from which they were scavenged. Objects imbedded in these layers of paint are often plastic ones, upcycled from a Goodwill store; a neon orange pupu platter gingerly finds its place as the base for Frag #3. “I think plastic is absolutely the right material to be working with now, because there is so much of it,” Bussell asserts.
In the process of making 2-D or 3-D, I always add what makes sense and subtract what doesn’t. That is usually in the context of formal elements. In the case of the Frag series, the materials I add represent the different parts of my history, dreams, or memories. I want the additions to finish the psychological loop and have aesthetic resonance.
The acrylic house paint from which the Frags are primarily sculpted— “solid, liquid, and in between”—has been utilized and manipulated in a variety of ingenious manners reflecting the artist’s history as both a painter and ceramicist. Remains of desiccated paint were wrenched from the bottom of gallon buckets, cast and cured, becoming the cylindrical discs from which Frag #2

finds its monolithic form. Paint that was still fluid was poured dozens of times onto now camouflaged chicken wire in Frag #1, each layer allowed to dry until after many weeks a new form altogether has been created.
In addition to acrylic house paint, Bussell utilizes both traditional and unconventional materials, such as aluminum-based oil paint and organic dried and sealed vegetation (Frag #3), and Damar varnish and a mid-century plastic bowl upended to create a topper (Frag #18). Many of the Frags have a sort of topknot: “I try to get away from a finial. As a classical ceramicist, it’s a ploy, yes, and it’s the humor part. It adds to the piece. It’s a crown. It’s not just an adornment.”
While all of the Frags on view at the Nerman were completed in 2020, the series began in 2003 with works that are smaller in scale and less complex formally. In 2019, the artist challenged himself to “grow the work”:
As the work got larger, the narrative got more complex and so did the list of materials. I began gathering extra material with the criteria that “extra” had to have relevance to my life. Then came the other materials that were surprises: a cannibalized painting on BFK, archival tape, plastic coated wire, discarded polychromed plastic, sticks and twigs and cardboard.
For the Nerman exhibition, Bussell also brings his experience as a master stager, for major department stores and theaters, to bear. He has encased the gallery in a shade of “cobalt purple,” a violet redolent with emotional connotation evoking histories of privilege, luxury, and the

sacred rituals of mourning. The artist shared, “I always like the sound of the word ‘violet.’ It goes to ‘violins,’ then to ‘violence’ and back to ‘violet’ in my ear. I’m not ignoring the political and psychosocial vibration that is inherent to the color.”
Bussell was born in Topeka, Kansas; grew up first in rural towns and then suburban Kansas City. He lived and worked in major cosmopolitan cities including Los Angeles, Tucson, Boston, and London before returning to Kansas City, Kansas, in 2001 where he still resides with his artist husband. Bussell has fought (and continues to battle) the culture wars first hand; he is highly literate and passionate about theater, music, art, and community; is funny and thoughtful about his friends and colleagues. A major influence on both the formal and psychological qualities that we see in the Frag sculptures comes from his work in an AIDS clinic:
The ghosts of my experiences at the AIDS hospice always halo my work. The Frag pieces dip in and out of my pool of experiences to perhaps give me a chance to heal from some experiences; sometimes to inform the art and the viewer and sometimes to give me the opportunity to joyfully make a body of work.
For all of the complexities of the Frag series, there is also humor and joy. “When I get to the heart of why I make art, it is to find a sense of play—most likely the play I was looking for when I was a child. Of course, making art satisfies my intellectual self as well, but it has to be fun in the studio.” The humor can be dark, as in Frag #4, with its clownlike figure wheeling its way toward us with an unsteady gait. Frag #1 suggests a dancer in a full body bend with its vibrant,

performative energy and palpable sense of kinetic dynamism: “I’m careful about finding the work’s center of gravity, but I like it when the pieces float, lean, and dance.” Bussell seeks a balance, comparing his work to theater:
You have to have everything: moments of tragedy and comedy and pathos. And each character—if it is just one thing, it’s a cardboard cutout. It’s hard to laugh at Stanley in Streetcar, but … he’s a clown. He was a mean clown. … Theater stays with me. I love working and thinking about a character.
When pressed on how he knows a work is finished, Bussell replied with marvelous self- awareness, “Do we talk about instincts? Collective consciousness? Things that we cannot put in black and white? At some point, I create a full narrative that is still only telling part of the story.” The story is only told when it is heard; the work is alive when it is experienced in the gallery. The vibrancy, intelligence, and ingenuity of the Frag objects find an ideal setting and cadence, gathered together atop a low plinth and cosseted within a violet aura within the McCaffree Gallery at the Nerman Museum.
Barbara O’Brien, an independent curator and critic based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was Executive Director of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri from 2012 to 2017, after serving as chief curator and director of exhibitions since 2009. O’Brien is an elected member of AICA-USA, International Association of Art Critics. Her three decades of curatorial practice and criticism have focused on the art and artists of our time.