The transitory nature of art

Bea Camacho once crocheted herself into a cocoon; the performance took 11 hours. Ringo Bunoan once created a wall of 300 pillows owned by people she knew. Gary Pastrana once painstakingly installed a mandala made of birdseeds and grains, and then he released 200 birds into the space.

These three young artists are featured in Bonifacio Global City’s (BGC) Passion Fest ’08, a series of events featuring music, art and play activities. BGC certainly lives up to its promise of being a “city with a soul” and “home of passionate minds.” BGC, along with the Bonifacio Arts Foundation Inc., has created a community fueled by art and other passions, and actually provides the space for them.

BGC is unique in this regard. It has created a well-rounded community whose approach to living is well-balanced, paying attention to modern conveniences as well as to the more uplifting aspects of daily living, such as being surrounded by art. Artists are likewise encouraged to bravely explore their art and the public to discover new forms not traditionally found in museums.  

For the “Open Art Installation” event, sculptor Reg Yuson — whose works are found all over Bonifacio High Street — was given carte blanche in choosing the artists. Bea, Ringo and Gary’s installations run for four weeks, starting last Saturday, all along Bonifacio High Street.

A strong sense of impermanence runs across the three artists’ works, all of which subvert people’s idea of public art. They’re not massive, they’re not permanent, and they’re not monuments to anything except for the artists’ own themes. They are, in fact, very subtle and movable. Ringo’s art is inconspicuous but also out of place; Bea’s is fleeting; and Gary’s is delicate.

Ringo’s work, called “Landings,” is an installation of 50 standard pillows scattered all around High Street. They are placed on benches, under trees, in front of stores, by the fountains and the sides of buildings, on the grass. 

“I wanted to study how people will react to the pillows being there,” Ringo Bunoan says. “Will they throw them away, will they get kicked around? Would it be the same way as how we react to homeless people?”

Ringo likes to use ordinary things such as pillows as metaphors. “There are many associations and meanings that can go into everyday objects. A pillow is like a portrait of a person, an extension of the body. For High Street, I put them in places where I thought people would want to sleep. I plan to change their locations in the next four weeks, sort of like people moving about.”

Ringo also wanted to explore the idea of intrusion. “How do we deal with intrusions in spaces, especially in a place like this where there’s a sense of order? When you try to disrupt that order, how will people react to the space and the things that are there?”

The reactions to the pillows have been interesting so far. Ringo put a pillow in front of a store last Saturday and when she came back they had moved it to the side, away from their store. “These reactions are perfectly fine. I don’t like people to be passive especially when it comes to intrusions into their space.”

An archivist for Asia Art Archive, a research center based in Hong Kong, Ringo is a graduate of UP Fine Arts. She came back to Manila last year after spending three years in Katmandu, Nepal, “doing nothing.” In reality, she left the country because she was nearly burned out from work and her three years in Nepal were “an exercise in minimalism — of going back to the basics. If there’s one thing I learned there, it was how to get rid of unnecessary things and go down to the essence of things.”

Bea Camacho knows also the kind of isolation and disconnection distance brings. At 11, she was sent to boarding schools in England and at 18 she moved to the US to study at Harvard’s Visual and Environmental Studies Department (their version of fine arts).

Even as a young girl, Bea was always good with her hands. She did a lot of arts and crafts and she originally wanted to be an architect. “Harvard doesn’t offer architecture as an undergrad course, so in my freshman year I took both history of art and studio art classes. It turned out that the history of art class I took was the worst class I had in college, so I took up studio art as my major.”

Her installation at High Street is blocks of carved ice spelling out the word “Remember.” “The word refers to the historical context of Bonifacio Global City, but at the same time it refers to the much more general sentiments of absence, memory and erasure, which are the themes in a lot of my artworks.”

Bea wanted to use a material that has “an ephemeral aspect” and she liked the ideas of erasure and absence in relation to the word “Remember.” She adds, “Ice has a kind of immediacy about it; it disappears.”

The ice blocks last about nine hours; she had them carved by Mang Johnny at Estrella Ice Plant in Quezon City. This is the first time she is working with ice and says with a laugh that it was harder than she thought.

“I work a lot with crochet. I’ve created crochet sculptures and hats for my family, and I’ve done performances with crochet.” Still on the theme of erasure, she once made blank portraits of seven family members. She photographed them and photocopied these pictures over and over (about 250 times) until the pictures disappeared completely, making the final portraits blank sheets of paper.

Bea says disconnection and memory became much more important to her as she related them to her artwork. Like in her “Cocoon” performance where she crocheted herself into a cocoon, some people were able to relate to the idea of creating a space for one’s self while others thought it was totally crazy. 

As the afternoon wore on and the words “Remember” began to melt last Saturday, kids played around the ice blocks and people had their pictures taken. Bea will be putting her ice blocks at different High Street locations for the duration of the event.

Right beside her installation last Saturday was Gary Pastrana’s “Sustaining Symmetry,” a mandala made from corn grits, birdseeds, pigeon pellets and grains.

“When I first did this eight years ago, I was trying to understand and wanted to experience the meditative and ritualistic act of making a mandala with such delicacy and precision only to be destroyed after its completion,” says Gary. “But I also wanted the destruction of its form to be more arbitrary and somewhat meaningful in a different way, so I used birdseeds instead of sand and then let the birds — which were unaware of the form and the work that went through in the process of making it — to just see the grains as food, to complete the process.”

With his High Street installation, Gary wanted to see how the work would fare in an open, more public setting. Will birds consume the grains, will wind and rain scatter them, will they possibly grow?

Gary likes to work with found objects and materials such as old dictionaries, photos from medical books, broken household items that he can turn into small sculptures and fake TV monitors — “things that don’t last or hold their form well like ice, clay and wax. I’ve been planning to raid the local crime lab for some time now, I have a few ideas for small sculptures using materials that can be found only there.”

These three new installations at High Street running this month certainly challenge our notions about art and, hopefully, fuel our passion for it.

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Carlos Celdran, known for his walking tours of Manila and probably the country’s most entertaining tour guide, just finished his first art walk at BGC yesterday and will have another one on May 17. Another interesting art event is the Lomowall Exhibit, to be mounted by Lomo photographers on May 9 to 31.