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

Arellano, on the other hand, invests in spiritual trad ition the power to bear witness to an ecological disaster that is survived only by armoured trees stand ing their ground on scorched earth like Japanese samurai. The artist taps a vital vein of Asian spirituality and makes its pol itics of divinity work as contemporary and everyday defence of earth 's 'present passing'. Estrangement For Paris-based Phil ippine artist Gaston Damag, the bulol, the rice granary statuary of Northern ethnolingu istic societies wh ich bears affinities with Pacific and Southeast Asian 'sculptural trad itions as wel l as ancestor worship rituals, represents not an identity to be recovered as fetish, but an endowment or a potency to be contained or harnessed . Such magic eludes strict regulation as evidenced in how the bulol is made to violate the protocols of museology and even of tradition . Damag would cut up the figures, those which are sold as souvenirs in the tourism and antiquities market and wh ich the artist regards as 'ethno-ready­ mades', electrocute them, and exaggerate their prowess with the view of mocking the system that idolises them . Damag's art, proceeding from the critique of the program governing the Musee de l'Homme, helps us ponder the question of displaying objects and speaking on behalf of the worlds they inhabit, leading us inevitably to be more reflexive in our practice of representing cultures through the agencies of objectification and our methods in naming and putting them in place. Reconversion The colon ial condition persists to afflict much of Phil ippine sensibility at the same time that it is equally resisted through subterfuge. Underwriting such a project is the aesthetic of suffering which is key to the visuality of transformation and the salvific vision to be d iscerned in the pain of bearing the colon ial cross and the sacrifice of pursuing its redemption . The works of Jose Legaspi and Imelda Caj ipe Endaya reveal that colonial ity and its always-already prefigured postness reconstitute the body politic as the latter becomes almost but not qu ite savage native or co-opted subaltern . Legaspi redeems baroque dolor by disembowelling the colonised body and sexual ising it, even to the point of laying it bare queerly as 'anatomy' in crisis; wh ile Cajipe Endaya revenerates the altar of Marian images, embodied by folk women and migrant workers, as the trenches of the many wars Philippine women had waged and continue to wage. In this l ight, it comes as no surprise that the centennial mural (the Philippines celebrated its national centenary in 1 998) of social realist Antipas Delotavo in which partisans trudge on wh ile victims languish in their wake would retel l the struggle of Filipinos through time by reinscribing suffering as controlling metaphor of a l iberation that seeks to enl ist the fullest range of collective grief - from awa (pity) to pagdamay (commiseration and complicity) to pakikiisa (sol idarity). For h is part, Yason Banal , in a merry parade of transgender personas, reinvents the colonial ritual of St. Helene's search for Christ's true cross as a masquerade of hybridity and a gay liberation of feminine ideals and the religious artifice of beauty. Colonial history, therefore, becomes a contested and contentional drama of reconversion with colonial ity construed as a modern moment which, instead of solely serving the idea of progress, also undermines its condition of possibility, and so signals the emergence of post-colonial modernity beyond the pale of empire and its representations. In fact, the body of work of Santiago Bose, consisting of whimsical parodies of civilisational pedagogy, val idates this premise of the colonial obligation being a burden and a demand for salvation . Surviving Trad ition The narrative of progress written through a self-consciousness of the past installs modernity as some form of master narrative of enlightenment. Philippine contemporary artists have tried to unburden the modernist problematic by salvag ing the past; in Philippine colloquial usage, to salvage does not mean to save, but to terminate unceremoniously. This aesthetic of abduction can be forcefully felt in Brenda Fajardo's rereading of official history through local tarot cards and Sanggawa's critique of the mural as device of memorialisation, appropriating it instead as editorial cartoon or satire which plays out the carnivalesque idiosyncrasies of Philippine culture and history. The question of identity also comes under heavy reconsideration in the hands of Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan who seek to redefine the house as an artefact or architecture in progress and a pol itics of homemaking; and Francesca Enriquez who deconstructs the 'home', supposedly a sheltering sky and bosom of family, and discloses the rooms of its repressions, the allure of its commodifications, and the uneven 67