The Philippine Online Chronicles

This is a critique of The Clear Light, an exhibit mounted last year, from September to October 2010, at MO_Space, an artist-run gallery on Bonifacio High Street. Artists whose works were exhibited in The Clear Light included Pardo de Leon, Jet Melencio and Jed Escueta. Photos of the exhibit can be found at the Sudden School blog, here, or at the MO_Space website here under "Past Exhibitions."

If the three-man show The Clear Light sheds light on one clear fact, it is that a discursive gap can exist (if not definitively exists) between the pictorial or material phenomenon of an exhibition and the curatorial or exhibition notes that configure the coordinates within which its audience can approach the work, the latter being the featured fragment of discourse whose role it is to conceptually inscribe on the surface of the pictorial or material phenomenon the very context that allows the work to become intelligible in the first place, what Ranciere would refer to as “painting in the text.”

The notes, for example, which one assumes to be the text where the curatorial vision and strategy culminate, begin with a lifted passage from The Tibetan Book of the Dead that speaks of “the pure clear white light from which everything in the universe comes” and  promise an “economy of means” and a “simplicity, rawness, and honesty” with which the works “strip art of its artifice and forego all its pretensions”—setting the tone for a sparseness of procedure and presentation the exhibition certainly evokes, but just as certainly only evokes but never fully employs, let alone embodies, without ever surpassing mere evocation.

Could this have been the intent of Roberto Chabet, billed as the show’s curator, to deliberately make the pictorial or material phenomenon fall short of the abstract promise of the text that the three artists “let go of preconceived notions about art and other delusions,” to ironize the bald humorlessness of The Clear Light’s references to Buddhism? Perhaps, the kitsch of the statement “The title signifies a clarity one achieves with advanced meditation or death, when the mind is cleared of everything and becomes one with the primordial universe” is not at all as unreflexive or unexamined as it seems.

The exhibition design or layout makes such a lack of correspondence between text and pictorial or material phenomenon apparent: The floor area of the main gallery space is occupied from end to end by Jet Melencio’s lavish installation of various crudely carpentered tables—the entire installation titled The First Bardo (the first bardo, as defined by the notes, being “the 1^st stage of death when ‘one momentarily enjoys a perfect balance before descending to the lower states’”)—each with one leg shorter than the rest (such that when all legs are firmly standing on the floor, the surface of the table can only slant floor-ward; when the surface is level or parallel to the floor, the table is unstable) and on whose tops are sheets of tracing paper that each map a portion of the gallery floor by way of frottage or rubbing on its surface with wax crayons with which a riot of disorderly non-patterns are wrought.

Admirable in showmanship through its spartan and singular execution, The First Bardo brings to mind Victor Burgin’s more unassuming Photopath precisely by departing from its more straightforward mode of mimesis, simultaneously critiquing the wobbliness of representation as it calls attention to the conceptualist tradition of which it is an extension that engages the empirical (and ideological) reality of the gallery.

While Melencio’s work indexes the gallery floor or the structural mechanism that literally supports the whole show, it is surrounded—bordered, really, or fenced—in turn by another work that indexes instead the gallery walls. Insipidly titled mirror, Pardo de Leon’s 40 sandwiches of acrylic between stretched canvases hung on the walls way below standard eye level are actually more interesting than their collective title implies.

More or less equally distanced from each other to span the perimeter of the main gallery space, it is hardly “about painting, distilled to its bare essences: stretcher, canvas, and paint” as the notes suggest; where paint is used for the end of gluing two canvases face to face instead of for pictorial composition such that paint makes visible the materials underneath that frame the paint, de Leon’s work is more about framing, the boundaries that formally designate the scope and span of a work, the setting up of a work’s perimeters.

In a sense, mirror is exactly what the notes say it disavows: “The untrained mind will easily assume that there is nothing to see, that it is all too abstract and distant,” the text claims, and yet one can also claim that the mind that insists on seeing where there really is nothing to see is just as untrained. The way out is to recall the Cagean proto-conceptualist formulation of poetry (“I have nothing to say / and I am saying it”) which de Leon’s work certainly echoes, then append the adverb “sloppily” at the end: mirror has nothing to say, and says it sloppily—calling attention not only to the fact that it articulates a lack, but, more importantly, to the manner it makes this articulation—a manner that subtly defies the conceptual and pictorial zero degree it initially appears to say to want to articulate.

One, of course, must consider that the slop is deliberate, that this is a calculated sloppiness, that this is deft slop: after all, if the primary procedure were simply to sandwich acrylic between two canvases and repeat the process a variable number of times (just enough to span the perimeter of the main gallery space) in order to flag the work’s procedurality, why else would the backs of the canvases and the stretchers be dirtied by paint, what for to apply paint so thickly between the canvases that it oozes out and messily overflows to the edges, almost dripping—in short, why this excess in a show that purportedly exhibits reduction?

De Leon’s Eftya (the clear white light) also only serves to (besides indexing the ceiling in order to complete the indices to the frames of the physical gallery) underscore the same question; while baring the kayak to its skeletal outline bares the show’s preoccupation with frames, it also transgresses the austerity the same art object wishes to embody by deviating from the exhibition’s dominant language of seriality, modular reproduction being The Clear Light’s dispositif. The facile counter-argument is the notion that the kayak’s skeleton is composed of serial wooden bars anyway; but if that were the case, a single table would have sufficed to complete Melencio’s installation, what with every sheet of tracing paper a constellation of lines moving in serial trajectories on a single surface.

Surely there is no “economy of means” in the means with which Jed Escueta’s photographs are exhibited in a separate room within the gallery, his work physically excluded, as if cast off, from what the main gallery space holds and yet remaining conceptually anchored to the rest of the show—akin to a tumor as fleshly excess, a kind of expulsion at once from and of the body. Or not so much a tumor but acne, a pimply multiplicity: the myriad photographs scattered on the wall rather than the straightforward arrangement of nutritionless information. One is tempted to note this awkward formal politics of inclusion and exclusion exemplified by the exhibition design or layout as a manifesto for Philippine conceptualism, codifying in the form of this exhibition and the gaps it creates between its parts what could possibly constitute, to put it bluntly and without apology, a necessarily abject conceptualism—that is, a Third World Conceptualism or conceptualist baroque.

From this vantage point, Escueta’s Attempts at the Star-Shaped Smoke Ring can be read not only as a deliberate but an inevitable bastardization of works in the conceptualist canon such as John Baldessari’s Trying to Photograph a Ball So That It Is in the Center of the Picture, allowing for an implicit subtitle for Escueta’s photographs that might go, “Trying to be a Conceptualist,” where the act of trying constitutes not so much a failure to become conceptualist but an aesthetico-politics of a becoming-conceptualist.

His Attempts at the Star-Shaped Smoke Ring may initially appear to be a work of photography, but it is in fact a work that straddles both photography and performance: Unlike in Baldessari, it is the formation of the star-shaped smoke ring that is attempted by Escueta, the photographs becoming mere documents that indicate traces of a performance, of a what was that is the performance; unlike in Escueta, it is the photographing itself that is attempted by Baldessari and not the hurling of the ball skyward, such that the photographs are documents of no more than the act of photographing per se, photography itself being the what was. This accounts for the presence of the pipe with a star-shaped hole in the room—for if the work were truly the photographs rather than the act of straddling between photography and performance, the pipe would truly have been extraneously extraneous to Escueta’s portion of the exhibition and not pertinently extraneous as the necessary excess that it is, calling attention to itself and flagging its own status as excess.

While the pictorial or material phenomenon of the exhibition hints at the supposed dispositif of reduction the discourse of the notes overtly calls out, The Clear Light in fact thrives on notions of the extraneous, positing that it is possible—possibly even inevitable—for reduction to be the ironic locus of excess. The ease with which one can refer to this exhibition as a welcome respite from the horror vacui that characterizes much of Philippine contemporary art is in fact suspect, if not altogether stupid: The Clear Light instead approaches this dispositif without letting go of the baggage of the baroque, problematizing the conceptualist inheritance within the larger historical context of Philippine art. In doing so, the show inhabits the gap it itself creates not only between the pictorial or material phenomenon and text but also between the Philippines’ amorphous appropriation of conceptualist praxis and the classical conceptualist tradition that the former has inherited from its Western forebears.

Image is a screen capture of the Sudden School blog post "Less is More" retrieved on February 2, 2011. Some rights reserved.