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. The
return of the (Cesare) comeback An
MMDA-pink pedestrian overpass spans C-5 or Rodriguez Ave. towards Libis,
off the corner of Julio Vargas Avenue. Relatively new, it looks
spic-and-span, bright and cheery, but remains unused, because it has no
stairs on either end. Bayani Fernando’s boys had installed the bridge
without consulting the proper owners on both sides of C-5. No one seemed
to know that they would have to ask permission to encroach on commercial
lots before they could erect the stairs. For
now we can laud it as an installation piece, an eye-catching sculpture
symbolizing shortsighted futility, with a clear allusion to the merits of
a mythic nowhere. Well, it’s also simple a landmark to make Metro
Manilans shake their heads in consternation or amusement. These days, whenever I catch sight of it, I wish Cesare A. X. Syjuco would take it upon himself to volunteer to collaborate on the work-in-arrested-progress, apply his iconoclastic bravura touch, the way Pacita Abad enhanced a similar walkway spanning the Singapore river. Perhaps Cesare can add text on its broad span: some arcane calligraphy, a cryptic quotation, or pithy lines of dialogue. He could also decide to hang a row of framed tarpaulin pieces with images in |
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color
or black –and-white, lit from behind, so that motorists
whizzing by at night would raise both eyebrows and say, “Did
you see those? Hey, That was Humphrey Bogart out there in one of
those banners, must be another Smart Addict come-on…” But
neither smart nor addictive describes the munificent sampling of
Syjuco’s recent artworks, which are on formal display at the
CCP Main Gallery until January 2005. Billed as Flashes of
Genius, the visual-literary trans-media exhibit of some 60
works is exactly that: it “flashes” uncompromising genius,
the way a creative deviant would throw his overcoat open to
display naked rhetoric and philosophical questions to an
intrigued, rather than stunned, crowd of instant voyeurs. There’s
a ludic and sexy come-on quality to Syjuco’s art, boldly
challenging, or at its gentlest inducing / seducing the viewer
to / into instant myriad reaction that partakes of both
quizzical cerebral contortions as well as gut-feel appreciation. “Fantastic!”
That was how fellow Philippine Star columnist and
critic-at-large Dr. Isagani Cruz was reported to have exclaimed
on opening night on Nov. 13. I believe I muttered the same
appraisal inside myself when my wife and I did an early bird
walkthrough that night, even before the ceremonial ribbon was
snipped to open the show. Oh
what a show it is, of the show-and-tell garden variety, too, as
in managing to raise all these splendiferous existential
questions that translate into hybrid bushes, hedges and groves
of perked-up consciousness. It is the same response we had to
seeing all those sculptures of cows all over London, or a
simulation of alien-looking characters seated on an installed
park bench across Singapore Art Museum. Here
in Metro Manila, we hardly have such visual titillation offered
publicly, that is, not inadvertently, as with that virginal MMDA
walkway. At best we have commendable examples of commissioned
public art at The Fort, occasionally at Greenbelt, and that of
former Manila Mayor Arsenio Lacson reading a newspaper while
facing the sunset in Roxas Blvd.’s Baywalk. No giant spoons or
magnified simulacra of mundane objects greets us in any
metropolitan tour, only the invariable accidents of kitsch such
as that monstrous sculpture on an island upon entering Anonas
Ext. in Quezon City. Well,
some alderman ought to commission Cesare A.X. Syjuco to
serialize a chainsaw massacre of city consciousness by
installing his arresting “conceptual” art where it can stop
people on their tracks and make the think, even if the first
thought would likely be: “Is my leg being pulled?” That goes
into the equation all right; yet it is more of one’s
relationship with words and images, thereby the world of worlds,
that is being tweaked onto a higher plane. Consider
the dialogue in a set of three hypertext artworks Cesare has
included in his exhibit. “18.
Mundane” goes thus: “:What is mundane?: Anything and
everything when you’re bleeding from shrapnel on the bridge of
a burning deck. :My thoughts exactly :You’ve never had a
thought in your life.” “19.
Mundane” has the following: “:What’s the difference
between mundane and inconsequential? :Mundane means it’s
unimportant. Inconsequential is when it doesn’t matter.
:What’s the difference there? :It’s a mundane question. A
reply would be inconsequential. :You’re a jerk, you know that?
:I love you too” And
“20. Mundane” goes: “Q: Why do people bother with the
inconsequential? A: I’m not sure Q: You mean like ‘Life on
Mars’? A: I mean like life anywhere” The
enlarged text, in bold, black or red, is superimposed on
black-and-whit photo images of an imperiled battleship at sea. The
“Dead Enough” series, also a triptych or trilogy, goes this
way. Panel 1: “How dead is very dead? Not dead enough.”
Panel 2: “How ‘enough’ is enough? Very verry dead.” The
text is imposed on a familiar if vintage cinema frame showing a
well dressed lady with a pistol in hand. The third panel
magnifies the hand with the gun, under which the bold black
text, in lowercase, goes “one more for the road,” (Yes,
that’s a comma rendering finis to this unholy trinity.) Some of the works offer nothing short of imperial messages, like the twin “Resonance” pieces, where the first aphorism is “The Resonance of Matter Matters,” and the second simply drops the first three words, so that we read: “Matter Matters,” – with eloquent spaces in between. (Yes, again writing finis are commas instead of periods; even that seemingly arbitrary touch must be a flash of something, say, idiot-savant proclivities?) And
then some works validate the authentic poet in Cesare, who after
all is a Palanca prizewinner
in that genre. “A Death Wish” – which shows a distorted
B&W photo of a dancing man, reads text-heavily: “I’d
like to go quite suddenly, I think, whacked from behind when I
least expect it, face down and spread thinly on some anonymous
sidewalk, in someone else’s anonymous hometown later to be
peeled off the pavement like chewing gum from underneath the
treads of a crumbling cream passat, and totally, joyfully,
wordlessly oblivious to the hours and the whys and the
wherefores of somehow not going in the very same way that I
came,”. Breathless; even that comma gasps for air. And
there are story-poems, as with “Dorothea” which has a
B&W photo, again distorted, of a naked man with a cello,
imposed on which is a modernist fable: “There was in his
strong upright father a kind of vague borderline malevolence
more disturbing than it was reprehensible. It took curious form,
for instance, in the jar of attic mice that he kept locked in
the trunk of his car. Or more to the point and closer to home,
to his bedside drawer, the perfectly trimmed tiny crescent
thumbnail with someone else’s name on it. Q: But who was
Dorothea? Q: And why were her mice so very small?” For
sheer poetry of quintessential, postmodern wit, there is
“Bow” which shows a naked man with a cello, and the
following haunting micro-text: “There is no song in the bow in
breaking. Wrap me in the bow in breaking.” The
work titled “River” is rhythmically cautionary: “A river
stays spread on pages without sight has no reach, without reach
will not flow, without flow will not rain, without rain will
die.” Most
of the artworks are on large tarpaulin rectangles that are
box-framed and backlit. But there’s a delightful
eye-and-mind-popper of an installation right on the sort of
anteroom when you enter: a bulky yellow column, the plaque for
which, reading much like a road sign, welcomes the viewer into
the kind of mildly caustic, quasi-ethereal plane the artist
visits in his sleep as well as OBE experiences, no doubt.
Generously does he share such dreams with us. The
work is titled “A Concrete Fiction” – text on acrylic
panel installed on color-coordinated concrete post (existing),
2004 – to wit: “One (1) rather unremarkable concrete
structural girdle post, obstructing principal lines of vision in
exactly the wrong place at the wrong time.. steel, fiber and ABS
reinforced for maximum load bearing capacity under extreme
stress.. X meters high by X meters thick by X meters wide.. clad
entirely in hipping grade marine plywood and painted a Gay Capri
Yellow (Ace Premix 442B or 442C specified).. to be immediately
constructed on this site for no conceivable purpose and at
ridiculously excessive cost.. and to be left uselessly in place
as a careless inconvenience for the duration of the monsoon
season..” Space follows, then dialogue in itals: “Q:
You’ve got to be kidding..right? A: You fckn wish..” Behind
this column is a glass rectangle with the word VOID. Viewed at a
certain angle, this piece imposes its reflection on another work
two meters away. It’s that kind of hyper-imposition I wish
Cesare can apply on many of the ongoing infrastructure projects
in our otherwise benighted cityscape. Cesare
A.X. Syjuco lives a life of the mind, and what antic, impish
imagination he parlays into words and visuals. A painter, poet
and art critic of international stature, he racked up various
distinctions at a young age (TOYM award for Art and Culture
advancement; Gerry Roxas Foundation Presidential Award for
Outstanding Achievement in the Arts; Gawad CCP sa Sining Biswal;
AAP Grand Prize for Painting; UNESCO Paris Gold Medals for
Photography and Design; the First Purita Kalaw Ledesma Award for
Art Criticism, etc.). The
groundbreaking artist once operated the studio-gallery Art Lab
right on EDSA, in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, if I recall
right. Then he inexplicably disappeared from the local art
scene. Rumor had it that he and artist wife Jean Marie had
decided to turn into stage “pay-rents” for an ultra-rock
band consisting of their five kids. And with the Syjucos no
rumor is ever an exaggeration. Now,
a dozen years after he donned that cloak of invisibility, the
Harried Pater of EDSA, Vancouver and Alabang resurrects himself,
and his pioneering art, nay, revives them, nay reinvents, nay,
redoes and remixes all of our notions on what can be splendid in
the visual arts (cum literary), with this his 13th
solo exhibition. No
wonder one of the tarpaulin works, in full color, is a page
straight out of a Flash Gordon comic book. It is titled “Last
Leaf” – with the ersatz-hype text blessing the frames: “I
am the last leaf in this book of vanishing pages.” What is this guy on? Pa-share naman, kumpadre! But of course the last must be the first. So welcome back, amigo pare siempre! |
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