Tony Godfrey. Good afternoon Gerry, I would like to begin with my experience at your impressive show at Vargas museum. Those simple cross shapes laid out on the floor instantly reminded me of floor based minimal sculptures by Carl Andre, Richard Long or Richard Serra. The way TV monitors were placed at the end of each arm of the cross reminded me of the way Bruce Nauman had deployed TV monitors in works like Going Round the Corner Piece (1970). I found myself responding to the work by walking slowly around it, stopping periodically to engage with a video of weavers at work or making music. But I remained always aware of my own spatial experience around the work and within the room. Apart from taking still photographs I found it necessary to record it for myself by walking around it again with a hand-held camera – e.g. my cell phone. Now I want to talk about this relationship to minimal sculpture and conceptual art anon, but first I want to talk about the weavers, because I soon began to wonder if you had an identification with the weavers. Was it the sight, and sound, of the weavers that drew you to make this work or a more ideological or political interest in indigenous textiles?
Gerardo Tan. The installation work called Rendering that you saw at Vargas Museum was conceived during a trip to Miag-ao, Iloilo City around 5 years ago.
I was initially attracted to the sound inside the weaving house that reminded me of minimal music, particularly the drone music of, say, Steve Reich or La Monte Young. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that the weaver’s movements also matched the sound they were creating and the weaves were also mathematically structured. How they configure everything still baffles me. They must configure everything in their heads or do it purely by instinct because they never refer to any notes. They just go on and on like the drone sound they were creating, stopping every now and then to adjust something. I thought – “what if they were weaving the patterns of the sound that their pedal loom is creating?”
So, I would say it was the sound and sight that drew me to make this work – also my interest in drone music and of course the works of the artists you mentioned, in particular, Robert Morris’s early piece called A box with the sound of its own making, (1961) and Andre’s early square metal plates that turned sculptures “in-the-round” into sites to be walked on and experienced directly. It was the effect that I wanted to achieve in my work. Other images came into mind while doing the work like Nam Jun Paik’s TV Buddha and Nauman’s running neon piece War/Raw. Placing the two textiles perpendicular to each into a cruciform refers to the weft and waft of the weaving process and the grid of modern art. My visual vocabulary is definitely influenced by the works of the artists I’ve mentioned. However, I also cannot deny the influence from my younger years in Mindanao of seeing itinerant vendors peddling all sorts of stuff where everything is on the ground and you walk around the mats to inspect what they got.
TG. I didn’t know you came from Mindanao. I have met many Filipino artists but I think you are the first to come from the Southern island. I have never been there so do not know what it is like. What sort of a family did you come from? Mindanao is home to most of the Muslims in this nation. Was yours a Christian or a Muslim family?
GT. I was actually born in Manila. When I was 3 years old, we moved to Cotabato City in Maguindanao because my mother’s family is from there. My father, who was a lawyer, loved to farm and there was enough land for him to till there. My mother on the other hand, who used to teach the sciences at the University of Santo Tomas, found work as a university professor at Notre Dame University. I come from a big family of six sisters and a brother. When I took up Fine Arts in UP, I decided to make Metro Manila my base because there was no art scene nor any infrastructure like galleries in Cotabato or nearby cities. Back then Mindanao was mainly an agricultural place though there were other industries around like gold and pearl jewellery, hand-loomed textiles and Muslim musical instruments (like the kulintang) and metal housewares. I remember my childhood years spent on the farm and beachfront property owned by my grandmother. It is different out there in that the air is much cleaner owing to the lush natural environment and the absence of smoke-belching factories. I hope it is still the same. We still have a house and a farm in Cotabato but I rarely visit because I don’t get any stimulus or find a conducive environment for artmaking over there. My family is Christian, my mother being a descendant of the first Spanish settlers in Cotabato, the Sousa family, that originally comes from Utrera, Seville in Spain. My father’s ancestors come from Amoy, China, which is now Xiamen. The majority of Filipino-Chinese families originated from Amoy, from what I heard.
TG. In my experience the ethnic Chinese or Peranakan community has blended in far more here than in Malaysia or Indonesia.[1] Has your Chinese “identity” been of any importance to you? You have never mentioned going to China or any interest in Chinese art.
GT. My Chinese lineage hasn’t really been of importance to me except that I feel somehow connected to Zen Buddhism and other “esoteric” beliefs that are Asian in sensibility and espouse paradoxical and humorous tenets. I do want to go to China someday, particularly Amoy (Xiamen) where my father’s ancestors came from in the hope of tracing my roots. I was able to do this in Utrera, Seville where I met three generations of my mother’s relatives. It made me feel more connected to history and to the world.
TG. Similarly, does being partly of Spanish blood have any impact on how you respond to the textiles of the Indigenous people? Or has your identification as a Filipino led you to naturally empathise with them? I am aware that many other artists, most of whom are from the majority Tagalog people, here feel fondly towards the wood carvings (bulol) of the Igorot, and the weavings of other hill people. Often visiting an artist’s studio or house I will spy a bulol.
GT. I think it is more of my identification as an artist (more than being Filipino, Chinese or Spanish) that led me to respond to the textiles because in my work I saw the textiles as musical scores or repositories of sound notations. However, I do believe in the influence of the genetic pool. For example, I had a maternal Spanish grandmother who was a nun and an artist. She took up Fine Arts in Madrid and painted. I’m not sure how she became a nun. She loved to drink wine which to her was some kind of panacea for all sorts of ailments. Maybe it is from her that I got my artistic leanings and cravings for wine.
TG. You mentioned pedlars in Mindanao spreading their goods out on a mat. Did this include textiles made by indigenous people? Did your family collect such things?
GT. The peddlers that I used to see in Cotabato were mostly Muslims selling all sorts of things, mainly fruits and seafood – lanzones,[2] fish, crabs and such. Maybe nowadays they have relocated to proper markets. The textiles were mostly sold in the dry goods section, hung like curtains and neatly folded on low tables.
TG. How old were you when you went to UP (University of Philippines) in Manila? Was it Fine Art that you initially went to study? And if that was so what sort of artist did you imagine yourself becoming?
GT. I was 17 years old when I enrolled at the College of Fine Arts in Diliman, Quezon City. I was also eyeing Architecture but I was a disaster in Math so I opted for Fine Arts as that only had one Math subject in its curriculum. Back then, the course load in the first and second years were the same for all three majors in Painting, Visual Communications and Sculpture.
In our 3rd year, we got to choose our major. Initially, I wanted to major in Visual Communication for practical reasons. However, when I enrolled in Roberto Chabet’s class, I realized that my sensibility was closer to painting and was promptly drawn to it. My decision to major in Painting firmed up when Roberto Chabet organized group exhibitions for us in CCP[3] Small Gallery as part of our class activities. He also introduced us to the director then, Raymundo Albano, who was also an artist. Ray gave me my first solo show in CCP Hallway when I was in my 3rd year of studies in UP Fine Arts. After that, there was no turning back. I started out as a realist painter, painting landscapes, portraits and still lives in my early years as a student. In my third year in UP and during my formative years as a professional artist, I became experimental, pouring acrylic and house paints on cement paper bags or canvas, and using unorthodox materials like beeswax, used motor oil, dust and in one group exhibition, live chickens. Looking back, I never imagined becoming the kind of artist that I am now.
I guess I just followed my instincts and worked on it.
TG. What an interesting answer! I must admit not quite what I expected. I was aware that Chabet though always called a conceptual artist was often very supportive of students who wanted to paint, but I had expected you to refer more to conceptual art and thinking. You were rather, it seems, an experimental artist with a passion for materials. And when I look at the extraordinary variety of artworks you have made since college maybe it is still the best description. Before we talk about some of those artworks can I ask a question about collage. When we were working on an exhibition some time back you told me that following Chabet’s instruction to make collages instead of drawings you continued to make collages periodically.
GT. That’s right – it was in Roberto Chabet’s classes where I was introduced to collage. Mr. Chabet assigned us to do collages based on paintings of artists we like. We started with a series of 4 or 6 collages and the number increased as we got comfortable with the medium. The exercise grew on me and I must say it was a good exercise in organizing spaces on a blank canvas or paper and composing elements in as many variations we can – kind of exhausting possibilities within the limitations of the materials that we had in front of us.
When I was doing graduate work in SUNY Buffalo, making collages came in handy because it kept me productive while waiting for the large paintings I was doing to dry or when I had to stop to think things over. After a semester or so, I was able to complete a body of collages that found their way in some group shows in Buffalo. In fact, my first solo show in Buffalo was a show of collages in an Italian Restaurant called Just Pasta. I titled it “Just Gerardo at Just Pasta”.
TG. Do you still make collages?
GT. Yes, I am still making collages until now and it has been part of my oeuvre since the early 90′ and I have done many collaged-based paintings aside from the other works that I do.
TG. How long were you at Buffalo? Was it a good experience for you?
GT. I was in Buffalo for three years. It took me two years to finish my MFA in Painting, after which I stayed for another year to participate in group shows and interact with the artists in Buffalo.
Yes, it was a very rewarding and inspiring experience. Seeing myself working from a different perspective and interacting with other artists of different nationalities made me more objective and open-minded about my work.
TG. Which is the earliest piece you have chosen to talk about?
GT. I have chosen to talk about an early piece from 1998-1999, called Apparition. It is a two-hour video footage of a melting candle that was reversed so that instead of melting, the candle slowly builds up to reveal the image of a Virgin Mary. If you look around Metro Manila and in many parts of the country, you will notice these faux rock canopies called “grottos” positioned in a prominent spot in the village. Some are built in spots where the Virgin Mary was supposed to have appeared to send a message to a medium, so the miracle was immortalized with a grotto in the same spot where the apparition happened. I first exhibited the work in Finale Gallery in Megamall,[4] together with a few other video pieces that mainly dwelt on the idea of surveillance in the things that we consume or through direct CCTV recordings. Another work in that show was a black Hugo Boss shopping bag that was affixed with a closed-circuit camera so that when you looked inside the bag, you see yourself in it. I also installed a surveillance camera inside the gallery that tracked the viewer inside the exhibition space and showed the image of the viewer on a tv monitor in the gallery, turning the viewer into a subject as well. These works where partly inspired by Ad Reinhardt’s cartoon drawing of a painting with a hand poking at the viewer and asking the viewer “…and you, what do you represent?”
TG. I love that cartoon of Reinhardt’s. I often used it in lectures. Sometimes it followed on from an image of the same man in business suit and hat pointing at an abstract painting and saying, “What does that represent?” Reinhardt was insisting that even his abstract paintings had some political significance. Would you say that your work at this time was in some way political?
GT. Definitely they have political underpinnings, especially those that had closed-circuit or surveillance cameras that address issues on how our lives are closely monitored for control by institutions.
At about the same time in 1998-1999, I did Code that was a collection of hand-held objects from various households in Metro Manila, mainly from friends and people they know.
I documented each object like forensic evidences and compiled the photos into a book. I exhibited Code in Brix Gallery, filling up all the gallery wall from top to bottom with the commonplace objects. The objects were installed in a grid structure like a wallpaper and exhibited together with the book. When later I exhibited Code in the 1st Melbourne Biennale in 1999, I had a wooden crate installed in the gallery where Filipinos living in Melbourne could drop objects from their households in response to the objects that they saw or had seen in the exhibition. The objects from Melbourne and Manila where later exhibited together at the gallery of the Australia Center in Metro Manila.
TG. I am sure it was easy to get your friends to join in this collaborative project; did the OFWs[5] in Melbourne understand what you were doing?
GT. Some OFW’s who understood well what I was doing. A few months before I installed the work at the Ian Potter Museum, I wrote to various groups of Filipinos in Melbourne through their community associations to brief them about my work and to invite them to my show. There was a good number of objects that were donated by Filipinos in Melbourne that I later exhibited in Manila together with the objects from Manila.
TG. What works do you want to talk about next?
GT. Since we’re into my works that use cameras or their attributes perhaps we can talk about Mirror Painting, Green Surveillance and for a bit of mail fraud, “It is not hard to put a painting in the mail”? I did three versions of Mirror Painting. The first version was done in 2002. This is the third version that was commissioned by Ateneo Gallery for their Video Collection.
Beach Scene was one of my Green Surveillance series – paintings based on surveillance photographs taken by the border police in Europe and the US.
TG. Can you explain these a bit? What were the three video screens showing in Mirror painting?
GT. The three video screens in Mirror Painting show me painting the mirror panels with a video camera – scooping paint from a palette using the camera lens and applying the paint in regular bands across the mirror until the whole space of the mirror is filled – which reminds me of the grid arrangement of the objects in Code. If you look closely at the monitors, the speed of each video footage varies, the slowest, bringing it closer to painting. A narcissistic work this is.
TG. Did the post office in both Philippines and the US accept your painted stamps as the “real” thing? What was the text you sent to the Worth Ryder gallery?
GT. Yes, fortunately the Post Office in Manila and the US took the painted stamps as the “real” thing. The piece was my submission to a group exhibition in John Worth Ryder Gallery entitled “Manila Envelope”. The text that I sent to the gallery is a photocopied anecdote of John Baldessari that ends with a moral “It is difficult to put a painting in the mail”.
My work therefore refutes Baldessari’s summation because I was able to put a painting in the mail. I had another text inside the envelope that was addressed to the curator, Jennifer Woford, telling her that the envelope with painted stamps is my submission to the show and to simply pin it on the gallery wall together with the photocopy of Baldessari’s story.
TG. What concerned you about the surveillance photo taken by border police – the cruelty shown to illegal immigrants? Or the increasingly common and insidious prevalence of surveillance?
GT. My concern for the surveillance photos started with a painting that I did for a group show that Roberto Chabet curated entitled Blank. The painting was an appropriated image from an art magazine of people crossing a border. The photo depicted the border-crossers as nebulous figures that reminded me of the glow-in-the dark figurines in another work of mine – Phosphorescent Salvation.
I was initially drawn to the image because of its relevance to the word “Blank”, which can allude to unregistered identity. The increasing visibility of the said images in newspapers and magazines also prompted me to paint them. I also relate “Beach Scene” to George’s Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Only in my painting, the beach is a night scene, with the promenaders in Seurat’s painting replaced by restless people on the run from the police.
TG. All three works are about the act of seeing, or what we may call the politics of representation. In all of them you are, in different ways, implicating the viewer. They have to think about what they are seeing and why. Is that a fair comment? The other thing they all have in common is that they are all paintings. Was painting just a convenient and appropriate medium for these works or is it something you take an active pleasure in doing?
GT. Absolutely! In all three, they implicate the viewer in the act of seeing (or peeping). That I recognized in Ad Reinhardt’s cartoon that I mentioned earlier. In fact I did an earlier work where I put a peephole on a painted canvas and attached a mirror at the back of the painting directly across the peephole so that when you peep in the hole, the painting peeps back at you.
After having majored in Painting in my undergrad and graduate studies, it was natural for me to express my thoughts through paintings. Aside from taking active pleasure in it, I like the tactility and malleability of the medium because paint can be applied in thin layers or impasto, as well as create various depths or textures through deliberate and chance procedures.
TG. You seem to maintain a practice that involves both painting and what Baldessari termed “post-studio art”.
GT. Yes, I can work in the traditional way in the studio churning out paintings, collages or whatever it is that I have planned on doing. When it gets boring, I look around and consider other processes or ideas to work on. I like to do extended forms of painting that necessarily changes the production site and process of the work, like making digital prints on canvas before painting them which extends the studio space to the print shop, or directing a skater to paint on canvas by attaching a can of dripping paint under his skates. Here, the floor becomes the easel, so to speak. Like how Jackson Pollack paints, but in my case I am detached from the act of painting. I am directing it and my cue to stop painting is a kettle of boiling water. When the whistling stops, so does the painting.
TG. Obviously, you didn’t agree with Reinhardt and Baldessari that painting was dead! You weren’t worried that you were indulging in an archaic technology with a reactionary aesthetic attached to it?
GT. Yes, I don’t agree with either of them. Maybe they were very much into the ideational aspect of painting? Like trying to make the last possible painting or exhausting the possibilities of formalism like what the Support/Surface group in France did? Anyhow, their work was something to consider and think about. I like them especially Reinhardt’s work.
However, considering my personal context in the Philippines, I see things differently especially seeing so many artists here still painting in various ways and subject matter.
TG. Do you want to talk about Phosphorescent Salvation? Was it an attack on the beliefs of what is now the most catholic country in the world?
GT. Phosphorescent Salvation is a work that I did in the 90’s in a group show at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. I did three versions of the work over the years. The first version included a bit of performance in that I stood beside the work at the opening night to sell the luminous statuaries. For 70 pesos each, which was the actual cost of each statuette in Quiapo[6], I sold quite a number at the opening night. I imagined these statuaries glowing in many houses around Manila. The work was supposed to be a critique of the many reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary during that time in the broadsheets and tabloids. In many cases, the stories were supported by local parishes. Curiously these miracles happen when the places were in a bad situation or badly hit by a calamity. The message from Heaven is the same – it’s time to repent and change for the better.
TG. And – give us some money! Apart from this demystification of such religious gewgaws, periodically you have made wry mockery of the supposed aura of works by “great” artists. For example, you exhibited dirt taken a painting by Juan Luna, the highly revered Filipino painter of the late nineteenth century. Set in a gold frame and especially lit, it was all aura and no paint!
GT. My intention for that work with collected dust from Juan Luna’s painting Tampuhan was not exactly to mock Juan Luna’s work although it might appear that way to others. It came about when I visited the studio of the Austrian art restorer based in Manila, Helmut Zotter. Helmut was then cleaning Luna’s painting and told me that the painting was already 100 years old so I requested him to collect for me all the gooey dirt from the painting. My impetus for doing the work was to do a monochrome painting that incorporates time and scale in the work. That is, the size of the monochrome painting was determined by the dust accumulated on Juan Luna’s painting over a hundred years so that the tininess of the painting will contradict the lengthy span of 100 years. To enhance that contradiction, I installed the painting in the centre of a large golden frame and lit it with a picture lamp. These tiny objects of some value remind me of the stampitas or scapulars that priests wear.
TG. There a number of works, This is not Gregor Schneider’s Room or This is not Sugimoto’s Cinerama Dome for example, that mimic or appropriate art works by art world stars.
GT. In This is not Gregor Schneider’s Room, my intention was to mimic the layering of materials, like lead and foam, that Schneider had used to deaden sound in his house installation called Ur Haus. My work is an appropriated photo of his Ur Haus. Initially, I had two photographs printed on canvas. The first photo was left as is and the second photo was painted over with oil. The process was repeated until I have layered 4 photographs and 3 paintings. I installed them in a row so one could see the diminishing clarity of the image.
TG. And, is it fairer to say that, like the work using the dust from Juan Luna, it is not so much appropriation or mockery as a delight in process and play?
GT. Definitely, I find delight in process and play, usually with images that are mined from the art world. This is apparent especially in my collages and collaged-based paintings. Working with process and play is my way of dialoguing with the art world or with certain works by other artists. I take pleasure in it. When I work there’s already something out there in front of me.
I rarely start with a blank canvas.
Believe it or not, Sugimoto’s theatre appeared to me in a dream, like a message from the heavens. Only, in my dream, the image was reversed. The black paint that I used to paint Sugimoto’s theatres was a mix of the six colours of the spectrum. With that, I turned light into pigment so that the reversal of the image corresponds to the reversal of the medium. Hence, the Magrittean title “This is not Sugimoto’s Cinema Dome”, and so forth.
TG. It surprises me it came as a dream. I had always imagined you as very much a rational artist. Has this often happened, works originating in dreams?
GT. Rarely. When I dreamt of Sugimoto’s theatre, I think it’s more of intuition working than being clairvoyant or something like that. I found his photographs interesting because with its photographic representation, it’s function was reversed from a stage for showing something to itself becoming the object of display.
TG. Other works in this series respond to particular spaces, not objects, for example, This is not MoSpace. In this case, I am aware that you have exhibited several times at MoSpace. What makes it a place especially congenial for you?
GT. MoSpace has become a congenial space for me because it remains open to my work and has supported my projects.[7] Also, the configuration and size of the space is manageable for me. As far I recall, it started out as some sort of extension of Roberto Chabet’s classroom in UP because when he retired, he continued curating shows and held workshops. Then for his “classroom: Mr. Chabet used an artist-run space in Cubao that was managed by artists like MM Yu, Gary-Ross Pastrana, Louie Cordero, among others. When that had to close, MoSpace was conceived. I was then a teacher in UP Fine Arts and also participated in the shows and activities that Mr. Chabet organized at MoSpace.
This is not MoSpace is a realistic oil painting of a large wall of MoSpace. It is installed in the centre of the said wall space and projected over it is a video of the same wall. The camera slowly moves forward until it reaches the wall, then moves backward to its former position, like following the forward and backward movements of the viewer. My intention was to get the viewer immersed in both the real and the representation of the space or image.
TG. So, if we were to generalise or theorise, we could say that all your work, disparate though it may seem in medium and concept, is epistemological and phenomenological in approach. It is about how we understand and how we experience it. Hence the constant play on appearance and reality. Would it be fair to say that throughout your work there is also – at the risk of sounding sentimental – a celebration of life. Both in things and their perception, and also in the sheer pleasure of process – of making. There is I think it is fair to say both a seriousness and a playfulness to your work.
GT. Yes, I agree with you as knowledge to me is empirical and based on how we experience reality, whether real or virtual. Hence, you can also say that my oeuvre manifests the celebration of life, for better or worse, or simply life moving in time. I consider my works as like recordings of how I see and understand the world. The sentimental character of this aspect is apparent in “Code” but more than the sentimental character of the work, I also like to show that, as though it were a two-way street, a thing that we make for a certain purpose in life, be it a spoon or a computer, also directs our lifestyle and ultimately the person that we are.
TG. Finally, how is it going with your work for the Venice Biennale? How different will it be from the work you showed two years ago at Vargas Museum?
GT. Work for the Venice Biennale is doing well and we are on it constantly. We will be doing a mock-up installation inside the San Ignacio Church in Intramuros to see how the three main components – sound, video and textiles – will work altogether in a space that’s roughly the same as the Arsenale in Venice. It will be different from the first version in Vargas Museum two years ago in the sense that the installation for the Venice Biennale will be expanded from 4 textiles to 12, as we cover more weaving houses throughout the country.
The expansion also includes a second video showing another reiteration by the musicians and weaver from the patterns of the first textile, which is the Miag-ao cloth. The second reiteration expands the project from within. We hope to come up with an immersive experience for the viewer wherever he/she is, from the narrow tunnel where chant video will be installed to the expansive space of the Arsenale where the textiles and videos will be deployed.
TG. Many thanks Gerry. I hope all goes well and that you have a great time in Venice.
- Peranakan: the term for people of Chinese-Malay or occasionally Indian-Chinese families. For their history and particular culture one could visit the Peranakan Museum in Singapore. ↑
- A type of fruit ↑
- Cultural Center of the Philippines ↑
- Finale gallery like West Gallery and others were originally situated in Megamall ↑
- OFW = Overseas Filipino Worker. Over five million work abroad. The money they send back to their families is an important part of the Philippines economy. ↑
- A district in Manila where the statue of the Black Nazarene is kept, a supposedly miraculous object. Around the basilica in which it is set are many stalls and shops selling devotional statues, pictures and amulets. The annual procession of the statue is an occasion for fervid religious frenzy. 70 pesos was then equivalent to about 2.5 US dollars. ↑
- MoSpace was founded in 2007 ↑