WATCHING THE SEEDS GROW

The Mustard Seed

New works by Marcel Antonio

April 3-6, 2014

The Gallery, Greenbelt 5

Ayala Center, Makati City

1. Road to An Anti-Impersonal Symbology

MARCEL Antonio’s scenes have been viewed as narrative. By some—including yours truly—, they’ve been approached as quasi- and pseudo-narrative, more concerned with a certain enigma I’ve recently described as a sort of “blue funk erotica”. I described this “blue funk erotica” value here and here.

     In the present collection, however, I am eager to acquiesce to others’ semiotics and confess that a more pronounced symbolism in the artist has indeed come to the forefront. But, doubtful of this, as I am doubtful of any critical certainty upon artistic intent, I stepped on a doorstep critics have been told to be wary of, and that is the doorstep of talking to the artist about his real intent of the moment. I disobeyed the warning and knocked on the door.

     But I wasn’t keen on asking the artist about my readings’ correctness, only about his painting process. After all, artists do discourse on their process in exhibition catalogues and manifesto/thesis announcements during interviews. And, in certain snobbish quarters, artists are deemed significant or otherwise by a process particular to them or a group of them. Beatriz Milhazes’ imagery wouldn’t really be deemed special if she didn’t have that value of a different process added to the production of her imagery, would it? Argue with me if you like, but it has always been process that defined the being of every significant movement in the painting art. Action painting was but the bawdlerization of process itself, and jazz underscored improvisation as the immediate process occurring inside the structured product of a process of planning.

     And so my conversation with Marcel Antonio might give us a clearer picture of a thesis that has been so often waylaid by traditional critical self-centeredness, that is, by the critic’s intent to frame his reading as an exhibition by itself almost independent of the “presumed dead” artist. That tradition is no more pronounced than in the Philippines, where artists are seldom wont (or allowed) to announce themselves as thesis authors on their exhibitions’ catalogues.

     But, again, I did not knock on the artist’s door to ask him about his art thesis but to ask him about his process which should be his thesis, or at least should/could be a factor in a comprehensive appreciation of any critical thesis on the artist’s thesis (really the artist’s thesis as imagined by the critic’s thesis).

     And this, over coffee, was what I and the artist came up with:

ANTONIO’S symbology (whether quasi- or pseudo- or closed-text-) is not really “blueprinted” from the start. Like a good painting, it starts as a traffic of pencil or charcoal or pastel marks directly applied as ghostly presences to a trigonometry on canvas. We have a formal composition involving figures in arranged spaces. The figures in turn acquire gestures, facial expressions, glances towards positions in the compass, poses, and so on, bent on acquiring a sort of dramatic dance that has yet no meaning. The figures’ hands and glances and poses become pointing arrows that provide pictorial motion. Yes, exactly—the concern is initially formal, with the eyes of a character placed at, say, 8 o’clock directed towards 2 o’clock, a figure at 3 o’clock pointing a finger to an object at 7 o’clock.

     However, now, that’s simplifying the initial process too much, because simultaneous (not necessarily working together yet) to this formal beginning is the play with free association (which may later have an impact on the titling stage). Antonio may appropriate a dictionary of dreams or an online random sentence generator or the Inspiro app (an idea generator) on his iPad, all for the purpose of inspiring a drama springboard. A working title might be as kinky as “KC Concepcion tips the avocado hat of Slavoj Zizek” or as lewd as “A nun tilts a monk’s garden towards suburbia and Hollywood”. At this point, you may call him a Surrealist. Who isn’t nowadays, anyway?

     But all this playing around with signifiers to arrive at significance within a formal arrangement might impress some as too plastic if one didn’t know the fact that some artists who work in this way are really already planning their work during the process, if only by way of tapping their subconscious’ prejudices for and against “things”. The play is as necessary as art qua an affirmation of life. In this sense, it is in the negation of play that one becomes purely plastic. And in Antonio’s case of playing around with the contents of life, there is the artist’s definitely far-from-plastic bias towards “the enigma stereotype” and bias against the “happy” moment. In this sense, the artist does display a taste, mostly subconscious, invoking his right to a marriage with the moods depicting ennui, melancholia, de Chirico, Chagall, and so on. “Ayoko lang talaga ng smiling face (I'm just not fond of smiling faces),” says the artist, flashing a smirk. You can’t be more organic than that.

     This process, or process of processes, would then work onwards and work together until it finally gets things to gel. Gel, that is, color-wise, mood drama-wise, perhaps semantically, but primarily towards the fulfilment of a visual logic that had worked through its highways of visual premises and visual conclusions, with its visual conclusive finding finally sparked by the luminescence of the four or so layers of paint that now function as a glamorous glazed image.

     But I’m lying. For, at this arrival, there is the equally primary recognition of a power in the center, a drama at the center (not necessarily in the physical middle), that has decided on the peripherality of the peripheral and the graveness of the central gravity.

     Add to this feeling of fulfilment lies the bonus of recognizing the enigma of the recurring motif in relation to the other pieces in the studio. The power of the center has occurred in each piece and in the solar system of pieces around and in the galaxy of works that the artist had churned out through the decades retained in his memory. The beauty of the recurring motif has also arrived.

     And so we come to the titling stage, as if that wasn’t already working with the daily progress of the work, as it is the case often with artists working in this manner. Books read are recognized, movies seen are presences acknowledged, news events come into play, the working title bolstered or felled. The title comes not as a conclusion to a contrived process for closing an oeuvre but as a signature on a plate that has been acknowledged to be personal. Anything less than or beyond the personal is not yet done, the arrival must arrive at the personal. This is the satisfaction that comes with the recognition of the old familiar recurring motif, which we critics often desire to call the thesis element. The recurring motif becomes proof of the personal.

     It is now, at this point, that we can say Antonio’s symbolism has happened, in the past as open ones in acknowledgment of the values others may attach to the same picture, in the present as both secretly personal and publicly public by virtue of the publicly-shared referents of the chosen titles. The title itself has become a center.

     Then again, it’s not as if the title wasn’t already there progressing with the daily evolution of the work as it was initiated by the traffic of pencil or charcoal or pastel marks directly applied as ghostly presences to the trigonometry on canvas. So much for this talk about process. [FIN]

2. Depot of Anti-Expressionist Symbolism

SOME Antonio followers might have seen that 2012 Antonio work titled Poetry in Three Tongues. I call back this work to show how in the current show of mainly 2013 works it may represent Antonio’s transformation from an artist of a previous Blue Funk Erotica to being one for a new BFE direction. In years previous, Antonio’s BFE rested luxuriantly behind his quasi-narrative and pseudo-narrative still stage plays as well as in his illustration of various existing literary narratives that turned out to be more like BFE variations on the original stories they purported to depict.

monochrome photo of Antonio's Poetry in Three Tongues, 42 x 54", acrylic on canvas, 2012. From http://www.surrealismnow.com/totem/featuredartistpage.html

     That 2012-13 transformation leads us to the present collection of works, painted through the stretch of 2013, that momentarily (or permanently) leaves the poststructuralist openness of the artist’s older paintings to almost hype up that part in Antonio with a more closed text (as against open text) symbolist intents.

     Where is this symbolism leading us toward? In that 2012 work Poetry in Three Tongues, Antonio provided us a hint—familiar images of concerns mundane (chess play), deep (zoology study), and routine-economic (butchery work). As usual, Antonio’s portrait faces here defied expression (and expressionism) and played up his wont for that drama of thinking that in turn inspires viewers to inhabit a similar world of contemplation.

     What is the point of this contemplation? What should be the object of our contemplation? Another 2012 piece I would like to go back to is Aegri Somnia, which was a more literal erotica showing an undressing female’s back and backside (talk of facelessness as dis-expression that also hurled at our faces an ass!). Around this erotic central figure were: a clown/jester/harlequin on his way out carrying on his right shoulder a young female with a likely-false sceptre and crown in her hands (she had a mesmerized/drunken look, unworthy of a queen, directed at “the cameraman”, and Antonio avoided showing teeth in her open mouth); a student or intellectual sleeping beside his open book or journal; a gourmand studying a slice of meat on his fork; a young female figure observing a butterfly. If you had seen this piece, you would have noticed that action and expression, respectively, were present only on the bird diving toward a river and on a cannibal pig showing his teeth upon a roasted mate. This work’s drama was an ennui- or tiredness-filled world for humans, horror of horrors, where dramatic expressionism was the mere luxury of animals. And although anyone could have structured Marxist readings of a worker-capitalist or subject-royalty or powerless-powerful relationship into an Antonio scene like Aegri Somnia, in the end they would find themselves in a mere depiction of a quiet or hidden misery behind a contentedness both political and psychological. (If it’s an aesthetic contentedness, it then offers political and psychological symbolism independent of expressionism’s shock methodology).

     The psychology around this relationship gets clarified in some of the works in the present collection. In The Do-Nothing King, the royalty-subject relationship is more explicitly used to show a squawking, supposedly bird-brained bird-king (expression allowed on a roi fainéant!). And although the singer-figure on the left is showing his teeth as he sings and could be read as Antonio’s version of Munch’s The Scream, context frustrates (mocks?) expressionism as that figure’s singing ultimately ends up on the senses as nothing more than a picture of submission to a job’s requirement. Here is Antonio’s symbolist genius working through a Lee Strasberg device, quietly method-acting through space without the need to screech.

EXPRESSIONISM was inspired by 19^th-century symbolism and carried forward even into this period of the 21^st century the latter’s torch. But Antonio’s reservation towards expressionist symbolism is not in any way similar to Stuckists’ claims to “authenticity” versus Conceptualism.

     For instance, in what would otherwise be a Buddhist-cum-Christian narrative piece, the show’s eponymously-titled The Mustard Seed, we are presented a moustachioed man in a suit and tie carrying an axe, one leg embraced (hindered) by a dwarf, as he approaches the supposedly mustard tree. Lesbians kiss in the background, another male figure on the right eats indifferent to what’s around him, and two blank-faced females appear on the foreground. It’s all a product of an attitude that seeks not to destroy an expressionist bent but merely to offer an alternative—the alternative of disengagement. This modesty, compared to expressionist self-hype of its direct engagement, is his own modest mustard seed to achieving an aesthetic heaven.

The Mustard Seed, 60 x 60", oil on canvas, 2013

     If there’s any mockery in this show at all, it’s in the subtle mockery of expressionism’s tantrums. As an option to these tantrums, Antonio offers symbolism’s postmodern self-consciousness or self-semiotics. I was already seeing it in 2012, as in an acrylic titled The Mirror Stage, where Antonio portrayed a Lacanian self-remembering. In the picture, a boy pondered himself on a girl’s looking-glass while the girl lying on the ground contemplated her imaginary self while looking at “the painter’s camera”. Defying the concept of self-contemplation as synonymous to narcissism (you could see a pool of fishes in the background)—perhaps narcissism has more in common with tantrums and complaining—, Antonio demonstrated that postmodern self-consciousness is self-alienating instead of self-identifying, actually a denial of identification even as it struggles with the truth of the surrounding illusions. Or is this denial of identification verily a resultant of this very struggle with the truth of those surrounding illusions? Ultimately, after the fact, all those (de Chirico-esque) objects in Antonio’s compositions act as mirrors for his characters’ self-conscious crises.

     In a piece in the present show titled A Love Encounter, the lovers’ dance and the accoutrements of courting likewise become mirrors for this self-alienation. Animals are mirrors for contemplating the relationship between self and those living others, going beyond anthropocentrism. Mulling over one’s nudity becomes a meditation on one’s place in the existing interrelationships in nature, on one’s humanity within the ecology. But lest we equate this self-consciousness solely with intellectual reflection (zoology, perhaps), it can also lead to the denial of the self through escaping intellection and falling for the (albeit boring) freedom of socializing (card games, perhaps, or hobbies like sewing).

     And so, coming full circle, we come to understand Antonio’s obsession with ennui in the years past. It is not simply “boredom” the way the word would translate to English, but the product of man’s estranged relationship with a challenging world. It is in fact an almost-sad surrender to the mysterious Immensity. But while some would illustrate alienation with the self-deprecating smile of humour or self-effacement, Antonio illustrates it with features of reflection (science, magic), contrivance (religion, myth-making, story-making), indifference (the ennui we see), and subtle or silent (because fearsome of aloneness) detestation. We see that last struggle in Myths to Live By, through the psychology of a dancing couple in the foreground who may not really be into their being a couple—is marriage one of the social myths Antonio would want to include in his Joseph Campbellian list of myths? We don’t know.

     In To Be or Not to Be, Antonio combines elements of cubism, the collage, and Pop art to posit his characters in a psychology of awe, speechlessness, and innocence/ignorance vis a vis a colourful world of consumer goods and decisions. The human perspective here becomes no more intelligent than a dog’s.

     Other possible relationships (between man and objects as well as between man and others) are explored further in a Kafkaesque composition titled The Test. Antonio’s acting direction works well here in representing the tension between two debating male friends, again subtly presented instead of loudly.

     Another subtle trick is used for Untitled, where a post-coital scene of two young people sleeping as curling shapes on a beach is foregrounded by the sea’s curves, a curling fish set within. Is the fish asleep (in harmony with the couple) or not (contrasting with the couple)?

     A masterstroke of subtle symbology is Life Is A Struggle Against Sleep, where Antonio’s bored actors struggling to kill time with their respective chosen interests—as mere workers for or subjects to a giant hand of power—are backgrounded by a de Chirico window to a metaphysical world, transporting thus the ennui and acquiescence to other possible philosophical or even political heights.

Life Is A Struggle Against Sleep, 42 x 54", 2013

     The Devil’s Backside (a word-play, perhaps, around the title of the del Toro horror flick The Devil’s Backbone) tames the terror in the devil and night owl figures through a post-coital-ennui composition that’s been a signature Antonio mannerism. Notice also the artist’s nice habit of inhabiting many of his scenes with “workers,” in this case a brass-band musician.

     More workers inhabit The Midnight Radio Hour, just as they do many of the pieces in this show. But in Midnight Radio Hour, the scene occurs in the bright of day, with the modern-day urban inhabitants going about their business (is Antonio mocking or emulating grade school social studies textbook illustrations?), expressionless, with one asleep. Thus, even Diego Rivera’s Marxist expressionism gets a kicking in this river of Antonio dramas.

     The drama of roles is played on further in The River Dreams of Angel Flores, Jr., where we see the living head of the late Angel Flores, Jr. (aka Roberto Chabet) floating on a dark river, his body left on a wheelchair at the bank. You could say this is Antonio’s salute to last year’s passing of his dear professor and godfather, acknowledging the aesthetic guru’s eternal presence in the Philippine art world’s river of artmaking dreams; but doesn’t Antonio also here regard the river as separate from his worldly concerns? And so Chabet’s open-eyed intellectual leaning towards the abstract and the conceptual is thrown into this collectively-emulated river, as if to say, “look at me, sir; see me go back to the symbolist narratives and myths that you so left out in your (equally mythological, by the way) ocean of preferences.”

     Indeed, Antonio’s symbology does try to cover all the grounds of his personal semiotics, from where he works like a free jazz artist who starts from A, goes on to B and C and D and so on, and later goes back to A. This is what decides for Antonio’s process of adding or replacing images to a composition. For instance, in Antonio’s 2012 work Elective Affinities (not in this show), the artist’s philosophical bent started as a visual pun on the egg in Magritte’s own Elective Affinities, which latter piece was itself a pun around the title of a Goethe novel on chemical affinity. In Antonio’s version, the egg was a bright female thigh near the groin; the Goethean chemical incompatibility, meanwhile, was dramatized by the painting’s male figure’s seeming rapture directed not at the female figure but at another object of interest: a book. The Goethe theme went to Magritte went to Antonio went to Goethe. Or was this Antonio’s self-critique on possible incompatibilities within his own symbolist erotica occurring in that surrealist space between his symbolist intent and his audience’s reading?

     In his new works, as in Two Girls Reading a Book, Antonio’s self-critique on possible incompatibilities within his own symbolist erotica is illustrated by the distances occurring between objects of intellection (e.g. books) and the knowledge pursuer, between knowledge pursuer and the disinterested, between what could be knowledge and what could be pop rumor, as if that last portrays symbol reading itself. Indeed, in 2013-14, two girls (or boys) reading a book, or reading a painting on a wall for that matter, has entered the gallery of the mind way beyond where Picasso’s work with the same title could go when it attacked our eyes in 1934.

     The Mystery of the Butterfly Wing, meanwhile, compartmentalizes individuals into profiles with props. That makes that title quite apt, considering that in science that would precisely translate to “the mystery of diversity”.

     Then, Antonio takes this compartmentalization farther in Untitled (with big fish), where the partitions are more psychological than spatial. The cubist-collage format as dream generates a social take on urban alienation.

Untitled (with big fish), 43 x 54", acrylic on canvas?, 2013

     Finally, in Pandora, the psychological partitions turn into portrait images of self-immersion, this despite the image in the background of a relational activity (a relational activity which could in itself be a product of a self’s or the involved selves’ selfishness). Self-immersion as self-worship? We know better, of course; judging from all the Antonios we have seen through the years, any self-immersion is really an immersion in the distance between the self and something or someone else. Self-immersion as the root of all evil? Perhaps.

     Indeed, with this collection’s dizzying array of intelligent significances, it is already a cause for celebration that in spite of the commercial popularity of the many sorts of Marcel Antonios peddled to the art market these past two-plus decades, a popularity enough to content an artist towards luxuriating in the routine of mass producing his success, the Antonio thesis has proved once again that it will never ever be dead in its tracks. Year after year the BFE thesis develops. Well, perhaps it has really only just begun. [FIN]

Passion for Profit (and Vice-Versa)

THE prolific Filipino ceramic artist Ugo Bigyan (he prefers to be called a mere "potter") has always espoused a 1:1 ratio for his entire output, the one part being on the side of business, the other on the side of art. This is not an alien doctrine to most successful artists, although some of them would deny having placed an equal premium on "commercialism". Bigyan's commercial items (he supplies three Glorietta stores, among many other mall stores) are neither crass nor condescending in their exploiting and feeding a supposedly less "academic" market. Quality is distributed to all classes and markets, that's his production's policy. And as for my use of the word "exploiting," we must remember that in marketing management the word is seldom used in its negative, irresponsible sense. And as for my saying "supposedly less academic," I must apologize as we must likewise remember that the market of higher-end artistic products are not necessarily always academic in their approach to sensual objects of purchase.

    In a capitalist environ, or -- if you will -- a free enterprise system, all art necessarily becomes commercial. Or, to be more blunt, all art is commercial. Anti-commercial art can be categorized into two: one patronizing a limited (therefore unprofitable) "cognoscente" class market which may actually include both learned and merely pretentious elements, the other exercising a form of rebellion against the role money plays in art, or otherwise flaunting a freedom from the necessity of selling. Some so-called installation art (a genre which blossomed in the '70s) have not always decried the money influence, for we might remember that the US' National Endowment for the Arts and such other funding institutions offer hefty sums to artists who wish to practice in this traditionally non-profit genre. But some who have been vocal in their installation-art practice about the supposed corruption of painting and sculpture have been able to declare their stand from positions that either maintained day jobs or otherwise solicited maintenance fees from their family wealth or from private contributions.
    I happen to be in a similar art practice, with my six online books of poems and one online short story collection, all being products sans profit. My day job not only allowed me the weekend luxury of writing but likewise access to office internet facilities. :-) When Dr. Zhivago (or rather, Boris Pasternak) wrote in a poem "And for your noble work no payment claim,/ Your art alone your wage", I wonder what sort of poet was in his mind -- a doctor-poet like him? A carpenter-poet of social realism subsidized by the state? Pasternak's medical practice, a half-commercial venture, sustained his art, making his art one with a possibly quasi-commercial source. The only true anti -commercial art, therefore, is the one that's produced only once and with the intention of dying, to be thus intentionally disabled from doing any further art or any future acceptance of a remuneration. Art that wishes to make further art would indeed solicit the question as to how one might be able to keep on doing it, what should sustain the artist's nutrition through the weeks. In the same way that no communist can survive in a capitalist society without partaking of the processes of capitalist exchange (including one's labor as one's capital), so the anti-commercial artist cannot claim freedom from commercialism until he leaves the face of that same consumer market's capitalist processes.
    Of course, what is often disparaged as commercial is art that has been downgraded, perceived to have compromised with -- to satisfy the profit motive of -- producers, patrons, and/or dealers. A sellout art, it's often called. Or the patron or dealer himself is the one labeled as a commercial dealer, as if there is such an animal as a non-commercial one. Now, such downgrades as we've mentioned do not necessarily produce lesser art. Picasso's ceramic plates have often been touted as some of Picasso's commercial works, never mind that a pejorative radical criticism would eventually regard Picasso's entire body of works as wholly commercial for their patron-friendly colors. Picasso's plates would now command serious study from many an art critic or art aficionado, and so does that mean that the commercialism has disappeared by virtue of their academization?

    Picasso plate

(photo from http://thealavigna.blogspot.com/2012/07/lately-ive-been-so-curious-about.html)

MARKETING men offer us this good advice: make good products as a first step to market success. However, in the same breath they'd also say, if there is no market for our products we can always make one. From Piccaso, let's fast-forward to the '70s and '80s. Why several artists marketed their stuff as "ugly paintings" in the '80s, or Bad Painting in the '70s, whether from a disgust for a burgeoning trend using, say, patron-friendly pretty coloration in many of the paintings of a decade, or whether from an awareness that there was a growing part of the market that had that punk rock-inspired disgust and had become bored with paintings in general, I do not remember. Was that de Kooning-ness a demonstration of the opposite of selling out? How many of their paintings were sold in the process? If they got sold, were the non-commercial painters unwitting participants as waiting commodities of an in-progress commercial marketing process?

    And as for art that is not art, so to speak, as in "popular cinema" (as against "art cinema" or film festival cinema), there exists such prejudicial tags as suspense thrillers, horror films, romantic comedy, and so on. Quentin Tarantino delivered the loudest statement at Cannes on this issue with Pulp Fiction, demonstrating that poetry (linguistic as well as visual) is possible within established Hollywood pop cliches and formats better known as pulp (meaning "cheap"). Katheryn Bigelow has done it too in her lesser-known films. Recently, in Kill Bill, Tarantino demonstrated further that there can be such a thing as art-for-art's-sake cinema that utilizes Hollywood formats and formulas. Not to use  them for some serious artistic end, really, other than to appropriate them for some redirection of audience reactions from these same-but-twisted formats or genres. These utilizations, by the way, while of artistic value can also be regarded as pure, blind entertainment, if only for the reason that the elements used were by themselves major parts of the source formats' entertainment value. Here, then, is the corollary idea that Hollywood formats may perhaps have always been more about the art of their genre than the stories and the plot; therefore, actions within may have been more important, to audiences as well as the filmmakers, than what all the action was about and for. Therefore, not exactly more commercial than Art.
    Consider that up till Kill Bill, such art-for-art's sake claims inside Hollywood were still only being associated with French and German short films (filmic films) that showed a lot of those blurs, scratches on the film, editing flairs, double exposures, swinging cameras, and so on, that seemed fraught with the obsession to bring painting and Pollock into the photoplay medium as materials, even while Kill Bill is not filmic. Tarantino had to bring art cinema out of the art cinema houses. Tarantino thus achieved for the turn of the millennium what the pop artists of the '60s (Warhol, Lichtenstein, etc.) achieved with kitsch, pushing pop and kitsch and the trampy up to a level wherein they became valid material for artmaking.
    But maybe I'm wrong. For how many Hollywood houses marketed their films for the special FX involved, or for the martial art choreography developed therein? The only difference, however, was that instead of these films embracing such elements for "art"-making, the elements were enjoyed for themselves. And would that make for art? Perhaps not. Nevertheless, here is still not a question of the difference between pure art and commercialism, but simply the difference between art (which is entertainment) and elemental entertainment as an "art" or art.

wallpaper for Kill Bill 

    And so, we may say art remains art when it utilizes the little arts of the world (special effects, cinematographic craft, etc.) for holistic expressions. But should we say that in holism is integrity and in its absence is selling out? Nope. Creating "shallow crafts" is not equivalent to commercialization, either, the same way that commercialization is not the devil that ruins art. Consider kitsch, a longtime enemy of art and good taste and one of the products of commercial merchandising interests: there may be a lot of art that are simply bad and derivative and deserve to be lambasted as kitsch, but using (consciously or unconsciously) the kitschy sensibility as material for good art is a different thing altogether. Laying Mona Lisa tiles on one's kitchen walls may be kitschy to one critic, but to another critic doing so and doing it in extremis  to come up with a so-aware or not-so-aware contextual statement on the kitsch-ification of the Mona Lisa in the age of Roman tourism would be using kitsch practice as material and thematic content for an art concept. It is possible for such art to attract a wide audience, which will not make it commercial, or attract no audience, which won't make it non-commercial.

    Statements and concepts abound in good art today, whether in New York or Berlin or Manila, and many if not most of these are for sale. In the same manner that novelists sell their novels and filmmakers their films, painters get rich by the commercialization of their art. But the critical wrongness of a painter's heavily-selling art would not be due to its commercialization but due to its own wrongness. Any form of "non-commercialization" would certainly not redeem it, critically.

    All good art that struggled in the market place is still commercial art that simply didn't compromise to a formula of commercialization but chose a different commercial direction, say, a long-term profit over a short-term one. As Tarantino has loudly shown, one can be "commercial" to achieve good art out of that commercialism. The painter Piet Mondrian produced a similar resultant with his work in a probably less-aware fashion. Five large paintings by Mondrian and his statement would already have been clear in that age when art was still covered by journalism. But no, he had to paint more, and still more, all under that same reductive thesis of his!  "Commercialism"? Perhaps. But in the end he demonstrated that the simplest, most basic formula can attain a rich number of variations to ultimately make up a collective output that can be regarded by the forgiving as one single artistic epic of an opus, profit-motivated or not, profit-motivated and  not.

    Many an artist have been practicing what business and product marketers refer to as positioning. And this with a brave struggle. Having come up with a painting that moved him, one may have decided to do more of the same and so position himself as a painter of a type of painting similar to what he's produced. Commercial? Perhaps. But so is everyone else in choosing a career, a success path, an area of expertise. Therein lies the motor of our merchant society within which we make and sell art. It should be commendable enough that each of us struggles with a brave fight.

    Commercial motivations, admitted as so or not, subconscious or vocal, have produced the best and the worst commodities in our time. An inescapable capitalist curse, we say. And yet "commercial motivations" have not been absent in communist states; in fact, these same motivations had kept many there working for societal or state approval.

    So, it really shouldn't be hard to understand that the artist's own profit motives are no different from the artisan's or the engineer's or the critic's. But not a few painters hate themselves for being pawns of a commercial system, and they ought to be made aware of the virtue (over the evil) within it. Some, meanwhile, in oft-unaware and thus not so self-critical positions towards the commercial facets of their art-selling, can only be looked upon in awe, in the same way we feel stupendously gratified by the coffeeshop-owner's sincerity in personally making our cappuccino (his mind off the fact that he'd personally take our payment later). When you love your coffee, do you call it a commercial cappuccino? It is when you hate it that you should.

SO, commercialism and non-commercialism ought not to be the cop-out idea of a dilemma that attempts to explain bad and good art. Bad art will remain bad, commercialized or not. Sure, it's poor quality that dictates our suspicion of a high degree of "commercialism" or corruption. But what if the cappuccino barista thought he/she was making really great coffee? In contrast, the artist who designs his art for both critical and commercial success ought not to be faulted for the virtue of finding mass appeal appealing. Conversely, the bad artist who has been patronized by an infinity of buyers who thought they knew what was great art, may have found his mass appeal appealing. But it must not be waylaid that the real reason we hate the bad artist's art is not because of the patronage but because of the absence of criticality around and within his success.
    All art is commercial, especially from the buyer's point. When your buyers are happy, they call you "non-commercial," an artist full of integrity. But since intrinsically all art is positively commercial whether we like it or not (whether we're aware of it or not), so-called negative "commercialism" or corruptibility in artists or coffeeshop restaurateurs becomes nothing more than a subjective view in the art and in the practice of art-buying, a cop-out explanation for our bad judgment. And since a buyer knows full well that all art is commercial, he ought not to complain that he got the sad end of a bargain, responsible as he ought to have been as a judge qua buyer.
    Recently, there's been this brouhaha over a supposed mercenary spat between a Church's authorities and the folk painter Nemesio Miranda. Miranda, commissioned by the Church elements to do a painting for the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue Shrine for the Holy Virgin, allegedly had been consistent in bidding for a high price (PhP400,000 plus) for the simple cleaning, and a much higher price (PhP1.5 million) for the full restoration, of a painting he made for the same Shrine. The Church allegedly haggled with Miranda (news the painter denies, claiming the Church could have actually negotiated). The spat came forth when the Church elements concerned decided to proceed with their own restoration, claiming they couldn't afford Miranda's quotation. The Church elements said that they had every right to do with the paintings whatever they wished since it was theirs, that they paid for it. Miranda cried foul, saying it was his artwork, and the restoration omitted certain parts of the original (no, practically erased these parts with a white daub). It was his concept, he said, and by the restoration his concept was denigrated.
    Clearly, Miranda (and his defenders in the press) missed the point. Forgetting he had consistently been acting the part of the artist aware of his commercialism. Asking to be paid for the restoration of his own concept already presupposed his concept to be less valuable than the payment, or coevally valuable as the payment, Then, Miranda insisted it was an ethical question. Suddenly, Miranda was on the side of artists who keep on claiming that their art is purely conceptual and only secondarily commercial. Obviously, Miranda failed to see that the issue was a purely commercial question. The question is this, which I shall henceforth illustrate by way of an idea for an art project:
    I will create a painting and exhibit it at a gallery. Before anyone can buy it, I shall buy it myself. Then I'll paint over it. Then I shall exhibit the redid painting, go through the same process of buying it myself and ruining it. And on. And on. Till I tire of it. I can do whatever I want with the piece because I bought it and therefore it's mine. I bought it and re-bought it, and every time I bought it I redid it. Also, I can do whatever I want with the painting because I was the artist. That would be the height of ethics, then. Permission unnecessary because nobody asks permission from oneself. Especially if that oneself is both artistic and commercial over his concept.

patron-delighting Warhol painting

(photo from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/104286547593608990/)

    And if I can do this, I shall have demonstrated a truly non-commercial art that -- in the manner of Tarantino -- shall have successfully used commercialism as my material and thematic content. I might thus achieve for the middle of this decade what the pop artists of the '60s (Warhol, Lichtenstein, etc.) achieved with kitsch, pushing pop and kitsch and the trampy up as valid material for artmaking, in my case pushing what I'd probably immodestly perceive as the work of my own genius (reworked every time in a kind of self-criticality) as valid material for a portrait of artists' passion for concepts. But I won't be so hypocritical and claim freedom from commercialism, for I shall remain aware that what made me buy my own paintings and abuse them was a certain luxury in my convent, free from hunger. I will thus not deny that I can afford any quotation from any expensive school of art that shares my taste (since that school of art that shares my taste is my own, cheap self).

    If all art is commercial and we cannot escape it, from living with it in art, then, we can see one final enveloping moral here. In the commercial world, one is judged by what he sells. Also by what he buys. In this sense, then, who we buy is a reflection of ourselves. Who we choose to sell to reflects who we look up to. We are judged thus, but mostly by ourselves, in the now and in the later. And the reason why there is no law against an art patron's right to ruin an art piece he bought (save a contract of sale specifying conditions) is this issue of trust between the buyer and the seller who in essence have been morally (not legally) married to each other by their similar taste in art. Being married thus, we can judge the relationship by the presence or absence of a continuing happiness in it. For, as we said, if you like your coffee, that coffee can hardly be called a commercialized cup of coffee. The sad thing is with the Church, which hates divorces. For it could have been made aware that when one enters a marriage, one also risks the possibility of future separation. Such happened between the above Church elements and Miranda.
    So, let's get back to the legality of it, of this separation. The difference between a wedding and a buyer-seller partnership is that in the latter there are no conjugal properties, there is only a product sold which was the product bought. In such a commercial arrangement, the critical appreciation of the buyer has made the art. The buying was a form of criticality without which commerce or exchange would not have been possible. It's not the other way around. All art is commercial and an art's value is relative to a market's criticality. An art's success or failure depends on this criticality. Therefore, this criticality is Lord; it is not the seller who is. This surrender by the latter is demonstrated by the act of exchange -- the money for the artwork. Once out of the artist's hands, the artwork becomes the sole possession of the criticality. If a millionaire buyer chose to leave my oeuvre in the rain, that was his prerogative and privilege.
    But what about the issue of good art and bad art? Those, too, are subsumed within the dynamics of a market, not within the dynamics of production. Again, commercialism is not the evil factor, it is in fact the sole measure of a market's degree of criticality. [END]