Really Short Notes on Things I Recently Saw
Paloma Polo, via Galeria Umberto di Marino
Paloma Polo, Hold Everything Dear (2014)
Ishmael Bernal Gallery, UP Diliman, Quezon City
Whenever I try to talk about the problem with buying artwork based on how it makes you “feel” (or the general problem of buying and selling art), I’m usually met with “But isn’t that how it should be?” Which has become something of a conversation-ender, because who said anything about the shoulds and should-nots. Anyway, here it is now, the job(s) I signed up for and the questions I’ll always be turning into unnecessary problems – such as the problem of all art being quite useless (Oscar Wilde). Then again, if I make it a problem, does that count as being of use? Haha?
There’s a small exhibit ongoing until the end of the month at the lobby of the UP Film Center, on the less popular side facing the lagoon. Here, Polo takes the materials of local knowledge, plant remedies (folk medicine?), photographs them, then renders them as highly stylized product shots of fossils. I start with this because I helped out a bit with finding a printer for these photos, and each time someone had an opinion about how the image was made, asking if they were wood carvings or engravings, or just really funky plants.
I guess it’s just apt to begin talking about what art does within communities, to audiences, to markets, by looking at Polo’s renditions of knowledge and remedy as it fossilizes and is, in the sense of modern industry, of scientism rather than science, rendered quite useless.
Poklong Anading, Road to Mountains (2015)
Art Fair Philippines, The Link, Makati
There is something sobering embedded in the playfulness of Poklong Anading’s installation at this year’s Art Fair, in which a mound of flattened tires were cut open and laid flat across a section of the 7th floor exhibition halls. The choice of material shows a clever engagement with the site, working within rather than in spite of the Art Fair being held at a parking garage. I happened to chance upon Road to Mountains being used as a trampoline, and like most work filed under the legacy of the ready-made, Anading’s work bears the aura of a practical joke.
Yet, there is that other dimension to the work, found in the accompanying video showing glimpses of what one sees while in transit, illustrating the lapses in our memory of getting from here to there, of the nuances between trying to remember and forcing oneself to forget. While recycled tires in this case find a new purpose as a plaything or an obstacle course, they also speak of endings, of grief, and of the conclusiveness of reducing the materials of mobility to a useless heap of industrial waste. Driving home that night with the windows down, I could hear my car’s tires on the road, the squeaking of treads gripping asphalt, and recalled the optimism of jumping on a pile of tires, of lifting off that which is meant to ground us.
Paul Pfeiffer, 24 Landscapes(2000-2008)
Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Malate, Manila
The twenty-foot-high walls of the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design are fully utilized in Pfeiffer’s first solo in the region. On its own, the image of a landscape barely warrants any notice, fully exhausted. Yes, we get it, our eyes need a break from this blighted urbanity–yet these are no ordinary landscapes. There’s something in the touch Pfeiffer lends to the subject that rekindles one’s belief in something larger than oneself, but there’s also the specter of his past work, which deals with iconography, erasure, and what he calls “camouflage” as a way of abstraction. To the uninitiated viewer though, taking in the views side by side is a humbling reminder of coexistence, whether you’re looking at a pebble or a cliff, a puddle or a shoreline.
Louie Cordero, Warslime (2015)
Blanc Gallery, Katipunan Ext., Quezon City
I’m guilty of being fully incapable of talking about Louie Cordero’s work without bringing up color, which was the primary reason it ever resonated with me – having grown up in Quezon City: SSS Vill Jeepneys, hand-painted billboards, vinyl stickers on everything, etc. I even see his comic, Nardong Tae, in color. Without the usual pinks and ochres, something is lost in the capital-E Expressionistic tendencies of the work – work that looks like candy but tastes like bile.
When I was starting out with this art writing/writing about art and artists thing, the first question I asked was “What’s your favorite color?” If interpretations of artwork commonly involve matters of self-expression, there is more to be said of the intricacy and fussiness of Cordero’s brushwork that creates a surface that is almost perfectly flat without compromising depth. It looks more like print than like painting. So what impression does Warslime leave? It looks like cigarette ash and smoke.
Alice Sarmiento 