Category Archive for: kultura

kultura

The Cube redefined

The cube as a form seems limited enough: put something inside it, paint each side of it and tadah! it’s a work of art. But in Cube at the Tall Gallery of Finale Art File (Pasong Tamo, Makati City) curated by Nilo Ilarde, the cube is revealed in all its possibilities, my only complaint is that there was too much.

Fill it up, or paint it on!

In Cube filling up the cube didn’t mean being uncreative. One only has to look at Juan Alcazaren’s “Hampering My Efforts” to see this to be true, as it always is for his body of work. This is true too of Ed Bolanes’ “Retirement” which seemed like an easy decision to fill in a transparent cube with remnants of a career as dentist. But this was also about the compartments within the cube, filled exactly with machines, teeth molds, painkillers, a random plastic glass maybe. In the end it was impossible to actually see everything that was there, the layers of glass compartments rendering retirement to be about layers of a life lived in loyalty to a career.

Raul Rodriguez’s “Die Inside” and “No Formaldehyde for Miro” were standard cubes with rattan frames, the former in black and the latter in gold. “Die Inside” is a cube with another cube inside it, atop charcoal, with masking and electric tape, a seeming paean to death within. “No Formaldehyde for Miro” seems like an ideal space to live, where the inside of the cube is alive with color and wonderment.  Hanna Pettyjohn’s “DFW, In Transit” meanwhile is a non-descript standard-sized delivery crate, the inside of which reveals what looks like a papier-mâché head of a middle-aged man, wide-eyes, slightly frowning, pursed lips. That this is familiar and normal to us, can only keep it painful.

Painting on and attaching things to the cube was also mostly unconventional here. Annie Cabigting’s “Paper Weight” is a 50 x 50 x 50 hunk of a cube that’s covered with shredded paper, an environmentalist up-yours to all us paper wasters.  Louie Cordero’s “No Piucha” is a happy box of a cartoon monster, his arm extending from the base of the light blue cube, with a finger pointing to nowhere.  MM Yu’s “Asleep” meanwhile was a wonderfully quiet cube, with a marble print of interspersed reds and blues and greens, almost featherlike, as calm as sleep.

Tearing the cube apart

More than the cubes filled with things, what’s here are cubes that are torn apart, not literally of course, but in terms of playing around with the idea of it. Kiri Dalena’s “White Cube” for example is made up of neon tubes that form the structure of the cube but allow its sides to be imagined through the darkness that the light creates. Nikki Luna’s “There’s someone in my head but it’s not me” also uses orange neon to create a cube, though this one was made to look like a house with a root. Against one side of the cube in white neon is written: “You lock the door and throw away the key”, which renders the cube as a possible space of love and its contingent abandonments.

Eng Chan’s four cubes are functional lamps made distinct from each by its materials: a bathroom drain here, a floor drain there, ice trays for another.  What is interesting about this work is that its existence is only completed when the lamp is turned on, and individual shadows are cast against the wall. This might also be the value of the Pete Jimenez’s two works, “Sketches” and “4 x 4”, both in dark heavy steel and both highlighting structure more than anything else. The former is a five-piece set of small cube structures with no sides, while the latter is a pair of solid steel cubes against each side of which are four holes. For these two works the weight of the material is all important, and the effect of that seems to be the point.

Which is what Pablo Biglang-Awa’s “S” can take pride in, too. Here is a cube with top and one side cut off, revealing what is a letter S covered in red candle wax that spills out and spreads randomly on the cube floor. That it is this image that’s disconcerting which doesn’t have a big reveal ironically renders it more surprising, if not affecting a little more discomfort than most.

Ah, but who else can tear a cube apart like Roberto Chabet? “Box” is a medium density board torn open to form a flat cross on the floor of the gallery. Painted in red, blue, yellow, black and white, it was an interesting centerpiece to a room filled with cubes, seeing as it was anything but. In light of this huge piece, it was difficult to appreciate Patty Eustaquio’s and Maria Taniguchi’s “Odyssey”, 12 photographic swatches flat on the floor, the imagination of two cubes too much of a stretch, really.

The unconventional and successful cube

Which is to say that this exhibit is filled with unconventional structures and objects that are cube-like but would generally not be seen as such, i.e., a metal safe or a TV set, even a freezer. The latter is Felix Bacolor’s “Almost Blue”, a wonderful imagination of the possibility of creating a perfect cube of blue ice. There was too Aba Dalena’s “Excubisinist Cat (Terra Cruda)” a sculpture in unfired clay of a cat wearing a cube, and playing with it on its tail and nose. Mawen Ong’s “Boxed” is a huge red cube that’s actually made up of columns of shoeboxes. It is a presence and nothing else.

The better cubes that shined in this exhibit were surprisingly smaller works. Jucar Raquepo’s seven small cubes an interesting rendering of the small toy cube and all its possibilities of being filled in, collaged on, rendered unfamiliar and almost losing its shape drowning in mixed media. Raquepo’s “Cube Construction” though was to die for, a cube created through plastic toy parts, a toy cube of toys, the wonder of toys times two, the one thing I wish I could afford to buy.

And then there was Soler Santos’ “Untitled” which was 20 wooden light boxes of the same size, all reflecting brightly images of tinier pieces of cubes in wood, some seemingly excess of a bigger project, others random cube objects of the same size, all being exhibited in these cubes. Now that is a meta-cube if there ever was one, an artwork meta-critiquing itself as it does the rest of the cubes that surrounds it.

Only Lara de los Reyes’ “Selected Works” could beat that, as it doesn’t quite paint a cube or fill it in, as it does create one using oil paint scraps. With a title like that, it also ended up questioning our notion of selected works in particular and exhibits in general. So really, cubes never looked this good.

kultura

the revolution cannot be staged

I had high hopes for Banaag at Sikat, The Rock Opera, a promise of good music and singing, a contemporary retelling of Lope K. Santos’ original novel on the winds of change that would bring the country to revolt against the overwhelming conditions that capitalism and feudalism wrought on the nation. But as it began with fake guitar playing between friends Delfin (Al Gatmaitan) and Felipe (Roeder Camañag), attached to what then becomes a fake amplifier, and with dancing from a chorus many of whom seemed uncomfortable doing the robot and dancing hiphop, I had to wonder if this musicale meant to be funny.

Love and revolution, not necessarily together
Because it didn’t stop, not the fake guitar-playing, not the requisite head bang. The beautiful love song between Delfin and Meni (Ayen Munji-Laurel) could only lose its tenderness with Delfin fake-playing the song. In this First Act, the beginnings of love are introduced to us at the same time as the characters, all of whom are perfect stereotypes that exist in an oppressive feudal society. Cigar factory El Progreso is owned by Meni’s father Don Ramon Miranda and Don Filemon, both unforgiving and unapologetic capitalists, who refuse to raise the wages of their workers who are ready to revolt. Nyora Loleng is wife of Don Filemon but is mistress to Don Miranda, a seeming pawn to macho control more than a powerful woman.

the rest is up at gmanews.tv!

kultura

relevant RockEd culture: notes on contemporary Pinoy rakenrol

The noise is overwhelming. SaGuijo isn’t made for long conversations with friends, not even when you’re all outside sitting at the farthest table from the entrance, having drinks and cigarettes. The truth is you’ve been here since dinnertime when it was empty and bright. You almost forgot it was the place of noise and crowds and youth, the one you hadn’t gone to in a while.

It had been a long day and, both emotionally and literally, food was what you needed. You also wanted to get eating out of the way while it was quiet enough to have a meal. The bagoong rice, salpicao and tokwa’t baboy, and ice-cold San Mig Lite seemed about right. Except that it was already noisy in your head, the kind of noise that apparently can’t be erased by a filled stomach. You came from the Maximum Security Compound of Bilibid Prisons in Muntinlupa, and after two years met an old friend—one who’s been there for almost a decade, the one for whom freedom is such a remote possibility, you cannot even see it.

The NGO Rock Ed was reason for that visit to Bilibid. Every Wednesday of every week, a bunch of prisoners expect Gang Badoy to arrive and teach them some creative writing.

the rest is up at pulse.ph!

kultura

romance(s) in Catalina Africa’s “The Etymology of Disaster”

It’s easy to be distracted by how pretty the works of Catalina Africa are in The Etymology of Disaster (West Gallery, West Avenue, Quezon City). The work that welcomes you to the exhibit after all, is a collage of black and white photos of sunsets, reminiscent of and invoking romance, the kind that we all know off. The letters that spell “departure” in bold bright pink letters makes it seem like both sunsets and disasters are happy. This dynamic between the brightness and the darkness, though all romantic.

Our shadows in boxes

A non-descript shadow box with a bunch of brightly colored used and uneven candles seems happy from afar. Up close you’ll find that it is attached to a mirror, is bound by a chain, atop what looks to be a tiny skateboard. “Home Guide to Bullfighting” requires the spectator’s reflection, as her incomplete image disturbed by the candles attached to the mirror, necessarily invokes an amount of discomfort. The sadness comes from the realization that this might be about you, and the ways in which home is about a bullfight, is about being chained down, is about wanting to get away, candles as symbol of both hope and death.

“Maybe, Baby (Study for a Parfait)” is a shadowbox with a piece of shell against what looks like a chest x-ray result. The word “maybe” is spelled out on the shell, the last four letters in white ink, the yellow letter M hanging from the shell. The light and love in a piece of shell, something that’s cliché souvenir, which is always one of a kind, ties the rarity with the uncertainty of something being experienced again. The x-ray kills the romance, as it proves life at the same time that it fails to see its heart. Maybe, there is love here. Maybe there is heart. Maybe, baby, there’s romance.

Breaking it gently, subtly

Africa’s “Broken Pleases” is an enlarged photo of the beach, with brown sand, a dark sea and blue skies. Bright colored balloons fly against the sky, though not freely: the balloons are tied to a step ladder, the same color of the sand. The sky is alive, as are the balloons, and yet what is alive is held down by what’s on land. This is how things are broken, where what pleases is destroyed by what it has to live with: the sky against the darkness of the beach, the balloons against land.

This dynamic of being held down, is also in “Happy Camping II” – a triptych of photos of a wooden house set-up against the greenery of a park. The first image shows the facade of the house, the second is its other side which reveals it to be a one-dimensional structure, the third seems to show one of two panels used on the house. While there is no destruction here in the conventional sense, the slow revelation of what this house actually – to be just a piece of plywood, be further divided into smaller pieces of wood panels – invokes a strange sense of sadness at how true it could all still be.

No happy in the ending

The rendering of sunsets and moments and love in “The Etymology of Disaster” is a happy and romantic thing by itself – there is nothing here that’s sad or destructive. Until the bright pink letters that spell “departure” sinks in, and you realize what these sunsets actually are: they are endings. And with the notion of leaving, of separation, of impending absence, Africa is able to point out that there is no happiness in these endings, there are no happy endings.

Which is true as well for the romance with poverty that popular culture lives off of, the kind that allows for a brand like the defunct Wowowee, to invoke so many other images, including that of tragedy. In “Wowowee” Africa installs seven photos, one for each letter, each one rendered through colorful flowers and twigs, and set against the ground upon which too many died in the show’s stampede. The prettiness of the flowers and their bright colors, don’t do much for the sadness that happens with this ending.

Meet yourself

It’s in “Happy Camping I” though, that the mind of Africa comes alive. A framed white piece of paper, written on which is an extended spider map in pencil. The map begins at the center with the word “LET’S” – obviously a reference to the invitation, “Let’s go camping!” What floored me was the thought process that went into this work, where that center branched out into six thoughts that interconnect at certain points, allowing for a set of activities that could/would happen in chronological order.

Camping here becomes analogous with doing whatever it is we want, beyond rules and parents and school and convention. Here, happiness is borne of this unimaginable freedom that would allow us to talk about “ordering someone to take off his pants, exhausting all possibilities, making a soundtrack for pissing, gambling our lives away, engaging in dangerous liaisons, starting a fire, smoking grass.”

Of course what is ultimately sad is the fact that while these are freedoms we hold dear, we cannot easily (if at all!) exercise these freedoms. And that, Africa teaches us, is where our romance with disaster lies.

—

note: all photos taken byme. the West Gallery site is down, but it’s at http://www.westgallery.org.

other reviews up at: suddenschool and nothingspaces.

kultura

would you marry Robin Padilla?

a friend and twitter/facebook contact was asked this today. that he’s a boy apparently didn’t matter. right now of course, what we’re told is this: that what matters is love. Robin and Mariel have fallen in love and have gotten married, and as Tina Monzon-Palma attests, you can see it in their eyes.

and yes, we grant them love. that’s easy enough. do we grant them credibility? that is the question. and this is what the above question’s about.

so would i? marry Robin Padilla, i mean? well, i’d begin my answer with:

(1) that i understand his appeal, this bad boy action star dirty rugged image, the one that just works with his history as a bad boy, and the way his icon has been created/fashioned/rehabilitated/ revived so it may keep at being the quintessential Pinoy macho.

(2) which is connected to this: in the midst of metrosexuality as capital, his value as Pinoy macho has shot through the roof because there really is no one else like him. add to this the fact of a divorce from longterm wife Liezel, and tadah! binata na ulit si Robin. oh, the appeal of that! (yes, i’ve swooned elsewhere.)

but is he marrying material? interesting question. in truth it never seemed like Robin was married. ever. because when we imagine marriage, we imagine it in the sense that the husband doesn’t flirt on nationwide television with the women he’s paired with in movies and on tv. in the sense that he is loyal and a one-woman-man. in the sense that we don’t hear news of him getting it on with other girls while he’s married.

add to all this the layer of celebrity, the kind that has allowed them, the couple and their managers, to have a plan. this might be contrary to their press releases, but really, you can’t tell me that your wedding in India was a surprise even to you both, when all of it (including what I was wearing, nandon! Mariel squealed) is on the next issue of Starstudio Magazine. you cannot say that this is about a love that is private and only yours, when you were prepared for a photoshoot with obviously choreographed and staged poses at the Taj Mahal. i do not doubt that there’s love there, but also there’s celebrity. and there’s capital. there are obviously their careers, now bound together into one career that’s about the two of them.

the lowest point in all this of course, was the media’s bombardment of these images. i don’t care that the showbiz talkshows feature it again and again, or that it’s in the chikaminute segment on Saksi and showbiz news on TV Patrol. but to actually deem it as breaking news? in the midst of everything else that’s of national interest, goodness gracious, why o why?

realize that this isn’t about the public wanting to know about Robin and Mariel. it’s about news and public affairs departments deciding that this is important enough to give to the public right away.

anyone who knows me would know that i am all for love at first sight, for swift courtships and secret marriages. i am all for falling quickly and easily, because that does happen, and sometimes it does work. but to bombard us with this particular love, given the trappings it comes in? and to deem it as important and valuable as the aftermath of the hostage crisis, and P-Noy’s trip to the States.

ah, but undoubtedly the Robin and Mariel story meant ratings. the kind that P-Noy might not be getting? and in which case, good job media practitioner! good job on losing your credibility.

next time i want more relevant news, i’ll watch my showbiz talkshow.