Misgivings 

by Patrick D. Flores

Marina Cruz revisits her grandmother’s cabinet and finds four dresses. They belong to four siblings, her mother and her three sisters. She spreads them out, with all the creases and stains of time before her, and begins to draw in her mind the threads of her kin’s tales, which soon thrive on their cherished garments, as if in a secret garden grown in the closet. Her mother is Elisa, one of the twins, a teacher in a public school to this day. The other is Laura, afflicted with Parkinson’s, is of the same vocation. Nora is a nurse, worked in Libya and married an English soldier. And Helen, the youngest, is a dentist who chose to stay at home and raise a family, the favored daughter of weak physical disposition.

Marina photographs the clothes, prints the digital images on a canvas primed starkly black, and lets them glow like luminous fabric. She then embroiders the surface with figures, in some parts rendering faces in appliqué, that tell stories of her women forebears. She stitches childlike motifs into the yarn of a life cycle that moves along with every expectant generation -- and is cared for with craft.

Marina remembers their lives through finery, recollected in a binary system of a 21st century medium, and sutures the lapse in memory with her hand that weaves filaments of feminine biography into paintings named after the guardians of a matriarchy.

It is uncanny that the writer Susan Stewart spins the word “longing” in ways that settle on the sheerness of adornment: “a yearning desire” or frill; “the fanciful cravings incident to women during pregnancy” or an inhabitation; and “belongings or appurtenances,” indeed possessions. All this intimates abode: the first, a symptom of homesickness; the second, of private life or an interior. And the third, according to the feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva, “a powerful sublimation and indwelling of the symbolic within instinctual drives.”  Society is vested in second skin.

This exhibit presents a wide range of current tendencies in Philippine contemporary art that works around the theme of “sentimental value.”  It is a broad interest that reflects on how certain things belong and how it is difficult, sometimes impossible, to cast them off; how lost things are remembered, constantly referred to in the present, and wished that they might come back in new forms, located between the residual and the emergent; how the impulse of nostalgia becomes not a futile, passive form of remembrance, but rather a critical mode of renewal and remaking “what could have been,” in other words, of figuring the future; and how the idea of value complicates the idea of sentimentality: that this value is produced and also exchanged as personal history, ideology, commodity, and everyday life.

The history of the Philippines as a series of colonizations and attempts at redeeming a national spirit, in the wake of a perceived loss of identity, and the epic of China as a relay of shifts from imperial ascendancy to socialist rule to the excess of expenditure in the present is central. It speaks of how cultures and people regard attachment to objects and how this affection generates subjectivities of entitlement, a sense of poverty and of aggrandizement, a sentimental value that clings like attire. The delusional former First Lady Imelda Marcos once said that the only things she keeps in life are the ones she gives away: at the end of the Pacific war, she fashioned dresses out of military parachutes; and during the dictatorship, haute couture and the signature ceremonial costume with butterfly sleeves became trappings par excellence of power. Indeed, property is hard to shed.

In our time when the egregiously wealthy and the exceptionally abject exist alongside each other, things at once become immaterial and matter so fundamentally. Arising from this tension are feelings of rights over a humanity in pieces, from intellect that is copyrighted to kidneys put up for sale. And there are more of these fragments in a dense city crowded out by strangers, a providential but cataclysmic nature that overcomes natives, a nation that sends its citizens away, and bodies performing the trance of repression and release.

Estrangement

Maya Muñoz and Poklong Anading both configure scapes of alienation, sprawling and compelling as they hint at forces at work in the making of history: nature for Muñoz and the multitude for Anading. They can be melancholic, too: mute, minimal, unmoving, in fact quite dreadful to the extent that the horizon is virtually uneventful except for a rock or a tree against a grey expanse, or people posing with indifference, their faces burnt up by the sun’s light; they hold up a mirror to reflect it and return its stunning gaze. There is desolation, but one that is suffused with misgivings: the irresistibility of an overwhelming force, a sublime if you will, of the vital spirit that precedes human beings and the animating movement that makes them who they are: collective selves and social persons in a milieu from which they cut their visage.  It is a valiant struggle to withstand finitude.

While these concerns may not be apparent, the method of depiction is fairly intuitive: “abstraction” that is open to process and accidents, attentive to the physical and the indiscernible; and photography that is urgent and ubiquitous and always-already contrived.  In these efforts, we glean wistful vestiges of intervention, some means of control over the inevitability that runs its course: the body that paints with passion and deliberation, amenable to the accretion of texture or the serendipity of dripping; and the eye that composes a community, stages the drama of engagement with the harsh elements amid an equally brutish urbanity, with the photographer communicating with other people, gathering them for their world-picture. Here is elegance in an ominous sense, the mode by which reality is seized before it falls apart: nature that is beheld but begrudged, a public that stands its ground but remains incognito.

Anading’s Anonymity suite takes us to Cubao, a bustling district of Quezon City, the nexus between the decaying capital Manila and the burgeoning suburbia west of the metropolis. In this dense labyrinth of malls, shops, and residences, the artist stalks his neighbors, an ice cream peddler for instance, and those who converge from far and wide, like activists rousing the rabble. The setting becomes more otherworldly because its tone is digitally made leaden so that when lit at the back, the image generates veritable portents, which transfigure into remarkable Cubao stragglers, at times forlorn with balloons or in front of a church, at others mingling with banal errands.  This prompts us to ask: Do these portraits taken at past noon go against the vein of portraiture’s urge to make things visible in the full light of day? And do these photographs survive photography’s fantasy to capture in spite of a disfiguring glare and against the light?   

Muñoz has also probed the face in a previous foray, where she belabors it in the hopes that she could know it better, with considerable fatigue and surfeit of energy. The face is Lester’s that is thoroughly violated with scratches and automatic writing but is also conjured fascinatingly with graphic discipline. What emerges is a compromised portrait that is lavished with “critical intimacy” and comes closer in the “beauty of distance.”  This is why in one of these “panoramas of the primeval” titled She Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, the lineaments of a man float up then sink into the canvas. The artist thinks about sentimentality in terms of a quest for difference: what one is not, what it could be, what it used to be.  In other words, the here and now must is tempered by history.

Leavings:  

The 2006 Be-Longing series of Alfredo Juan and Isabel Aquilizan has undergone several incarnations, each guided by the notion of collecting and the collective. The most recent articulation may be condensed in three projects marked by a common mode: a family’s personal effects, or items to be shared as gifts or kept in storage, that are compressed in homecoming boxes. The latter serve as vessel from which the content takes it shape, like liquid assuming the form of its container as if it were cast. These are laid out on the floor like minimal sculpture with maximum substance.  

First was for the Sydney Biennale in which the couple packed objects that they would be needing in Australia for their impending resettlement.

Second was for the Filipiniana exhibition in Madrid in which the couple asked Filipinos in Spain to give miscellaneous objects that they would be sending home.

And third was for the exhibition Danas: Palabas. Here they crammed the boxes with sundry articles that they would leave behind, like Christmas trees, alarm clocks, and kitchen knives.  On the wall was a maquette of their house, watching over the leavings of a mobile life, tearful odysseys, and “shelter blues” as the scent of the Sampaguita flower lingers sentimentally.  

The artists take two boxes from the last project and place them in front of their magnified identification photographs, covered by a translucent material and stamped with their passport numbers.  It may seem that the migrants have become totally abstracted from the melodrama of departure and are clinically replaced by remnants of the things they have outlived, so to speak, which in some stroke of relocation have become artifacts for the museum to be documented like their identities.

Kawayan de  Guia’s temperament coheres with the Aquilizans’ to the degree that it partakes of the same inclination to refunction objects in the manner of a bricoleur and to utter a poetics of space from which these objects are made and circulate.  We could venture that the artist is inspired by the practice of his father, the filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik who lays bare the popular public transport jeepney of Pacific War vintage as a hybrid vehicle in the verisimilarly improvised film Perfumed Nightmare, and of Santiago Bose whose efforts in the aesthetic of bricolage has become a watershed in Southeast Asian contemporary art.

In this exhibition, de Guia is introspective, rummaging through household and found objects from the crannies of his memory, limning them as a naturalist would, and lodging them in the niches of his imaginary museum or cabinet of curiosity that is placed next to austere rooms with sleek furniture and specters like a recumbent nude that resides. At the fringes of this tableau are real things – talisman, cigarettes, stalks of rice -- encased in plastic that virtually frame the representations of artifacts. A recurring image is the Chinese jar, probably of Ming vintage, that refers to the kind his grandparents owned. That they came from China through trade alludes to the intriguing ties between the countries, especially if seen through an archive of goods and effects and heirlooms that is put together with circumspection. We sense a delicate, even fastidious, hand that copies form, stencils silhouettes, pastes collages, and draws with affection. De Guia intuits the ethos of keeping but does not install it as a fetish; but rather as a continuing dialogue with objects at our disposal.

The Aquilizans and De Guia embody an ethnographic streak, devoted to the so-called “social life of things” and the spell that the material has on people. Their practice is largely strategic, making do with what is at hand, but also ethical, sensitive to other people in the vast network of subjectivities who are objectified, on the one hand, and regain their agency through the sharing of burdens, on the other.  

Allure

The role of image is paramount in the history of visual culture in the Philippines. It was indispensable in Catholic conversion and later in the consumption of American civilization through its mass media.  From this scheme of spectacle, within both catechism and entertainment, the image would be a source of instruction and medium of critique. Kiko Escora and Iggy Rodriguez grapple with the make-up of this image, and try to shape the reality that is able to question dominant iconography.

Escora is fixated on stances, the posture of figures as they are caught in certain acts, preen before or turn away from the lens, or demonstrate some kind of telling gesture. Lurking beneath this sort of self-absorbed somnambulism, with peculiar bodies dancing to a queer choreography, or simply striking either a nonchalant or a studied pose, is a desire to engage or be engaged in a tryst. The latter requires consummation.

But this surface is not merely gloss or veneer. It is substantial for it is the very form of mediatization that the artist is keen to uncover. In I Like Boys, he filches a page from a magazine, an interview with the Hollywood actress Cameron Diaz, who is pictured as basking in the sun in a black swimsuit against the cityscape.  In Do You Think I’m Sexy, a solitary skull seethes, its magenta radiating like inner heat; it is a memento mori that foretells decay but at the same time remembers carnality. In these paintings, Escora harnesses the potentials of acrylic to simulate the “commercial” and oftentimes exhausting quality of pop. This he does to enhance his spontaneity as a painter who has a very lively intuition about how certain fantasies of the body and sex, the seduction of urbanism and the decay of character come together. In contrast to his cool charcoal works, which are effective in delineating the fragility of the camera-savvy hipsters and style icons, these pieces are more confrontational and provocative, more politically poised to unveil the consequences of desire.

Iggy Rodriguez provides an interesting foil to the eroticism of Escora’s scenes. He references a persuasive repertoire of protest from the social realism of the seventies, and inflects it with an exigency that we had thought would wither away in the hothouse of a postmodern cosmopolitan lifestyle.  But his aesthetic is not derivative of the said syntax; rather it is its vernacular, a language that is difficult to place at a time when politically partisan art tends to be seen as an instrument, a function of a program and not a speculative exploration of the possibilities of change. His pen-and-ink works evince traces of the editorial drawings of such exemplars as Danilo Dalena and Jose Tence Ruiz, with a measured mix of grimness and whimsy.  

A man surrounded by pigs in a slaughterhouse in Inconvenient Truth may imply the porcine and murderous politics in the Philippines in which slayings are nearly routine and rudiment.  Another figure bearing the weight of a cargo of machines on his back in Other Man’s Load is a searing rebuke of the unsparing demands of capitalism on a proletariat that slaves away to amass it. And a politician and a general wheel and deal as their heads mutate into monsters and viruses and as people plummet in the tragic background in Iron Logic.

Both Escora and Rodriguez instinctively describe instances of overkill in a society that indulges itself too much and where people languish behind guises and expire under the sway of avarice.   They train their sights on the body politic itself, how it performs in the theater of norms, crimes, and transgressions.

Enigma

There are levels to consider in the works of Wire Rommel Tuazon and Jose Legaspi: the literal that forms compelling content, the hyper-real or surreal that blurs the distinction between the fictive and the factual, and the meta-linguistic that foregrounds text for Tuazon and reveals autobiography for Legaspi. The result is the disruption of a neutral narrative by the writing of the text on the painting for the former and the personal history of the artist bleeding into what may well be a dreamscape for the latter. But there is difficulty in how meaning transpires. The text and the image in Tuazon, combined unpredictably and culled from various sources like the encyclopedia and the internet, could be disjunctive and distantiating; and the clues in Legaspi’s sexualized and macabre universe are truly idiosyncratic: a naked man French-kissing a head without a body and the same personage crawling on a remote room or alley, looking bestial and malevolent, and perhaps in doing so, becomes more authentically human.  

This bewilderment is confounded by the sensuousness of the paintings and the drawings, the sense of marvel at exquisite skill and unerring precision. Their talent enables them to resist the picturesque and instead define the beautiful in confrontation with radical horror or incomprehension. In conceptual and visceral revelations, their art assumes depth; it fathoms the value of sentiment in a very exacting reflection on puzzling phrases that are foisted on image in the oeuvre of Tuazon and the intricacies of the phantasmagoria of the artist in the corpus of Legaspi.

This is the context of the enigma in their travail. Tuazon paints hands clasping and piling on top of each other and juxtaposes it with “Lotus Sutra,” an infant inside an incubator with “Ursa Minor Lab,” and Harry Houdini and his wife doing séance with “Trauma Industry.”  The relationship between image and text is fraught and intractable. And the titles, respectively, are nowhere near clear: Surrender to God, Surface Phenomena, For Ashiya Mara, Little Dipper’s Lullabies. But taken together, they may signify the afterlife, beginning with a prayer in the Buddhist cosmos, a reckoning of the spirit beyond the earth, and a tribute to a daughter’s life in a different constellation.  These texts in staid sans serif typography serve as a screen that defamiliarizes images, which may be too commonplace or random, and evokes an elsewhere or a hereafter between the sensing of painting, the cognition of word, and the personal pining of the artist.

Sentimental Value is the first exhibition of Philippine contemporary art that introduces to the Chinese public in China a latitude of expressions from one of the liveliest art worlds in Southeast Asia.  In a season when power seems to tilt to Asia, the Philippines stakes a claim, not so much to exceed the frenzy of the current market as to insinuate that between scarcity and riches is a creative sphere of emancipation. We should eternally abide by it and never wish it away despite the myriad mediations of capital and the brazen abductions of art.