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In her
essay “Hunger as Ideology,” Susan Bordo relates her
classroom experience: “Sometimes, when I am analyzing
and interpreting advertisements and commercials in
class, students accuse me of a kind of paranoia about
the significance of these representations as carriers
and reproducers of culture.”
Recently
concluded at Galeria Duemila was a show/exhibit ascribed
to Romina A. Diaz, Ann Wizer and Wild Cat Girls. Those
names are no more authors than cartographers and
facilitators, raconteurs interested in expunging images
of squalor and poverty and underscoring them in
instruments that escape boundaries. Like Bordo, they
will be accused of paranoia about how poverty is
represented or misrepresented. For the cornucopia
displayed wildly atop buildings there is the
corresponding missing portraits of those who reside at
the bottom of these huge structures, under the bridges,
over the canals and even on treetops along the highway.
Unlike
Bordo, the Wild Cat Girls, the young girls who have been
made part of this social art experiment, may never feel
any paranoia about what meanings they may attribute to
the ads around them. They will not share the degree of
articulation the two artists have about art, for these
young girls will have their own area of articulation. In
a pop twist, the project allows the public to monitor
the young “artists” through a web site as they create
their own arts derived from their “aesthetics.” The
approach in effect asks us to look again at how the
traditional framed paintings of squatters paint for us
poverty and loss.
THE
photographs of the Wild Cat Girls by Romina A. Diaz for
the exhibit
Living on Loring.
The
artists are disparate: Romina Diaz, half-Filipino and
half-Italian, believes that emotions, not just colors,
paint a truly human picture of the reality of poverty.
Ann Wizer, a half-Norwegian/half-Lebanese American, goes
out of her art and talks about how her displays, in so
many words and images, may provide “decent shelter,
basic education, proper health care.
The two
artists have also lived on Loring Street in Pasay. For
this exhibit—titled Living on Loring—an art
presentation that is more performative than framed, the
two travel back to that street. Within that territory, a
terrific engagement blooms, where the established
Galerie Duemila now looks out to a different set of
interpreters, the young girls who may not be artists in
the academic or practitioner sense of it, but are
capable as well in depicting their surrounding.
The
results get mixed emotions and feelings. If you are for
the formalist art, or even for what Nick Zangwill calls
the verdictive aesthetic judgments (distinguishing
between ugliness and beauty) or the substantive
aesthetic judgments (notions of elegance and delicacy),
Living on Loring as a set of artworks is not for
you.
Wizer,
the more established artist (the definition loses its
function in this processing of arts where nonartists are
embraced into the sphere of art presentation),
contributes a series of photographs of structures with
spider-web embroideries on them. The pieces are framed
then in the ubiquitous GI sheet material that composes
the “bubong na yero.” This material is the first to be
blown away during typhoons, and it is the first that
gives the makeshift houses of informal settlers around
Galeria Duemila a sense of shelter. In Wizer’s art, the
nipa hut comes out as a soft, almost ghost-like
apparition over tomb-like structures. Is the artist
opting for the heart in poverty and commenting on the
death of emotions in more solid buildings?
A series
of collage strikes out the bitter chord of this
presentation: memory is the only escape available. A
collage titled Malibay, from afar, looks like a
sophisticated drawing board, a corporate mural detailing
corporate responsibility. Upon closer inspection, one
sees scribbling about the past of the place. On the
right side, a cluster of junk resets the blown-away roof
of the Japanese print, and reveals writings about change
that is not always for the better. The report is a map,
technical and technological, leaving the people out.
The
photographs of Diaz bring into the landscape the
unmentionable. They are the selected girls from
Loring Street.
The collaboration is in full force, with the girls being
“inspected” through the lens of the camera as they
construct or reconstruct their identities. The exercise
is noninvasive; the girls construct out of the
balikbayan boxes colorful homes, painted in colors that
will put to shame an errant rainbow. Are these the paint
that we use to hide the grime of urban slum? Are these
the tones that we admire in the paintings about hunger
that are displayed in our offices and homes?
As a
project, Living on Loring extends into another
presentation under the title of Finding Sita. In this
public art, Wizer says they will attempt to
recontextualize the girls’ works and photos within the
archetype of Sita, the heroine in the epic Ramayana. Why
Sita? What aspects of Sita, this many splendored woman,
will be sought?
Is it
Sita the woman who is journeying beside her husband,
Rama? Is it Sita who is asked to prove her loyalty and
purity? Why bring in a character from Ramayana? One
apparent answer is that the artists see in the decay and
loss the massive role of globalization, which in the
literary sense is duplicated in scope only by the spread
of the epic Ramayana. That we do not have mainstream
knowledge of the epic could be also a commentary of the
loss of identity in our site.
The
exhibit Living on Loring/Finding Sita came out of
the discussion for a larger project: “Trade Routes,
Converging Cultures—Southeast Asia and Asia America.”
The project, which involves cross-cultural
collaborations and exchanges between women, was
conceived by Angel Velasco Shaw, who also curated the
Living on Loring exhibit. The curator is noted for
the anthology Vestiges of War: The
Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an
Imperial Dream. |
