An Apocalyptic Chat With Manuel Ocampo: Swastikating between art and death

If Hieronymus Bosch got drunk one day on Cerveza Negra, read an issue of Cracked backwards, and with his Walkman blaring Black Flag, he might end up painting something like this: Jesus swooping down with big black wings — talons out, crown of thorns on, his swastikas gleaming under the baroque sun — heading toward demons raging against damnation at the end of days.

Filipino artist Manuel Ocampo painted this picture in 1991 (or was it 1993?). “Untitled” it says in the Hardy Marks-published book Virgin Destroyer with a painting of an infant Rene Requiestas in diapers on the cover wielding a knife (although the work is captioned as “Die Kreuzigung Christi” in an issue of Giant Robot). However one calls it, that painting presents a tableau of the inhuman condition, a scatological projectile against religious dogma and propaganda as well as the imperialists’ distortions of history. At best it intrigues and agitates viewers at the same time; at worst it allows art critics to string together impenetrable sentences with the words “postmodern” and “zeitgeist” in them. Landmark paintings are those that do nothing less than stun. Or leave a cold, clammy trail of critical baggage behind them.

Many critics have written extensively about Ocampo’s art in terms of the multi-cultural and the post-colonial aspects (“Look, Ma, the Virgin of Guadalupe as a giant cockroach! And oh, here come the agents of the Inquisition!”), but most of them fail to see the punk attitude of his work. What draws most people in about Manuel Ocampo paintings is the sense of vehement nihilism, the hardcore fanzine aesthetics, and the I-don’t-give-a-shit approach. How does the book Vitamin P describe Manuel? “The bad boy hanging on the art-world block…” Like Jello Biafra in a world of Johnny Cashes.

According to Vitamin P, in Ocampo’s work “Nazi insignia abounds alongside intestinal tracts, satanic cults, flagellations, decapitations, cockroaches, Ku Klux Klan members, penitents, prison camps, rats and syringes.” Those are just a few of our favorite things. The crucifix and the iron cross side-by-side, totems and taboo coexisting on one canvas. The blackest of humor. The most contradictory of cultures. A lump of literal shit. More weird shit. No goddamn flowers in sight. Well, except the bloom of blood from a penitent who beheaded himself (“Heridas de la Lengua,” 1991). Ask him about nudes in ballet poses or farmers in idyllic rice fields, and he’d probably tell you politely to go f**k yourself.

But then a couple of years ago Ocampo overhauled his iconography, reinvented his oeuvre which took on a more cartoonish twist and began questioning the very principles of aesthetic construction itself. Art, even his own practice, is attacked by him with the molly hatchet.

Take the case of his exhibition early this year at the Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Victoria in Australia titled “She Has a Hot Ass: The Demystification of Art into the Practice of Everyday Life through the Deliberate Lowering of Standards!” characterized by wacky drawings of Christ, The Count from Sesame Street, phalluses, crows, skulls, lumps of feces — poop as art and vice versa — with messages such as “Art has gone through phases of development that it no longer needs to repeat.” (Filipino painters still stuck in Impressionism should heed this.)

In the latest one at Pablo Gallery in The Fort titled “Monuments to the Institutional Critique of Myself,” Ocampo would initially dismiss the “detritus-as-décor” installations (a mounted underwear with a lit flashlight, a case of SMB beer bottles attached to an iron gate, a hung Gerhard Richter book, paintings in a pail) as propelled by being broke.

“Wala na kasi akong pera kaya kahit brief ko binebenta ko na,” he shrugs. “Eh ’yun namang tindahan sa kanto ayaw ibigay ’yung deposit ko sa mga basyo ng bote kaya nilagay ko na lang sa painting… Eh di ba, itong isang Bay Area conceptualist na si Tom Marioni, may work siya na tawag ay ‘The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art.’  Either na-transcend ko na ’yung ‘Highest Form of Art’ sa paglalasing ko o nai-flush ko na sa kubeta…”

And this punk provocateur — who once got censored in the 1992 “Dokumenta” show in Germany for a painting peppered with swastikas (predating the Nazi-symbol-heavy stuff by German artists like Jonathan Meese), who once served dog-meat lumpia in a show in LA, whose work is reportedly collected by actor Dennis Hopper, who was allegedly asked by Julian Schnabel if he could do a documentary about him, and who is one of the Filipino artists who really matter — sits down with The Philippine STAR to talk about subjects that touch on everything from Rabelais to rebellion. 

PHILIPPINE STAR: What was the inspiration for the Pablo show? How did you arrive at the “Jeckyll and Hyde” aspect of the artworks? Is there a symbolist significance behind each object, or do we as viewers have to interpret the objects as a whole?

MANUEL OCAMPO: I have two working aphorisms for the Pablo Gallery show: “A picture is just a pathetic attempt to do justice to an image” and “Lack of originality is made up for by craftsmanship.” Of course both are tinged with irony. The first one refers to the exhaustion (according to postmodern theory) of aesthetic strategies in the task of making a picture today — and with picture we mean storytelling or the narrative. Painting is perfectly suited to storytelling in terms of its durational process and compositional highlights, although it is communication without words. And we can’t argue with this because we have centuries of religious storytelling courtesy of painting to back us up. However, nowadays what typically happens is we end up with an image — and with image we mean information. 

To cut the long story short, what we have is just the surface and not the substance. Or worse, what we get are merely “infobytes” that are easy to contextualize into comfortable labels and commodifiable as stock ideas. Like for example predictable work that can be tagged as “Identity Art” or “Social Realism” or “Relational Art” or “Photorealism,” so on and so forth. 

Therefore to cover up the lack (this is the second aphorism), artists tend to just focus on the obvious and what’s easiest to do (especially when talent is natural), rather than really putting art through a wringer. And so, I wanted to kick out all the stragglers in my paintings, put them out of the picture plane, and bring them to our own brutal reality. 

Detritus (your word) are all existential residue of the every- day. They are abject remains of our presence. Hence, I would rather consider the displayed ignominious objects as reliquaries of our essences rather than trash. Maybe this is another jab at the bridging of art and life cliché. The “Jeckyll and Hyde” condition of the works in the show touches on this dual nature of painting, or the “picture-equals-image” problem perspective. By putting the aesthetic event behind the surface of the painting (i.e. events being dictated by objects rather than illusions), then maybe this will challenge the viewer to look at and experience art even more. 

How’s that for keepin’ it real?

Were there guests baffled at the installations? Or did they just accept everything hook-line-and-sinker because, well, you are Manuel Ocampo?

I don’t know what the viewers think of my work, I’d like to know, but I think that people don’t openly accept whatever I do. On the contrary, they look at what I do through a pinhole.

When I put chewing gum and toppled beer bottles and kitty litter as my work in a gallery, people are ready to dismiss the work as Manuel just f**king around (nang-gagago lang). They say: “Because he’s Manuel he can do whatever...” What they fail to understand is the context surrounding the show and the work. Those aforementioned works were part of a group show about mapping so what I did is something akin to marking territories like a cat, etc.

Making art is like marking out one’s territory or space, or territorial pissing. I wouldn’t do those things if they don’t have any place to be there to begin with. It’s a hard balance to keep your work marketable and at the same time be critical and make work that is part of the discourse surrounding what’s happening in art at the moment.

What is it like to be part of the LA scene that American critics have categorized — unjustly, injudiciously — as “lowbrow” art?

If we were to include into “lowbrow” art the type of work that incorporates tattoo craftsmanship, punk DYI expression, outsider graffiti, and other popular design for the masses, then the term “lowbrow” can be unjustly (to use your word) bad. And unjust, because those types of work are valid forms of aesthetic expression within their own context. In another period, when “global” was another code for being American, the word “lowbrow” was called kitsch. And if we try to recall Clement Greenberg’s now- forgotten critical essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” he would warn us about the impending clutches of the lowbrow. Because lowbrow/kitsch is what causes impurity to the purity of art while it contaminates the culture of fine art with the vulgar stain of commerce — or in other words, if your art sells out it's kitsch. 

See, for example, the work of Thomas Kinkade who is the so-called “Painter of Light.” No matter how much he sells, he will never be part of the institution of (high) art. In that sense highbrow art is actually discriminatory in its rarefied goals, and lowbrow art lies outside the narrative of high culture and is thus marginalized. I don’t think it’s like that anymore. In fact it’s the reverse. 

Nowadays it is the lowbrow that has become the oppressor, because of the triumph of capitalism, and the highbrow is the one that is cowering on the side. Not everyone gets an oil-on-canvas painting anymore, but a tattoo everyone does. So kitsch/lowbrow can be political in that sense because of its popular appeal and accessibility, but one has to be mindful of “for what.” 

The LA art world acknowledges my work but I always have to think about the context I’m in, meaning does the art world in general see my work as being exotic and “Other” hence — by default — marginalized? What if I turn things around and use the very signs and language that “they” use and try it out “my way,” will it then still be perceived as work by the “Other”? Interesting, isn’t it? And so we begin to think of who really owns culture and “for what.” 

Do you still feel (now that you’ve made a name for yourself in America, Europe, Australia, the rest of Asia — practically the whole world) that you are an outsider? What do you rebel against in your art nowadays? 

After so many ways of proving oneself either by action or by words, people still perceive you from the outside, which is of course only human. But you do become aware of where people are coming from, once more, in terms of context. This insight gave me the reason to return to the Philippines and see things in proper “context” so to speak, and not as an outsider as I was abroad but part of a larger whole. Living in the Philippines now I see my role in reverse, that of acting as an “inside man” causing change (or rebellion) from within.

Did you get flak for something like, say, “Islamic Disco Painting”? Angry e-mails or death threats, perhaps?

No death threats or angry letters, none at all.

Is there any taboo that you haven’t taken on yet?

I’m not into breaking taboos.

It is hard to live in Manila and not be affected by the goings-on in government. What do you think of the President’s decadent Le Cirque dinner in New York, or the National Artist Award brouhaha? 

I don’t think about the current government that much, it will just ruin my day, make me depressed and ask myself why am I living in this country. As far as I’m concerned, the National Artist Awards died a long time ago. It’s already an embarrassment to be a called a “National Artist.”

Do you collect works by other artists? What do you think of the local art scene? Is there a marked improvement? 

Besides making my own art, I also collect the works of others. Of course I like the work that I buy, and the reason behind it cannot be put into words except by saying that it’s a matter of taste. By collecting them I contribute to the art community and the economy as well, but more important than that I get to support a struggling artist and encourage his/her production in the future and hopefully introduce an audience for that artist when nobody is looking as of yet. Why? Because I’ve been in that boat, and support and encouragement is key to an artist’s development. What did The Doors say about being isolated? “People are strange when you're a stranger, (faces look) ugly when you’re alone.” (Laughs.)

Seriously, though, the local art scene is very small and incestuous, there’s not a lot going on in terms of dialogue and support. Most collectors and dealers see artists as just artisans. There is a hierarchy that’s tough to dismantle and the “ma’am/sir” mentality is appalling. But that’s the culture and that’s why a lot of artists here are socially inept.  The tendency of most local artists is they can’t see (for whatever reason) from a distance, which is another term for being critical, and by critical I don’t mean being judgmental, or worse, aping academic concepts of criticality. True, those concepts facilitate, but as tools not as dogma. 

For me, criticality means just assessing the situation, thinking for oneself, and doing what’s necessary.  Anything else is just theory, and not practice. I hate to say this, but I miss the days when the galleries were in the malls. When there was an opening you’d see everybody and the art was much more daring. Now that the market in art has greatly improved everyone just wants to be the next auction star — all Gerhard Richter look-alikes or worse: like buff naked guys with wings in ballet poses, but only in tasteful black, white and grays. And now you don’t see anybody; everyone’s in the studio making huge, ambitious paintings to fill the warehouse gallery spaces and auction houses.

Of course collectors snap them up like sizzling sisig, because they’re so well painted, and we tend to equate good works of art with the labor involved in making it.   

Don’t you find it amusing when critics use highfalutin critical language to make sense of your artworks, when you parody and expose the hollowness and inscrutability of highfalutin critical language in the titles of your artworks? Do you believe critics when they proclaim, “Painting is dead!” Do you think painting will ever die, or is it dead already and what we see in galleries is something like George Romero’s zombies?

But I was serious with those titles! I wasn’t kidding anybody. (Laughs.) I have a work that says across, “Criticism will have no effect.” Another one disparages, “Everyone loves a theory guy.” These slogans are actually ways of exorcising the painting from bad critics. And as long as painting is able to use criticism for its own purposes then it will never be dead. What did Jorg Immendorf say? That “the enemy of painting within painting is its own best friend.” Or what about Albert Oehlen? “To critique painting by painting means” furthers the life of painting. Therefore, according to Kippenberger, “You are not the problem, it’s the problem maker in your head.”

(To be concluded)

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Manuel Ocampo’s “Monuments to the Institutional Critique of Myself” is on view until Sept. 26 at Pablo Gallery, Unit C-11, South of Market Condominium, Fort Bonifacio Global City.

The photos of paintings are courtesy of the artist and galleries Finale and Pablo. Special thanks to MJO, Vita Sarenas, Raena Abella and MM Yu.