Dear friends and colleagues
Quite clearly, I will never be a journalist when I grow up!
As you may recollect I promised to talk about the show at ARK gallery in Jogja by Freddie and Isabel Aquilizan, but I neglected to take proper photographs!
I have a snap of the private view from outside, but it isn’t very informative, though it does show you that ARK has a big flight of steps outside: good for sitting on and chatting!
I have another snap that shows the row of photographs that they took of farmers holding sickles. And above it you can see the shadow of one of the three giant wings they constructed with sickles made by a local blacksmith. People here still get their sickles made by a local craftsman, not from a DIY superstore.
I have a detail of that too, showing just four farmers, but it is a bit blurry.
And, lastly, I have a picture of a vitrine in the exhibition with some sickles in.
Do you get a sense of the show? There were three giant wings made, not with feathers, but sickles; these were erected on the metal rods that are used to weigh rice and the counter balance for each was a sack filled with rice. Around the exhibition, as well as the photos and sickles, were large drawings. In an adjacent room was a DVD projection of the sickles being made: the sound of hammering echoed through the larger space. The wings moved slowly; the shadows were delicate. It was very beautiful, very poetic (a German professor recently told me I am not allowed to use those two words – but those are the correct words for the effect it had on me, so I use them and will continue to use them, however problematic they are.) Also, there was a little frisson at the thought of what would happen if one of the wings collapsed, showering those below with viciously sharp blades.
The Aquilizans, who are Filipino but have lived in Brisbane the last ten years, were in Jogja for a month to teach and during that period also made this installation. They have always been interested both in works that involve other craftspeople and in works that the audience can participate in – though Isabel admonished me for giving one rice sack too hard a push.
Why did I neglect to take proper photos? Because I was so entranced by the slow, stately dance of the wings and their shadows that I became engrossed in trying to film it. I add two very trimmed mini-movies that I hope will manage to squeeze into your letter box.
Last Saturday I started a six week course here in Manila: an Introduction to Contemporary Art. Teaching global art history is one thing in the West; teaching it out here on the “peripheries” is another, even more challenging. Like it or not, the vast proportion of the most important art has been made by artists from the West, especially the USA. The effect of this has been exacerbated by the extraordinary insularity of writing from New York. (For example, someone pointed out that the big book on twentieth century art by Krauss, Foster, etc. does include some Asian artists, but only Asian artists who lived in New York.)
To give a history where people outside the West do not feel disenfranchised and excluded you do need to also show what happened in their country and region. But histories do not always run in parallel: modernism, conceptual art, abstraction, realism all happened here, but at different times and in different ways. It’s complicated. Furthermore, of course, there is the old problem that so much happened in the Sixties and you can’t miss it out but it is so long ago for young people everywhere. A distance accentuated here both by geography and by only seeing things in reproduction. Google is very useful (don’t we all know it?) but to learn art history through google is to know it as a mass of undifferentiated sound bites and eye candy.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Best Bloomsday wishes
Tony