The abject art of Louie Cordero
December 4, 2006 | 12:00am
Recently, I came across an Amazon.com review of Simon Schama’s recently published book, Power of Art. It read: "Great art has dreadful manners... The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality..."
Amazon.com goes on to describe the book in detail, focusing on "the make-or-break turning points in the lives of eight great artists who, under extreme stress, created something unprecedented, altering the course of art forever. The embattled heroes – Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko – each in their own resolute way faced crisis with steadfast defiance. The masterpieces they created challenged convention, shattered complacency, shifted awareness, and changed the way we look at the world."
Those who are familiar with the abject art of the emergent Filipino visual artist Luisito "Louie" Cordero should understand the context in which the aforementioned reference is used. For no painter in recent memory, to my mind, has shocked local museum visitors and gallery goers (with the exception perhaps of the onanistic perversions of Jose Legaspi) as much as he has. The question that remains, of course, in the face of the oeuvres’ obvious shock value, is this: Does Cordero make "great art"?
Clearly, there must be a point to the anti-establishment comportment and rhetoric – the paint-stained finger up the ass of polite society. So does his output, following Schama’s line of thought, aspire to transform our vision of ourselves?
My knee-jerk response to this would be, "No, he doesn’t give a sh*t," judging from the five works that make up the artist’s most recent show at Finale Art Gallery. It’s an opinion that Cordero himself shares, what with the use of the title "Synthetic Fury (Greatest Misses)." The self-deprecation is, of course, tongue in cheek and – borrowing the term – "synthetic" in its false modesty. Billing these as the worst of the worst is just like screening the "World’s Greatest Disasters." This isn’t so much a trunk show of leftovers as it is a Barnum and Bailey carnival freak show that is staged to delight.
It’s all a game to him, really. Cordero’s canvases are littered with so much filth; they are enough to make even the most neglected gas station toilet look immaculate. Uninitiated viewers are usually left speechless in the face of, among other "yuckies," turds coiled like serpents poised to strike, putrid puddles of sticky mucous, distended spines, yanked-out offals and teeth, vomit running like rivulets, and dollops of brain matter oozing out of shotgun wounds to the head.
The response to the abject provides the first key to unlocking the esoteric, seemingly inexplicable charisma of Cordero’s art; for in the squeamish reaction of the repulsed viewer lies the innate understanding of human nature that is, in equal measure, discombobulated by the sight of objects detached from their source – the disembodied disemboweled – yet is also strangely fascinated and masochistically enchanted by the sensation of seeing the integral body dismembered, or the typically autotelic corpus become a wellspring of material (i.e. bodily fluids and excreta).
Much has been written about the root of the sick pleasure derived from the abject: among these, the theory that this instinctive reaction derives from the moment when the infant is separated from uterus and passes through its mother’s torn pudendum at birth. But suffice it to say, Cordero mines this innate human quality ingeniously. Not that he is alone in this respect: monster and teen slasher flicks, and most provocatively, Japanese anime cartoons, all owe their affective power to the abject.
In contriving the sources of these powerful sensations, it is easy to see the artist take on the sage role of sadist, serving up morsel-images that are as replete with references to anti-culture as they are symbols of grotesque fascination.
The youthful defiance of these works is, more than reactionary, vicarious. And what Cordero represents, as far as the Philippine contemporary art scene is concerned, is an in-your-face disavowal of stiff upper lip sensibilities, crossing as he does into territories of our shared psyche that had remained uncharted for so long. His canny approach to art making – in particular, his critique of the commercialism of the art world – is best summed up thus: unmask the hypocrisy and show the public what it really wants.
It is hardly surprising then to see Cordero held up as a paragon of the avant-garde: the ability to upset a key quality of artists of his ilk.
He has off late, swept the board of contemporary art prizes: first the inaugural Ateneo Art Awards in 2004; then recently, the CCP Thirteen Artists Award.
So what then of the question of greatness? Clearly, this is a burden that Cordero refuses to carry.
In the end, it’s all about the "who gives a f*ck?" attitude; and in this regard, Cordero is in good company. The history of art, as Schama points out, is replete with artists whose iconoclasm laid the groundwork for epiphany.
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