TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 180
2nd May 2023
- Oca Villamiel, Potteries, at Finale
Dear friends and colleagues
How can we adapt our aesthetic spectacles when we are in unfamiliar territory? Is it possible to actually take them off?
It would be nice to arrive at every exhibition with innocent eyes, in no way prejudiced by all the things we have seen before, and all the opinions we have, knowingly or unknowingly, listened to or proposed ourselves. One tries. But the mind is never a tabula rasa: we see everything through a palimpsest of past experiences.
These words above were, more or less, the third set of thoughts I had on seeing Oca Villamiel’s exhibition at Finale Gallery in Manila. The first set of thoughts was that, yes, I liked this: a great big circle of in the centre of the gallery, just like a Richard Long sculpture, but made with earth and seeds and Japanese sake cups. (You can buy these very cheaply in the Philippines at a chain of shops called Japanese Surplus.)
2. Detail
I assume I was partly liking it because (a) I am so familiar with Long’s work and (b) he had done something new and unexpected with that form. (N.B. Note implicit assumption that Villameal is influenced by Long.) That many thin green strands of grass were already appearing in the sculpture connected it to all sorts of ecologically inspired work – Herman de Vries for example.
3. Oca Villamiel, Like the dew of Hermon, 2022-23, 60 x 72″
4. detail
The second set of thoughts came when I started looking at the wall paintings and other small objects. Things made but looking as if made by natural forces: paintings with no apparent composition, just an accumulation of marks or stuff. Just like Nul or Zero.
Although the Dutch artists of Nul were much affected by Manzoni and his Achromes, and the German artists of Zero were close to Yves Klein, one of their members Günther Uecker having him as a brother-in-law, they were wary of both Manzoni’s prankster cynicism and Klein’s cranky spiritualism.[1] Uecker spoke in 1965 of the Zero Group being, “from the start an open domain of possibilities, and we speculated with the visionary form of purity, beauty and stillness. These things moved us greatly. This was perhaps also a very silent and at the same time very loud protest against Expressionism, against an expression-oriented society.”[2]
“The absence,” Nul member Jan Schoonhoven wrote in 1964, “of any preference for places or points in the work of art is essential for Zero and necessary to provide an isolated reality… The goal is to establish reality as art in an impersonal manner.”[3] Schoonhoven worked with paper and cardboard and white matt paint, the other Nul member with everyday objects often arranged in grids. Uecker famously worked with nails, covering his “canvases” with them, sometimes in swirling circular patterns.
5. Oca Villamiel, Earth, welded nails, 2023, 24″ diameter
And Villamiel, as recounted in Tuesday in the Tropics 134 (7th August 2018) had previously made a singular installation with nails in this same space. Nails for Uecker were a way of working on a painting, not in it. This would seem true of the paintings that Villamiel surrounds the sculpture with: an accretion of marks or in smaller paintings just a lot of matter (acrylic paint).
6. Oca Villamiel, Where is the Moon? 2022, 60 x 72″
7. Detail
However, it can be problematic to understand art from this region through the spectacles of European art. (And note: artists here, for historical reasons, are far more attuned to what has happened in the USA than Europe. I have no idea BTW if Villamiel knows anything about Nul or Zero.)
What of Villamiel’s past record? Should we read this work through that? Firstly, that having studied fine art he opted out of the art world for thirty years – or so I read, working in his family’s garment business or making sets for TV shows – and when he returned to art making in his fifties it was with massed collections of things: plastic dolls, feathers in bottles, coconuts, nails. Many of these things come with a social history (does this in Europe-talk make him more akin to Arman and the Nouveau Realistes obsession with the consumer society’s used objects?) He is often referred to as a collector, or a critic of society.
8. Oca Villamiel, Potteries, 2023 from gallery above
9. Oca Villamiel, Potteries, 2023 et al
And what of the titles of these works? The white on grey painting is called Like the dew of Hermon. (see Psalms 133 verse 3) Not the sort of title Uecker or Schoonhoven would have used. In the exhibition wall text Pristine L. de Leon writes, “From great snow-capped mountains, the dew flows South, blessing the far lands. An image in nature takes on symbolic meaning, but in painting, its presence is atmosphere. Globules of white, appearing across fine blots of gray on a wide expanse of canvas, invites optical absorption. Paint, as material, creates an impression of the natural, the hint of cool air and bright dew which seems to generate its own existence.”
10. Wall Text on Oca Villamiel
Is it a problem that a work can attract “nullish” meanings, sociological and biblical?
I would suggest that this indicates this work is interestingly complex.
As always
Look after yourself
Tony
PS. Schoonhoven, Manzoni, and Uecker all used white a lot. Does white mean the same in the Philippines when Villamiel uses it? Look at this image of a giant nun like billboard I snapped on the way home out of Manila. Not an advert for the monastic life, nor fashion, but like the other giant billboard left of it for skin whitener.
11. Billboard , Expressway, Manila
12. Billboards, Expressway, Manila