Making a spectacle: Cian Dayrit at Tin-aw
You don’t need microscopic vision to see that Cian Dayrit likes to poke and prod. “Spectacles of the Third World” makes sure even the half-blind get the picture.
The first impression you get is that it’s festive. There’s a table stocked with objects as a visual feast, banderitas, an altar, a pabitin. Large paintings hang neatly on the walls. It is a gallery, after all. Tucked away to the side is guestbook scheme altered to fit the event: tick off your answers on the number to the corresponding question.
But the questions are barbed, pointed with humor. Paper money scatters the floor. There are symbols on the dinner table’s crab dishes. The prizes off the pabitin are a collection of printed certifications (laminated!) that would make Recto proud. And in every pennant: a single eye, framed by a triangle.
What you see is what you get. And what we get is a distortion of the distortion. Dayrit has always been amply interested in our history, and the many ways in which it has shaped us, but he is also adept at collecting representative images and treating them like artifacts. Here he dives into the extreme, concentrating the mess onto his pieces and making a proper show of it. The result is spectacle indeed, though more in the way of a Victorian freak show.
Dayrit’s art has always veered towards the tongue-in-cheek (his 2013 show at the Vargas Museum was called “Bla Bla Archeological Complex”), and therein lies his strength. He harmonizes a collection of topics, icons and images that are meant to stir the pot: colonialism and geopolitics, religion and folk superstition, social order and societal chaos. Yet it isn’t the kind of harmonization that produces sweet symphony but rather a colorful, blaring fiesta. There’s nothing shy and everything coy about it, with a stuffing of symbols in all that is in between.
Fun, figurative, and funny, the work is injected with the kind of provoking humor (a lot of which I suspect can get overlooked even as you stand around discussing purchase of his work) that will amuse alongside its punches. Dayrit makes use of the relevant parts and pieces that make us who we are — or at least what we collectively like to think we are — and hangs it all up for all the world to see. Or maybe what he has done is simply his own transcription of what he sees; after all, in the end, it is we who make spectacles of ourselves.
[‘Spectacles of the Third World’ will be showing at Tin-aw Gallery until April 4, 2015].
