Wunderkummer - Kawayan De Guia

Adjani Arumpac 

The pop icon images are tired and Warhol’s time capsules have had their fifteen minutes of fame. These boxes reek of stale superstardom, copies of copies that once shook institutions. These are a rehash, if not a reboot. Against all odds, we are taken back to where it all started, the 16th century European development that is the Wunderkummer - the cabinet of curiousities.

Long before the creation of stark white modern unobtrusive galleries, there were only the private museums of things whose values only the owners know. The concept, though, remains until today in museums and galleries. By juxtaposing such disparate objects, comparisons, analogies, parallels within, between and among exhibitions are encouraged to create a discourse that ultimately validates the collection.

These artist’s cabinets of curiosities - fragments of a culture he has lived in and within - consist of plaster casts of idiot boxes and soda bottles, and copies of popular culture at their kitschiest, packed together tight under the guiding principle of a personal aesthetic. In between the public spectacles are ritual boxes full of thingamajigs - from amulets, to feathers, to rice grain and dried up bladder, to betel nut - used for rituals of the Northern tribes of the Philippines.

Random texts shout out to us. Ice cold. Happiness. Fifty percent design. Essential component. A typical command task. Zero. Happy om. Words rasterized to become part of the image but still hauntingly speaking its own language, albeit in a postmodern commercial Babel speak.

Drawing upon Libeskind’s process-oriented metaphor of the labyrinth, De Guia’s assemblages strongly conjure the image of a maze visually.  We are maze-viewers looking at strange labyrinths without paths. There are no corridors nor exits. What we have are boxes within boxes. Or rooms within rooms, a concept that the artist has been playing with in his past paintings.

Museums in their own rights, complete with glass covers and cotton beds to reinforce the value of decontextualized ethnographic fragments, we walk the artist’s museums’ “active paths” visually and textually, reconstructing paradigmatic relationships between exhibits.

In “S+V=P (Sex+Violence=Profit )": guns in cotton beds and James Bond; red, red roses and crimson lips; and a whole lot of sitting Gods. In “Ice Cold Happiness": casted Coke bottles stamped with some designs; four televisions; Washington; a ritual headdress and a sheaf of rice. In "Essential Component": a naked female; Astroboy; a breast; a skull; a flower; some toys; four televisions; and a collection of things used to harvest rice. In "Zero" : five televisions bearing images of kissing lovers, woman smoking, and another woman slashing; Mickey Mouse; an orchid; and a small plaster relief depicting life in the Rice Terraces up North. In "All The World's A Stage": Gandhi; Elvis Presley pointing a gun; casted bones distinctly marked with numbers; a saint; a pack of cigarettes; dried twigs; and an Ifugao home relief. And finally, in “Happy Om”: painted copy of a publicity image of a sewing brand, with the mutilated tagline satirizing religion; Marilyn Monroe; a relief of a carabao and a hut; three televisions; comic strips with erased thought balloons, a God with some twine; and the usual contents of a ritual box.

It is not the things, but time and spaces, that Kawayan De Guia forcefully puts together in these six assemblages. These are but shards of a shattered whole. Which is precisely the point of labyrinthine museums. There is no grand unicursal narrative to follow. What we have—behind, above, and with these fragments—are a multitude of narratives and wholes and realities irreconcilable. De Guia’s collections are labyrinths wherein we are invited to observe spaces with such narrative potentials, but succinctly without passages.

Doing thus, the artist has rendered visible the 21st century Zeitgeist. With the global gates open and barriers broken, one learns to fuse survival fundamentals such as religion and consumerism without blaspheming. As with everybody else, the artist compartmentalizes. In a state of flux, he finds fixed states. In line with the rebooting to Wunderkummer, the artist freezes all his processes, finds borders and categorizes values. As with Libeskind’s conclusion on the labyrinthine museum, the artist’s movement through the nonlinear discursive space is ultimately, decidedly, a linear one. The individual cannot win against the system. But he can make sense of it and reorder its unruly exhibits according to his own interests and sensibilities.

Beyond show, beyond shock, beyond pop, these Wunderkummer are De Guia’s impenitent yet truly earnest “Happy Oms.”