Dear friends and colleagues
I’ve been in bed with a fever the last week so I haven’t been out much.
Of course, I have been thinking and remembering things, but as is normal when one is ill, in a rather discontinuous and inconclusive way.
One thing I was thinking of was an exhibition I saw a couple of weeks back in Manila at Finale Art Gallery. In the main gallery Yasmin Sison was exhibiting. In the smaller upstairs gallery works by six young artists just about to leave art school.
Ayka Go. Bahay bahayan. building a house from memory and fantasy.
One of them, Ayka Go, showed an oversize doll’s house filled with sheets of writing – apparently childhood diaries she had photocopied. I liked it, of course, one always warms to nicely made miniatures. As Susan Stewart told us in her book On Longing the miniature often has the aura of perfection and in the guise of something like a doll’s house a sense of innocence and nostalgia for childhood. I would have liked it even more it if it hadn’t been so big. At least three of the five other artists made works that dealt with miniatures and childhood.
Downstairs Yasmin Sison’s show touched the same concerns. On shelves arrayed around some large paintings were small sculptures made from toys or doll’s house furniture – or things that looked like them. They were quirky. The paintings seemed to be of events in a doll’s house. There was a suggestion both of something staged in a painting like Little Ida’s flowers, a party or a fight? And there was a play on scale – “real-size flowers”. And there were the familiar flicks and drips of paint we see on her work periodically that are there to remind us it is a painting. It was troubled, but in gentle way. Uncanny, but with a smile on its face.
There’s a point I am trying to get at and that is to do with that constant balance between The Family of Man and local specificity. Between the universal values of Steichen’s show (motherhood, work, etc as things that unite all people) and the way art refers to a particular context.
We all have a childhood. We all like miniature things.
What was different then here from what might see in London? Innocence, I think. Seventy-seven years of Freud has had an effect, thirty or more years of paedophile paranoia have cast a long, long shadow. How would this show have changed if Yasmin’s painting had been called Jimmy Saville’s flowers or Gary Glitter’s flowers?
For me, yes, I would have liked a bit of danger to the show, but is that just my cultural background talking through me or am I making a reasonable critical comment? I’m not sure.
Have an unfeverish Tuesday
Tony