New Art Hits The Road
New Art Hits The Road
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: Sunday Globe Leisure, May 05, 1991
"These works are bound to surprise you, to shock you, to question and challenge your comfortable notions about art and reality; they may even displease you, as I am sure some of you will be displeased; but they will surely make you prick your mind's ears because they will confront you with the vast possibility of artistic probability—what if, after all, the world is as these works portray?"
- Cirilo F. Bautista
on The Road Tour at DLSU
March 20, 1991
BARNSTORMING, it used to be called, in mock reference to those acrobatic airshows that moved from hick town to hick town in the early days of aviation. To be sure, the traveling show—peddling everything from patent cures to circus thrills and mouse traps—has been an integral part of popular culture since the dawn of recorded history. Politicians refer to them as "whistlestop rallies", rock bands call them "road gigs", but the idea is always the same. And it works, precisely because it takes the "merchandise" directly to its market.
At the Museo Iloilo, premier showcase of Western Visayan culture, people from virtually all walks of life came by the busloads to see an art exhibit that even we, its organizers, could not have given a bat's chance in hell of success. The odds had definitely been stacked against us. Days before, super Typhoon Ruping had totally devastated the city and left it in shambles. Tons of debris littered the streets like booby traps. Much of Iloilo still languished in darkness, and there were widespread rumors that the show itself had been canceled along with all flights to and from Manila.
But the good people of Iloilo turned up in force on opening night, surprising even themselves. Video footage taken by a young filmmaker from Bacolod City caught the amazing spectacle of hundreds pressed shoulder to shoulder against the throng, necks
craned to catch fleeting glimpses of the exhibit as they pass on tiptoe. In the background, the museum staff barked instructions from an emergency loudspeaker in a futile attempt to maintain order. "Please, please keep the line moving!" "No lingering in front of the artworks...please!" The experience was a stirring climax to what had been an uphill labor of love.
□□□
"Smash hit, gani!" an elated Zafiro "Zaffy" Ledesma proclaimed to all who would listen. A prominent scion of the local culturati, it was his idea to "import" the exhibit from Manila at great effort and expense. "We have never seen a crowd like this," enthused Norma Sapaula, a museum volunteer whose husband manages the local GMA-7 station. Indeed, the crowd at the Museo refused to disperse until late in the evening, and people were turned away at the door without seeing the show. "Grabe talaga," said one out-of-town artist who had taken the inter-island ferry that afternoon to attend the opening. "If some crazy person had hollered 'Fire! ', all hell would have broken loose."
Months later, at the Art Gallery of De La Salle University in Manila—an in-campus showroom that, at best, averages one or two hundred registered visitors per exhibit—literally thousands of college-level students flocked to see the same show. "Parang Shoemart sa dami ng tao," was how acting curator Edward Liao described the crowds that continued to turn up for the exhibition throughout its month-long run. "It's amazing. Excited talaga yung mga students," said one faculty member two weeks into the show. "Hindi ka na makahinga dito," complained a visiting writer who had driven across town to see the works on assignment. "Walang tigil ang dating ng mga tao."
Everywhere that it has been exhibited, the New Art Road Tour has outreached our wildest expectations, drawing viewers from various sectors of society and from all age groups and cultural backgrounds. The phenomenal success of the project to date may confirm what a few art experts had been saying all along: that novel artforms, radically evolved from art's classical precepts, could succeed in winning over potential audiences that had previously been disinterested in, or even hostile towards, conventional art presented in conventional ways.
Mixed-media installations, kinetic sculpture, art performances, sound-works and videos—all considered "experimental" or "renegade" mediums—comprise the bulk of the Road Tour exhibits. While the existence of such works isn't entirely new, their finesse and mass appeal almost certainly are. Until now, alternative artforms were considered highly-esoteric fare, with a very limited audience confined to the underground intelligentsia. The general public's favorable to the Road Tour—particularly the project's unprecedented success with the youth sector—could disprove this notion once and for all, heralding a new day for an art that extends beyond paint and canvas.
□□□
In recent years, the unorthodox pieces featured in the Road Tour would have been laughed out of town, and hardly anyone in his right mind would have queued up to see them. The installations of Sid Hildawa use basic construction material like sand, gravel, hollow blocks, old crates and shovels, all in their natural state, arranged on the floor like upright dominoes parading in review. Jose Legaspi's macabre tableaus are painstakingly crafted around papier mache casts of whitewashed crypts, winged sentinels, and other statuary at the La Loma Cemetery, even while the artist's diaristic drawings—stacked in rows and numbering in the hundreds—are dark probes into his own twisted sexuality and bizarre religiosity.
On the other hand, Orville Tiamson's latest "soundwork" is a haunting concerto of synthesizer music, composed and performed by the artist to accompany his own apocalyptic stockpile of exploded LPG tanks, skulls, photographs and candles. The award-winning videos of Chito Valenzuela are plotless narratives, somnambulist sketches that focus—if obliquely—on such unnerving episodes as that of a woman swatting at a hailstorm of colored pingpong balls. Monster-toys that seduce and startle, freestanding contraptions to climb on and peep into, even room-sized dioramas carpeted with dense layers of palay, corn and wheat grain, are only some of the other mind-boggling elements in this travelling extravaganza.
□□□
As daring and as innovative as the Road Tour may be, the artists selected for the project take their work very seriously, and hardly anything is left to chance. Laboratory-style workshops are conducted between shows to re-evaluate previously-exhibited installations, rework them into new configurations, or expand them to include an infinite array of other creative possibilities. The artists derive no income from the Road Tour, and the strong sense of comaraderie is fostered only by a shared set of ideals and a mutual need to create and discover. They openly discuss their own reactions to each other’s work, and it is usually during such discussions that two or more of them may decide to collaborate on an entirely new project. Because of this, some of the artists in the Road Tour have taken to calling the lab-workshops their “sparring sessions,” if with some amusement.
An integral part of the Road Tour, the workshops likewise constitute periods of intense planning for future exhibits. For instance, among the shows scheduled in the coming months are those specifically designed for venues that do not have gallery facilities to speak of. Self-illuminating or free-standing pieces are being produced to respond to the absence of regular tracklighting and walls. At the new CRC College, a relatively small facility strategically located in the bustling Pasig-Ortigas area, indoor space is decidedly limited, and an outdoor show for the school is even now in the works. For this purpose, the Road Tour artists are developing a new range of site-specific installations that will be anchored on trees, peripheral fencing material, and stakes imbedded in the ground. Another exhibit scheduled for mid-July, at the well-appointed Galeria de las Islas in Intramuros, will focus primarily on performance art, with an elaborate site work to be constructed as a set. The Ateneo Art Museum has requested a show composed primarily of wallworks, since floorspace is reserved for its permanent collection. Each exhibit in the Road Tour must adapt to different spaces and conditions, and the artists are challenged again and again to react to these changing factors as they present themselves.
□□□
There are, however, things that cannot be anticipated, and valuable lessons must be learned along the way. Often, they provide the Road Tour with some of its more amusing moments—and some of its more trying ones as well. At the Penguin Cafe in Malate, asthmatic customers complained about the abaca fiber that the artists had installed on the ceiling as a canopy. In still another venue—best unnamed—large rats took shelter in a fabricated "nest" of twigs and twine, eventually gnawing a painted triptych to pieces and scaring off the clientele. A fire-breathing college chaplain, incensed by what he percieved to be "the un-Christian-like character" of some of the works on display, wrote a letter to the school president demanding that the show "be immediately dismantled." When the latter refused, the good chaplain took his case to the pulpit, lambasting the exhibit from on high. Viewership doubled the very next day.
Perhaps what one critic has called "the new Smart Art" is smarter than we think.
* * *
Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “New Art Hits The Road” (page 1 of 1), Sunday Globe Leisure, May 05, 1991
