Category Archive for: review

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suddenly survivor

First a confession: the only Survivor Philippines season I watched religiously was the first one, where JC Tiuseco won, where I was rooting for Nanay Zita and Kiko Rustia (he who kept a diary throughout his time on the island, aaaaw). Another confession: I stopped watching Survivor Philippines because I treat TV shows as one of those things you put in a box to return to your ex. Since I can’t actually do that, I’ve just learned to periodically let go of many shows on my TV list.

But I’m suddenly back on Survivor Philippines, a surprise even to me. And I think it’s because the show has changed, enough to make me forget about the things I equate it with, enough to make me think that it’s a different show altogether. Something that might be easily explained away by the fact that it’s the Celebrity Showdown. But things are never as simple as that.

No stereotypes here

One thing that’s most interesting about this edition of Survivor is that while it does have a set of celebrities, there is no major superstar, no box office king or queen that would’ve surely made ratings soar. Instead, many of the castaways are familiar in this I’ve-seen-her-somewhere-I-just-don’t-know-where kind of way, making the near stranger a real person to us, even when we barely know them from Adam or Eve.

Even more interesting? The fact that there aren’t any clear-cut and solid stereotypes here, i.e., the celebrity castaways weren’t introduced with labels that would tie them down and box them up for viewers. This is what the Pinoy reality show usually does for its contestants from the get-go, which also explains why there’s always a girl and boy next door, a mahinhin virgin, a mayabang hunk, a single parent, a working student, a loyal daughter or son, a geek, someone who’s poor and someone who’s rich, on local TV half the time. These stereotypical labels create characters that are presumed to be more interesting than just regular normal people.

And it is regular normal people that this season of Survivor is able to sell us. Instead of giving each celebrity castaway a producer-imposed stereotype, the castaways themselves talked about the roles they thought they’d play in the game, and were given labels based on these. These defining labels are farthest from the limitations of stereotypes, because definitions can change, are not cut-and-dried, not at all limiting. Instead it allows for a set of possibilities and impossibilities, the latter being the things that will necessarily be tested in the face of group dynamics and isolation on an island elsewhere. Instead it gives us a set of people who speak for themselves, versus characters that are limited by stereotypes, the ones that will surely capture our hearts.

the rest is here! :)

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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Cherie Gil, world class

<…> as with many women, Callas also just wanted love. And this apparently, was her failing. Seeing her teach this master class though, is a testament as well to her spirit. She was stereotype, yes, she was diva, as expected. But too, she’s a woman who knows not to rest on her laurels, and instead actually wants to share it. That soft spot is what’s startlingly overwhelming about her persona.

Cherie portrays Marie

One realizes two things in watching Master Class. First, that the struggles of woman, image and otherwise, public figure or private, are the same in many ways, and that as you empathize with Callas’ story, you realize how sisterhood lives, beyond death, across races, despite differences. Second, that you do not know a world class Filipino performance until you watch Cherie Gil do this play.

read all of it here!