Still hungry & out of order

In 1998, an important book on contemporary art came out. Entitled Cream: Contemporary Art in Culture, it sought to map out the art for the years to come. It still serves as one of the best introduction to anyone who is interested in visual culture and its ever shifting ideas, forms and contexts.

Fast forward to 2005. While artists and artistic trends have faded in and out of the critics’ watchful eyes (and dare I say favor), I feel that much that was being discussed in that exhibition-in-a-book is still relevant today, not just about art but more so about culture as we know it. Among other things: How a new empire called globalization erodes difference and subjectivity by translating them into products or slogans. I’m not being paranoid or reactionary here (these two being my not-to-be New Year’s resolutions). Maybe globalization instead transforms individual sovereignty into a universal order. Isn’t that great? We’ve had 500 years of that just for one order of paella, another 50 for a universal order of hamburger – and that’s not counting the year after year and layer upon layer of extra cheese – then decades past up to the present of the ever comforting "You name it, we don’t have it or we can import it or only a few have it or you can’t afford it anyway so just wait and be patient until the last order’s done" order.

So, after we’ve gobbled up all those ready-to-go meals and burped to our hearts’ delight and our livers’ failure, will we then take the next one with sugar, ma’m, or just with cream, sir?

Cream published the edited transcript of an Internet debate among 10 participating curators who in turn chose 10 artists each, eventually producing a hundred of the who’s who in the art world. One can protest as to why we should care about knowing these artists and their artworks, especially when all of them are from abroad? Why care about art at all?

Here is a selected passage from that Internet conversation. I chose this one because, first, it made a reference to the YBA or the Young British Art phenomenon that first started out in my school, Goldsmiths College, and then eventually took center stage in the international art world. I remember being terribly annoyed by the arrogance displayed by some of my teachers and classmates who reveled in this universal art order propped up by the new British Goldsmiths Empire. Now I just giggle. The empire can be so over. And it’s art’s imagination and not responsibility to do it. Repeatedly. Forever. And again, a one and a two. Secondly, and this is truer and more relevant here in the Philippines, it may provide us a clue or two as to maybe why we Filipinos are ignorant and/or resistant to contemporary art.

From Gilda Williams of Phaidon Press, February 18, 1998:

I am very interested in pop and world music as well as pop culture as a whole, so I try not to judge one cultural form as more worthy than another. Pop and world music, even at their most cutting-edge, do not at all disdain being part of mass culture, and I am intrigued by this contrast with contemporary art…there is a kind of anti-mass culture purity in contemporary art. Is it because whenever it moves outside of its specialized arena it is reduced to a parody of itself, stripped of its ambiguity, exhibitionistic, dull, like the mainstream English press’ treatment of the Young British Artists?

From Dan Cameron, February 21, 1998:

I’m a little skeptical when people compare art’s lack of an effective audience to pop culture’s immersion in its audience’s self-image. Art is not lacking a mass audience because of some deep inner flaw that makes it opaque and impenetrable to most people. Rather, art’s physical and conceptual conditions make it very difficult to market it the way that music, film, and even literature are marketed.

From Rosa Martinez, February 25, 1998:

Globalization is producing cultural homogeneity, but its opposite – the extreme defense of local identity –is creating new ideologies, new codes of legitimization that direct us toward other totalitarianisms… so the balance is between the local and the global. To leave home from time to time or to open the door to other guests is a good way to see how complex the village we live in really is.

From Yason Banal, February 5, 2005:

One such complex but inspiring village this sleepwalker passed through was the 50th International Biennale of Art in Venice, Italy. The art counterpart of Cannes with a matching "aesthetic" standard of a Ms. Universe beauty pageant, it was an interesting mix of oohs and aahs as well as huhs and duhs.

Inspired by the show’s theme "Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer," I kindly encourage you to behold these images for your own pleasure and analysis, and despite what you think of what’s been said and seen, to still be able to work for or at least dream of new utopias while negotiating present conflicts and engaging in complex realities.

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Thanks to the people who came to my artist talk yesterday. There will be another one next Saturday, February 12, from 5 to 7 p.m. at Big Sky Mind Artist Foundation. The author will be in conversation with art historian, curator and critic Patrick Flores regarding his past and recent works in performance, installation and video. The foundation is located at #70 18th Avenue corner P. Tuazon, Cubao, QC. For details, call 421-2125 or e-mail sonjalaban@yahoo.co.uk. Admission is free, hope to see you there.