Grounded art

I don’t visit museums and art galleries as often as I want to. The various facilities we have in Metro Manila are scattered all over the place and many are inconveniently located. There are two near were I live and work and those are the Ortigas Library and the Lopez Museum.

I visited the Lopez Museum recently for one of their Saturday artist talks. The event was in connection with their ongoing exhibit “Grounded.” I was intrigued by the exhibit notes, which pointed to a discourse on the “positionality” of the Lopez Museum, or any museum for that matter. All these institutions of culture need to locate themselves as “physical and social ‘loci,’” to see how well they relate to the public.

 â€œGrounded,” say the notes, is an extension of the Lopez Museum’s earlier exhibit called “Extensions.” It also is part of a larger initiative called “Back to Square 1,” an “…artist-initiated effort that hopes to enable increasing numbers of members of the artistic community to step up more visibly in the larger project of owning our creative capacities ….to get art to (the public), thus hopefully broadening the contexts within which art is encountered, interrogated, and made dynamic.”

Well, I’m all for bringing art to the public. The public must also first be able to come to art. I came to the talk also because I had missed a number of previous exhibits of the arts involved. This particular Saturday involved short talks by Toym Imao, Eric Zamuco and Josephine Turalba.

The venue of the talks was the main reading room of the Lopez Museum and Library. A sizeable crowd of about 30 gathered, composed of art enthusiasts and artists. The talks were short and to the point. I appreciated that all three artists’ spiels were not shrouded in academic or art history terminology and concepts. They were all straightforward in presenting the narratives being their art.

Toym was first. He showed us the product of his Fulbright stint in the US. He normally produces monumental work (as in statues and reliefs for monuments) so he quite enjoyed the freedom a scholarship presented. He developed an explosive type of art, he calls ASAP — auto serendipitous action painting. Here he makes effigies of  icons of art, society or politics, he stuffs them with explosives and paint, then blows them up! What is produced is serendipitous indeed but it is a controlled chaos that seems to express sentiments deeply embedded in the subject matter of the event being interrogated (as with his ASAP painting of the Bali Bombing).

I asked him later in the session, what three iconic buildings of Manila he would blow up and why. I’m afraid I cannot print his answers here, but they were intriguing choices.

Next was Eric Zamuco. Eric does not look like your typical artist. His boy-next-door mien masks a deep interior from which he produces art and installations that are biting social commentary. He showed us a series of photographs of him  in the act of continuously jumping up and down, while people helplessly passed by him, unable to react or do anything because of the fleeting action. Eric says that this performance and the photos taken express his reaction to a racial slur he experienced early in his move to the heartland of America. I noted to him that his images were of a typical Filipino pastime — the jump shot.

Eric jumps on anything and everything, it seems, that cannot initially be expressed or is repressed. I particularly liked his piece “City of Man,” which shows plastic models of skyscrapers (collected from garbage dumps) mounted on a kariton. This is a particularly wry commentary on our metropolis and its booming changes addled by a mass base of social inequity. That’s my take, not his, but isn’t that what art is about?

Art is many things to many people, but to Josephine Turalba, it is about bullets. Or biting the bullet, as we found out her story — that her father was gunned down in a remote provincial road years ago. Her art, although not all of it, stems from this trauma and loss. She took to fashioning the very medium of death, bullets, into a medium for expression and continuing closure.

She took bullet casings and used its symbolism as a trope for her art …literally enclosing herself in garments and jewellery made from them. She showed us shoes, dresses and head-dresses of brass casings and the reactions of people in various cities to her parading in the heavy (art-literally) getup. She did the talk in one of her creations (she originally was a jewellery designers) and encouraged the audience to try them on afterwards. I don’t look good in high heels, especially ballistic ones, so I was happy just to take photos of them.

All three artists engaged us, the audience, very directly. They carried no airs, just their art, which we scrutinized that Saturday afternoon. Yes, they were all grounded. That grounding is also what is needed by us in all the settings of our now-very urban lives. Few places like the Lopez Museum and Library exist as venues for this grounding. Cedie Lopez, the director of the institution, informed me that they were moving to Rockwell next year. This is fine for Makati but Pasig will lack one more space for art and culture.

I do hope the cities, their leaders, philanthropists and the public clamor for more venues of art, artistic expression and performace. Art, sculpture and performance was embedded in older Filipino societies and cultures. Our modern lives seem to be bereft of these elements. Maybe we should go back to square one and look at what we have lost when we trade art and its enjoyment for the fleeting pleasures of the internet or shopping at the mall. And no, Toym did not want to blow up a shopping center.

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Feedback is welcome. Please email the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.