10.04.07 kulturnatib

Legs

The definition of a chair always includes the fact that it has legs. These hold up the chair making it possible for it to support any weight often heavier than itself. Just how heavy is easily imagined by how heavy one is. Together with the weight of the chair itself, one can imagine the stress the chair is subjected to even without the additional weight of an occupant. This image is difficult to grasp until one is somehow made to feel some of that weight.

These were my ruminations some two weeks back when we did a 'guerilla' performance at UP. We did this commemorative performance on the occasion of the declaration of martial law, which, as an aside, there were more of such activities this year than any year previous that I can remember.

My performance piece titled, ' Democrasilya,' involved having a white monoblock chair taped to my left leg that was substituting for the chair's missing leg that had been broken off. I saw this disabled chair leaning forlornly at one of the classrooms where fine arts students had gathered for a workshop of performance art that I had been invited to. This was the creative spark that led to the development of the piece.

While waiting for my cue to start, I saw Kenneth Cobonpue, a leading local and internationally recognized furniture designer, waiting to witness the performance. He had just come from a class in industrial design he is teaching at UP. Looking at me with a look that asked, “and what in the world are you doing with that chair taped to your leg?”, I remarked, “I now finally know how a chair's legs feel.” “It's surprisingly heavier holding up a chair with one's leg than holding it aloft by hand, even by one hand,” I continued, as he ambled into the canteen where Raymund Fernandez, chairman of the UP Humanities Department and fellow performance art artist, was holding court.

Not only was my leg standing in for the chair's missing leg, it had to do something no chair's legs does or is ever made to do. My chair-leg had to walk, dragging the chair along. And it wasn't just to be any sloppy, haphazard, whatever walk. It was to be a brisk, stern, ramrod straight military walk. A march.

To emphasize the point further, on that foot I was a wearing full leather military combat boot. By design, such boots are not meant to be comfortable. They are meant to help drive fear into the enemy's hearts by saying, “I can suffer more than you can and I can make you suffer many, many times more!”

But, my performance piece was also saying something else. On the back rest of the chair and hanging from the backside as well was an eye chart, normally, one of the diagnostic tools used by optometrists or eye doctors to determine visual acuity or its decline through the measured decrease in sizes of letters that one is asked to read as far, smaller or bigger, as one is able.

Instead of the usual letters, that eye chart formed a sentence whose letters were arranged like that of a typical eye chart's. The sentence reads : A MAN MAY BUILD HIMSELF A THRONE OF BAYONETS BUT HE CANNOT SIT ON IT.

I am doing this performance piece again tomorrow (5 October) during the opening of the UP Centennial Fine Arts Alumni exhibit at SM City Cebu. But, beyond the performance by itself, this will develop into a sculptural piece. The chair, boots and eye chart will be installed on a platform that, together with some red resin liquid that I will pour over the boot until it makes a small bloody pool, will constitute the sculpture by the same title, 'Democrasilya.'

This is what I am attracted to with performance art; the opportunity for an artwork to transform yet into another work. Especially, with this work, it fully carries out the metaphoric and even literal dynamics of its most engaged element; Legs. Seen two ways, in both cautionary or celebratory perspectives, one question: See where they lead to?