Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

PHI LIPPI NE CONTEMPORARY ART AND THE ASIA PACI F IC: MOVEMENT ACROSS WATERS Patrick D. Flores Abstract The essay speaks of Philippine contemporary art in the context of its engagements with Asia-Pacific traditions and transformations. Instead of simply presenting a 'country report', a custom in global art rituals, this paper intends to foreground specific issues of artmaking and art theory as well as certain social accountabilities with which it reckons. From this discussion, Philippine contemporary art gains rondure as a complex aesthetic practice involving agents and structures that constitute the Philippines at home and elsewhere. I n a video work titled a voice remembers nothing, Lan i Maestro, a Philippine artist based in Canada, reveals visions of waves rushing to shore. We experience the iterative motion of the sea in the act of breathing incessantly, generating an image of sameness and likeness wondrous in its material ity as sight but also eerie in its plenitude as silent element and spirit. Then we hear a voice speaking of names of lost lives, and finally we h it land and a history claiming justice for a trauma inflicted by a regime which to th is day l ives in the words of a begu iling widow named Imelda, who in a recent interview would preach that the 'only th ings you keep in life are the ones you give away'. Between expiration and expenditure, Maestro's instal lation of two television screens wrestles with memory and its affection and betrayal . If we are to believe Helene C ixous, memory is not only about remembrance, but also about the th ings we forget. Philippine contemporary art has always been ravaged by the inclement weather of memory. And its navigation through time and space has always placed it on water, from Ferdinand Magellan's expedition to the Pacific and the conquest of the Philippine arch ipelago, to the ancient relations with the Southeast Asian kingdoms and the so-called Great Traditions of I ndia and China, to the Pacific War which marked the end of the first half of the past century, and finally on to the rimming of economies from California to Papua New Gu inea. But exploring l inks across geographies becomes rewarding only when it strives to cross gaps rather than bridge them. To cross is not so much to reconcile or to facil itate convergence as to come in contact, to encounter, to engage. It is also to attempt to renew certain ties and tensions and to reconstitute communities, abodes, places where people gather, belong, secure shelter and entitlement. Such an engagement, therefore, can never advocate promiscuous liaisons with total ising globalities; neither can it limit social p ractice to the demands of 'identity' under the sovereignty of nation , gender, or class. This manoeuvre, however, is also not able to altogether d isclaim the energy these categories charge as well as the bureaucratic pressure they exert on normative knowing; at its most strategic, it insists on a practice that seeks to grasp the complexity of the current world without l osing out to its plurality, and to consequently ordain a destiny that, wh ile not singular and · singularising, is determinate and transformative. To discuss Phil ippine contemporary art in the context of the Asia-Pacific, I wish to draw attention to five themes . Reorientation The works of Roberto Feleo (Shiva doing the twist) and Agnes Arellano ( Dead trees) in the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial reference an active nostalgic kinship with Asian spiritual traditions and imagine the future of the world. In Feleo's case, his refunction ing of the Shiva iconography does not so much unearth a h idden lndic tradition in Philippine culture as stage the fin-de-millennium catastrophe in a tableau which presents a cosmology failing to hold . In a parodic take on an impending planetary collapse accessed through the malfunctioning metaphysics of creed, the artist deliberately tosses an I ndian god into the orbit of the First Man on the Moon , rendering mankind's much-vaunted 'giant leap' bogus : a wrong turn, a misstep, an apocalyptic fall. 66