The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

JOSE LEGASPI - 1 MOTHER, UTOPIA, BURNING HOUSE' Like a fecund psychopath, he lasciviously licks his lips at some nubile, although slightly cadaverous . . . young woman who hangs from a cross, writes mama on the wall as if in the final few frames of an Italian new realism film, chews away at somebody's breast, or maybe heart, who complicity lies prone (dead) on a bed, flushes babies down the john, kinkily undresses young women leaving them in high heels & a necklace, is prone to fart, drowns without trace under the sea, couples with a werewolf, howls at the night, recovers his childhood whilst his mother lies dead on the bed, .. . sodomises and slays, sections bodies into transportable limbs, disposes of them in rubbish bins, leaves somebody strangled in a cell vomiting blood, cuts off somebody's penis, indulges in homosexual or bisexual . .. pleasures, dresses as a nun in underwear leaving his genitalia exposed, burns the house down, wears the devil's crown, ... (Kevin Power)' When Jose Legaspi was asked to contribute an artist's statement for a recent exhibition, his response was short and none too sweet: 'mother, utopia, burning house'. 2 Legaspi's mother is dead and his relationship with her was passionate but conflicted . As a young boy, he vandalised her domestic shrines, her storehouse of saints, imposing devil's horns on the Madonna figures, revealing, he believed, their true nature. Filipino homes, rich and poor, are full of such altars, small armies of santos, wall engravings, little statues of the Divine Child, lovingly painted and bedecked. The holy figures have fully prescribed iconographies, representing evidence of gruesome martyrdoms alongside oddly banal narrative details. San Roque points to a wound on his leg, the mark of the plague, while a dog stands alongside. San Isidro Labrador grasps a shovel, and at the same time an angel works the field with a plough while a landowner gapes in amazement. Santa Lucia, blinded by her persecutors, offers up her eyes on a tray. Lucifer is trampled and speared by Saint Michael. Saint Jerome, wearing a cardinal's cape and a wide-brimmed hat, has a lion at his feet, recalling the legend wherein the saint tamed the beast by pulling a thorn from its paw Saints Paul and Catherine are accompanied by swords, symbolising martyrdom by decapitation (although in Saint Catherine's case this was achieved only after her accusers failed to break her on a wheel). Of course the purpose of these incessant martyrdoms was to re-enact the central Christian mystery of a being who suffers in order to redeem . Torment thus assumes specific meanings that allude to truths beyond the perishable and mutable. Legaspi delves deeply into this cultural baggage, debunking the popular obsession with penitence as a key to personal salvation . After his mother's death, Legaspi portrayed her in a life-sized installation, enthroned like a Holy Mother whose Holy Child has been torn from her lap. Her sculpted body was impaled by 13 kitchen knives and there was nothing remotely beatific about her anguish . 66 APT2002 Phlegm 2000-02 Chalk and charcoal on paper 1000 drawings: 22.8 x 30.5cm each Collection:The artist In Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection, Julia Kristeva contends that we first experience abjection at the point of separation from the mother and that it represents a revolt against that which gave us our own existence or state of being. We are both drawn to and repelled by the abject; nausea is a biological recognition of it, and fear and adrenaline also acknowledge its presence. 'The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them.' 3 Legaspi is an openly gay man within a society that is avidly disconcerted by homosexuality. As Roselle Pineda points out, the artist promotes his sexuality as his 'natural selling point', and as the factor that makes him essentially and even blessedly different. 4 However it would be a mistake to consider Legaspi's imagery altogether alien .There is, after all, plenty of blood as well as pungent political and social commentary evident in the primary lineages of Filipino traditions. Ana P. Labrador describes how schoolchildren on visits to the National Museum in Manila are regularly led in front of the Spolarium, one of the country's cultural treasures - a huge nineteenth– century mural that vividly depicts dead and dying Roman gladiators being dragged out of the Colosseum. 5 And in a country where the clergy advocate excessive concentration on the grisly details of the Crucifixion, where oppression and civil war are fresh in the memories of many generations, and where the rural and urban poor grapple daily with slum housing, malnutrition, tuberculosis, apathy, corruption and violence, Legaspi's preoccupations (if not his treatment of them) do not seem that fantastical. Jose Legaspi The Philippines b.1959 Phlegm 2000-02 Six of 1000 drawings