AFTER gaining such mileage for being the resort du jour for fancy weddings and exclusive pictorials (READ: the Senator Chiz Escudero-Heart Evangelista nuptials) – the kind that makes you wonder if it’s even in the Philippines at all – Balesin Island Resort has gotten the kind of press any business for the wealthy and elite would love.
Or hate. As the resort’s press release has inadvertently asked: What is this hullaballoo? (more…)
Alwin Reamillo’s Ang Balut Viand exhibit is like balut: it looks like a standard generic egg from the outside, but is an unborn duck on the inside. Which is of course to say that you might not have the stomach for that sisiw literally and figuratively; or find that you actually quite have a taste for it, from sipping that hot balut liquid straight from the shell, to the process of slowly peeling the shell, and downing it whole: the eating of balut isn’t just about eating, as it is of knowing, of identity.
The balut is one claim to fame we’re uncertain about, seeing as it is equated with hissing cockroaches on Fear Factor. Talk about bringing us back to the dark ages of being the exotic and barbaric brown siblings of America.
In Reamillo’s hands though the balut becomes reason for pride, as it is reclaimed in its process of being changed: there are no duck fetuses here, but there is plenty of balut made out of plaster and emulsion.
the rest is here!
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?”
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.
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.
now, maybe i hope for too much.
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.