TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 196
19th November 2024
Dear friends and colleagues
I am very happy to tell you that I have just put another interview up on my website arttalksea.com, one with Mark Valenzuela. I realise that these interviews are getting longer: I have become more aware of the need to document this part of the art world I am living through. Therefore, as in the New York Times, I am marking at the start of each interview how long it takes to read – 22 minutes in this case.
When I moved permanently to South-east Asia all my stuff was collected, wrapped up and sent in a container in Manila. There it stayed for some time in storage. Eventually, once I had built my library, I brought it all to my new home.
I remember looking at all the old forgotten things as I unpacked them. Memories seemed to flood out. The container had been a time capsule. These things had come back from the past: books I had inherited from my brother that still stink of cigarettes, the old wobbly chair I used to sit in and that still wobbled familiarly, the Victoriana that my grandmother had collected, my father’s old sermon notes.
So going as I did last Thursday to Ateneo Art Gallery and entering the installation by Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan consisting of the not yet unwrapped domestic objects they had recently brought back from Australia where they had lived for eighteen years, I felt a certain kind of nostalgia, because, yes, this looked similarly like the contents of my container of domestic objects: books, lights, a sofa, two globes, a canoe (though that could be taken as some sort of metaphor for travel. Yes, it looked like the contents of container filled with objects that had been wrapped in cardboard by the removal men.
Until it didn’t look like that at all.
For a start, “what’s with all these cardboard flowers?” Do Australian removal men always garland their work? I doubt it!
And then one might have noticed the title: Project Belonging: From There to Here. The Familiar in the Foreign. Which is a pretty heavy-handed way of indicating there is something strange going on here, something uncanny, or… let’s go with Freud and speak in German, unheillich. Or, as Violetta in La Traviata sings when she hears Alfredo has gone to Parigi: “È strano!”
And why was it on a grid of bread containers with blue lights underneath? And around it a very different blue: the blue of sea and sky in over three hundred photos downloaded from the internet and printed at postcard scale, (a sort of democratic DIY Sugimoto seascape)?
One began to wonder if these truly were exactly what the removals men had despatched. Did the Aquilizans add or change the wrappings? These seem to me rather excessive. Maybe they do things differently in Australia but my removals team would have put much of this stuff in boxes filled out with balls of crumpled newspaper or polystyrene chips, not meticulously wrapped every umbrella.
Look at it instead as a sculpture and it was formally satisfying and semantically intriguing. One of the best cardboard sculptures I have seen. In daily life cardboard and packing tape is ubiquitous. Thanks to Amazon the world now comes to us dressed in cardboard. Easy to crumple or bend but cheap enough to chuck away or burn. But cardboard like polystyrene is an unsung and much used art material. Think of Hew Locke, or our modern master of carboard and duct tape Thomas Hirschhorn. And before those two there was the Austrian sculptor Franz West. Die Aquilizaner sind auch Kartonundverpackbandmeister.
Seeing it this way, the installation was maybe not so much about memory and belonging but about transformation. It is in fact a carboard floral garden – surrounded by sunlight, albeit reflected by the sea and echoed in print-outs of jpegs. And in terms of transformation remember what we saw in the wardrobe we passed as we entered the installation (in fact an earlier work from 2011 Foreigners: Project Another Country). What mundane objects they have in their wardrobe! The things they took to Australia many years ago. Such mundanity, is I am sure, deliberate. They become strange and interesting only by being packed and displayed.
I have seen their installations in Singapore, Brisbane, Liverpool, Jogjakarta and of course Manila. As travellers often do, they often have a fine, wry view of the places and cultures they move through. Their work often involves participation or collaboration. But perhaps above all their work displays wit. It is witty in a Pope-like way (and here I refer to the Eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope, not to any resident of the Vatican). A display of ingenuity, both mental and physical. Moreover, as in Pope or Mozart, that play of wit can be both entertaining and enlightening.
A few years back (2018?) they had a show at Aphro. The Aquilizans did something very simple. They went to what is many artists favourite shop Japan Surplus where you can buy loads of flawed or surplus stock Japanese objets, especially ceramics. They made little sculptures by gluing several pots or vases together. Geraldine said what other artists probably thought, “I wish I had had that idea” – and bought the one she liked best. Wit, ingenuity, playfulness, vivacity. Making something strange, in this case not to register trauma but (dare I say it?) a certain joy in life.
Speak again soon, I hope!
Tony
PS, yes, it is our Christmas tree in the background. The Christmas season starts early in the Philippines.