4 BY SYJUCO - The Best Art Critic In The Country Today

4 BY SYJUCO - “The best art critic in the country today!” —I, Krip Yuson, say so.

by Cesare A.L. Syjuco

Published in: San Juan [The Liberated Bimonthly Magazine of Art], March 1986

A PRICK BY ANY OTHER NAME
The Luncheon Nudes Brouhaha in Makati

I remember Nemesio Yabut’s first year as a Forbes Park resident. He was, quite literally, the odd man out. He had yet to acquire any class, any friends, any social respectability to speak of. Everyone said that he was wealthy, but there were nasty stories circulating about the source of that wealth. And new money doesn’t mean much to the moneyed. Or at least, that’s what the moneyed like to think.

Mesio threw some really big parties, but hardly anyone of substance cared to come. He seemed desperate to crave acceptance, and no one would give him the chance. Somewhere along the way, someone in his employ must have suggested to him that he had best clean up his act before going a-courting among the natives, because that is exactly what he did. And he appears to have taken the advice all too seriously.

Mesio sent every house in the neighborhood a gleaming new garbage can fashioned from steel drums. They were painted a queer green coloration and were stenciled with bold letters that read: COURTESY OF NEMESIO YABUT. Everyone joked about those trash bins, but I don’t believe anyone had the courage or the good sense to send them back. Soon, Mesio had more and more guests at his parties; and eventually, it was this role as the crusading mopman that put him in the Mayor’s office. No one in Makati liked to clean up for a living, but Mesio didn’t seem to mind. His initial success with the part must have convinced him that here, at last, was his place in the sun.

On the other hand, I remember Ernie Tagle from my early days with the Saturday Group of Mang Nanding Ocampo. I had great difficulty telling him apart from Edsel Moscoso. Ernie, too, like Mesio, was scratching around for his place in the sun. My first impressions of him persist to this very day. He seemed to have his nose and ears perpetually standing at attention, a man on the lookout for that proverbial windfall, one foot in the door and the other in his mouth.

Like a lot of other people in that orbit, Ernie Tagle knew well enough how to draw. His problem seemed rooted in not knowing what to draw. Nudes were the Saturday Group’s staple. Nudes were that group’s season pass into the homes of the wealthy, where the Chivas and the Johnny Walker flowed, and where commissions could be readily obtained by the charming. Naturally, we were all as charming as possible. But Ernie Tagle was charming to the point of pain. It was clear he knew what he wanted even then.

The lecherous smiles on the faces of the “art patrons” were a dead giveaway. It wasn’t the unintelligible chatter that excited them. It wasn’t the dexterity of hand and eye. It was tits and ass that kept them coming. Nude women were infinitely more eloquent, and far, far more winning. The grey-haired and illustrious looked on with a snicker, digging into their pockets for spare change. And so the money was made and the lessons learned. And Ernie was a gifted learner.

Ernie came into his own as the self-proclaimed “Father of Erotic Art in the Philippines”, a trade-name he still brandishes in between consular exhibitions of fully-clothed women enterprisingly fitted with the faces of the elite. His was not an obsession with gestalt sexuality, as was the art of Modesto and Dalena. The man seemed to intuit that sex spelled big bucks, big noise, and that a prick by any other name was still a prick. I remember a press release that had him celebrating his birthday at the Holiday Inn Manila, the candle on his cake in the shape of a large cock. Ernie had two small children "blow" it out for him, and had the event covered by his friends in the press.

This vile display clearly indicates the extent to which this man is prepared to go in the conduct of his business. And what a lucrative business it must be!

Having Tagle and Yabut as the opposing protagonists in the recent brouhaha regarding luncheon peepshows is, if anything, a reflection on the mental aptitude of our society at large. That each of them should succeed in masquerading as a legitimate personification of art and morality signals an all-time-low in our collective intelligence. Whatever is the quarrel here is no more artistic than it is moral, despite the disturbing presence of some committed Social Realists in the midst of the controversy. And both the true artist and the true upstanding citizen would do well to ignore it altogether.

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THE OVERLOAD
"Mindscapes" at the Penguin Café Gallery in Malate

Running across much of Sydney, Australia, is the Parramatta River. Residents of New South Wales like to tease themselves by saying that it is the only river in the world that runs upside down, with the mud on the surface and the water on the bottom.

Attending the recent exhibition "Mindscapes" at the Penguin Gallery, Manila, brings back memories of the Parramatta River and its exceedingly more noxious cousin, the Pasig. The exhibit bears witness to the fact that Philippine Art today is like a winding river that runs upside down, with the kids at the helm and the stars in total eclipse.

The exhibition features some outstanding transmedia work by Gabriel Barredo, Dwight Gaston, Roy Lachica, and Fergus Martir -- with Barredo undoubtedly the main event. The activity was originally billed as his first one-man show, but was later rehashed to accomodate the work of the other three. What at first appears to be a selfless gesture on Barredo's part is, on closer investigation, a move probably inspired by his own latent feelings of inadequacy. For while Barredo's work is truly exquisite and masterful, his output has obviously been limited by his excruciatingly painstaking approach to object-making. Some of his work dates back to his participation in the 1982 AAP Annual, and along with his winning piece at the recently concluded Metrobank Competition for young artists, number only a few pieces.

But the fact remains that, a case of cold feet notwithstanding, Barredo was more than eminently capable of going it alone. His intensely-belabored relief paintings are certainly among the most exciting objects by a Filipino artist that I have ever seen. At least two of his pieces are mind-boggling, with the artist's devotion to detail bordering on the bizarre, and his exceptional mastery of means hinting at what could well be a consummate genius. If there is one thing that Gabriel Barredo does not lack, it's talent. That, and a frighteningly original vision laced with a healthy amount of decadence and mystery, rates him at the very top of my list of artworld newcomers. An artist like Barredo comes once every ten years or so, and our quota for the 80's has just been filled in this exhibition.

The 24-year-old Dwight Gaston likewise shows exceptional promise on a somewhat different level. Gaston may as yet be a young upstart, with neither clarity of vision nor singleness of purpose, but he is obviously gifted and certainly worth watching. His fabricated sculptural head, wired and electrified, is in many ways superior to similar work by the award-winning sculptor Jose Tence Ruiz. What Gaston still needs in experience and polish is more than made up for by his adventurousness and innate daring. That he has yet to acquire technical proficiency and a professional level of competence is to be condoned in this, his first appearance in a Manila gallery.

Roy Lachica is well known to Penguin audiences as a paperworker and mixed-media experimentalist. Unfortunately, he remains a mainstream outsider with a small, devoted following. His exhibit "Acid Flashes", held at the same venue in 1984, remains among the best exhibitions ever staged at the Penguin Gallery. Lachica's historically-significant "erasures" — photographic clippings from magazines that are made to undergo a meticulous surgical reduction of detail — energized the New Photography that the Penguin had espoused from the onset. In this current outing, however, Lachica moves into painterly abstraction, presenting moribund shaped work that is dark and sinister, but is far too tentative for an artist of his calibre — a questionable display that is difficult to comprehend in the light of so limited in participation.

Better known as an actor and as a regular member of the "Batibot" cast, Fergus Martir is an intuitive sculptor who has only recently given vent to his creative skills. Those acquainted with Martir's earliest efforts will recognize a continuing concern with lightweight pieces fashioned from scraps and characterless odds and ends. Martir's work charms and fascinates with its simplistic approach to structure and form. His is almost a whittler's art that is much too unpretentious to make demands on our time or to needle our sense of propriety. And this, more than anything else, sets him apart from an older generation of "junk" sculptors and welders — those who, self-conciously attempting to surmount the humility of their materials, choose to inflict size and vulgarity on our sensibilities.

"Mindscapes" is an impressive debut for Gabriel Barredo, with a sprinkling of work by some very talented friends. While the presentation of the collective exhibit leaves much to be desired—resembling a Christmas baratillo bedecked with black permawrap and floor-to-ceiling installations—it is no less heartening to know that the energy of our cultural underground makes thoughts of our own aging bearable.

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NOT THE KARATE KID
Popo San Pascual at the CCP Museum Hallway & elsewhere

It was conceptual art's overwhelming tendency towards cutism that ultimately brought on its demise, initiating our return to representational painting in general. The concerted effort to free art from the cult of the masterpiece had sought to present alternatives to the all-too-precious nature of paints and canvas, elevating gesture and random choice to the level of a consummate artistic manifestation. But the celebration of the ordinary everyday object notwithstanding, the challenge lay in transcendence nonetheless; the artistic activity still demanded the conjurement of miracles from a set of givens, be those givens of heroic or of mundane origin. While the conceptualists had inherited a marked preference for the commonplace from their immediate predecessors, it was the intellect, and not the object, that conceptual art had sought to glorify at the onset. The tragedy lay in the fact that an entire generation had began to equate the trappings with the art, and in so doing, had perpetuated a romance with things instead of with ideas.

Cutism, the by-product of an art gone soft with itself, was the decadence that eventually consumed the art of ideas. That the rot has outlived the tree itself, threatening to consume the new painting that it has brought on in its wake, has become increasingly more evident in the art of Popo San Pascual and a growing number of his fairytale contemporaries.

San Pascual represents a new breed of representational painters immersed in the making of pretty pictures, albeit of a decidedly more dramatic persuasion given to gargantuan renderings and bravado brushwork. This in itself is no mean feat. San Pascual appears on the verge of perfecting a technique that is deceptively passionate and unrestrained in its conception and execution, but which on closer scrutiny, rings hollow and manneredly contrived. In actuality, his sweeping vistas and larger-than-life macroforms are made to be irresistably quaint, sophisticated-and-crude designer editions carried out with a camouflaged pallette of deeper tones and densely varying contrasts. His inner sources are Rosamond and de Ville, Hallmark greeting cards and posters, oversized teddy bears and curlicued grills. San Pascual is a Parisienne in Old Manila. San Pascual is a choirboy in wolf's clothing.

Stripped of size and sheen, his trendy canvasses are almost scented. That his plump, starched forms are surefire decorator pieces is beyond a doubt. Popo's twisted plants and clumsy gardenchairs and furnishings beg to be smothered and given a home, like stuffed toys or abused animals. His romance with objects in centerfocus is still-life in panavision. His is an art that is progressively fashionable, not saccharine per se, but is aimed at a market that thrives on sangria and pastries -- effeminate monster-forms tailored to the needs of Alabang and Valle Verde bungalows -- imposing and yet incredibly well-mannered.

But Popo San Pascual is a baby armed with an industrial paintbrush!

The late Leonidas V. Benesa confided to me that he had developed a system by which he could readily tell a good painting from an impotent one. "A good painting has balls," he said candidly one night in November. "When you punch it, it punches you right back." The paintings of Popo San Pascual have yet to learn self-defense. When you punch them, they run home to tell mother.

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THE YEAR OF THE HIGHWIRE MUSE

1985 was the year of the Performance Artist.
1985 was the year for Performance Art.

In January of 1985, Performance Art was virtually unknown in this country to all but a very few. In December of 1985, it has become for us perhaps the most vital and effective art-form of them all, with a homegrown following that has literally renewed public interest in art and the artist.

It is said that Performance Art was around in the 60's, and that one of Europe's leading performance artists is a Filipino. But before 1985, Performance Art had been relegated mostly to exhibition openings in elite sanctuaries, a quaint synthesis of art and theatre that was, for the most part, unworthy of attention. As an artform, therefore, it was largely ineffective, incapable of persuasion and iconoclasm, incapable even of sustaining itself.

It is also true that many artists, poets, and thespians had, at one point or another in the past, inadvertently taken the role of performance artists, unaware that the activity in which they were engaged had already been previously consigned to generic terminology. But before 1985, Performance Art had remained an undefined quantity, oblivious of its own power to influence and to captivate, without criteria, without identity, without dignity or direction.

So 1985 was the year for Performance Art.
And 1985 was the year of the Performance Artist.

It was in April of 1985 that Ronnie Zabala Lazaro, then a cinematic actor of rather dubious repute, performed his "FEAR OF RED" for the exhibition Mixed Media at the Pinaglabanan Gallery in San Juan. To be sure, it was an historical event, propelling Performance Art into his own orbit and dramatizing its potential as a significant artform. So compelling was Lazaro's 25-minute performance that it instantly persuaded at least four people in the audience to abandon their respective artistic concerns in favor of Performance Art. So powerful was his characterization that it served as catalyst to a new awareness for the medium, even while a simultaneous performance piece in the same gallery by a more experienced artist went completely unnoticed.

It was in May of 1985 that Jean Marie Ricaftor Syjuco opened her memorable exhibition SLEEPER at the Sining Kamalig Gallery in the heart of Manila. Once again, Performance Art captured the public imagination, as the artist -- then better known as a painter of large ephemeral abstractions -- transformed her venue into a "stunning labyrinthian backdrop" to her 12 consecutive days of live improvisations. Performance Art had thus taken the driver's seat in a legitimate local exhibition, perhaps for the very first time.

It was in June of 1985 that Bandidos Here & Now staged an evening of art performances thenceforth to be known as "The Performances of June 4" -- an extravaganza that was to see participatory works by the late Ray Albano, Michael Adams and Agnes Arellano, Gus Albor and Teresa Bargielska, performance veterans Alan Rivera, Judy Sibayan and Jean Marie Syjuco, painters Jun Domingo and Rafael del Casal, playwrights Ed Cabagnot and Jorge Hernandez, stage personalities Betty Mae Piccio, Jaime Fabregas and Jorge Ledesma, poets Alfred Yuson, Felix Fojas, Cirilo F. Bautista and Ricardo de Ungria, and featuring a new wave of performance artists in the persons of Joey Macalino, Soliman Cruz, and Ronnie Lazaro. Apart from the immeasurable attention it generated for Performance Art, the activity was notable for bringing together two generations of its practitioners and adherents, including those operating on its periphery. It likewise set the ground rules for the staging of similar activities in the future, defining space and time considerations and establishing the hand-held video camera as the ultimate documentational tool for performances.

It was in July of 1985 that Jean Marie Syjuco installed her manned and fully-operational "Talking Booth" at the CCP Small Gallery for the exhibition Story, Fantasy, Mythology -- the last activity to feature the late Ray Albano as curator and participant. The exhibit also highlighted recent work by Teresa Bargielska, whose remarkable video coverages of the performances events aforementioned had earned her an enviable reputation as a documentational artist of considerable renown.

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Will performance take the lead in restoring art to the
people and away from the tyranny of our institutions?
Will performance survive the visual arts?

—————

It was in August of 1985 that friends of Ray Albano conducted a series of Performance Art activities at the Luneta Park in Manila, dedicated to Albano's memory and organized in the same spirit of adventurousness that had become his trademark. Performance Art had slipped out of the galleries, testing its own ability to adapt and reintegrate. So successful were these initial performances before a "totally public" audience, that places open to ready access were very soon to become the testing grounds for a new generation of "creative" political activists. The new artform was starting to make inroads with audiences at social gatherings, parks, campuses and shopping malls. Performance Art had become relevant. Performance Art had become insistent.

It was in September of 1985, that the exhibition CHROMATEXT had initially sought to put Performance Art at the service of literature, and in so doing, had initiated a concerted move to return literature to an alternative oral tradition. Two comprehensive evenings of live performances capped both the opening and the closing ceremonies of the show, with notable performances at Pinaglabanan Gallery by Ronnie Zabala Lazaro, Joey Macalino, Ige Ramos, Soliman Cruz, Jean Marie Syjuco, Alan Rivera, Anton Juan and Roque Lee, among others. The exhibit actually feared transmedia works by poets of the Philippine Literary Arts Council, an active writer's group well known for espousing public readings of their own poetry. But from the standpoint of Performance Art, the significance of CHROMATEXT lay in its having lent credence to the idea that performance was a logical extension to the public recitation of poetry, superior in its ability to transmit and personify. Performance Art had begun to function on equal terms with its peers.

It was in November of 1985 that Performance Art elicited resounding response at the First Manila International Poetry Festival, which brought together contemporary poets from Japan, the United States, Australia, China, Austria, Indonesia and the Philippines. The affinity betwen poetry and performance, first gleaned barely a month before in CHROMATEXT, was brought into the open for the MIPF. Memorable performances by Joey Macalino, Ige Ramos and Ronnie Lazaro provided both counterpoint and support to the razzle-dazzle renditions of renowned Japanese poetess Kazuko Shiraishi, as well as to the grassroots theatricality of the Indonesian poet and dancer Abdul Hadi. The notes accompanying the MIPF Exhibition of Books & Holographs at the National Library in Manila underscored "the tendency of many Filipino poets to seek out alternatives to the printed page", citing both the prohibitive cost of publication and the persistence of an oral literary tradition among our people as points of reference. It went on to say that "performance lends itself readily to the poet's devices... (and that) much of the underlying nuances of even the most concrete poetry -- hopelessly lost as it is in its outright verbalizaton -- is translatable as performance. The performer, as interpreter of the poem, can embody the work even as the printed page does, translating it in both language and spirit, transposing directly from the word on impulse into space and time."

It was in December of 1985 that the balikbayan artist David Medalla, probably the first Filipino artist to pursue Performance Art as a serious creative manifestation, was to come face-to-face with his enthusiastic local counterparts. Performance Art had gone full-circle.

There's no doubt about it.
1985 was the year of Performance Art.
And 1985 was the year of the Performance Artists.
New questions have replaced the old ones.
For instance:
Will performance take the lead in restoring art to the people and away from the tyranny of our institutions?
Will performance return us to our ancestral modes of self-expression and stimulation?
Will literature pollute performance?
Will performance pollute literature?
Will politics pollute performance as it has polluted literature?
Will conventional theatre survive performance?
Will performance survive the visual arts?
The years to come, if we ourselves survive them, will tell for sure.

- Cesare A. L. Syjuco

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