The days of art criticism may soon be at an end when an art critic himself has turned to making art, which is the best and only form of criticism, come to think of it, in whatever language. And whatever else might be said of Cesare Syjuco, whose latest one-man show “A Life of the Mind,” poems for walls opened recently at Galleria Duemila in Loring Street, Pasay, he’s a grown man now and should be responsible for the words and concepts and found images he has deemed fit to exhibit.
In Cesare’s case, the word itself becomes art — which remains a family affair (his wife the sculptress and performance artist Jean Marie is curator — be it a barely decipherable progression of tankas etched on marine plywood that greets the gallery-goer left of entrance, to the almost cheesy rendition of “Snow White forever” scrawled on the restroom’s mirror, the scent of contraband hovering. There are falling ninjas too and what looks like a cat’s skeleton preserved in a glass case, entitled “Gazelle.” There are carved neon of white light in a succession of four words on canvas, best plugged in for maximum effect. Also a table of zeroes that tackles the exponents of zero the hero, nada pues nada. A corner of mirrored reflections, you have to see it to believe it at the risk of sounding redundant, and no ants in Antwerp. Small comfort is provided by the original cover design of the Philippine Studies issue published by Ateneo and edited by the late Alfrredo Navarro Salanga in the early ’80s, which gives new life to the cover of a telephone directory.
The exhibited poems on walls qualify perhaps more as art criticism than as poetry, then again I am only guessing. Maybe the poems are saying that most art coming out these days lacks context, much less a solid textual foundation or construct. The Structuralists and Post-Structuralists might have a bone to pick, as well they should, for Cesare’s conceptual approach can be a bit heavy, as opposed to heavy-handed. Cesare as poet was never a slouch to begin with, and as art critic his demeanor comes across more like that of a construction worker, as in workmanlike, however landed his origins. Still missing or left out for the nonce are works like “American Scarecrow” of the suspicious looking nuns on bus, and that poster poem hanging on MRT trains that is like an entry for a contest of a literary magazine.
You wander into Galleria Duemila at Loring and see and hear the bongo players evoking the ghost of the white hermit, blowing in with the sea breeze nearby strains of an old Joni Mitchell song: “I was driving across the burning desert/ When I spotted six jet planes/ Leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain/ It was the hexagram of the heavens/ It was the strings of my guitar/ Amelia, it was just a false alarm.”
If art becomes criticism and here in these poems for walls do they meet, then art criticism may only be for the blind, who according to the Greeks are the ones who can truly see. Consider Teresias the blind seer, or even Oedipus who tears out his eyes when the truth of his origins blinds him.
So do Cesare’s words mirror a black truth, the death of art criticism as we know it due to falling ninjas imported from the old Pinaglabanan Gallery. He’s the last holdout of “Chromatext,” whose art is a concept by which he measures his words.
On the other side of town, or about seven stops on the MRT train going north along Edsa, on Connecticut Street off Ortigas, Marika Constantino is holding her fifth solo show at Art Informal until past Holy Week, “Drawn Entanglements.”
What a difference two or three years make, since her first solo show in Boston Gallery off Aurora Blvd., a stone’s throw from Betty Go-Belmonte Street, her desire has branched out like spokes on a wheel. Now the works are smaller, but no less gangly or calling up past demons. The materials used are torn pages from a telephone directory, stoneware, mixed media. Thought-provoking doesn’t quite describe these entanglements, conjuring images of transcendental parking lots.
Let the old meme dragonfly speak, the motif red, constant as the miniature mirrors like eyes, volcanic debris, graphs and memos.
“Primordial Divinities” is one of a clutch of works that feature a school of dragonflies, suggesting a mysticism that straddles sexuality and innocence.
Another is “Self Realizations” that might see the dragonfly as other, manifestation of a singular counterpart, the color red at the same time opaque and translucent.
“En Route to Metamorphosis” is clearly anti-Kafka, for here the outcome can only be bright, and maybe Paul McCartney and Wings can be heard in the background singing “Little Lamb, Dragonfly”.
Enter the dragonfly! Year of the dragonfly! Decades ago such flying divinities were a dime a dozen on Diliman campus, along with the omnipresent duckweeds in the lagoon or sunken garden.
“Memo to Self: Decide” seems to be a sibling of “If you come to a fork in the road, take it” as both would require balance on the hand of a waiter, with cups of inebriation on them.
The slimmer works might be misconstrued as sungka boards, but the mirrors trace outlines on the wings of a dragonfly, or the eyes themselves.
The slim work might also be seen as a tail of the winged insect, and the waiter’s trays its wings after all.
How easy to get lost or found in the labyrinths of a Diliman long gone, or has it ever left us, leaving a mark of red like the spine of the book of knowledge.
On the second floor adjunct gallery simultaneously ongoing is the exhibit of Mark Valenzuela’s drawings in pen and ink, “Serrated Storytelling,” that reveal fine lines of black on white and the many grays between. It’s a heady journey, from word to mirror to dragonfly, to a serrated storyline tangled up in ink.