03.19.09 kulturnatib

Consuming art

I was just on the phone with an art supplier. They are five hours away by car. One would think that here, for a major city – Canada's capital, no less -- art supplies should not be difficult to come by.

They, actually, are not. The major art suppliers do have branch stores here as do some of the more specialized, non-Mall shops.

But what I need is not what is considered a traditional art supply. In this sense it is specialized. Yet, in the usual sense it is rather common; wherever there are Chinese or Asian restaurants or groceries, which there are quite a number here even if the local Chinatown is not as big or as prominent as in other major metropolis.

Still, what I'm looking for is to have this common after-meal delicacy customized to make it a component, a major one, of an art work for an upcoming exhibit.

I'm looking for custom-made fortune cookies or to have custom fortune cookies made.

They will be part of an installation/performance art piece that is my contribution to an exhibit called Transcontinental Divide.

The installation will be some kind of Zen Buddhist altar and the performance will be by the guests to or viewers of the show who will be encouraged to partake of the cookies that will be served in the altar in order for them to fully appreciate the artwork.

The more perceptive amongst you will immediately realize that fully appreciating the work crucially involves getting into the cookie, breaking it open perhaps, and retrieving the slip of paper that will contain one's fortune or its directions for realizing the same.

Except that this will not be regular fortunes. Thus the need for customizing. They will be koan like directions. There is neither space nor time here to get into what koans are except to say that they are riddle-like sayings used in Zen Buddhism to aid in attaining enlightenment.

Yet, they are not riddles in the usual logical-rational sense. They, indeed, appear nonsensical. But they are supposed to lead to the instantaneous, intuitive grasp of non-dual reality.

At least that's what I take these directions to be though a Zen Buddhist might legitimately beg to disagree.

They are provided by an artist in Vancouver, our counterpart in this exchange exhibit, whose idea or intentions for the artwork we are at complete liberty to interpret or implement the way we understand them to be. We are, in fact, as free as to reject entirely the other artist's idea or directions and come up with our own artwork provided that it refers to the rejection.

That is not an option for me. Rejection is not necessary. In fact, as soon as I saw (the text wasn't just simple letters but had a visual or graphic design element to it) or read the instructions, I immediately knew what to do. The rest of the work is a matter of a little tweaking here and there.

This work is about the consumption of art, of how it is to consume art, of how art can even be art at all. These are some of the knotty questions that bedevil art and artists today and ever since art has been accorded its very own soapbox.

Eating is a very basic if primitive form of consumption. It is also high art. I have no problem with both. Like cake, I can have art and eat it, too. Only this time it won't be cake but cookies.

03.12.09 kulturnatib

Picture imperfect

As soon as I saw the picture -- half a page of one page and a quarter of the next page -- of a middle aged woman looking away from the camera into space that must be as wide as hope and deep as despair, I knew I was looking at a Pinay.

It is a single picture. But there is a one inch space – gutter margin on two separate but adjacent pages that are not contiguous – that slices it in two unequal halves.

This margin is not necessary. The picture could have been bled up to the folding line of both pages maintaining pictorial integrity.

But pictorial integrity is hardly what this picture and the story it tells is about.

The bigger half is taken up by the torso of Julia Evangelista. The smaller half, immediately behind and to her left that the tight focal point of the camera already blurs a bit, shows snapshots of her life pinned up on a board. She is not in any of them, but she is all over them, in her children – during graduation – , her family and friends and, perhaps, a grandchild or two.

In the presentation of this picture an inch separates both halves. In truth, both are several thousand kilometers apart betrayed only by Julia's far-away look that fixes a deeper truth of necessary separation made more heart rending by unnecessary cruelty especially in the hands of people so educated.

Hell is how the accompanying article in the Montreal-published French newspaper, La Presse, calls it.

With my somewhat shaky command of French, this is what I was able to piece together of Julia's story. She arrived in Montreal in 1996 on a tourist visa. She found live-in domestic work with a Kuwaiti couple, both medical doctors, who then keeps her passport and for the next ten years keeps her in servitude working daily, without breaks or holidays, from 6am till 11pm. She was not allowed the regular wherewithals of a normal life, access to the city's shopping centers, cinemas, banks, transportation system, etc.

Still with her measly 280Can$ monthly salary she was able to send her four children, who she has not seen in more than a decade, through university.

Had it not been for an almost one-way trip to heaven facilitated by a cerebral stroke in 2006 hell would have been forever for her. Actually hell lasted a bit longer. When she was literally felled by the stroke, sending her tumbling down the stairs, she had to wait for four hours before she was taken to the hospital, in favor of the children being taken to the day-care center.

The stroke half-paralyzed her but fully freed her. Her story was out. Her employers were prosecuted. They plead guilty. They were made to pay 4,000Can$ to an organization that defended immigrants rights. They also had to organize information sessions especially among their compatriots on the importance of respecting the laws of Canada.

There is no mention in the article of Julia being paid anything.

But it must have been payment enough for her to be freed from virtual slavery conditions, to reclaim a normal life, to find work on a regular job, after recuperating from her stroke and her ordeal.

It was a stroke of luck that many, mostly Pinays in similar situations, are banking on. Here, where Pinays make up the majority of domestic helpers and caregivers, and in the Philippines, where many are all too willing to risk falling into dire straits brought on by exploitation and deprivation.

03.05.09 kulturnatib

Open letter to XO?

A vacation is always thought of as a trip away from the familiar, everyday routine – drudgery, if you will – to an exotic location or even familiar locale sans work, house and office, with its attendant chores and obligations.

Our recent vacation was like that. Yet, it was, for me especially, also a return to the familiar work, chores and obligations that characterizes any art activity. In particular, a performance art event.

Thanks to you, XO?, who I'm sure won't mind not being named here in person since many of you have already made a name for yourselves individually to the point where the mention of your names brings on appreciative nods while that of XO? incredulous stares that wonder if artists are all such incorrigible alcoholics that they need to talk about intoxicants all the time.

Yes, you were able to organize two performance art events in as many weeks. Or, even less. And, in venues that reflect the continuing dominance of the youth market as the engine for the fast, furious and futilely unplanned urbanization of Cebu City. Moreover, they seemed to lend credence to some observation that the worldwide economic meltdown has yet to lick our shores.

The first, at Mango One, during the day of hearts. It was guerilla performance at its best. So far. I say this from the stand point of that being my first performance at said venue where, true to forewarnings, I found the audience to be the most heterogeneous and art-innocent yet at the same time certainly the most art-curious of all the audiences I've performed for there and here.

Russ Ligtas's performance was as stand out. Gay caricature is standard if usually tasteless fare in the city's menu of cultural offerings particularly for a day like February 14. But, Russ's performance art piece grabbed this caricature by the balls – pardon my French – and dazzled the audience with its unflinching, in-your-face honesty that I believe many there understood to be more about our addictions (loves, if you want to be cute) and less about gayness, straightness or whatever-else-ness.

The second event was at a more familiar venue. The audience, too, was more homogeneous, art savvy in both appreciation and practice. It was more intimate. As such, I was more relaxed, less wired for the minor to killer disasters that one prepares for with unpredictable success with an unfamiliar audience.

Yet, disaster struck. Almost. Not from the audience but from a fellow performance artist.

As I watched breathless, certain that all I was going to be left at best with was cleaning after the wreckage, that of my own performance particularly, the word 'spontaneity' came around to haunt me.

As I have often maintained, one of the most attractive element, for me, with performance art is the possibility or even the demands of spontaneity. A performance art piece can only be prepared, rehearsed, planned for up to a certain point. Beyond this is the slippery slope of spontaneity where nothing succeeds like success and flops like a soaked tissue.

Yet, it has to be spontaneity with a respect for some basic boundaries. My stuff is mine and yours is yours and make sure which is which.

I didn't mind much that a crucially important prop for my performance made an early appearance ahead of me without my permission. It was grabbed by this co-performance artist in a dance that had no business with my prop and vice-versa except for the simple, spontaneous fact that it was easily at hand.

Thank God non of the delicate release mechanism in the prop was dislodged or in any way rendered inoperable. That it didn't operate as well as planned when I did my piece is another matter that has nothing to do with the violation.

Yet, it could have ended otherwise. Badly. Then this letter would have been unnecessary. My point would have been made more directly, more immediately, there and then.

Still, this point wouldn't and shouldn't be lost for all that and even for the potential worse of that: You are doing a wonderful job, a real cultural service to the community whose archaic conservatism often trips or traps the long heralded march towards openness and modernity.

Padayon! I look forward to even bigger events with you.