The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

MANUEL OCAMPO The Philippines b.1965 2007 (from ‘The Corrections: 20 years of self- loathing and intestinal mishaps’ series) 2012 Synthetic polymer paint on digital print on canvas / 167.6 x 127cm / Image courtesy: The artist Your first art experience was drawing cartoons for newspapers and painting versions of Spanish colonial folk art for tourists. Both commercial illustration and Spanish painting have continued to inform your work. How important were these early experiences? Both are very important to my current practice. I did two comic books in 1978, when I was 13, and another in 1984, and I did some cartoons for a newspaper as early as 1975. The Spanish fake antiquing gig was when I was in college. We would bury the paintings in the earth and heat them up in the oven. My experience with both cartooning and faking antiques gave me a sceptical attitude towards the art market. It gave me a purpose to be critical with art, especially painting. In a way, these influences gave me freedom to play around with painting’s codes and not take it seriously. You lived and worked overseas for many years, and returned to the Philippines in 2005. What has been the influence of travel on your work? I am lucky to have lived and worked abroad, not only in Spain and the United States, but in several other places in Europe. I still have a studio in Luxembourg and need to keep moving around to keep on my toes regarding my practice. It is really German art that has influenced my work the most. I particularly like the Hamburg and Cologne art scenes from the 1980s: Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Werner Buettner, Georg Herold, Andreas Schulze and Günther Förg. I feel they were giving painting and sculpture a rebirth, or a really hard time, with their pseudo-critical stances. Making fun of themselves and the art scene impressed me a lot as a young artist. They were always drunk, too, which is a plus in my book. Alcohol and art is definitely a good mix. Living extended periods of time in Manila gave me the impetus to explore other fields as an extension of my art practice — like opening a gallery and organising shows abroad of art made in Manila. Since I travel a lot to Europe, I can promote what is happening in the Manila art scene. How do you see the role of painting? You’ve written about finding ways to resist painting’s commodification through community traditions, such as murals and tattoos, for example. I don’t want to be an apologist for painting, but I think painting is still more intelligent and complex than, let’s say, cinema. Who was it who said that ‘movies are a dumb man’s painting’? Painting is intimate and requires a slow read — too much art tends to be grandiose and ambitious just to impress the public. I have certain doubts about community art too, as there is a consensus that it should benefit the public. I believe making art should be improper, perverse, threatening and absurd. My use of murals and tattoos are, for me, ways to expand the idea of painting outside the canvas. It is foolish of me to talk about resisting commodification when I am very much part of the system. The motifs in your paintings — religious iconography, political imagery, cartoon figures, body parts and functions — have remained remarkably consistent over two decades. What is their significance? These motifs come up again and again because they represent what I am burdened by. These are images which haunt me when I’m making art. Maybe they come from my childhood, as in religious imagery. Lately though, these motifs are used like characters in a play, the same way Josef Albers used the square. When they are painted, they go beyond meaning and drift somewhere into the abstract. But, as we all know, these floating signifiers can contain a considerable amount of information at the same time, and these forms become an accumulator of ideas which scatter and overlap as form, colour, matter and proportion. In other words, things that make up a painting are composed of precisely what cannot be thought; it is that which exceeds thought. These motifs perhaps are a way for me to anchor the painting to something which I can call my own. Your work has been described as ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘postcolonial’, with its complex combinations of cultural references. You are, however, suspicious of pluralism — can you expand on that? My annoyance with pluralism came out of me being labelled as a ‘multiculturalist’, which was born out of capitalism’s liberalisation and the intellectual collusion with it. In a cultural context, the ‘anything goes’ of pluralism makes art trivial and unhistorical. It also fosters a Western perspective of exoticism — that all non-Western culture is predetermined and a kind of anthropological enterprise. Culture becomes interchangeable and ephemeral, making it disposable and complicit with consumerist culture. Interviewed by Russell Storer, June 2012. MANUEL OCAMPO An interview 170