TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 197

TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 197

26^th November 2024 -15^th December 2024

Dear Friends and colleagues

Having written this, I had second thoughts. I was uncertain whether I had made a regional difference sound like a qualitative difference. Maybe I had not looked hard enough? So a week later I went back to the two shows and thought for a few more days after that.

I was in Manila last Saturday to meet people and also catch up on exhibitions. Here are some thoughts on two unusually interesting shows.

Revisiting the Landscape from the entrance.

Works by Mariano Ching and Lui Medina on the left-hand wall.

Revisiting the Landscape looking back at the entrance

At Mo_Space there was Revisiting the Landscape curated by Gerry Tan. I was intrigued: if this was representative of how artists in the Philippines see landscape, there is a considerable variation from what you might see in an English, Welsh or Scottish (And yes, there would be significant differences!) exhibition about landscape.

Poklong Anading

Consider the piece on the floor here by Poklong Anading, a number of chunks of concrete, presumably jackhammered up in road repairs. The flat side has been painted on by the artist. Now imagine an English exhibition with a floor piece by Richard Long: a row or circle of stones. The one exhibition would seem to about cityscape in flux, the other about engaging with the natural landscape. (Implicitly, all Long’s work is about walking in nature; the only work at Mo that references walking in nature is a video by Eric Zamuco.)

I am not saying that Poklong’s work is not a good work of art. Far from it: I have always liked these floor works of his and am intrigued that the painting element has become more complex and self- aware. (BTW you could argue that their genesis, knowingly or unknowingly, comes from the scatter pieces of the New York artist Barry Le Va, not the stone works of Long. Urban, not pastoral) What I am saying is that with some exceptions such as Mariano Ching’s dystopic landscape paintings and Lui Medina large photo of alpine and pinoy landscapes merged, this exhibition could have been entitled “cityscape” rather than “landscape”.

Lesley-Ann Cao, Three and a half billion years

I really liked Lesley-Ann Cao’s elegant and somewhat hermetic work, a box with metal keys, chains, magnets and machine embroidery but I had no idea what it might mean or how it was to do with landscape, until I was informed it related to gravity and the magnetic core of the earth, hence the title Three and a half billion years. Learning that made me think about landscape and its roots in geology and palaeontology. (Otherlands by Thomas Halliday, Penguin, 2022 is a great book if you want to think about landscape and deep time.)

There were a lot of other interesting works in this show but it did bother me that no artist here seems to be interested in walking or otherwise participating in the landscape.

Nobody sketches anymore. Or if they do, they keep it secret.

Making something that may look like a traditional landscape may be an uncool thing to do, something only Sunday painters or Mabini artists do. I am sure Gerry and the 17 artists he selected would vomit if I said their work reminded me of Amorsolo.^[1] In his agreeably clear essay for the show Cocoy Lumbao states that “landscape as a genre… in Filipino art… since colonial times… [has appealed] by virtue of the exotic, the nostalgic, or the pastoral.”

Does that now disqualify the genre? Or just make it interestingly challenging?

Yes, as Cocoy also says, we see the landscape through cultural stereotypes promoted by adverts, Instagram posts and the like, as well as art. The assertion is elaborated at length in Simon Schama’s annoyingly over-rated book Landscape and Memory (publ. Harper. 1995). However, the landscape, (soil, trees, stones, humus, grass, etc. does actually exist! It’s for real! Just as Doctor Johnson refuted the idealist philosophy of Bishop Berkeley with its apparent assertion that the material world was an illusion by kicking a stone, shouting, “I refute him thus!” and hobbling for the rest of the day, I refute Schama’s truism everyday by going outside and walking my dog in, on and through the landscape.

There are two big existential issues lurking here: firstly, our alienation from nature in the age of late capitalism, secondly, the pending climate change crisis. You can add as a third if you like: land, its ownership and misuse.

No-one would expect every artist to deal with this directly. But to have a landscape exhibition of seventeen artists with so little apparent interest in green issues is surprising and, dare I say it? a little alarming. Q. Is the Philippines one of those lucky country that will not be affected by climate change and where the land and access to it is shared equitably? A. No.

Landscape art is something I have engaged with ever since I curated my first show in 1984^[2] Indeed since 1977 when I first read Wordsworth’s The Prelude. I could write for many pages, but I will content myself by making just a few observations.

The land (and scape of it) is not just a national issue, but also like climate change, a global one. Artists such as Monet, van Gogh, Long, Hokusai and Thomas Kinkade (yuk!) have had an effect beyond France, Holland, England, Japan or the US on how we engage with landscape. Understanding the first three of those takes us beyond the “exotic, the nostalgic, and the pastoral.” Within art history there have been fascinating analyses of the landscape tradition, semiotic, political, feminist.^[3] Do we want to work within this tradition, which still represents arguably the dominant ideology, or as Cocoy seems to suggest “shift away”?

Cian Dayrit. Geopolitics Capital (Outline for a Blueprint for the Neo-Colonial-Modernist Fortress) Collaboration with Cathy Manala and Mang Pedring) Recto

You could argue that the genesis of Cian Dayrit’s piece here, knowingly or unknowingly, comes from that counter Anglo-American tradition of a politico/sociological critique of the landscape tradition that was first perhaps epitomised by the moment in John Berger’s 1972 TV series Ways of Seeing when he asked us to imagine how different a famous and much loved painting by Gainsborough of Mr. & Mrs Andrews sitting in their country estate (painted c. 1750, in the National Gallery London) would be if you added a Trespassers Keep Out! sign to the idyllic scene. Dayrit’s work is an analysis of the elements that go to make up BGC (Bonifacio Global Village) an upmarket enclave in Manila created in the last twenty years. (Mo_Space is in BGC.)

Thomas Gainsborough. Mr. and Mrs Andrews. c.1750

Still from Ways of Seeing, 1972

On the verso of Dayrit’s painting is a list of such elements: mining companies, real estate dealers, embassies etc. But I couldn’t help wishing that this documentation had been, in the spirit of Hans Haacke, worked out at greater detail. It felt a bit as if we had the essay sub-titles but not the full essay.

Cian Dayrit. Geopolitics Capital (Outline for a Blueprint for the Neo-Colonial-Modernist Fortress) verso

(And how, you may have been asking, would a Welsh or Scottish exhibition on landscape be different? In both countries, as in England, the particularity of the landscape is important to a national identity, in Wales, the mountains, the slag heaps, the leeks and daffodils, in Scotland the highlands, lochs, thistles and bluebells. You would expect some reference to this, whether patriotic or ironic.) Landscapes are places, real or imagined, and as such are key for our sense of belonging. If touristic images and Amorsolo-istic artists have re-presented them as false consciousness, we have to convert them back

Jill Paz, Revirescence, Guardian Series (stoneware) in foreground, Grove Series: Gabriel and Mary on right

If the artists at Mo seem to want to avoid the “landscape tradition” Jill Paz in her exhibition at Artinformal, seems to deal with it directly. Félix Resurrecíon Hidalgo (1855-1913) one of the first Filipino artists to become famous, was her great grand-uncle and her work has often been a détournement of his: reconstituting his paintings with laser cut cardboard. I am not sure to what extent the images in this show use his paintings. I assume some of these monochrome watercolours derive from his work, directly or indirectly – but more potently they call on the motifs of romantic landscape painting, Claude, Turner, Friedrich, Courbet, Church… etc.

Delightfully the gallery and its website give us only the puzzling title Revirescence^[4] and a very short statement by her, “Like many people, I am both from here and from there. This feeling of being both engaged and estranged, has inspired my practice. My work examines themes of diasporic intimacy, remediation in art, and personal healing.”

Which reminds us that not only is she negotiating between past and present but also between the Philippines where she was born and Canada where she grew up. And Canada has a very interesting landscape tradition from the Group of Seven, Tom Thomson and David Milne to Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, Annie Pootoogook et al. plus perhaps above all Emily Carr, who would compete with E.L.Kirchner and Emil Nolde as the most compelling landscape painter of the Twentieth Century.

There is a wonderful interplay or conversation going on between the watercolours, the laser-cut cardboard and the ceramics. Technically they are very assured. The titles are like poetic titles from the 1890s: Grove Series: Gabriel and Mary; The sight of the Moon over a windless Meadow; The Path the Sun makes in the ebb of day.

Her studies for Path and Jacob’s ladder are double backed and set on an isolated plinth in the centre of the gallery. It’s like a fulcrum to the exhibition.

Jill Paz, Revirescence, Study for Path in foreground

Jill Paz. study for The Path the Sun makes in the ebb of day wc 2024

Jill Paz. Study for Grove Series. Watercolour. 2023

I especially liked the images where her bulols, always in the meditating posture, inhabited these romantic landscapes.

Jill Paz. Grove Series. Anitu Guardian. Laser cut cardboard 2023

Jill Paz. The sight of the Moon over a windless Meadow. 2024

In the small adjacent gallery she has hung very understated watercolours of flowers; a bouquet series she calls it, the colours so pale the seem to be fading back into the paper.

Jill Paz, Bouquet Series: Heliopsis with Wildflowers 2 and 1

Is her use of old art meant to be ironic? What does it mean to have her bulol like ceramics in the pathway through her forest? The mood of the exhibition is calm and elegiac, but in some uncertain way unsettling.

Jill Paz, ceramic bulol

Looking a second time I realised that whereas traditional bulols are almost invariably male, hers are always female. This changed the show entirely! Landscape art is often securely gendered: the male looks at the female reclining in. Here, that was reversed.

The two exhibitions seem to present different options: either to ignore the tradition and find new forms or to work within a tradition to critique and change it

Have a good week

Tony

PS. As always you can find much better images of the show and individual works on the gallery websites.

1. Note for US and European readers: Fernando Amorsolo (1892-1972) made a career of stereotypical pretty landscape paintings filled with happy peasants. They remain very popular with Filipino collectors but disdained by artists. ↑

2. Landscape, Memory and Desire, Serpentine Gallery ↑

3. In the UK for example by David Solkin’s controversial curation of the exhibition of the eighteenth century landscape painter Richard Wilson at the Tate (19820 or Ann Bermingham’s book Landscape and Ideology: the English Rustic Tradition 1740-1860. (Thames and Hudson, 1987) ↑

4. Not in my compact OED but, going to google I learn that it means the state of growing fresh or young again, or reviving. It comes from the Latin word revirescere, which means “to grow green again” I think Paz’s work touches both English and Latin meaning, even though it is, ceramics apart, an exhibition of black and white. ↑

TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 197

26^th November 2024 -15^th December 2024

Dear Friends and colleagues

Having written this, I had second thoughts. I was uncertain whether I had made a regional difference sound like a qualitative difference. Maybe I had not looked hard enough? So a week later I went back to the two shows and thought for a few more days after that.

I was in Manila last Saturday to meet people and also catch up on exhibitions. Here are some thoughts on two unusually interesting shows.

Revisiting the Landscape from the entrance.

Works by Mariano Ching and Lui Medina on the left-hand wall.

Revisiting the Landscape looking back at the entrance

At Mo_Space there was Revisiting the Landscape curated by Gerry Tan. I was intrigued: if this was representative of how artists in the Philippines see landscape, there is a considerable variation from what you might see in an English, Welsh or Scottish (And yes, there would be significant differences!) exhibition about landscape.

Poklong Anading

Consider the piece on the floor here by Poklong Anading, a number of chunks of concrete, presumably jackhammered up in road repairs. The flat side has been painted on by the artist. Now imagine an English exhibition with a floor piece by Richard Long: a row or circle of stones. The one exhibition would seem to about cityscape in flux, the other about engaging with the natural landscape. (Implicitly, all Long’s work is about walking in nature; the only work at Mo that references walking in nature is a video by Eric Zamuco.)

I am not saying that Poklong’s work is not a good work of art. Far from it: I have always liked these floor works of his and am intrigued that the painting element has become more complex and self- aware. (BTW you could argue that their genesis, knowingly or unknowingly, comes from the scatter pieces of the New York artist Barry Le Va, not the stone works of Long. Urban, not pastoral) What I am saying is that with some exceptions such as Mariano Ching’s dystopic landscape paintings and Lui Medina large photo of alpine and pinoy landscapes merged, this exhibition could have been entitled “cityscape” rather than “landscape”.

Lesley-Ann Cao, Three and a half billion years

I really liked Lesley-Ann Cao’s elegant and somewhat hermetic work, a box with metal keys, chains, magnets and machine embroidery but I had no idea what it might mean or how it was to do with landscape, until I was informed it related to gravity and the magnetic core of the earth, hence the title Three and a half billion years. Learning that made me think about landscape and its roots in geology and palaeontology. (Otherlands by Thomas Halliday, Penguin, 2022 is a great book if you want to think about landscape and deep time.)

There were a lot of other interesting works in this show but it did bother me that no artist here seems to be interested in walking or otherwise participating in the landscape.

Nobody sketches anymore. Or if they do, they keep it secret.

Making something that may look like a traditional landscape may be an uncool thing to do, something only Sunday painters or Mabini artists do. I am sure Gerry and the 17 artists he selected would vomit if I said their work reminded me of Amorsolo.^[1] In his agreeably clear essay for the show Cocoy Lumbao states that “landscape as a genre… in Filipino art… since colonial times… [has appealed] by virtue of the exotic, the nostalgic, or the pastoral.”

Does that now disqualify the genre? Or just make it interestingly challenging?

Yes, as Cocoy also says, we see the landscape through cultural stereotypes promoted by adverts, Instagram posts and the like, as well as art. The assertion is elaborated at length in Simon Schama’s annoyingly over-rated book Landscape and Memory (publ. Harper. 1995). However, the landscape, (soil, trees, stones, humus, grass, etc. does actually exist! It’s for real! Just as Doctor Johnson refuted the idealist philosophy of Bishop Berkeley with its apparent assertion that the material world was an illusion by kicking a stone, shouting, “I refute him thus!” and hobbling for the rest of the day, I refute Schama’s truism everyday by going outside and walking my dog in, on and through the landscape.

There are two big existential issues lurking here: firstly, our alienation from nature in the age of late capitalism, secondly, the pending climate change crisis. You can add as a third if you like: land, its ownership and misuse.

No-one would expect every artist to deal with this directly. But to have a landscape exhibition of seventeen artists with so little apparent interest in green issues is surprising and, dare I say it? a little alarming. Q. Is the Philippines one of those lucky country that will not be affected by climate change and where the land and access to it is shared equitably? A. No.

Landscape art is something I have engaged with ever since I curated my first show in 1984^[2] Indeed since 1977 when I first read Wordsworth’s The Prelude. I could write for many pages, but I will content myself by making just a few observations.

The land (and scape of it) is not just a national issue, but also like climate change, a global one. Artists such as Monet, van Gogh, Long, Hokusai and Thomas Kinkade (yuk!) have had an effect beyond France, Holland, England, Japan or the US on how we engage with landscape. Understanding the first three of those takes us beyond the “exotic, the nostalgic, and the pastoral.” Within art history there have been fascinating analyses of the landscape tradition, semiotic, political, feminist.^[3] Do we want to work within this tradition, which still represents arguably the dominant ideology, or as Cocoy seems to suggest “shift away”?

Cian Dayrit. Geopolitics Capital (Outline for a Blueprint for the Neo-Colonial-Modernist Fortress) Collaboration with Cathy Manala and Mang Pedring) Recto

You could argue that the genesis of Cian Dayrit’s piece here, knowingly or unknowingly, comes from that counter Anglo-American tradition of a politico/sociological critique of the landscape tradition that was first perhaps epitomised by the moment in John Berger’s 1972 TV series Ways of Seeing when he asked us to imagine how different a famous and much loved painting by Gainsborough of Mr. & Mrs Andrews sitting in their country estate (painted c. 1750, in the National Gallery London) would be if you added a Trespassers Keep Out! sign to the idyllic scene. Dayrit’s work is an analysis of the elements that go to make up BGC (Bonifacio Global Village) an upmarket enclave in Manila created in the last twenty years. (Mo_Space is in BGC.)

Thomas Gainsborough. Mr. and Mrs Andrews. c.1750

Still from Ways of Seeing, 1972

On the verso of Dayrit’s painting is a list of such elements: mining companies, real estate dealers, embassies etc. But I couldn’t help wishing that this documentation had been, in the spirit of Hans Haacke, worked out at greater detail. It felt a bit as if we had the essay sub-titles but not the full essay.

Cian Dayrit. Geopolitics Capital (Outline for a Blueprint for the Neo-Colonial-Modernist Fortress) verso

(And how, you may have been asking, would a Welsh or Scottish exhibition on landscape be different? In both countries, as in England, the particularity of the landscape is important to a national identity, in Wales, the mountains, the slag heaps, the leeks and daffodils, in Scotland the highlands, lochs, thistles and bluebells. You would expect some reference to this, whether patriotic or ironic.) Landscapes are places, real or imagined, and as such are key for our sense of belonging. If touristic images and Amorsolo-istic artists have re-presented them as false consciousness, we have to convert them back

Jill Paz, Revirescence, Guardian Series (stoneware) in foreground, Grove Series: Gabriel and Mary on right

If the artists at Mo seem to want to avoid the “landscape tradition” Jill Paz in her exhibition at Artinformal, seems to deal with it directly. Félix Resurrecíon Hidalgo (1855-1913) one of the first Filipino artists to become famous, was her great grand-uncle and her work has often been a détournement of his: reconstituting his paintings with laser cut cardboard. I am not sure to what extent the images in this show use his paintings. I assume some of these monochrome watercolours derive from his work, directly or indirectly – but more potently they call on the motifs of romantic landscape painting, Claude, Turner, Friedrich, Courbet, Church… etc.

Delightfully the gallery and its website give us only the puzzling title Revirescence^[4] and a very short statement by her, “Like many people, I am both from here and from there. This feeling of being both engaged and estranged, has inspired my practice. My work examines themes of diasporic intimacy, remediation in art, and personal healing.”

Which reminds us that not only is she negotiating between past and present but also between the Philippines where she was born and Canada where she grew up. And Canada has a very interesting landscape tradition from the Group of Seven, Tom Thomson and David Milne to Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, Annie Pootoogook et al. plus perhaps above all Emily Carr, who would compete with E.L.Kirchner and Emil Nolde as the most compelling landscape painter of the Twentieth Century.

There is a wonderful interplay or conversation going on between the watercolours, the laser-cut cardboard and the ceramics. Technically they are very assured. The titles are like poetic titles from the 1890s: Grove Series: Gabriel and Mary; The sight of the Moon over a windless Meadow; The Path the Sun makes in the ebb of day.

Her studies for Path and Jacob’s ladder are double backed and set on an isolated plinth in the centre of the gallery. It’s like a fulcrum to the exhibition.

Jill Paz, Revirescence, Study for Path in foreground

Jill Paz. study for The Path the Sun makes in the ebb of day wc 2024

Jill Paz. Study for Grove Series. Watercolour. 2023

I especially liked the images where her bulols, always in the meditating posture, inhabited these romantic landscapes.

Jill Paz. Grove Series. Anitu Guardian. Laser cut cardboard 2023

Jill Paz. The sight of the Moon over a windless Meadow. 2024

In the small adjacent gallery she has hung very understated watercolours of flowers; a bouquet series she calls it, the colours so pale the seem to be fading back into the paper.

Jill Paz, Bouquet Series: Heliopsis with Wildflowers 2 and 1

Is her use of old art meant to be ironic? What does it mean to have her bulol like ceramics in the pathway through her forest? The mood of the exhibition is calm and elegiac, but in some uncertain way unsettling.

Jill Paz, ceramic bulol

Looking a second time I realised that whereas traditional bulols are almost invariably male, hers are always female. This changed the show entirely! Landscape art is often securely gendered: the male looks at the female reclining in. Here, that was reversed.

The two exhibitions seem to present different options: either to ignore the tradition and find new forms or to work within a tradition to critique and change it

Have a good week

Tony

PS. As always you can find much better images of the show and individual works on the gallery websites.

1. Note for US and European readers: Fernando Amorsolo (1892-1972) made a career of stereotypical pretty landscape paintings filled with happy peasants. They remain very popular with Filipino collectors but disdained by artists. ↑

2. Landscape, Memory and Desire, Serpentine Gallery ↑

3. In the UK for example by David Solkin’s controversial curation of the exhibition of the eighteenth century landscape painter Richard Wilson at the Tate (19820 or Ann Bermingham’s book Landscape and Ideology: the English Rustic Tradition 1740-1860. (Thames and Hudson, 1987) ↑

4. Not in my compact OED but, going to google I learn that it means the state of growing fresh or young again, or reviving. It comes from the Latin word revirescere, which means “to grow green again” I think Paz’s work touches both English and Latin meaning, even though it is, ceramics apart, an exhibition of black and white. ↑