7th March 2023
Dear friends and colleagues
You may remember that in my letter 163 (10th March 2020) I talked of how a group of nine of the most important Manila galleries had become dissatisfied with the art fair (Art Fair Philippines or AFP) and started their own fair (ALT). “Is the art market here big enough to justify two art fairs?” was my question and my answer was “Apparently so”.
However, it does not present a very coherent picture of the art scene to visitors from abroad, especially as they do not coincide. (AFP 2023 has been and gone, ALT is yet to happen). For, yes, after three years where restrictions have stopped either fair happening except as a sort of cross gallery bonanza the two fairs are back.
Has AFP changed? In two respects yes, there are no artists projects and the space, rather than being arranged on a grid, was filled with curved bamboo walls that led one from one gallery to another. It was rather like going round IKEA, forced to walk through every room and see every bit of furnishing before getting to kitchen utensils. Sometimes one was uncertain which gallery one was in. A labyrinth was how people described it. It reminded me more of an endoscopy or, even worse, a colonoscopy. Given the low ceiling (it is held in a multi-story car park) it was always a bit claustrophobic, now, for myself at least, it was even more so.
And the gallery’s responded, it seemed, by acting as though it was a jumble sale or car boot sale and cramming in far too much stuff. Instead of artist projects a few artists, Pow Martinez, Wawi Navarroza and Yunizar included, were shown in a more spacious tent like structure on the roof top. Their work could breathe!
However, paradoxically, the most crowded space in the 4 floors below was the one that worked best – No Space. An exhibition of art (high and low, pure and applied) From Baguio and the Cordilleras. This was not about cramming in everything you want to sell, but rather about showing the cross fertilisation going on in a very particular area.
The Cordilleras are the mountain range north of Manila that were never colonised by the Spanish. The Igorots and other tribes that lived there were too hostile. The Americans took on their Christianisation building a home from home in Bagiuo itself. Being much higher it is much cooler. Cool enough to grow good potatoes. So, this is an area where “tribal” arts and “tribal” beliefs persisted well into the Twentieth Century and still persist though in various ways dislocated by, merged with and re-invented as Contemporary.
No Space felt more like a café or meeting place (marae) than a gallery. Many of the artists were there, hanging out, chatting, happy to meet visitors.
No Space. Nona Garcia in black.
Who, What to pick out?
Perry Mamaril and Lee Aguinaldo. Lights by Perry Mamaril.
A vast woodcut by Leonard Aguinaldo.
Animals made in rattan by the blind weaver Rogelio Guinannoy.
Weaving by Irene Bawer-Bimuyag who has been important in re-energising weaving in the region.
Paintings by Nona Garcia, one of many artists who has decamped from Manila for Bagiuo in recent years.
Paintings by Kawayan de Guia.
No Space
Kawayan is at the heart of this. Indeed, the whole project began with him back in 2013 at a Singapore Biennale. The project was called AX(iS) project: curated by Kawayan, a seemingly anarchic presentation of all sorts of art being made in and around Bagiuo. For me it was the most interesting thing in the Biennale. For others it was a disgrace, wasn’t art and shouldn’t have been there. The “trademark” artform in traditional art of the Cordilleras were bulols; wooden carvings supposedly of rice gods, but probably capable of many other meanings. Many Filipino artists have one somewhere in their house or studio. Collectors search for old, “genuine” examples. Tourists buy one to show they have been there. Kawayan commissioned 86 people who made bulol for this tourist market and got them each to carve a self-portrait in their “style”. (Binulol.) These were each exhibited with a photograph of the carver attached. Notions of creativity, tourist/tribal, authentic/fake became deliciously paradoxical.
BINULOL at Singapore Biennale 2013, as reproduced in Tiw-Tiwong
Singapore Biennale 2013. Binulol & prints by Leonard Aguinaldo.
Perhaps most importantly No Space was the site for the celebration of the culmination of Kawayan’s project – he would deny it was his project, so many other people have been involved – the large book Tiw-Tiwong: an Uncyclopedia to Life, Living and Art in Bagiuo, the Cordilleras, and Beyond. (308 pages illustrated in colour throughout. Price PHP2,800) it’s a compendium of artists pages, anthropological and historical essays (sort of), dictionary type entries for local words – for example, “Pitik (KAN) The act of praying when drinking rice wine or any alcoholic beverage. Before drinking, a small amount of liquor is poured to the ground as offering to the unseen spirits who are among the people drinking.” (p. 241) If you are interested in art in the Philippines, or First Nations art, or how the traditional and contemporary can work together creatively you should get this book. (I will try and find out how you can get it outside the Philippines.)
Tiw-Tiwong
Outside the fair, several artists urged me to go see the show of Bacolod-based Charlie Co at Finale (one of the galleries whose loyalty is to ALT not AFP). I was surprised when someone came up as I walked around the gallery and introduced himself. “I’m Charlie,” he said. In fact he introduced himself to everyone and then proceeded to go round the gallery explaining why he painted each work and what it meant to him. His explanations were as forthright as his paintings.
Charlie Co explains his work
This is an artist without irony, vivid colours, structurally strong. He reminded me of the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. Co would have been a good muralist if he been born in that place and era.
Speak next month, as I write I am off to Bagiuo.
Tony
PS. Food for thought: Reading the Sri Lanka writer Shehan Karunatilaka’s Booker winning novel of 2022 The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, I came across this sentence: “The Philippines [like Sri Lanka] also started in 1948. Like us they are smiley, happy-go-lucky and vicious when they choose to be.” (p. 139)