The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

JOSE LEGASPI Legaspi confronts us w ith one of the most important junctures in human behaviour: the moment w hen pain violently and irrevocably breaches the arena of sexual pleasure. The protagon ists in his drawings, paintings and installations assault, degrade, consume, defile and mutilate. A dog with a human face feeds on the intestines of a dead woman; a dismembered foetus, umbilicus still attached, lies at the bottom of a toilet bowl; men copulate with bizarre beasts; somebody self– combusts; saints urinate on decapitated heads; a crown of thorns is wrapped around the entire face of a quaking, screaming Christ. Every figure is a prisoner of the cell-like space Legaspi constructs as the ground in each composition. The suffering captured in these images is demonstrably unredemptive - it leads to nothing, illuminates nothing, spares no-one.The attempt to leave nothing untouched compels the artist to transgress every constraint of morality; his attention extends into realms inhabited by the suppressed and the unspeakable. In some of the paintings meaningless script borders the image, forcing our participation in an irrationality that passes entirely beyond language. The title of Legaspi's work in APT 2002 is Phlegm. It comprises up to 1000 rough charcoal drawings on loose-leaf bond paper, arranged as a grid, in a sequence determined by the artist, on the walls of a room dedicated to its display.The seemingly random sequence compounds the difficulty of unearthing the linearity of what appears to be a tragic narrative. 'Only those who share my torment,' he says, 'can look at my sketches and be just as lost'. 6 When I was a small child I had a great-uncle, a miner, who was dying because his lungs were choked with coal dust. He would sit by the fire while his chest rattled and heaved, and every few minutes he would cough up viscous secretions and expel them onto the flames, where they sizzled and sparked. Phlegm thus seems a completely apposite title for art work so claustrophobic and dispiriting that it literally takes the breath away. But 'phlegm' has other meanings too - meanings that speak of inscrutibility, self-possession, detachment. Legaspi is a trained scientist who once planned a medical career. There are still undeniable traces of that clear, clinical eye: the acute regard of the vivisector. Bataille wrote that art 'is born of a wound that does not heal'. This French philosoph ical theorist and novelist, who was dubbed the 'metaphysician of evil', would have been deeply interested in the desperate eroticism of Legaspi's work. He argued that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in violent, transcendent acts of union. Religion, violence and sacred horror are linked, according to Bataille, in a twisted relationship; at the heart of beauty is blood and terror. Those who cannot bear the fu ll light of decomposition, or the griminess of their own unconscious, should not expect to take refuge in art museums or aesthetic distance. 7 Opposite, clockwise from top left: Dog eating a woman 1997 Collection: Hiraya Gallery, Manila Job 1997 Collection: Kim Atienza,The Philippines The usurper 1998 Collection: Malou Babilonia, The Philippines Prayer for the dead 1998 Collection : Hiraya Gallery, Manila Pastel on paper 92 x 61 cm each Crucifixion 1995 Mixed media 122 x 152cm Collection: The artist For all their nastiness and brutality, there is something undeniably beautiful, even serene in some of Legaspi's images. There are small, lost boys; strange other-worldly couples who reach for connection; family groups in lonely rooms. Particularly in the paintings, pain is offset by the hieratic formality of the compositions, by the use of deep, unusual colours that penetrate the otherwise overwhelming gradations of grey, and by beguiling, opaque surfaces. Formal features counteract the visceral emotional impact. Legaspi reveals the painful and tragic complicity of perpetrators and victims. He shows us that the human body is not just an object of desire, but also the site of agony and death. In reality, despite its shocking content, this message is delivered in the form of a lament, and every now and then Legaspi hints at the prospect of a faint utopian glimmer at the end of the tunnel : And yet, while gloating over his ow n irredemption, both personal and aesthetic, he keeps a little door, a little window stained with a feeble light, though the corridors remain darkly menacing. 8 Lynne Seear is Assistant Director, Curatorial & Collection Development, at the Queensland Art Gallery. 69