Coming face to face
It is with some curiosity and excitement that I visited the touring Asialink and d/Lux/MediaArts exhibition, “Face to Face: Portraiture in a Digital Age,” at the ground floor of Ayala Museum the other week. I hadn’t read about the exhibition in advance but I did however see in the promotions of the show the stunning image of Daniel Crooks’ “Portrait # 1 (Self)” (2007).
The digital print joins together horizontal bands of several shots taken of and by the artist in the same background with slight differences in his pose. These strips amalgamate these different movements to converge in a single image the subject’s merging and diverging occupation of time and space. Through a simple technique, these disjointed slats of the subject — all the more startling in the print’s sharpness and vivid use of color — show the self at dislocation, which is certainly acute in this technological age of identity and reproducibility. With this image, the exhibition title and my own interest in video, the show certainly seemed like a requisite to look further into its premise and the other artworks it chose for its iterations.
The exhibition turned out to be one of immense satisfaction, leaving me enthralled, inspired, even giddy. It helped perhaps that I ventured more with curiosity rather than expectation. Regardless, it was an exhibition well done, a theme as solidly delivered as it was aptly titled. Not a large exhibition with 14 artists, it was concise and straightforward without pretension and without the malaise of too much ambition that can complicate (and subsequently, malign) exhibitions.
The exhibition greets the visitors with the artwork of Michelle Barker and Anna Munster, “The Love Machine II” (2003). As foretold by an offspring-predictive photobooth meant for couples, it shows enlarged digital prints of what the children of these artists could look like, crossing over their features with certain racial and gender stipulations. The faces of the kids are awkward and peculiar, muddled in its fusion as it is in its resolution. Though the machine itself is a gesture of jest, the work exposes the cracks and malfunctions in the increasing seamlessness and popularity of altered images as it also solicits the idea of the stereotype. The work reacts to the obsession and expectation of our current culture with instantaneity and with the ability to alter and mold together pictures.
Denis Beaubois’ “Constant” (2004) was a work almost too easy to slip by. Quick glances will give the impression nothing is happening, or at least, nothing of urgency. A face just stares out. Fleeting about the show, looking elsewhere and looking back again at this work will yield seeing a different face staring out. Yet, in actuality, there are 13,000 faces over less than nine hours. Watching carefully, the work shows each face morphing into another so smoothly and subtly that it’s barely perceptible. This near-indifference viewers will almost have to its change is a deliberate effect desired by the artist, inspired as it is by his residency at a forensic psychology department and where, as the brochure says, “he explored the problem of wrongful imprisonment through inaccurate selection of suspects in a lineup environment.” And while the work’s title may seem to recall the oft-repeated adage, “the only thing constant is change,” its meaning is, gratefully, less hokey than this. The title actually refers to the viewer who, as thousands of faces extend by, remains the one fixed, underscoring that the work’s importance lies less in the facial morphing than the role of the viewer and the viewer’s perception (and specifically, the perception of distinction).
“Prosthetic Head” by Stelarc A standout in the exhibition is John Tonkin’s “Time and Motion Study” (2006). It takes a short while to understand how this interactive piece works (and being clothed in black doesn’t help) but once comprehending this, it can take one on a delightful journey. Using a camera with feedback on a flat screen TV, the work takes pictures of the viewers in front of it, layering them with time stamps and in a sea of black. Motion sensors allow one to make the work responsive to one’s movements, allowing one to travel across these layered images and to go back and forth to and from earlier times, seeing other exhibition viewers as well who had been captured in motion in front of the camera. My friend Louie Barretto and I found this greatly enjoyable not because of its interactivity but in the work’s able engagement to take us “time traveling.” As testament, future viewers to the piece can go back in time and visit my and Louie’s images Feb. 2, somewhere between 4 to 5 pm. The traveling across is wisely and thankfully easy and quick, promptly encouraging viewers to explore this parallel dimension.
The work, while also interactive, reaffirmed my affection for video — its dominance in contemporary art internationally is not novelty (and beware the posers who do it just for so) and its cheapness in freight. It is admittedly tedious in many cases, being of a time-based nature, but video admittedly expresses quite powerfully. While artworks of all different media, still or moving, can be commanding — in presence or in depth — the moving image does so in a different language. Even being in the period, as the art historian Rosalind Krauss termed it, of the “post-medium condition,” the moving image occupies a strong position due to its temporality and the strong presence of the projected image, which is most of the time combined with, less it be taken for granted, the element of the auditory which is also compelling in itself.
A most impressionable experience I had of video was in 2004, while still an undergraduate student and spending six weeks of my summer in Melbourne. I visited a number of museums then and remember suffering from “museum fatigue” or being completely exhausted or overwhelmed by seeing so many works. Yet, I was mesmerized by a new museum at that time, the Australian Center for the Moving Image (ACMI). While it has shifted direction since then to lean towards more populist exhibition offerings, at that time with its exhibition “Transfigure,” it was a marvel helped by its delivery of massive projections making an intense impact. There was Chris Cunningham’s Bjork music video All is Full of Love (1999) which, with its caressing robots, imbued sensuousness to the world of icy technology; Gina Czarnecki’s “Infected” (2001), featuring a human body dancing nude but in a frenzied blur; Robert Gligorov’s “Bobe’s Legend” (1998), showing the artist’s mouth repeatedly contained with finches that would sit there and then fly away. There was also a giant projection of a head, which had been modeled in the artist’s image and who, via artificial intelligence, one could interact with and converse with by keyboard. It would be a few years later, when I returned to Melbourne for further studies and it was no longer on show, that I learned that this work was actually one of Stelarc’s, an internationally well-known artist who deals with themes of the posthuman using his own body.
It was, of course, to my amazement that, seven years later in this exhibition here in Manila’s own Ayala Museum, the same floating head peeked out at me from a dark room. There was Stelarc again, projected much smaller but he seemed essentially the same. Typing onto the keyboard, I greeted him, politely inquired how he was, asked him to sing and even to say my name (to my surprise, he pronounced my last name correctly). In this digital age, as interaction is increasingly being done and mediated through screens, we must navigate through its meaning and implications and what it means to again come face to face.
The exhibition was also agreeable in that though it presented the works of all Australian artists, its theme could engage a wide and diverse audience from anywhere in the world. Here, closer to home, it is also of relevance to a recent local issue that seemed to be raging online, the weight loss company Marie France’s billboard of its latest endorser, Sharon Cuneta. As people deliberate on the issue whether the photo was photoshopped or not, ignited apparently after comparing the billboard’s after photo to Cuneta’s appearance on television, the debate is testament itself to how the idea and possibilities of portraiture have certainly changed in our digital age.
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“Face to Face: Portraiture in a Digital Age” ran until Feb. 20 at the ground floor of Ayala Museum. The author may be emailed at letterstolisa@gmail.com. Her art writings are at http://writelisawrite.blogspot.com.
