TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 175
31st December 2023
Dear friends and colleagues
Alas, it is the last Tuesday of the month, not the first when you should have received the missive, but I have been ill. Or perhaps I should say “I realised I was ill.” I was periodically ill last year, often lacking in energy and had lost a lot of weight. Eventually I was identified as having anaemia and was scheduled to have an endoscopy to try and find the cause. However, just before Christmas I could hardly stand and was rushed into hospital where my endoscopy was fast tracked. An out-of-control bacterial infection in my stomach being identified I was dosed up with antibiotics and given a blood transfusion. (If you have never had a blood transfusion it is pretty painless but very boring: you have to lie there still for a long time.) Since then, I have been taking my pills, building my strength back and getting ready to do at least some of the things I was unable to do last year – especially more interviews!
One thing I was unable to do this year was go to Singapore and see, as I had promised in my last letter, the new art fair Art SG and also revisit the Biennale. I had to postpone my flight to March when I should be more ready to travel.
One show I did see before I became seriously ill that I want to mention was Pow Martinez’s at Silverlens Gallery. I have always liked the way he makes paintings that at first see sloppy, sleazy, even infantile, but which are increasingly well composed. I like it that in one painting he riffed on Ed Ruscha. He does not have the rage or gravitas that Philip Guston had – who does? But he certainly finds, like Guston, a happy blend of the cartoonish and the neo-classical. If one remembers the many bad imitations of Guston one saw in the Eighties and beyond that is a more than decent achievement.
Pow Martinez
Pow Martinez
I have been reading a lot: Elena Ferrante’s wonderful Neapolitan Quartet, the new biographies of Piet Mondrian, Hilma af Klint, Sybil Andrews, Ruth Asawa next. I really like biographies but I worry that there will be few good biographies of my contemporaries. There will be so few letters to read and, I suspect, very few diaries as source material. Who keeps email or Messenger conversations? Interviews with artists are normally over-edited as a sort of promotional literature and writers of books on artists seem ashamed to give much biographical information. Is that seen as too old fashioned? I wish I had kept a diary when I was involved in the London Art world (approx. 1977-2009). Someone should have been noting down the gossip, the studio chatter, the everyday travails of artists and others. One day I should (and others should) sit down and record all the things I can remember hearing or seeing that aren’t going otherwise into the record. Some of that will be potentially libellous so I guess it had better be given to some Institute like the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art to keep safe and unread till I have passed on.
I have started making my first ventures out. Friends from England, Chris and Suzie, came to see us and we visited Taal church of St Martin of Tours. As so often in the Philippines it is the fourth manifestation of the church. The first and second were beside lake Taal – the lake with an active volcano in the middle – and the second was destroyed by the volcano in 1754. The entire town of Taal was destroyed so it was re-sited 3 miles away beside the sea. The third church was destroyed by an earthquake in 1852. The current church was built 1856-1878 and is claimed to be the largest church in Asia. It has the sturdy proportions typical of churches here – though not so much earthquake-baroque as earthquake-neo-Romanesque. A wedding was going on while were there. There were many pauses for various photographs of different groupings: family of the bride, of the bridegroom, friends of bride, bridegroom, sponsors of the wedding, etc. These seemed to flow much more easily into the service than they do in the UK. Partly because people are so much more relaxed about photos. Is it also because there is a greater emphasis on family? Or that the service is relatively informal?
Church of Saint Martin of Tours, Taal
St.Martin
Detail
I am not sure if the sculpture of Saint Martin was from the previous church, but it was one of the better ones I had seen. The wood carving tradition here has never stopped, though the seventeenth century ones seem pre-eminent.
We spent time at the beach too. I attach, for those of you who like dogs, an image of myself and my dog Ragnar there. And one of him swimming for the first time in the sea. A nice way to celebrate his first birthday.
Wishing you all a good 2023
Speak again soon
Tony
