National Art Gallery
ROOM 307: INKLING, GUTFEEL AND HUNCH


Emerging from the rubble of failed Modernist utopias, contemporary art is, at best, shaped by uncertainty. Witnesses to the tensions, conflicts and broken promises of recent history, contemporary artists sift through the ruins and decay, gathering fragments of what could be of value. If the Moderns sought art’s meaning in the encompassing vastness of creation, the contemporary seeks it among the shards of the commonplace and in the fugitive moments of the everyday. Likened to rag pickers who scavenge the waste of Modernity, they assemble a fractured aesthetic that departs from earlier tenets of unity, idealism and perfection.

The works of the 60 contemporary Filipino artists in the exhibition Room 307: Inkling, Gutfeel and Hunch are reflective of the shifts and fissures in recent art making. The images, objects and spaces brought forth by this specific community of artists defy easy categorization, operating on the slips and accidents that can occur in the creative process. Merging idea, expression and relation, their works oscillate between doubt, probability and other ambiguous markers of contemporary life.

As part of the opening of the new National Art Gallery’s Contemporary Art Projects, the exhibition provides an opportunity to contemplate on the state of contemporary art in the Philippines. The spaces opened up for contemporary art are obviously unheroic compared to the refurbished rooms allotted for the official narratives of Philippine history. However, this wasteland is probably an appropriate terrain for art that denies the gloss and spectacle that accompanies convention. Responding to the context of the space, the artists in the exhibition hint at the underlying issues that affect contemporary art in the country, questioning everything from its formal properties to its place in the world.

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Public domain is inevitably probed, mediated and simply taken over by the artists whose works are done on site. Located at the thresholds of the room, the works of Gary-Ross Pastrana and Kaloy Olavides are foretelling of the imminent disasters and traps inside. Pastrana’s sign that reads ‘Sorry for the Inconvenience’ is presented as a metal-engraved reminder of the forever-unresolved nuisances and difficulties we encounter each day. Olavides’ installation of broken glass at one entrance coupled with a ‘Please Use Other Door’ sign on the other likewise intervenes with how we perceive and negotiate hazardous space.

MM Yu personalizes the room’s towering pillars with her signature drips of colorful paint while emphasizing the height and gravity of the space. Bea Camacho, on the other hand, underscores what’s lacking in the architecture, the gaping holes, cracks and negative spaces, by bringing in mats, fixtures and other details that echo those she has in her own apartment. Lena Cobangbang’s tiny bird perched on a branch inserted outside one of the gallery’s windows and Paul Mondok’s plaster spilling out of a hole are likewise interventions with architecture and experience of space.

The direct wall paintings of Vic Balanon, Louie Cordero and Erick Encinares meanwhile adopt the strategies of street art into the rarefied sanctum of the institution. They elevate defacement and transgression, minus the politics and hostility of what we often see scrawled on the city’s alleyways and walls. Balanon captures the nearly graceful arching movement of bodies falling and hurling in space, while Cordero and Encinares’ collaborative sketch mimic a grotesque editorial cartoon.

Also done directly on the wall, the collaboration of Robert Langenegger, Renmar Celestial and Israel Remo, is a stronger comment on the Museum targeting its most prized possession, Juan Luna’s Spolarium. Approaching sacrilege, it shows a sick tableau of images that bastardize the Luna original. Kreskin Sugay takes it even further with his sarcastically mediocre tarpaulin version of the masterpiece branded with the Diesel logo on one corner.

The subjects of the oil on canvas paintings of Costantino Zicarelli, Bembol Dela Cruz and Ranelle Dial are similarly less than laudable. Zicarelli blanks out a section of a photo of a royal Italian funeral while Dela Cruz and Dial’s collaborative work enlarges two jarring images of a lowly cockroach and the ‘Little Boy’ nuclear bomb. While magnified into explosive proportions, there is no attempt at a tour de force. Their nearly monotone rendering of images drags on the trails of photorealism, yet they retain a painterly disenchantment for its sheen.

These days, discordant images proliferate more than ever aided by the rapid availability of digital technology. The photographs of MM Yu, Jun Sabayton, Paul Mondok, Ikoy Ricio, Gary-Ross Pastrana and Sam Kiyoumarsi frame random individual views, fetishes and snippets of real life. Installed on the glass panes of the gallery’s windows, they become integrated with the actual structural design, utilizing available light and serving as a screen between the outside world and the interior space that has now become cast in shadows.

Yason Banal and Vincent Viray both present alternative situations and narratives in video, making use of the breaks in between text and moving images. Banal’s sing-along video juxtaposes random footages with pop songs from the 80s. Viray also works with juxtaposition in his silent commentary about urban poverty. Through their editing of text and images, they construct a parallel escape reality.

Some works are open –ended approximations and purposely in between, cutting across distinctions between various forms and gestures. Pow Martinez’ work amplifies the noise of a regular electric fan in his sound installation. Tin Garcia’s vertical queue of male and female figures glued on one of the posts parodies rigid gender stances, while Jayson Oliveria’s haphazardly taped photos and Argie Bandoy’s canvasses articulate the materiality of the medium rather than its carried image. Marc Gaba fleets in between drawing, painting and erasing in his traces of human figures originally used for architectural files.

Sculpture is redefined in the works of Jed Escueta, Ringo Bunoan and Lara De Los Reyes. Escueta’s dinosaur is carved out of Styrofoam and covered with small cut up photos of forests. Bunoan’s bridge is made up of stacked old wooden pallets nailed together to form an arch. Both work with scale appropriate to the room’s dimension, yet both remain unmonumental and retain the vulnerability of the handmade. Downscaled yet similar in tone, De Los Reyes’ fragile ceramic crumpled paper form a small mound on the floor, nearly disappearing in its expanse.

The social dimension of sculpture is further expounded by Poklong Anading and Ferdz Valencia. While keeping the formal qualities of an object laid out for contemplation, they invite participation from the audience. The works are gauged according to not just how it relates to space but to the actual users of the space. Both are grounded on a physical relationship with the body: Valencia’s ramp is a platform for the skater’s body as it dives and falls while Anading’s open book relates to the span of our outstretched arms.

Three projects, Cobangbang’s zine, Banal’s list of actions and the ceiling archive initiated by Anading, deal with the context of the museum, taking a closer look at the urges elicited by the museum phenomena. In her interview with the other participating artists, Cobangbang opens up a space for artists to reflect on their attitudes towards the particular exhibition and Philippine art in general. Banal utilizes the museum as a material, proposing / conducting 37 contemporary improvements from services, tricks to tremors. Dealing with the idea of collections, the ongoing ceiling archive attempts to gather objects from other artists and individuals, which are then sealed in between the floor joists of the room above, a hanging web of relics that reveal the intersecting ideas and idiosyncrasies of a particular community.

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If it is true that one has to break down form in order to get to the eternal, then this exhibition signals the caving in of old guards that hinder true experimentation. Let loose and torn apart, the excavated museum is given a new sense of purpose and order and made relevant to our time. As much as the artists in Room 307 resist overt historical and thematic classifications, they play a role in the interrogation and representation of the contemporary as it is happening, creating dynamic interludes within the hollows and depths of an otherwise dying structure.