Spitting Images

Young Star
Spitting images
SLEEPWALKING By Yason Banal
Friday, June 6, 2008

Dear Yason,

I hope this e-mail finds you well. Sorry for being out of touch. I’ve just come from a show of paintings. It was called Ebenbild. I’ve asked my German friends and none of them know exactly what it means. I checked online. Loosely, it means a spitting image, as in, “a spitting image of your father.”
That’s perfect, then. The paintings were exactly what paintings normally are, and the young German painter boy, my classmate, was a spitting image of an artist as a young man. If there was any irony I didn’t catch it, but my bad — too busy nursing my warm beer and the awkward small talk. Or maybe the irony was in the normalcy. Or the edginess was in the conservatism. Shit, death and violence can be so fuddy-duddy. I don’t know. Anyway, at some point a mini Dachshund arrived and stole the show, and that was that.

I didn’t finish the machine I was making for you. Sorry about that. I’ve attached the study for the machine. It’s called Melencholia I Rainbowmaker after Durer. Melencholia I is an etching of his. Wikipedia says that Panofsky says it’s his “spiritual self portrait.” Google it. I like that one about how it’s about Agrippa’s Melencholia Imaginativa, the third kind of melancholia, affecting artists. I don’t know if I have that much drama in my life but I’m making this machine so cheers to Durer on that. The machine is like a very elaborate hose with fancy housing and floodlights. I mean, I can make rainbows with a fishbowl of water and a flashlight, but that’s just not as sexy. It’s going to look like a pre-fab, German kitchen mod Tony Smith in his black metal phase. It’s going to be fabulous. Hyper-modernist fountain spraying water all over the gallery awash in Klieg lights. That is so sexy. If I ever get it done you’ll be the first to know.

Love,

Maria Taniguchi


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Dear Maria,

Many thanks for your e-mail. I just came from a comedy night with no name. No Germans nor Irony, just (g)old plated humor, as evidenced by a status-anxious youngster who dishes out “hey is dude” and “emo is jologs” jokes — his silly hat earning the most applause — and a Hong Kong socialite who was talking on the phone while his sketch was ongoing.

Is this still, modern life? Is Modernity melancholic or hysterical, ridiculous and boring? Are we the new Antiquity? I ask these questions because the preppy young comedian and the Chinese doyenne seemed to have hit it off well after the show.
I like the idea of the Ebenbild, by the way, “the spitting image of your father.”

It could mean an exact likeness to one’s father, or more exactly, the image of a father spitting.

The first description seems appropriate to both machinery and melancholia, the “mmmmm”s of modern life. Isn’t a machine after all a technological tool aimed to re-present reality by enhancing it? And isn’t melancholia via Durer a waiting for inspiration, because reality fails (and thus no spitting image to be likened or aspire to)? Can machines, spitting images of modernity but better, be melancholic? Machines cannot be, I know, and I know the questions aren’t sexy enough, but to me it’s interesting how these 3 Ms intersect. It’s kind of the reverse of your hyper-modernist fountain, where water comes from a single source but sprays in different directions.

The second description is funny but one-dimensional. He spits and we know why, and where it goes we’re sure it’s still within the plane of reality. The original father has limited strength and range, while his spitting image replicates, learns and destroys.

So I guess an eventual third is spitting the image of the father. Now this could be the triumph of design over law, of simulation against the symbolic. The elaborate hose you mention can be an initial vessel and all the fancy housing and floodlights, a sexy future retreat.

Besitos,

Yason

P.S.: Your studies for the machine wonderfully intersect figuration and containment — they invoke varnish and vegetation, of moss coated in and liberated by gloss.

Our Body Electric

OUR BODY ELECTRIC
Sleepwalking by Yason Banal
Friday, March 28, 2008



Over the course of many years, artist-run organizations have made significant impact in society. On one hand there are the alternative spaces, non-profit and independent galleries run by and for artists. Storefronts were converted, apartments refurbished, empty buildings occupied – unconventional places transformed in order to produce and showcase art that was fresh, anti-commercial and challenging. In Manila during the 90’s, such spaces as Surrounded by Water, Third Space and Big Sky Mind served as hotbed for experimental artistic activity, paving the way for the vibrant Filipino contemporary art scene of today. On the other hand some artist-run organizations are modeled from associations, guilds or collectives, while others have been molded into small-scale enterprises and philanthropic foundations. A few still have grown into full-blown art establishments themselves, complete with staff and major funding. In any case, most are formed in order to support the work of emerging and exciting artists in various disciplines such as painting, sculpture, performance, film and multimedia. While the cultural industry (and much of consumerist society) is oftentimes made out as being driven by capital interests and empty spectacle, others brave attempts to counterbalance such totalizing trends by focusing on humanitarian and social issues as well as creative organization, developmental communication and cultural collaboration.

One such entity is ANA, or Arts Network Asia. It is a group of independent artists, cultural workers and arts activists primarily from Southeast Asia that encourages and supports regional artistic collaboration as well as develops managerial and administrative skills within Asia. Arts Network Asia is motivated by the philosophy of meaningful collaboration, distinguished by mutual respect, initiated in Asia and carried out together with Asian artists.
It is a network where individuals from around the world, through residencies, researches and projects, develop local communities in Asia. It pays attention to the diverse perspectives of a global Asian urban metropolis, the continuities and disruptions with Asian tradition, the multiple contexts of everyday life.

For ANA, art can be an instrument for meaningful collaboration, dialogue and exchange among diverse communities co-existing in Asia. Art as a social tool creates positive impact on communities, such as in the case of the Wedikã Group of Artists’ “art-as-social-process project” in 2007. Using multi-media and theatre to bring different perceptions of war and life onto the stage in Kalpitiya, Sri Lanka, the production was developed and performed by youths from the community where the first major fighting broke out between the Liberation Tigers and the government forces.

ANA supports wide-ranging projects with contents that vary. However, they all have a shared philosophy with the mission of ANA, so each project is itself important and noteworthy. But like any artists’ organization, the reality is that funds are limited and selection is competitive. ANA Director Tay Tong adds: “I appreciate all these projects and their intentions and achieved objectives, (so) it is really difficult when we can only support only 16 projects out 223 applications. This was in 2007. And in 2008, we received a total of 430 applications and we are only able to provide support to about 20 projects.”

Last year (2007) ANA has offered a total of US$78,000 to 16 arts organizations and individuals to support a diverse range of inter-disciplinary projects with a strong focus on sustainability and capacity building.

This included a performance festival of young visual artists in Vietnam called Sneaky Week; sustaining the OK Video Festival, organized by a Jakarta-based artists collective; and ruangrupa, a documentary project with villagers and Asian young film makers in Beijing at Caochangdi Workstation.

Art universities were not forgotten through the training exchange between the Cambodia and Vietnam schools of circus arts and the more experimental school of art and life in The Land Foundation, Chiang Mai, Thailand planned by artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and others.

For the first time, ANA has also initiated support for the development of infrastructure in arts and cultural organizations: a group of Thai independent film artists called Thaiindie, as well as Cambodian artist Linda Saphan who proposed encounters between female artists locally and regionally in Selapak Neari Art Exchange. Finally, ANA also offers a Travel Grant programme that is aimed to support Asian artists traveling within Asia for their work.

Entities like ANA does help significantly in getting Southeast Asian art around. More importantly, it supports the here and now in our own backyard: one that is bristling with energy, ideas and talent, setting the scene for a new cultural renaissance.

ANA Director Tay Tong is as exhilarated and hopeful. “The Southeast Asian art scene is extremely diverse and constantly evolving and developing. It is exciting. There is such a hunger for knowledge sharing and the want to exchange and dialogue. ANA received 430 applications this year. The highest ever, demonstrating a need for such a body like ANA to support such interests.”

Invisible Imaginative

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.

Puppy Draining A Teat

Philippine Star
Puppy Draining a Teat
SLEEPWALKING By Yason Banal
Friday, January 25, 2008


For the second installment of UTOPIA:SLEEPWALKING, I’ve asked young artist Robert Langenegger to contribute, in this case, two drawings. The first time I encountered Robert’s work was in Mag:net Katipunan – Poklong Anading curated a programme of recent video art from the Philippines, and included works by the likes of Louie Cordero, Lena Cobangbang, Cocoy Lumbao and myself. His video piece, entitled Emotional Intelligence, combined drawing, sound and stop animation to create surrealistic vignettes that resonate with dystopic energy and desire. Figures and scenes swiftly dissolve from one to the next like torrential rain, as if the in/stability of nature itself (and our perception of it) hangs in the balance. There is no closure, no exit; only transitions and rebirths.

An email conversation is similar in this aspect. As a regular conversation is a model for the fruitful exchange of ideas, online chatting also produces a generative relation – a virtuality that simulates a soft “seeming” of ideas and attitudes, open to mystery, multiplicity and mutation. In a way both the “conceptual structure” of Robert Langenegger’s work and the “feel” of this online conversation reflect an approach that is both systematic and emotive, factual and fictive, dissolving in-between the precipices of thought and form.

Yason Banal: Hi Robert, where are you doing this email conversation?

Robert Langenegger: I’m at a doctor’s house.

YB: Really? That's interesting. What kind of a doctor?

RL: An aspiring neurosurgeon specializing in lobotomy

YB: Now that you've mentioned neurology and lobotomy, do these medical fields, or medicine in general, bear a strong influence in your art practice, if not a significance in your view of the world?

RL: I am more versed in the field of veterinary science so I treat humans as mere mammals with the same basic organs and bodily functions . I value the canines higher than primates. My influence is nature, particularly Darwinism or evolution.

YB: In 2003 you had a series of photographs of animals, dead or on the way. There was a puppy sucking on a teat, and someone's finger inside a reptile. There was also a gecko, an ostrich, a rat - all in various states of death and decay.

RL: I just wanted to document the various evolutionary dead ends or the process of achieving our imprinted evolutionary code which is to contribute to the gene pool of the natural world - in other words - to prove your mettle as a specimen able to adapt and contribute to the world’s evolution.

In my photos I wanted to cover the pre infancy all the way to the very end where the atoms dissipate into convertible energies of lower life forms in no way less important than the ones in the photos.

YB: How does the grotesque play in the evolutionary process you think? I mean on one hand there is the idyllic scenery, and then on the other there is your photograph of excrement forming a heart in a field of grass. It's as if the feces has offered the earth a gift of what the future could be like.

RL: Grotesque only applies to humans. There is no such thing in the natural world.

YB: Nature is violent, even virulent, and in representation, including art and science, the grotesque does play a role in evolution. In your work Untitled 9, the numbered drawings seem to indicate another transformation of some sort. Was it based on a surgical procedure or did you conjure the sex operation yourself?

RL: That work was the sum of all my rationality and understanding of mammalian functions. I see it as a crude short cut to a similar end.

YB: What do the scribblings say?

RL: They are a vague guide to muscular inversion.

YB: There is quite a lot of inversion going on in this work, but, not in a way that is grotesque or perverse. It's like a surreal scientific method, odd but nevertheless convincing.

RL: It lacks the grotesque element for me because it is done in a systematic manner. For me it isn’t the process which is surreal. It’s the person doing willing to do it.

YB: Who are the other surreal figures you find possessing a systematic manner in creating work - be it art, music, or other forms that interest you?

RL: Everyone I know is a surrealist to a certain extent. For me it’s safe to say that everyone’s a surrealist if we look at it relatively.

I am not really discerning when it comes to what I like or not. It just has to connect at a certain level like a private joke or if you get that feeling of "why didn’t I think of that" you see the genius of the work. I can appreciate all kinds of music except R & B. The heavier the better. Films with dogs make me cry.

YB: Whatever gets you through the moment, or gives you one. Can you talk a bit about the other work, Untitled 08? The girl's expression is quite ambiguous, as is what's in the plastic packet.

RL: It was a plate for my class in Kalayaan College. The sachet attached is full of my pubic hair when i got infected with pubic lice. I had shaved it all off and applied Quell to the stubble.

Utopia in Progress

Philippine Star
Utopia in Progress
SLEEPWALKING By Yason Banal
Friday, December 7, 2007

Since SLEEPWALKING came out in The Philippine Star two years ago, it has been interested in exploring the potential of “the printed page” as an imaginative space for art and ideas. There had been e-mails, phone conversations, dream sequences, suicide notes, rumors, conceptual works and critical theories, punctured with bits of sex, politics and culture. Beginning this month, I will occasionally be converting my newspaper column into a project space, inviting creatives, thinkers and curators to make unique works or organize special projects specifically for publication — the works will not exist anywhere else in the same form as they will have here. Spread sporadically over 12 issues in the course of one year, UTOPIA:SLEEPWALKING will serve as a platform for exciting and experimental practicioners from various disciplines and countries to create “projects for the printed page,” thus communicating such “propositions” to a broader public. It is imperative for an exchange to happen, not just of ideas and images, but of communities and contexts; these gestures, this space, can only hope to be insightful and transformative for both creator and audience.

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Figure 1-A: John Torres, filmmaker, Philippines

"The Philippines is rich with very young film talents. John Torres is one of these. His films are close to the street, but their implications are far from earthy."

— Gertjan Zuilhof, International Film Festival Rotterdam

In 2005, John Torres bagged the 2005 Cinemanila award for Best Short Film and the Ishmael Bernal Award for Young Cinema for his short film, Salat. In 2006, he was awarded the Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema at the 25th Vancouver International Film Festival for his debut feature, Todo Todo Teros. He also won the NETPAC and FIPRESCI critics awards at the 2006 Singapore International Film Festival and a Jury Special Mention at the Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival. In 2007, the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino (Film Critics of the Philippines) nominated his film in four categories, namely: Best Screenplay, Best Editing (won), Best Director, and Best Picture. His second feature film, Years When I was a Child Outside, funded by the Hubert Bals Fund and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, was awarded the Grand Jury Prize in the 2007 Cinemanila International Film Festival, where the film was screened as a work-in-progress.

For UTOPIA:SLEEPWALKING, I am happy to present the world premiere of John Torres’ debut film for the printed page, Flash Elemental.

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FLASH ELEMENTAL: a short film for the printed page
by John Torres

Sawa na ako sa mga taong biglang-pasok, biglang-alis sa buhay ko. (I saw her on a train.) Nanghihinayang ako. Wala ba tayong kwento? (Dahil ayoko na ng tamawo.)

I was raised by a tamawo.

Manang Betty had been our help for three decades. My first memories, she was already there. One afternoon, she showed me an instructional video my father shot and sold to the masses: ABC and Numbers, published by his Listen-N-Learn Enterprises to “raise brighter children.”

I grew up bright but I still don’t know much about being, beings. B. B as in bicycle.

“Mga kapatid mo sa labas.”

Kids on bikes call my father father.

Manang Betty, after telling me I have half-siblings. She left her usual place by the laundry area.

Manang Betty, projected, split between parents, asking her to tell two truths. I frame with my two fingers.

Manang Betty wanted to work abroad. To do that, she had to have her face exposed, scanned, printed out — visa, NBI clearance, security stuff.

Manang Betty, photocopied, printed out, scanned, scarred, and projected on a green towel.

I went away and found that Ilonggos are all tamawos.

I was shooting around Iloilo. A young Ilongga asked to tag along. I did not shoot but kept snapshots of her in memory. There’s no proof of her existence. She didn’t speak much, but I remember her eyes not shining no matter how beautiful the sun angled itself. She always managed to walk away.

Tamawos have no pupils. I am learning from this young Ilongga.

This is a tamawo film; my film is another tamawo, borne out of found characters.

No money was spent during production. I made friends: man’s nature.

(Man vs. nature: Footage captured as interlaced frames, always in between. I long to store progressive stills instead.)

But my heart is still with the girl on the train.

We’re having a story now. But she’s away, studying language. And I am thinking of studying her language, new words Tagalogs don’t have. (Pero tama ka, paano ang Hapdi at Kirot?)

I’m tired. I’m old. Her youth rents spaces in faraway distances. I am tired of knowing and being left behind.

She arrives in a month but she leaves again. I have this card 722663251549 to say goodbye. 92 pesos left. Check if you want. Zero balance means I’ve called her and given up.

This is just 12 minutes worth to St. Petersburg. She arrives on Christmas Day.
If there’s load in this card on Christmas, give me credit. I have survived and promised to wait some more. Check on me. Dial 10-10-11.

Now, I must finish my film. And Manang Betty’s calling. It’s early, still.