The Philippine Online Chronicles

I don’t know Angelo Suarez, Gelo, personally, but I appreciate his (virtual) presence in the way that I tend to love every other person who has the gall/temerity/balls man/woman/gay to speak his mind even when it’s unpopular. The thing is, there was nothing unpopular about Gelo’s review of Pablo Gallery’s Chabet, Tan, Ilarde exhibit. In fact, knowing the kind of consciousness Gelo brings to art, this was a pretty good review – good, being, he liked the exhibit – like, being, he didn’t dismiss the exhibit – didn’t dismiss, being, he actually wrote about it.

Which in these shores is something we should be thankful for, right? Here, where the conversations on art – any art – are praised when they are praise releases, where the critical bent is, i.e., the good review that speaks of the bad in art, is always deemed unproductive and useless. The goal kasi is to sell art.

This goal is what Gelo hits at with Conceptualism, fellatio, and the admission of futility of resistance as a form of resistance. On that level, the question for the spectator should become: do I agree with Gelo? My answer, as a spectator, is no. I agree with Antares, from whom the more intelligent comments on the Gelo’s article came (and who should really be writing art reviews, please please?). In light of capital, resistance isn’t necessarily futile, and to insist on futility is to place one’s critique very clearly on the side of capital and its contingent oppressions. Parang, ay walang nang resistance, so ‘wag na lang?

But what has become more obvious in the aftermath of Gelo’s article is that this isn’t even the question that’s being asked, and there is a refusal to even begin a discussion on the crucial things about contemporary Philippine art that Gelo raises.

(1) The use of the name Pablo for the gallery, in the context of Third World Philippines and its Third World art, which does highlight an amount of veneration of/admiration for Picasso. Why this name versus for example, a local artist’s name? If they mean a different Pablo, and Gelo’s reading was wrong, then all it takes is for someone to say no, Pablo the gallery isn’t named after Picasso, it’s named after Pablo Antonio, national artist for architecture. Or Pablo Gomez, the commercial film writer. Or wait, Kuya Pablo aka Kuya Pabz of U.P. Diliman’s AS 101? Chika.

(2) When an exhibit has no notes, no piece of paper to guide us through it, nothing but artists’ names and price tags, it is everything and brave, on the one hand, as it forces us to deal with the exhibit on its own, without any help from another (curator’s) set of eyes that has looked at it before us. On the other, it does come with an amount of yabang, an absolutely Pinoy thing, if not an up-yours (uy, sosyal!), as if the artists are saying, we don’t need words, we (and our works) are enough. As someone who also enjoys exhibits I, like Gelo, take the curatorial notes or the lack it, as part of the exhibit itself. If this is wrong, then really, tell us why.

(3) All this time I thought it was clear to us all, that the art world is like the literary word and every other kind of culture industry, where there are the senior and younger artists, notions of mentorship, and the possibilities of slaying our fathers/mothers/siblings. Gelo’s assertions about Chabet vis a vis Tan and Ilarde revolve around this systemic status quo, and its violence(s) as glossed over by an exhibit such as this. Or by every other exhibit of art, or anthology of literature for that matter. It was an interesting insight into an exhibit with no words, in a gallery called Pablo. If the issue is the street term pa-blow, well, a sense of irony might help, if not a sense of humor.

Instead of looking into these things, there is Daisy Langenegger’s Facebook Note Destructive, Unruly Energies, where she speaks on the level of protecting “their” ranks of artists and galleries from people like Gelo whose article was “crap, a shameful piece of drivel, masquerading as a review.” Langenegger also questions the fact that Gelo didn’t talk to the artists themselves or review the form and content of the works, which to her, is what “real art critics” would do. She questions Gelo’s Marxist critique and calls it "old school," critiques the space in which the article appears, and says that what it does is NOT an “educated study about the work being shown.”

I respond, as a writer/critic/reviewer/pakialamera on two points: one, form and two, content.

On form: Langenegger fails to consider the possibility of criticism being more than just that familiar essay we encounter in the newspapers and magazines, or in the scholarly journals. Those are two very different essays, and obviously not what Gelo does here, which doesn’t make it invalid. As there are so many different ways of telling a story, and so many kinds of poetry, there is variety in the essay as a form as a critique as a review. The essays we write are informed by our experience of any given work or exhibit, by our theoretical leanings, by our contexts. There is no one way of writing a review, this was Gelo’s way. As far as I’m concerned, this wouldn’t get published in a broadsheet (where Langenegger’s kind of review exists) but that only shows how valuable thepoc’s Metakritiko is as a space for pieces like this, or yes, people like Gelo and moi. Are we critical? I don’t know about Gelo, but I think entertainers rule this world. Take a look at who tops those senatorial surveys and you’ll know why.

On content : There is no one way of experiencing an exhibit. This was Gelo’s. If in the process of thinking about this exhibit he thought of pa-blow in relation to Pablo, then that’s his head (pun, so intended), not yours. If, instead of focusing on the works (which he did look at, and saw as just “old” or the “usual” works of these artists) he decided to focus on the mode of production of the exhibit, then that’s his call not yours. If our issue with Gelo is that he is all wrong, then let’s talk about his points, without seeming like we have so much at stake here, in the process giving Gelo the kind of importance I’m pretty sure those who hate him don’t want to give him. Case in point, this:

"It's not critique anymore! F*ck the Philippine artscene! there will be no more Pablo galleries! IF Gelo Suarez brainy smurf doesn't come up withan apology to Pablo - wala na! Sorry Igan I'm pulling my work out of the mega mall show! no more shows in the P,I, for me! Filipinos need to grow up. You guys can't just act cool all the time! Its a shame. Sorry... guys I've had it. I'm not going to continue work with the Berlin show and the Austria show! In fact I'll tell them it's not worth showing Flips anymore, anywhere! Hey Arvin let's not waste our time in this wasteland!" – Manuel Ocampo

If there’s anything I’ve enjoyed in the aftermath of Gelo’s fellatio article, it’s that it has brought about a reaction such as this, which is so telling of precisely the existence of things that are questionable about the Philippine art scene in particular, and the arts in the Philippines in general: everything is personal, criticism is not welcome, criticism is personal. The call for an apology just points to how the status quo is maintained, the threat to refuse exhibition in the country and the exhibition of Filipino artists’ works elsewhere in the world, is everything and full of itself.

In Gelo’s place though, I would just have an absolute(ly false) sense of power, and a silly grin on my face.