Category Archive for: kultura

kultura

Meat h(a)unts you in Bacolor exhibit

It’s disconcerting for sure, even strange. But is it funny?

Felix Bacolor’s Meet Your Meat (Gallery 1, West Gallery, West Avenue) had the latter as goal, and yet it isn’t so much a sense of humor that this exhibit requires. Maybe a sense of irony? Maybe just a snicker – the physiological act, not the candy bar.

Because in fact, eating will be the last thing on your mind once you see Meet Your Meat. From outside the tiny gallery, the amount of meat across the space is startling; within the gallery, it is everything and disconcerting.

On the main wall are three huge images of stark white trays with individual slabs of raw meat: a drumstick here, some steaks there. The paleness of the chicken beside the bloody redness of the beef brought on an involuntary crinkling of the nose: images of raw meat, I realize, can only evoke memories of wet markets, with its ironic stench of freshness.

Smaller versions of these digitally modified images of raw meat make up the Warhol-inspired bigger work in front of the gallery. While this is a little less disconcerting because it isn’t extraordinarily larger than life, the discomfort does lie in the fact of its smallness, i.e., it almost seems like something that we would still possibly eat, although we’d fear growing a finger given what looks to be the size of a genetically modified animal.

But what does evoke an amount of fear in this exhibit is the stainless steel meat grinder that seems to be centerpiece. From outside the gallery, the grinder atop a wooden table looks like it’s spewing out raw meat in its various shades of red to pale pink. It doesn’t just require a crinkled nose, it begets a certain amount of disgust. Inside the gallery, the disgust turns into astonishment: what a good pair of hands can do with clay and some color.

On opposite walls of the gallery are two smaller works. One is an installation of a stainless steel meat tray made in China, which evokes the coldness of raw, unencumbered, meat. The other is what looks like a puzzle from our childhoods: cartoon-like images of a pig, cat and cow are cut up into 16 squares scrambled across a square frame. The goal should be to rearrange the pieces and complete the puzzle. In Bacolor’s installation, the manner in which the animals are cut up are telling of the meat parts we end up eating: the chicken’s legs and wings and breast, the pig’s snout and belly, the cow’s ribs and loin. The interest is necessarily sustained by a work such as this, given one’s gut reaction to “solve” a puzzle, yes?

At the same time, an exhibit such as this can really only be puzzling. On the one hand, there is the surprise and astonishment that sustains interest; on the other, there is the gut reaction of disgust that makes it too easy to walk out of, or not even walk into, the gallery.

One’s reaction to the real images of raw meat vis a vis the cartoon painting seems like a difficult test you can’t pass. Or, given that there’s no delicious cooked food in sight, i.e., no food as we know it, this could also be a cruel joke: we are being reprimanded as meat-eaters, being judged for what you do to those poor cartoon animals, being told of what it is you really are eating before it becomes your food.

In this sense, the gut reaction of disgust, the imagined smell, is a critique not so much of the exhibit, as it is of the meat-eater-self. That self that doesn’t care much for the meat one eats, has taken it at (cooked) face value all this time, without thinking of wherefore it comes and why. To say that this is a critique of capitalism is a stretch, but so is to say that it’s funny. Maybe in the end, all it becomes is the strangest of mirrors. The kind that reminds us as well that we are nothing but meat, just not the kind that’s made for eating. Though maybe the worst kind of animal.

kultura

kawayan takes a walk on the blindside

It seems too easy, really. On one July 4, Kawayan de Guia found himself in America, and felt removed from what was a major celebration in the land of milk and honey. On this day, he decides to take a 30-kilometer walk on non-descript Route 66, which may be part of his personal history of walking, yes, but to a spectator who needs no personal history, could really be about so many other things.

Which is really what works for Bored on the 4th of July (Ateneo Art Gallery, Ateneo de Manila University) an exhibit borne of de Guia’s New York Art Residency Grant. An installation of photos that de Guia took on this walk of purported boredom, what was striking to begin with about this exhibit was the fact that it really is just a bunch of photos. The current propensity for capturing images of moments and keeping memories, with social networking sites and the internet’s enterprise of sharing and developing relationships through these swiftly changing images, this is exciting as it is possibly boring. For really, when I can put an album online of my own walk through an unfamiliar street in an alien city, wouldn’t my own captured images necessarily be as important, if not more so, than someone else’s? (more…)

kultura

Lack of irony in Happily Unhappy

a version of this was published in the Arts and Books Section of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, 8 February 2010.

A group exhibit such as Happily Unhappy (Blanc Gallery, Mandaluyong) has a lot going for it, other than the possibility, and the fact, of a smorgasbord of artists. There is the brilliance of a concept, the idea of being happy with one’s unhappiness, that can carry an exhibit like this to, well, brilliance. This of course banks on the infinite possibilities that a title such as this allows: what is it to be happily unhappy? Where does one take that idea, and how can it be configured and reconfigured? It also presumes a certain amount of irony, yes? Because that title is, if we must state the obvious, ironic.

But apparently the danger with irony in an exhibit such as Happily Unhappy (curated by Jordin Isip and Louie Cordero) is the possibility that a greater number of the participating artists would work with the concept in the same way, i.e., talk about the same kind of happy unhappiness. The irony then becomes less potent, less obvious, less than what’s expected. (more…)

kultura

Lee Navas Olazo rock the new year!

A two-man one-woman show featuring Romeo Lee, Elaine Navas and Jonathan Olazo (Manila Contemporary, 2314 Pasong Tamo Ext), opens the year 2010 with a bang of bold strokes and crazy textures. The diversity of course lies in the kind of works that these three artists are famous for, a diversity that necessarily lies in form, but more importantly in subject matter.

It’s Navas’ three panels that capture the eye upon entering the gallery, with her signature impasto technique and an amalgamation of green. The four panels that make up “Asborbed” “Found” and “In Between” could easily be different angles of the same forest rendered in still life. What makes it unique is Navas’ use of a technique that seems to bring this forest to life, engaging the spectator in the familiarity of the moment captured: the trees and leaves all tangled up, a bit of sunlight cutting through the chaos. It calls out to the spectator in the way the unknown does, where being in between is the same as being found, as one is absorbed into discovery as well.

In “Wishingbone” Navas’ still life isn’t so much about the engagement with what’s familiar, but a rendering of the familiar into strangeness. The wishing bone, which connotes hope, is shown as a headless fish skeleton hanging upside down, a query into the idea of a wishingbone and what it is in truth: a surrender, an end in itself, a moment up in the air. It’s this same suspension of belief that is apparent in Navas’ two other works “Solo” and “Pink Mutations”, as both work with crumpled unidentifiable forms that seem to be moving on the canvas. The latter merges together the forms using shades of pink that interact with and into each other; the former works with contrasting colors, both moving differently and seemingly extraneous from each other, creating a dynamism that’s difficult to miss. (more…)

kultura

2009’s Notable Cultural chevers*

As with all year-ender lists, this is necessarily full of itself, and can be accused of having a false sense of power, imagining itself to be comprehensive and truthful and correct. Unlike many of those Best of 2009! lists though, this is conscious of itself and its limitations, and is willing to be shot in the foot for missing the point entirely. Too, this isn’t really a Best Of list (haha!); this is really just a list of my top 10/11/12? spectacular (-ly negative, positive, happy, disappointing) things that did happen in our shores as far as popular, alternative, online, indie culture was concerned, as distinct from what have been termed notables of the year in books, theater, art and music. All these terms of course are highly arguable, but then again, culture is highly arguable, and is in process, as with everything that is lived. So maybe this is really just a way of reckoning with the past year, looking at what we did, where we are, what else is there to do, given the good the bad, the sad the happy, the almost-there-but-not-quite, that happened for and to culture in 2009. The hope is that we will continue to argue in the year 2010, over and above – and more importantly because of – the relationships we hold dear, the interests we treasure, and well, where we clearly stand about real and relevant change.

1. Uniting Against the Book Blockade. In the summer of 2009, poet and teacher Chingbee Cruz blogged about being taxed at the Post Office for books that she had ordered online. This would begin the fight against the taxation of imported books which, according to U.P. Law School Dean Marvic Leonen is against the law: books are tax-exempt, no ifs and buts about it. And yes, the last we heard, we are going to court on this one. (more…)