atlas(t): galleon trade edition

stephanie syjuco and body double

Video stolen wholesale from www.stephaniesyjuco.com. Double-click to play.

hildhood is a distant country for everyone, a place of proverbial and metaphorical nostalgia. Most of us learn in adolescence that something is not right about ourselves, and we drive those things we found it so easy to be underground.

Artists especially have to spend their apprenticeship fighting their way back to childhood insights and personality quirks merely to find an authentic voice---to ground themselves in who they actually are and to dissipate the clouds of who they are taught to be. This is why autobiography is so essential and ubiquitous among learning artists. This is not news.

So when a child starts out to be someone--starts to learn a language, a way of dressing and thinking and behaving, a way of making noise in the world--and then has to change all of those things to continue growing up in a new culture ... well, it causes a quiet cataclysm. Idiom becomes stunted, often, and the child becomes a person permanently chasing after the right language to use to say, "I am."

I spent the year most children spend collecting complete sentences speaking my own language, an idiosyncratic mixture of English and Cantonese that drew vocabulary, grammar, and tones from each in an unusual pattern. When I left off and emerged speaking English, the Cantonese faded away. Well into adulthood, whenever I heard someone speaking Cantonese in public, a ghost self emerged, a sort of presence behind my left shoulder, that understood what was being said, and was connected to me, but could only communicate to me a sense of fading rightness in the sounds of the language.

It's like a parallel universe. When your childhood in one culture is broken off, the person that child would have become in that culture is broken off. But that no-longer-possible-person remains with you as an echo of yourself you can either choose to ignore, or attempt to build a sound-box around, to see if they have something interesting to say. If you choose--as I have--to chase after that echo, you'll never be satisfied, or triumphant, in boxing that voice. You're chasing a nostalgia for an alternate universe, depicting a world that your audience will never be able to see, and perhaps never realizes is there to be seen.

And then, of course, as adults we see the exotiphilia, or fetish for tribalism, or lust for otherness, that strangers will ground in the cultures we left behind. We don't fit into these visions, but even in the most egregious expressions we see small corners of the alternate universe. And we're angry and sad and speechless that someone else could appropriate the little nests of our echoes to say something that annihilates them.

This is how I'm reading Stephanie Syjuco's Body Double pieces. She composed them before we went to Manila, but I first saw one of these on someone's laptop in The Living Room while we were there, and all our talk, and thinking, about distance and culture of origin wove itself into my reading. I got to see a display of three of these pieces at the opening of Mills Art Museum's show We Interrupt Your Program tonight.

Each piece in the video triptych shows excerpts from a Hollywood Vietnam war movie filmed in the Philippines. Stephanie muted the sound and put black boxes over the images that turned the Philippine landscape into Vietnam. What's left is small glimpse of jungle or hills or skies or rainfall--the sorts of small moments and images brought back, Proust-like, when we smell rain or foliage, or eat something we haven't eaten since we were children.

The monolithic blank forms interrupting the landscape are nothing so simple as Western brute technology or political iron-fisting, or even colonization. At the risk of interpreting one-for-one: the hard, black boxes are maybe memory loss, or maybe just the places that never got filled in. Or the big, ugly swaths of the here-and-now we have to cover up to let the echoes gain some volume. Stephanie said tonight, looking at her own work up on the wall, that it was an exercise in minimalism. I think it an attempt to contain lushness in minimalism, something resounding loudly in Woff's new piece (yes, I will blog about it).

louise nevelson is a goddess

Photo via Wikimedia

'm Not Interested in Abstract Sculpture (sooo not!) so I wasn't going to see the Louise Nevelson show at the De Young (nodding in appreciation? NO!)

But then I interviewed Woff for a Hyphen magazine article (stay tuned) and she mentioned, among other, more idiosyncratic influences, Louise Nevelson as a role model in her "pomp" and confidence. So when I was there last weekend to see Mike's show, I took in the Nevelson as well, on coincidentally its last day.

Wow.

That was a great show, especially the first four rooms: one of those lovely, simple moments when the curators and the preparators and everybody gets their shit together and comes up with a complete experience that IS an experience ... but also shows off each individual piece to its best advantage.

Case in point: the entrance contained two pieces--a self portrait, and one of her "cathedral" walls of boxes. Each was set apart from the other, displayed in contrasting and theatrical styles. The cathedral piece stood against a wall and was placed so that the viewer had to stand right up before it without gaining distance; the self-portrait in front of a sheer screen and lighted dramatically from above, so that you could walk around the dividing wall and see the shadow of the piece from behind.

The second and third galleries were full of these black-painted-wood "cathedral" pieces, all stacks of open-faced boxes filled with found pieces of wood: lathe-turned table legs and the scraps of circular cut-outs, wedges, blocks, discarded moldings, etc. The genius of these two galleries was that each piece was set against a dark grey wall and lighted by two or three blue-gelled frenells. Far from obscuring the black-on-black piece, this color scheme turned out to be the best way to pick out the movement and blockage of shadow Nevelson built in. The modulation of shadow and surface that Nevelson plays with is so complete and sophisticated, that you don't need a high-contrast lighting scheme to make it come out. On the contrary, you need mood lighting. This was proven out by two later galleries which lighted black pieces in white to no great effect.

When I stood before the first cathedral piece in the entrance, I felt as if I was standing before a bank of speakers. I could almost hear music, the synesthesia of the experience was so strong. I had to concentrate hard, like when looking for the figure inside a 3-D dot graphic, but I could almost hear music throughout the exhibition.

Then I emerged from the faux-gloom into a room full of light, and white-wooden pieces of the "Dawn" series. After being dazzled for a moment, I noticed that, although strongly lighted, the pieces didn't create a high contrast between lighted surface and shadow. The white paint and varied forms of the sculptures' components reflected light in various directions around the pieces, modulating the play of light and shadow in remarkably complex and subtle ways.

The subsequent galleries, while impressive, weren't overwhelming. They were more a hodgepodge of miscellaneous great work, such as an entire room constructed on her scrap-box plan, plexiglas pieces, and paper reliefs. The first galleries, though were like the first two movements of a symphony, that tracked the sounds of night and daybreak.

Pompous? Probably, but what symphony isn't? Fabulous is more like it.

mike arcega and homing pidgin

Photo swiped from www.arcega.us.

t the top of the broad flight of stairs glows a row of stained glass windows, like what you'd find in the arcade of a monastery. The windows are each composed of a bright primary color, a tribal image inscribed on it in white light. From a distance these have a similar effect to the Chagall windows in Chicago, part commissioned artwork, part upscale design element, part museum dramatics.

But up close they read more like a lightbox poster ad for a traveling ethnographic exhibition. "Savage Artifacts Here! Now With Twice the Post-structuralist Selfconsciousness!"

The gallery they gave Mike Arcega to continue this thought is more a throughway. A landing, two hallways, and two doors give onto--or are accessed through--this space. Glass-covered vitrines sit in the center, each filled with the promised savage artifacts, and to the left--on the wall and in the corner--larger objects not suitable for display cases sit in theatrical isolation: a large, wooden ceremonial implement, and a rough-looking map, possibly of some sort of aboriginal provenance.

From the doorway, that is.

Up close, the ceremonial implement resolves into a giant spork, the map (of Oceania, natch) turns out to be made of spam, and one vitrine houses a selection of cheap tourist souvenir wooden spoon-and-fork sets (some bought in Quiapo in August). The "legit" artifacts, a solemn row of tribal war and ceremonial clubs from the Peoples of Oceania, are solemnly echoed in another vitrine by a series of Arcegaesque wooden "war clubs" (the photo thereof jacked from famsf.org/deyoung/exhibitions/) topped by wooden miniature aircraft carriers and the like, and "dance clubs" topped by miniature nightspots flashing lights.

The gallery is filleted by two windows giving onto the interior entrance hallway; these, also covered with "stained glass" transparencies, emit almost no light, and make of themselves the interior backlit didactics of button-pushy educational museums.

Sadly, in the center of this organized breakdown you'll find a real didactic explaining Mike, the work, and His Point. (Don't worry, I won't tell you What It Means. I'm too bored by the prospect of Educating People.) I suppose it was necessary, or at least inevitable. But I would have rather been given the opportunity to walk swiftly past ... or to stop, look, and say WTF? (especially to the fork-and-spoon sets on loan courtesy of Lordy Rodriguez.)

Far from placing him at a disadvantage, giving Mike a foyer for his installation Homing Pidgin was a perfect choice. The hallway to the right leads past a wallpaper of "Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique" to another gallery sporting hybrid American art-ifacts from Indigenous artists incorporating European elements and from European artists about indigenous subjects.

That entrance in turn leads to the museum's permanent collection of American art, organized by era and topic.The gallery on the opposite side of the staircase shouts out some dramatic--and actual--indigenous artifacts from somewhere or other--aren't they all the same?

The doorway opposite leads to a dim gallery displaying oriental carpets made by the Turkmen. And the hallway to the left leads into the middle distance, a place too far for the casual museum-goer to go.

As near as I can tell, from various websites, programs, wall didactics, and the half-remembered tales of Arcega himself at parties, Mike was invited to a residency at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. This residency was part of the "Collection Connections" project they started to "attract new and diverse audiences to the Museums." The De Young opened up its collections to Mike to browse, and Mike ended up putting together an installation/exhibition in a gallery provided for the purpose, created out of old and new work by the artist himself, and work from the Museum's collection. Plus, his friends' tourist souvenirs.

Very cool, the De Young. Props.

In all of this it's hard not to see the things I'm tracking in this blog--Manila, Quiapo, and Green Papaya, and Megamall--in Homing Pidgin. Heretofore, Mike has trafficked solely in eurocentric images and styles, with Filipino content. I've talked about Mike and hybridity before, but the hybridity has existed more in the artist's identity and subject matter than in the meat and bones of the work.

But here Mike is (re?) appropriating "savage" "indigenous" "tribal" images, making them not lyrical frills or mark-making on a more recognizable piece, but rather confrontational in their size and manner. The "stained glass" images are grainy, ultra-reproduced, slick-vinyl photos of pieces that have been discussed to death. The authentic war clubs seem rather tame and powerless in comparison. And all of these exist in the presence of too much self-consciousness about colonization ... and in the absence of an aesthetic that could be definitively attributed to a Filipino American 1.5 Generation X American-trained conceptual artist (re?) claiming a public identity.

I'm not sure what all that means, but for an artist like Mike, pre-identity totems seem a logical, bold statement. His lock on these images is what is hybrid: does he claim them as an artist of pastiche? As a clown/ethnographer? As a pseudo-curator? As a son of the islands? I don't think there's another artist who could keep all the possibilities in the air for so long; any other artist would have to mean something by it.

Maybe it's just from being in a museum (those windows!) but there's a size and attitude here. Basically, it seems to me that Mike has acquired the confidence to not make fun of the museum, but rather take advantage of it. His piece respects and dovetails with what the museum is trying to do, but is so much clearer on the whys and wherefores--and where-to-nows--of this kind of intersection, that he's able to hijack the discussion for the space of a short hallway.

Very cool.

The show's up until January 20. I'm a loser for not posting about it before. Go see.

new years and artistic processes

have a great many excuses, reasons, circumstances, 'n' such to present for being essentially non-blogging on this blog in the past few months. But the main reason is simple: depression.

Not that I've been completely nonfunctional. It's been a mild depression, brought on by shortening days, a mild health-related problem, and, perhaps most importantly, the seeming near-total suspension of my creative faculties in 2007. Crappy year.

At the end of this year someone, I think it was Jaime, told me that if you don't feed the beast it starts to feed on you, and it seems to be true. But there was also, with regard to my performance on this blog, some discomfort from a few of the Galleon Traders in response to my post about how the Galleon Trade Manila events were less about the artwork than about the artists themselves.

I see how this post could easily be read as being dismissive of the artists' work, although that was not my intention. Still less was it my intention to cause distress to the artists. Although it's always been clear to me in the abstract why "embedded reportage" leads to ethically compromising conflicts of interest, this is my first visceral experience with it. I'm simultaneously writing critically about artwork, and turning my critical eye on my friends. When the beast is busy eating your heart out, this kind of internal conflict can freeze you. And it did.

A few things have contributed to my release from freeze in the past week or so. The first was the turn of the year, which is powerfully symbolic, symbolically operative, and coincidentally happens a week or so after the winter solstice so that the symbolism and seasonal rhythm can work together to give you a full-on catharsis.The second was my doctor figuring out my mild health-related problem, but the less said about that the less boring.

The third was, strangely enough, that the Irish film Once got to the top of my netflix queue. No others of my friends felt the same way about this flick that I did, but when you're coming out of a depression and creative freeze, a movie about an artist who has come to the end of a long stretch of dark-night-of-the-souling and is jumped into the next level through the friendship of a fellow artist is just exactly what you need to see. The scenes where the two musicians play and sing together were ecstatically blissful for me, because their release felt like my release.

That's enough, clearly. But then the year turns and everyone gets energized in January again and Things Start Happening. In the past week I've stood before, and in one case, within, the artwork of distant geniuses, community sprites, and friends (sometimes all three at once), and it has been electrifying.

Last weekend the National Book Critics Circle was in San Francisco to acknowledge the existence of the provinces and announce the fina-list for their award. Thursday and Friday I went to three literary panels therefore. I might post about these over on my personal blog, but I won't here.

That same night (Friday) I went to Trader Woff's opening at Southern Exposure Gallery, a show I helped install, along with a number of other friends (in fact, helping get that show up was part of its process, and mine here).

Saturday I took one of my last chances to see Mike Arcega's installation at the De Young Museum, and also took in the Louise Nevelson show while I was there. Other De Younginess ensued.

Later that night I saw There Will Be Blood with Jaime, and trust me, there will be blog on how bad that flick was.

And Sunday afternoon, I took in the annual Day of the Kings concert of Coro Hispano with Robynn.

Yes, each of those is a future post, to which I will link here when they are complete. I called this post something about "artistic processes" because my blogging--my record-keeping of and spur to my critical practice--is string and parcel with my creative writing. My practice is integrated and revving up my critical function is the first step towards outright making shit up again. And vice very much versa, of course. So this is my declaration: as of January 15, 2008, Clairica is open for business.