Dear friends and colleagues
Eheu, I have fallen in the way of being late.
I don’t like making generalisations about race or nationality,
Which is, of course, a cue for me to do so.
What always impresses me in Manila is that everyone, except for those who sleep on the street, wears clean clothes. No matter how mean or poor their house they come out wearing a clean t-shirt, shorts, dress, whatever. They have a regional reputation. In Singapore if you want a good cleaner you look for a Filipino. But, paradoxically, I can’t think of many other nations so lax about putting rubbish in bins, or who seem so guilty free at dropping plastic bags or Macdonald’s containers on the streetside.
Staying overnight at the seaside in Anilao yet again one was puzzled. A well designed hotel, inside it was scrupulously clean, but outside the beach was littered with so much plastic flotsam. Can’t the hotel delegate their staff to pick up the trash at the start of the day? Every resort I have stayed at in the Philippines, it has been the same.
Are people blind to it? It was a beautiful location so a couple were having romantic pre-wedding wedding photographs with the sea churning behind them. Were they not bothered by all the trash appearing on the photos? (Incidentally this is a very Asian habit: having photographs taken before a wedding in glamourous surroundings. Has the practice spread to the UK too?)
I am curating two shows so I am doing a lot of studio visits. It is rare here to find an artist with a decent sized studio but Pow Martinez has built one on his parent’s backyard. The only downside is that it is close to the river which recently flooded and inundated his studio with filthy water. His book collection was a casualty. He is trying to dry them out in the sun, but I doubt they can be saved.
I’ll talk about his work next year when I work with him on the show but my mind at the moment is fixed on rubbish or poverty.
In the Philippines there many poor people; there are also a surprising number of very rich people. The artists sit between these two extremes. In a nation with very little state or public support for art they depend enormously on those with disposable income to survive. (Having a wife, husband or partner with a “Real” job also helps.)
As in other Asian countries most artists come from middle class families so you rarely see them starving, but they see and experience of poverty every day, especially if they live as most ambitious artists probably do, in the megacity Manila.
It struck me how many artists deal with or use poverty and the signs of poverty in their world when I went to see the Ateneo Art Awards. Situated in the Ateneo university in Manila, am elite university founded by the Jesuits, the gallery was initiated by the artist Fernando Zobel (who came from the prominent Ayala family. As always twelve artists under the age of thirty-five are selected on the basis of a show the year preceding. The three winners are offered residencies in Liverpool, Singapore or Australia. There is also a competition for art writing: a very good venture as there is so little platform or encouragement for writers, (I should add I have in previous years been a judge for both type of awards.)
I have problems with the work of one of the winners, Ronson Culibrina. Sculptures of junk frozen in slime coloured resin as if in the badly polluted waters of the laguna near Manila, and paintings junked up with blobs of black resin. Both seem to me to be, not as is claimed an ecological protest, but squalor-chic. I notice all his works, like most of the other eleven artists are already in private collections. It is great that there is such support for young artists, but what do these works about urban squalor actually mean when they hang in an elegant sitting room of the comfortably off?
Johanna Helmuth. A set of paintings of urban grottiness, a man exhausted on a couch, sitting next to a sex doll, a boy licking his mothers’ feet – all painted with a curiously clogged and crusted surface. These are strangely compelling and her sculpture of a pedicab decorated as if it was a chi-chi bedroom was both amusing and touched on the heroism of everyday life. A bottom end job for the poor is to bike for your life: borrow a bike with a side car to give people rides and deliver goods. Helmuth grew up in an area where many pedicab drivers slept in their pedicabs for lack of a better home.
Elias Miles Villanueva. Small collages made on scraps of broken glass bottles. I liked these: they were inventive. Again, I am impressed that so many collectors are relaxed to buy such curious, transitional objects.
Issay Rodriguez. Looking at the small scrappy drawings, often torn into irregular shapes. I was reminded a little of Richard Tuttle and the way, especially in his early career, he would make whimsical but poetical works from bits of string of paper. But Rodriguez’s were too fussy and their effect was radically diminished by being put in rather heavy frames. They should have been shown unframed. Her table piece, textile books that you were invited to embroider in, did successfully entice some visitors to participate.
Robert Langenegger. His recent work has gotten more sharply imagined and painted, which I think is good. As always they are humourous but scabrous. Even more than most he sees the comedy or grossness of everyday life, not the heroism.
One of Geraldine’s fellow students at College was a nun. Nowadays she works out in the provinces with poor people trying to help them. Sometimes Geraldine helps her by selling a work or taking on a helper. One of her sister nuns came to us asking if we could help two teenage girls. Their father was a fireman but had died fighting a fire. The widow had been given no pension just a flat compensation payment of 10,000 pesos (about 150 pounds). She is struggling to make ends meet and cannot afford the education for the two daughters. Could we give 20,000 pesos (about three hundred pounds) a year to cover their education? One always does one’s best to help, but one also knows there are so many other people facing terrible hardships here.
Have a good month
Tony