On the idea of there being real art critics distinct from the mere ass kissers

(a mini-essay inspired by a public Facebook post by artist Kin Misa)

SA ganang akin, ang problema ng art critic, akala niya siya lang ang dapat pinakikinggan tungkol sa art ni Juan. Ang problema ni Juan, gusto niya siya lang ang pinakikinggan dahil art niya raw yun. Ang problema ng art collector na may maraming pera, gusto niyang iparating na siya lang ang may huling salita sa kung aling artwork ni Juan ang superb at aling art ni Pedro ang walang kuwenta.
    Ako ay political critic. Wala akong pakialam sa problema ng ibang political critics tulad ni Tom. Wala rin akong pakialam sa problema ng mga pulitiko tulad ni Dick. Wala rin akong pakialam sa problema ng mga powerbrokers tulad ni Harry na may hawak na mga political pundits at pulitiko na rin.
    Pero, teka. Mali yata ako. Kasi sa mga sinabi kong iyon, di ba't kasasampal ko lang sa mga problema nila? At dahil sinampal ko ang presensiya nila, ibig sabihin, pinoproblema ko pa rin sila!
    Well, paano ka naman tatahimik kung nakikita mo silang tatlo at hindi lamang ang isa?

AND since we mentioned the word political, I'd have to agree that art criticism is indeed politicking, in many senses of the word, depending on how one is politiciking with their art criticism. Presumably, some, if not all, critics have their own agenda.
    It's a given, then, that critics and curators and art theorists do carry these agendas of theirs with them, some not even latently or subtly but in the loudest fashion available to them, and in some cases in cahoots, even, with artists and artists' groups whose considerations for a buying public might come last. It is "the modern conceit," this artmaking and art-seeing within one's politics, and vice versa, shared by everyone at the production end, whether they like it or not.

HAVING said that, the ass kisser critic, being in the act of politicking within their politics of ass-kissing, is simply being an art critic and a politicker at the same time, the way all critics become every time they critique. The only difference is that not all critics own the ass-kissing politics that Tom/Dick/Harry (or whatever their name is) has, even though a nation's critics may 90%-95% be a bunch of ass kissers like Tom/Dick/Harry (or whatever their name is). But that doesn't make the ass-kissing critic a fake critic, the politics of ass-kissing being as real as any ass that is seen. In short, ass-kissing critics are real critics, and we have to acknowledge that they exist and are practicing their politics in the here and now. [AP-CA]

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]

A NATION’S 20/20 IMAGINATION

“Real politics is to engage to resolve problems within a collective with enthusiasm. It's not simply to delegate problems to the professionals. Love is like politics in that it's not a professional affair. There are no professionals in love, and none in real politics.” – Alain Badiou

“The President’s Office” (curated by Antares Bartolome[1]) occurred at the U.P. Vargas Museum from January 8 until February 9 this year. It was purportedly part of “Blind Spots,” a working series exploring restricted spaces as springboards “for imaginative construction.” So, presented with that goal, how did one—like a poet—show off anticipated wit upon neither images of seen reality nor the concocted images of surreal dreaming but upon merely hidden but ostensibly real spaces? How did the imagination work around this latency?

    But the deeper question would be: what was the resultant of such an exercise? With which did the imagination try to work? Detached humor? A more direct caustic humor? Emotional sarcasm/satire? Empathy? Sympathy? Understanding? Paranoia? Ignorance? Indifference? What? The artist could in fact have explored all these points of flight with all the usual creative aplomb or fun were he using more universal imagery, as, say, a child in a garage unseen by its mom trying to back up the car. Exploiting such an emotional scene-situation for artistic concerns and causes is commonplace, especially in the cinematic art of pounding our universalized, normal hearts.

    It’s a different story when art becomes political. The imagination may be allowed all sorts of humor and colors of expression (the too-dark, the too-red, the green with envy, the yellowed, even the too-heavenly-white), but simply cannot suffer to be seen as shallow in its working with ignorance. This, especially in a country currently under someone at the helm who has been counter-critiquing his “matatalinong” (read: ignorant) critics, labeling them as mere workers in a burgeoning criticism industry, working, that is, to keep the network or readership ratings up or keeping opposition party elements in the sound bites roster. In short, here is a president flaunting the substance of achievement while quasi-exposing what he likes to call journalism’s possibly-corrupted refusal to see the good. And, indeed, could the “fourth estate” proposal be a myth in our corrupted or partisan times?

    In this show’s case of handling a political motif, however, values other than a literal criticality’s were placed on the table. Despite the mind-influence of the more overtly political exhibition in the museum gallery’s adjoining wing (which mused on the question of land use from progressivist art’s standpoint), or despite the show’s wall notes claiming a portrayal of a “den of thieves,” in the end “The President’s Office” put forward less the emotion or intellections of politics than the luxury of the imagination, in the end clarified what installation art qua craft and art is all about. The individual concepts may indeed have been familiar, may have been established before by jokes from the drinking-binge table or the radio station booth or the sitcom set, materializing as our "expectations, fantasies, and perceived relationships that overlay our collective imaging of the seat of power." But the show’s PR-announced point—exploration rather than expression—unwittingly or wittingly succeeded as elegant executions of simple black jokes, expanding on the jokes by sheer subtlety of imagery rather than an insistent expressionist righteousness.

    For instance, with Soiree (Dahil sa Iyo), Alwin Reamillo’s offering of a possible Palace piano[2] (red, white and blue feet and the President’s seal on the body’s side for this symbol of opulence) took on the acerbic but common view of the Presidential office as one that’s often just playing our economy via the fiat of mere ear training. But departing from the clichés of radio broadcasters who may know little or nothing about fiscal policy, Reamillo donned the robe of the poet and looked for a rarer eloquence to deliver the same old message. Here, he literally filled the piano’s soundboard with a large amount of shredded bank notes (bought from a community of garbage pickers in Gloria Arroyo’s province after watching a TV report’s discovery of a Central Bank secret disposal in 2011). Then he glued a wooden heart’s-anatomy chart (“wooden” pun not intended?) to the center of the grand piano’s top, almost neutralizing the acerbic wit and projecting a serious note. Apart from the playing-with-our-money context’s referencing a central space in Malacañang called the Music Hall (often used for important meetings with selected members of the cabinet and for entertaining foreign dignitaries/diplomats), the glued-on heart’s and title’s alluding to Imelda Marcos’ favorite love song, “Dahil Sa Iyo,” the P20-P50 notes’ carrying the images of the Palace and Old Congress building, and the shreds’ simulation of a garbage dump or volcano (read: social volcano), the formal contrast between the piano’s lacquer gloss and the shredded bills’ matte truly affected glamour not only to the mind but also to the senses, taming thus the politics somewhat without erasing it. In the end, it was the elegance of the satire and our tempted senses’ reaction to the presentation apart from the sardonic statement itself that became the point. It didn’t matter now if the original criticism was correct.

    An elegant caustic humor, meanwhile, showed in the collaborative work The Stockholders by Mity de la Peña/Jed Nacabuan/Patch Qunito/J.P. Samson. This literal wall piece factured the common intelligentsia wisdom that says Philippine political maturity is rooted not in history but in cinema. Hastily painted portraits of past presidents and presidential wannabes carried titles of movies (local and Hollywood) and were placed at the tips of a painted tree’s roots. Meanwhile, right below this, Leo Abaya’s Rigodon played with the check-patterned floor tiles of the Palace and associated this with the chess game of politics by illustrating a (pseudo) chess problem using floor stickers of chess-piece shapes and photo-stickers of Philippine presidents’ faces as chess pieces (all pawns) on the fake tiles. The idea of the artist as whining mimic or mocker of a chess composer would here have to be mentally contrasted with the idea of that imagined composer who often laughingly wins.

    To address the issue of security amidst political conflict and ambition, Cian Dayrit provided readymades-of-sorts titled Trophy Pelts, involving cult-religious “bulletproof vests” placed in the gallery, thus evoking the late dictator’s (and his wife’s) predisposition to fall for such indigenous superstition as well as the present president’s adherence to ethnic Chinese-Filipino feng shui beliefs. The title may likewise refer to the belief in a throne/power as divine grace.

    But it was Manolo Sicat’s furniture set, Palamuti ng May Sala, that was able to produce a multilayered statement akin to Reamillo’s. Albeit gleaming in white, the coffeetable made of steel bars wrought into the word “Mabuhey” on its glassless top was unusable, as were the benches made from pieces of discarded wood, with their backs looking a lot like an architect’s model of slums. As foyer pieces that seemed to welcome Palace visitors to a reality beyond the whitewash, this was one of the show’s works that wore the loudest color of mockery.

    Looking outside the gallery’s glass walls from where the lobby white furniture pieces were, one could glean Buen Abrigo’s half-concealed puppet-looking armalite-toting figures with woven bags for head masks positioned on some trees, PP1017. While suggestive of Palace security sniper personnel, the woven-bags-for-masks called to mind the appearance of the local informants of the Japanese-invasion era called the “makapili”. Were these snipers supposed to be the same type of traitors, personnel deriving from a social class who have nonetheless chosen to serve lords of another social class, a ruling class?

    Another amusing piece was Lisa Ito’s Personal Domain, a wall map under glass emulating the appearance of official technical maps or military maps. However, this emulation led to surprise (or did it?) as it happened to be by a more personal presidential map where state nomenclature gave way to filial historiography. For instance, an island was named “Asyenda ni Lolo” while another was called “My Sanctuary.” Indeed, in Philippine politics elitism is a perfect equivalent of British royalism.

    Kristine Calayan’s Made to Measure featured portal columns made of raw piña fiber and rice paper, classy but vulnerable. Behind this, Mark Justiniani’s 2-in1 piece, Hole/Appointed, was outstanding. For Hole Justiniani appropriated a part of the gallery’s architecture for imagining Malacañang and the Presidential chair. While a stainless Damocles sword hung above the chair in Appointed, beside it on the white floor was a manhole-shaped glass-covered floor exit (for Hole). The hole revealed an aluminum ladder rung leading down to an unknown tunnel area, with rows of light bulbs illuminating the way. It was an elegant piece of work that was terse but sweet, with all the moods of sci-fi, spy cinema, and steampunk converging in the brain’s own creative appreciation.

    Then, coming out of a blackened wood gate (simulating precious mahogany) was the piece by Salvador Alonday, What stood there in the doorway, a sculpture of a large sea turtle with a human head (in concrete and acrylic?), possibly referencing folk parlance’s regard for the turtle-man as one who is slow and seldom comes out of his house. For a large king turtle-man to be let out of its house and beyond, out of its gate, is to hasten a political contextuality of what’s impossible, or of wishful thinking, or otherwise of a shocking fulfillment of what we think could never happen—the slow leader has come out of his comfort zone to face his nation.

    Now, what were a couple of paintings—two from Buen Calubayan’s Landscape Eternal series—doing in a show of installation art pieces, unless they were to be read as installation art pieces themselves? An erstwhile First Lady had the reputation of being a buyer and collector of expensive local paintings and priceless foreign ones, modernist as well as of previous periods, so: would she have bought these paintings of what looked like fallen bodies on a tree-surrounded rally ground and of a blood-spattered open field? Would any president’s wife or sister receive them? Should one, there’s a new paradigm.

    Noel EL Farol’s bookshelf was one compound of context pieces, with each piece its own lyric poem.

    One layer of thought would have perceived the shelf contents as mere representations of presidential books/references. Another angle would have considered expression in material execution: Unfinished Business (Series A) and (Series B) were constructions of discarded wood, thus books never touched again, never to be touched again at all; Spratly Islands’ Souvenir was a glass case filled with white silica sand, a touristy memento of what is otherwise a motif of geopolitical urgency; Filipino Favorits was another glass case containing rice and a water vessel, another touristy treatment of an economic point of class conflict; Target Appointees was a dartboard signifying a not-so-good marksmanship; while Executive Appointments’ glass case containing toy guns could have been toying with the idea of a shooting sportsman-president’s image of having appointed shooting range mates. Noli by JP and Fili by JP were books of constructed steel, presumably locked in, never to be read again, or otherwise mere monuments to a now-faux nationalist cause. Ang Bagong Balita was a copy of the Holy Bible cast in resin, unusable thus. Filosofi, a collage on found objects, seemed to signify precisely that—political philosophy as a syncretist’s collection of found objects, like slogans that can change like window curtains. Consti was supposedly a printed copy of the Constitution, or so said the engraving . . . on constructed steel—thus, again, not needing to be opened for reference since it couldn’t be opened anyway. Sure, the obvious social and political polemics of each of the Farol sub-pieces may falter in an argument of facts, but that would miss the point. Again, the point is the alienation of subjects of a land from the truth and facts behind a Presidency, any Presidency. It occurred to the artist to come up with a concept anthologizing mini-concepts, a mini-show by itself inside this anthology show—coming up with that was already a point for applause.

    Applause. Mideo Cruz inserted that audio player into Farol’s shelf and played in a loop the applause of US Congressmen for Corazon Aquino’s presence in their halls in 1986. He titled the sound recording Booby Trap, to allude perhaps to the presidential promise to pay all debts incurred by Ferdinand Marcos. Was the US Congress applause the trap that Aquino couldn’t get out of later? Was the applause and US Congress visit merely the crowning ceremony for a trap set up even before Aquino’s US-supported campaign began? In which case, who was booby-trapped, Aquino or her subjects? Consider the fact, also, that the recorded applause did sound a lot like a rainstick flurry, an aural cheese to a rat trap that would hurt.

    Finally, there was Renan Ortiz’ Sugod, positing Malacañang security in a tweaked survival video game called Lusob (Attack/Invasion). Often in a video game one can choose to be either the protagonist or the antagonist. Was the gun-wielder in the played loop a security man or a coup invader, then? Were the men in barong Tagalog executives of the Palace or were they attackers disguised in barong? Were they armed enemies or were they civilians? Whatever (partisan) setting you would have chosen for your imagination to play around in, the reality remains that the Presidency of a State presupposes enemies and conflict. And corollary to that, the hidden fact remains that the President of a given territory and race could also either be that nation’s hero or its treasonous villain.

    Reamillo’s Presidential wall seal encased in glass—and made up of shredded bank notes for border accoutrement and crab shells for the seal ground—laid the contextual axiom for all:

    Stating the obvious statement of this piece, titled Sa gisa ng Pangulo, amounted to The President having gotten to his post via a lot of hidden moolah and by the strength of his crab mentality. But could it also be usable for a non-obvious signification?—alluding to achievement by a popularity shredding the influence of moolah and by an ability to unite and trample on the need for crabs in the bucket? Whichever type of President one is, this seal can remain as the seal.

    And whichever type of President the viewer may support, the pieces in this show could remain in memory to refer to either a forgotten past, a disappointing present, or a long insufferable future. For their part, professional artists will continue to reflect a blinded and divided nation’s 20/20 imagination while abetting, examining, or merely suffering its ramifications. For art’s sake, yes, but also for reflecting on the polis. After all, political art is not just a professional affair. [END]

[1] son of activists Heber Bartolome (the folk rock singer-songwriter) and Maita Gomez (the late beauty queen)

[2] Reamillo’s is not exactly a total outsider’s perspective. The artist’s affinity with pianos (he has used the image in a previous restoration project called Nicanor Abelardo Grand Piano Project) stems from his family's involvement in maintaining all the pianos in the presidential Palace. Though he hasn't been to Malacañang himself, he often recalls the white piano his family built specially for the Marcoses. Imelda Romualdez Marcos's piano tuner was an older first cousin, whose brother also worked for Imelda’s brother and later Tacloban mayor Alfredo “Bejo” Romualdez.

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PHOTOS BORROWED FROM VARGAS MUSEUM'S WEBSITE AND FACEBOOK PAGE. OTHER PHOTOS BY MARCEL ANTONIO.

Art as Politics; Politics as Art

Samurai X poster from Rurouni Kenshin (1996 TV series) - Wikipedia

WATCHING SAMURAI X or a similar anime series on TV the other day, I noticed a certain resemblance to the Peter Jackson-helmed The Lord of the Rings trilogy effect---effect on me, at least, as a passer-by viewer. So, you can just imagine its effect on the anime fan! The effect I'm talking about is anime's potential propagandistic charisma value that the Japanese probably are aware of. Now, I am not so much talking about the content, which may vary from anime to anime (albeit a constant pattern may be gleaned by any curious social scientism). I’m more inclined to talk about and celebrate the virtue of fantasy in the hands of The Good, wherein some Hitlerian (or Hirohito-ish) grandiosity must be restrained from temptations that might allow it to express either some inner Big Hate or some Gargantuan Intellectual Philosophy of Greed. Because, believe me, this charisma value can be quite charming.

    Anime cartoons are fantasy cartoons in more ways than one. They neither pretend to be realistic comedy cartoons nor do they kowtow to the category of children’s programming. Anime is considered an art in itself, involving a fantastic plot and a fantastic power object portrayed via another Japanese fantastic achievement: the anime eyes.

    Now, anime eyes are a Japanese vehicle for escape from the global stereotype on Orientals as squinty-eyed, but its design goes further than the Western man’s larger eyes to produce in the end a different nation that’s ultimately quasi-Japanese and quasi-Western, the citizens of which Different Nation inhabit a globally-marketable art. Add to this, anime characters’ hair color try to eschew ground level by exploring the possibilities of dis-blacking. This style propagated a trend in Japan of color-dyed hair among the youth (and later the middle-aged) previously only plausible in the urban planet among so-called fashion punks.

    Much has been said by many a lay philosopher today about the escapism of fantasy literature and art vis a vis the boldness of realism and allusive expressionist passion. The Lord of the Rings trilogy of the Lord Dunsany school of literature which was delivered through the genius of J.R.R. Tolkien have influenced fantasy lovers way before the book's story was made into three special-effects breakthroughs, as had the pioneering progressive rock of Yes and King Crimson and Uriah Heep and the psychedelic blues-rock of Led Zeppelin, as have later oeuvres of high-tech special effects such as the George Lucas-written and -megged fantasy classic Star Wars. However, in the liberal press today, fantasy art is given credence as serious art only when driven by artists and authors surrounded by a traffic of political oppression (within a geo-political or ethnic boundary); these artists’ works supposedly hide or enhance a political satire or symbological value. When flaunted by artists in happy surrounds, however, fantasy art is often deemed by the liberal or even conservative snobbish critic as simple fantasy devoid of any socially-redeeming significance as art.

    In the age of post-structuralism and Marxist criticism, however, reviewers have been given easy license to read (or over-read) almost anything into anything, thus the term cultural studies, the only universal rule being that the reading maintains integrity within the construct. This certainly went further than Marcel Duchamp's now-lame proposal that anything exhibited in a gallery may qualify itself as art. (Certain thinkers decry integrity in reading, meanwhile, celebrating entropy and disavowing criticisms against "unintelligent" readings by the masses.) So Star Wars can now be taken into a classroom and deconstructed to fit any personal or political agenda into the work, and that is not anymore considered shameful. Indeed, we can say that in our age artworks are liberated from the author-dictated (or New Critics-proposed) moral, and are now surrendered to the intelligence or lack thereof of the masses or the masses’ favorite authority critic (who may then offer various readings or approaches to the consumer masses), thus, finally, dis-glamorizing snobbery. So why, we ask, does fantasy art still manufacture frowns from authorities at Cannes or Stockholm? Perhaps because post-structuralism, supposedly masses-friendly but ridden with academic gibberish of a new snobbishness, didn’t exactly create a trickle-down effect upon magazine reviewers. In the end, it's as if post-structuralism has yet to happen and history continues to flow on unhindered as a manifestation of the law of God consisting of repetitions and second comings devoid of academic views and lessons. Devoid, that is, of both the fantasy of a hermeneutics from a campus distance or the social hermeneutics delivered through a distantly fantastic construct aided by alcohol or drugs or the naturally imaginative individual.

    There will always be the divide between realists and expressionists, but the divide between these readily-popular alluders and their fantasy art counterparts are wider still. And this will remain an interesting kind of divide, with the former not confronting the latter but ignoring the seriousness of their lot, never mind that this lot comprises the higher percentage of the mythology of the populace.

    Realists will, however, not begrudge fantasy artists their "rightful" place in society. Today's anime cartoons, along with fantastic movies like The Lord of the Rings, not only create entertainment offering momentary escape from our dirty laundry and the depressing art films from the festivals and the subtle artistry from Congress' halls, they also inspire creativity with measure. Such measure is easy where the art (with its accompanying creativity) is almost an end in itself. As in clothes fashion. L'art pour l'art. Many fine cinema techniques can be traced to comics art, in the way technology traces its achievements to basic science. Were anime not fantasy, I doubt that it would come up with the visual quirks (lighting, color, lines, etc.) that are in the level of what theatre people and fashion ramp aficionados proudly refer to as meaningless creative faggotry beloved of Broadway.

    But what do we make of it when certain fantasy artists, beyond the academicized critics, proclaim on their own their arts’ realist side, that is, their social significance beyond the merely entertaining or l’art pour l’art (read: decorative) value? Do we take them seriously? Have we really taken science fiction seriously beyond the claims of the college curriculum, at this same podium where we’ve regarded magic realism with awe?

    Perhaps the answer is that fantasy is simply too much of an achievement of metaphors. The "real world" already abounds in perceivable metaphors . . . so, why create another mythological world? And, conversely or accordingly, everything is fantasy anyway. A paragraph that describes a coffee break in a Milan sidewalk café might read as fantasy to a University of the Philippines Diliman student from the province who saves up on his allowance to be able to sip at Starbucks on his weekend.

    As for realism, I wonder how realist it really is. An early literary movement called Naturalism claimed more real realism in the portrayal of the helplessness of the individual as victim of his surround, beyond salvage by the fantasies of revolutionists. And although this genre (as in the talents of a Eugene O'Neill or Alexander Solzhenitsyn) clamored for a kind of counter-revolution (Solzhenitsyn against a continuing communist "morality," for example), the Naturalist’s art itself had to portray a reality first; not the reality of omniscient organizers of reality but the reality of the imprisoned denied vision of anything beyond the four walls of his cell (and inner cell). Therefore, to the Naturalist, so-called Realism is fantasy. Ernest Hemingway’s own type of quasi-inner naturalism already regarded realists as suspect.

    But fantasy art's role, like anime, will continue to be equated with the functions of background music, chandeliers, relaxant drugs, tapestries, or postcards. Entertaining tools, mere artisans’ produce. Which does not exactly sound demeaning or insulting, but yet decidedly relegated to a lower echelon in the kingdom of criticism.

    Perhaps this is all cultural. The miracles in the Bible are not viewed by Christians as fantastic but rather as historical (or quasi-historical). And as for being a matter of degree, with realist art having more reality in it than fantasy, fantasy having less, this theory likewise turns suspect when we start to consider the claims of science fiction or fantasy literature authors that humanity exists purportedly not in the world of the "real" but in the inner landscape we carry with us everyday. This inner landscape could actually be in any setting at all, they'd say. So, a Milan café is no more real than a cave in Mars. And wherever fiction is located, the same real human principles apply, as it did among the power-brokering and struggles developing in The Lord of the Rings or Spiderman or Winnie the Pooh. As it does in the amazing cartoons of anime art. They might claim that an utter removal from readily-allusive reality creates that distance that allows humanity to focus on the principles by themselves, not on some trivial facts of everyday politics.

     For, sure, imaginativeness or creativity is probably exercised fully in fantasy literature and art (being armed with a freedom like those on the shoulders of basic-science researchers, unless pressured by a direct corporate or market demand). But one’s understanding of human behaviour is also exercised here. Wouldn't present human behaviour be better exposed in a sci-fi novel? These same exercises among fantasy authors and artists are also operational in fantasy readers and viewers. After all, when we come right down to basics, seeing the category "Fiction" in a magazine automatically relegates pieces in this zone to the level of fantasy vis a vis the claimed realism or objectivity of the news, and the reader accepts this fantasy, suspending disbelief in his submission. It’s time we admit that all art is nothing but fantasy, and that therefore our first obligation as artists is to art itself, avoiding being boring or un-fresh, especially when ready realist allusions realistically point to boring trivia about figures in current history, veering away from the distance of the mythologizing process of art.

THE RECENTLY-concluded US elections were full of fantasy and realism. A lot of real facts about George W. Bush’s and friends’ businesses in the Middle East were touted by his camp’s defenders as mere lies, and a collection of political measures and war-machine restraint in contender John Kerry as unrealistic. Meanwhile, some of us in the social liberal side of the globe were amazed at the restraint that Kerry displayed in avoiding mention of such red meat potentials against G.W. Bush as United Defence or Unocal, which Green Party candidate Ralph Nader (armed with the l'art pour l'art freedom to spill the most conservative-offending beans) would have no qualms mentioning and offering to the media head-on. Which filmmaker Michael Moore, as critic of both Republican and Democrat meta-narratives, had no reservations in exposing. Which Fox News, for all its denials of being a Republican propaganda bus stop, made open efforts to deny.

    Fantasy and realist portrayals are two approaches to the same thing---Art, which draws the myths and illusions of every profession and its accompanying uniform, of every business enterprise with its marketing, of every political career with its restraints and compromises, of every greed with its blueprint scheme and impending grand architecture, of every religious mission, and---finally---of every nation’s delusion, escapism, or self-imaging designs.

    But the only truly realist portrait is an inner one, because it draws the mythological and propagandistic face of a winner. This winning, however, is made possible by the art and lie of the imagination, combined with a restraint towards realist allusion. It is what makes all fantastic realities succeed. They succeed by virtue of an acceptance of their own mythology, which acceptance gives them the moral license to bare others' myths.