The past two years of going around art exhibits and events have taught me two things. One, no matter how much I love a work of art, I will never be able to afford it. Such is the tragedy of my writing about art: spectatorship isn’t ownership unless I delude myself into thinking exactly that. Two, pre-exhibit write-ups aren’t my cup of tea. Many people are trained and/or like this kind of writing; I feel like it impedes upon my spectatorship of any art form.
But there is one event I can’t resist, and that is the Art in the Park project of the Museum Foundation of the Philippines. It might be because of the lightness with which art is spoken of here, or maybe the fact that it brings art outside the galleries and makes it a public Saturday event, at the Velasquez Salcedo Park in Makati and nearby spaces. It even brings back Concert in the Park, with jazz musicians performing this year.
It’s also this year that there’s an excitement in the variety unlike ever before. At a table in a quiet French restaurant, the women of Art in the Park and plenty of us female writers laughed and chatted like giddy schoolgirls.
2. how is it that this is NOT the We Are Not Aimless exhibit? nope, none of those paintings are part of it, not that gallery set-up, nothing. how does this even make sense?
3. i was at your gallery for close to an hour, even used the comfort room while there, and three of your gallery people saw me. NONE of them told me i was looking at the wrong exhibit, or the right exhibit with the wrong title, or the right title with the wrong works. in the galleries more respectful of guests, basic but non-obvious information is offered. none was offered me here. i took that to mean things were obvious.
4. had the gallery people told me i was looking at a stockroom exhibit, I would’ve promptly walked out o there: what a waste of time to look at works on gallery walls that have no point for being other than being unsold.
5. had your people said go on to the second floor, that’s where the REAL exhibit is, i would’ve stayed; had they said it was outside in the heat, i would’ve walked through it still. i spend too much time looking at art, taking curatorship and works seriously. i do so for no other reason than to value what’s here: people spent time money energy / blood sweat tears for any exhibit to be set-up. i respect that by spending time with the work.
6. i’ve reviewed you before eh? been through your gallery often enough, even the guard by the gates of Whitespace knows me. i’ve been doing the art beat for the past two years. never NEVER has this happened to me. nor has it happened that no one would point out to the girl taking 10 million pictures that this exhibit ain’t what she thinks. goodness gracious what a waste of time.
and so i promise that i will stop wasting time at your gallery. i shall boycott you all this year. maybe that doesn’t matter to you. but then again, that only means you don’t know what matters.
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I’d like to apologize to the curator of the real We Are Not Aimless exhibit. That review wasn’t written out of stupidity; if you read it at all, it was an example of how seriously I take art / curatorship / exhibits. I take responsibility for it, and I’m sorry for whatever stress it caused you.
I’d also like to apologize to GMANewsOnline which put up the story and had to receive the flack first. Lesson learned. It won’t ever happen again.
on an otherwise quiet Saturday, driving home from a jog in the Fort, I could only be jarred into the realization that the cities we live in survive on activities within and in and by itself. and no this doesn’t mean fiestas anymore, not in this day and age.
it seems that the city’s local beauty pageant had just been held, a tarp with the Mayor’s face actually announces the event. the Miss Mandaluyong candidates had one tarpaulin each, hung on a post each, around the City Hall Rotonda.
tarps are the new “in” thing, a way of saying: “Sikat ako, ikaw?”
on posts, alongside advertisementsms.mandaluyong 2011!
yes, those tangled wires represent the state of electrical maintenance in this city that has a beauty pageant. but i digress.
as i turn right into Boni, it takes me a while to realize that the set of tarps that line this narrower minor street actually has a different set of women. it was also about a different pageant altogether, one that obviously wasn’t just about beauty.
you are reading that right: Bilbiling Mandaluyong 2011. and i cannot tell you how stunned i was at the idea of a whole city having excess fat, though i imagine that is beyond what the city hall thought when they put together this pageant.
this pageant that we’ve actually seen done on TV and the movies, yes? but also in the current scheme of health consciousness and early mortality rates is just startling. the gut reaction is to think: how politically incorrect is this? the other reaction is: but who’s to say, really?
in these times when being healthy is everything and commercialized, when it necessarily sinks into a consumerist culture that’s about the brands that matter, the places to run in, the workouts to do. in these times when impossible thinness has come to be seen as normal; when all thinness requires is a lot of money to go to some slimming clinic of other of which there are plenty.
in these times when we should know better. we should know that half the time it isn’t about misrepresentation as it is about class, the other half maybe those who worry about the world less actually get it right. in these times when we should know that all the time we are all victims of the culture of beauty of any given time, and yes this includes the men, too. in these times when whitening the skin and straightening the hair, whittling the waist and trimming the thighs, and for men being buff and sleek and metrosexual, is what’s seen as normal.
maybe the ones who don’t want to take some diet pills have got it right, are actually better off, are actually on a healthier track spirit-wise.
in context, on the street.tabi-tabi portion eh?
i’m far from calling this revolutionary of course, but i will say this: maybe it makes for the most uncanny of steps in the right — because different — direction. hopefully these ladies refused to be made into the laughingstock of the pageant, ideally they are given the same kind of courtesy and respect accorded Ms. Mandaluyong. because there is more to Bilbiling Mandaluyong than the additional weight. especially if these Bilbiling candidates prove that their intelligence is just as big, their brilliance equally overwhelming.
these were up elsewhere that i love because they are untouched, unexpurgated, and i’m left to fawn or freak out and everything in between. art can only be about how it makes you feel eh?
