Dear friends and colleagues
On Parties and green, growing things.
4th Jan 2020 near Tagaytay
At Gregory Halili’s house. It was a birthday party for Gregory and two other artists – MM Yu and Elaine Roberto Navas. Many other artists that we have mentioned in previous letters were there. In any other country I very much doubt if it would be possible to have so many prominent members of the art world at a social event set up by an artist. It was a friendly and relaxed event. The art community has its cliques and dislikes but is overall a companionable body.
Furthermore, it is always a pleasure to visit Gregory’s house and garden because he is both an instinctive collector and passionate gardener. He installs his various objects and plants with elan and precision.
The installation he had made with some of the paintings of skulls he has made on clam shells bears witness to that.
28th Feb. 2020 Silverlens gallery, Makati, Manila
Gregory had been asked to curate an exhibition at Silverlens gallery. As a committed gardener he wanted to think about plants and about the climate crisis. In his curatorial note for this exhibition which he called Seeking Sanctuary he wrote, “If the current state of environmental decline continues its destructive path, then inevitably nature will only exist as a memory.
“We live in a country blessed by natural abundance. Yet we seem to believe that our resources are unlimited, depleting its wealth dry…Now, it is estimated that only 20% of the country’s forest remained.
“Searching Sanctuary is the manifestation of ideas and inspiration, from 21 Filipina and Filipino artists, whose absolute purpose was to hunt, capture and preserve what is vanishing. The act of creating images of nature: of painting, of drawing, of photographing, of sculpting, is a profound expression of preservation.”
I can’t disagree with that, but how do you make an exhibition, as opposed to a single art work an “act of creating”? How can you make a garden in a gallery? How can you in an exhibition convey or create some sort of objective correlative to the principle and manifestation of plant growth and blooming – especially here in the tropics where the growth is so prolific and the abundance of species immense?
There were some really good works in the show but it still seemed to be very much an exhibition in a commercial gallery, albeit an elegant one. He had thought, he told me, of putting plants in the foyer but in retrospect it needed the energy of plants entwined in the exhibition itself. Which would have made it a problematic project for a commercial gallery.
21st October 2019 Fondation Cartier, Paris
It made me recall visiting the exhibition Trees (Les Arbres) at Fondation Cartier. The exhibition was incredibly popular – my daughter Isolde and I had to queue for an hour or so to get in. The subject touches people. At the time my reaction was that the exhibition was a bit messy and cramped – a bit claustrophobic and very crowded! But the messiness or chaos allowed for a lot of energy. I liked it that the exhibition spread out into the garden with works by Agnes Varda and others. And it made great sense in the inside/outside architecture of the building. There were trees as well as pictures of trees.
Of course, you cannot compare Gregory’s show with a long-planned global project such as Trees which effectively started nearly thirty years ago when Jean Nouvel designed the building and asked Lothar Baumgarten to design a garden around and in it – later enhanced by the vertical garden created by the artist Patrick Blanc. Trees also had a massive compendium of a catalogue – available in English or French. Everything, texts, objects drawings connected – however inelegantly.
21st November 2019
Before flying back from the Singapore Biennale (yes, I know I never finished my review of it, but a volcanic eruption put it out of my mind) while waiting in Changi airport I wandered, as I often do, into the butterfly garden. It is a wonderfully calm place to sit in for a few minutes when waiting to board a plane. There are lots of plants scattered through the airport – presumably the Singaporeans have done their normal super-thorough research and concluded that green growing things are therapeutic for tense or bored passengers and contribute to making the airport the one universally regarded as the best in the world.
Who would not like walking in a garden and seeing butterflies hatch, flitter about and eat?
Could one make an exhibition that integrates objects about nature and living nature? Could one make an exhibition that one is “in” in the sense that one is “in” a garden? I wonder if Seeking Sanctuary could turn out to be a more than useful stepping stone to both imagining and creating such an exhibition.
Next week’s letter will be the last Tuesday in the Tropics at least in its current form, so I hope to see you there.
Have a good week
Tony