Philippine Star
Invisible Imaginative
SLEEPWALKING By Yason Banal
Friday, February 29, 2008
On October 31, 1938, an article appeared in the New York Times:
RADIO LISTERNERS IN PANIC, TAKING WAR DRAMA AS FACT!
A wave of mass hysteria seized thousands of radio listeners between 8:15 and 9:30 o'clock last night when a broadcast of a dramatization of H. G. Wells's fantasy, "The War of the Worlds," led thousands to believe that an interplanetary conflict had started with invading Martians spreading wide death and destruction in New Jersey and New York.
The broadcast, which disrupted households, interrupted religious services, created traffic jams and clogged communications systems, was made by Orson Welles, who as the radio character, "The Shadow," used to give "the creeps" to countless child listeners. This time at least a score of adults required medical treatment for shock and hysteria.
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Sixty years later and a decade ago - but with an entirely different take on the “invisible, imaginative and interventionist” - curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s book Unbuilt Roads: 107 Unrealized Projects attempted to explore the notion of a complete “art/work” by listing down projects of some prominent artists that were never realized. Unlike the unbuilt projects of architects, “which are published, debated, and considered critically important, artists' unrealized projects are invisible, almost a shame or a failure.” However, such “unbuilt roads” can reveal so much more about the artist’s process and his/her negotiations with reality, i.e. the museum, funding, and the public. Studying such invisible works (and the highly visible obstacles which thwart their production) may thus lead to their fruition in the reader-viewer’s mind.
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Proposing yet another effect is artist-curator Lena Cobangbang’s Nomenclature Project, the latest commission for Utopia: Sleepwalking. Applying notions of “projection” and “classification” in various fields such as cinema, language, community and commerce, Cobangbang flies (and fills) the invisible imaginative by announcing names (of artists, venues, and titles) and scenarios (via exhibition statements), pointing at the tongue-in-cheek tenses of both grammar and p/recognition: a naming of that present, some indication of this future.
THE NOMENCLATURE PROJECT
by Lena Cobangbang
These exhibit notices may serve as curatorial templates for would-be taxonomists of a various growing number of aesthetic tendencies, some of which are superficially engendered to serve a certain theme, usually imposed for civic/commercial purposes. Some have been encountered a few times before, while others are novel combinations that might work given the proper venue or compensation for the artists mentioned.
Vacuum Is Only Vacuum On Average, works by Poklong Anading, Felix Bacolor, Bea Camacho, Nilo Ilarde, Pow Martinez, Manny Migriño and Alvin Zafra deal with the notion that the presence is much more sensed in their disappearance. A purely documentary-based exhibit.
Predicated on Veritable Facts, works by Bembol Dela Cruz, Gary Ross Pastrana, Gerardo Tan. On the duplicitous nature of copies, and thus transformed to being objects themselves with their own histories, their own authentic origins as art objects.
I Lick Ur Motherland, works by Peewee Roldan, Wire Tuazon, Cos Zicarrelli on history paintings that document an alternative theory to world domination and post-colonial conquest; Or the insistence of art’s relevance by media and global market trends.
Society for The Confusion of Useless Knowledge, works by Bandoy, Kurt Gloria, Kim Landicho, Kaloy Olavides, artists whose predisposition almost always relegate them into subgenius savant in simply presenting the mundane ness of the absurd or was it the absurdity of the mundane?
Falling With The Weight Of It All, paintings by Amy Aragon, Bubbles De Leon, Popo San Pascual, Trek Valdizno, all featuring colorful canvases of unrestrained palette pattern making in thick globules of oil.
Why Cant Monsters Get Along With Other Monsters, works by Victor Balanon, Mariano Ching, Louie Cordero, RM De Leon, Robert Langenegger, Romeo Lee and MM Yu on the squalid metropolis as veritable playground for perverse apoplectic storytelling, envisaging pre-apocalyptic medievalist scenarios. Or why trash is sometimes more appealing.
Subterranean Head Candy, photographic works on subcultures by Jed Escueta, Pol Mondok, Sam Kiyoumarsi and Arvin Viola because we really haven’t had enough of vicariously living off of other people’s kicks.
Altruisms of Terrible Liars (And Kick Some Giant Bum Ass), a presentation of several treatise by painting on painting from Ronald Achacoso, Jet Melencio, Jonathan Olazo, Jayson Oliveria, Raul Rodriguez, Kreskin Sugay and Miguel Sandejas , pitting modernist aspirations to romanticist heroics against the Hamburgian squalor of post-pop, post-surrealist expressionist undifferentiated subjectivity. The techniques employed begs for an affirmation of universal truths of existence, but obvious enough to obfuscate the cheekiness of such questioning. All in all, these painters won’t allow painting to be such a lazy bum, or painting, thus becomes a lazy bum and thence the maker of it. But then if the picture works, why call it a bum?
The Fashioning of A Formal Casualty, works by Lara Delos Reyes, Patricia Eustaquio, Nona Garcia, Geraldine Javier and Yasmin Sison, generously supported by Hermes Singapore. This exhibit plays like a Clue-do game in a labyrinthine questioning of roles and types fashioned from what’s usually represented in the glossies. Which then is a far more worse crime – framing the stereotype or widening the frame to accommodate all as victims?
The Means Won’t Justify The End : Death To Death or The Ultimate Painting Show, an exhibit in the form of a book that is as big as a painting, meant to affirm painting’s privileged position, as it was and has always been, forever and ever. Featuring works by every painter who matters and have invariably produced iconoclastic works.
