TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 194
9th July 2024
Dear friends and colleagues
Although painting dominates the galleries and the auction market it is in making installations that the particular genius of Filipino artists – and indeed artists from the Tropics generally – most especially appears.
Among exhibitions I saw recently in Manila two were fully fledged installations, in two others installation of the objects was a determining factor of the viewer’s experience.
What do I mean by the word “installation”? It is, alas, a word like the term Installation Art used in a very loose way, especially in SEA, to cover objects, or collections of objects. Those things that should be referred to more properly as “sculptures” or if that word is too value-laden, as “objects”. To my mind Installation Art – think Ilya Kabakov, Anne Hamilton, Christian Boltanski, Helio Oiticica, etc. – has always been an art of the room, where the artwork takes over the entirety or most of the room. Whereas you walk around or past a sculpture (or object, if you insist on that term) you walk into and through an installation. The artwork activates the whole room. A sculpture inhabits space, installation art transforms it.
For example, although one couldn’t technically enter the installation at Art Informal, Travel Light by Pete Jimenez, it more than half filled the room. Like an organic presence it had, one felt, taken the space over. It was a strong image, or collection of images and though simple – giant cement bags hung upside down with lights – was rich in suggestions: transformation, post-colonial poverty, arte povera, a room of lights… Discussing it with other people there I said it would have been an ideal piece for a biennale (Venice or elsewhere). It was visually arresting, but it was rich in suggestion. Many viewers would be caught by it, stopped and made to think what it might signify.
Finale where Ghost Painting: Pagkalake by Kristoffer Ardena was shown can be a difficult space to show in: it is much like a massive shoebox. Ardena’s work used the immensity of the space well by filling it with a giant patchwork quilt replete with texts about being gay.
Finale also has a balcony from which one can look down on the exhibit – this worked well here too. One could walk behind the suspended quilt and view it from the back of the gallery. It would have been a really nice bonus if slippers had been provided so one could actually walk on and through the quilt.
At Silverlens gallery Bernardo Pacquing showed sculptures and paintings. It was the sculptures that caught my attention: scattered on the floor they looked like elements of a sort of concretised gym. Objects to pick up and interact with: beams to lift, sacks to push against. In some ways it was not unlike Robert Morris famously cancelled show of a gym/playground sort of interactive installation at Tate Gallery in 1971.[1]
When does a selection of ceramic bowls become an installation? Obviously Pablo Capati’s exhibition of ceramics at Aphro was about selling – the gallery specialises in ceramics, design objects and affordable art. But the curious layout of the space, two rows of steps to place objects on made it much more interesting than that. Perhaps the particularity of the space, its unconventional way of display sometimes makes artists raise their game.
I want to say something about recent exhibitions by Dina Gadia (paintings) and Leslie de Chavez (wall-based objects and paintings) but I will get to that next week or the week after.
Have a good week
Tony
- See https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate/perspectives/robert-morris ↑