Type. Error. Silence.

PHILIP-PINE STAR: Your work still doesn’t have a title.

MARC GABA: I’m considering Spell “News.” It’s taking  me longer than usual because I don’t know what sort of title would encompass the different  ideas that I’ve hoped would be part of the piece. And partly because I don’t know what precisely is the relation of the title to the artwork here, especially since as an abstraction it’s already text. To a certain extent I want the work to be untitled.

I saw the other day this documentary entitled Helvetica, which delves into the history of typography and the changing type/face of visual culture. I’m curious as to the decisions you made on this particular work  —  was it the content of the headline, or was it the typeface, the visual aspect of the text?

The most important thing is that they are headlines from the Philippine STAR.  And also there is a hope that the work will somehow recall the type from the first page of the newspaper, but this time unreadable. I wanted it somehow to look like an error, a typographical error, which would shift the attention to form. It’s not corruption.

How do you see this work in the context of your practice as a poet and more recently, as a student of architecture?

I think the work is related to the rest of what I do in the sense that I work on a per project basis with some sort of a defined limit. I see a work of art as a unit of attention, so however much one can say against the frame, how it can fetishize the piece of art or something like that, I think that it generates meaningful limits. In this piece I should maybe say that it’s not something that I would do for an art show. Its terms are very specific to the site of the newspaper.

The fact that you work on a per project basis, that you consider the framework and the context where it will be shown, you learn the form that can best execute it. Does having this multidisciplinary background give you a certain leverage?

Coming into visual art as a poet sort of protected me from any kind of totalizations regarding how art is thought about, and it gave me a freedom to look at things as a hopefully intelligent and informed outsider. Visual art is not anything that I operate in exclusively, so I’m free from any kind of pressure to play along.

Do you see architecture as a separate field of inquiry and expression? Is it the fact that you’re back in school that you find appealing, or is architecture another approach that you feel contributes to your art practice?

I think they all contribute something. The leverage, if it is leverage, that I have coming at visual art and then now going into architecture as a poet, is a certain respect for silence, and maybe a more bodily knowledge of the limits of what we can describe — genuine ones — the limits of the speakable. It’s a training in silence, almost. I’m studying architecture now because I do think there is a way for structures to alter perception in an instant, or in a brief experience of moving through all sorts of relations that it can make…The thing is, I love architecture, because I feel the difference it can make. I was at the National Gallery in Washington DC and there was this fantastic moment when I had to ask where I was. Because the architecture was just so awesome and irreducibly itself as a place.

You do approach the printed page as a structure. The fact that you wanted the work here to be of a particular size is a consideration of architectural space — it becomes an interesting confluence. You have an artist like Vito Acconci who started out as a poet, then delved into conceptual and performance art, and later started doing architecture. Are there figures who have inspired you with regard to lateral movement, as well as the silence you speak of? Silence by the way of Susan Sontag, as an aesthetic strategy, as refusal.

Lots of figures. I would mention the poet Cole Swensen, who almost always works with the page. I think Fanny Howe is an influence — but more because of how she handles syntax, and how she makes lines behave tectonically. In my first manuscript there’s a series of poems called “Studies of Linearity,” where a whole line can function as a form of punctuation.

Definitely.

Also there is this figure, George Oppen, who stopped writing poetry for a time for political reasons. Maybe visual art is a form of silence, in that I don’t want to talk about some of the things that I nonetheless want to express some things about.

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Marc Gaba finished an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was part of the “Inkling, Gutfeel & Hunch” show at the National Gallery. He will have a show in Mag:net Ayala in October. He is currently taking his second degree — BS Architecture —  at UP Diliman, and publishes multi-disciplinary art magazine called Spacephilippines.com. He won a Palanca in 1998, a Boston Review Poetry Contest in 2006, and has a chapbook called How Sound Becomes a Name, published by High Chair. His first manuscript, called “Have,” will be published by Tupelo Press in the US. He recently finished work on a second manuscript that uses language from an English translation of El Filibusterismo.