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Holding mirrors to our faces


Two Pinoy artists were chosen to be part of the Singapore Biennale 2011, and while this might seem like a quirk of fate that’s like most of the grants and awards they’ve individually received before, there is much to be said about the fact that these two artists are Louie Cordero and Mark Salvatus. In an essay written for the Biennale on these two artists, Dr. Patrick D. Flores (Curator, Vargas Museum) draws similarities between Cordero and Salvatus succinctly: These two are masters of living in these spaces that are theirs, both imagined and real. The former via popular culture that’s crass and painful and class-based, the former based on the streets we walk, the poverty that’s normal, the deprivation that’s default. With eyes wide open, Cordero and Salvatus are able to live here, even as they elude it, escape it, and find a way for it to become the subject of art without romanticizing it.

Mark Salvatus wraps the remnants of people's transient presence in front of his wall.
Salvatus’ blank wall Salvatus’ Wrapped Traces project seemed way too ambitious for the members of the media, curators and members of the Singapore government’s cultural offices. It is after all about a wall, make that two, both on staircase landings of SAM at 8Q, an old school building turned into a Singapore Art Museum (SAM) extension. Those walls are white and empty at least until Salvatus begins his project of getting people to trace something of themselves onto the wall. Random pencil traces of watches, pens, jewelry, a camera, an umbrella, cellphones, and bags appear on that wall: the things people wear or hold in their hands. Choosing among the objects and erasing the repeated ones, Salvatus wraps each object by drawing over them, filling them in, rendering these into new things uniformly woven with what looks like rope, tight and snug, keeping the object in check even as it seems to float on the wall. The process is not only tedious, it’s also a project that can be as endless as Salvatus wants it. Which it is, geographically speaking.
A wall of objects is part of Mark Salvatus' tribute to community and transience in his "Wrapped Traces" project.
The Wrapped Traces project has been doing the rounds of cities since 2007, and has been on public walls from Amman to Bandung, Bangkok to Barcelona, Kuala Lumpur to Manila. The point of the project is one that isn’t obvious, but sit on it and let it settle, play around with the idea in your head, and it’s difficult not to be overwhelmed by its brilliance. Make that layers of brilliance. Take an empty wall and draw on it; yes, that seems easy enough. Have the public come and participate, take into consideration their embarrassment or their downright refusal. Tell them to trace objects off of their bodies, from inside their pockets, or from within their bags. Tell them to trace a version of themselves on that wall. Tell them to leave a remnant of their presence. Tell them to leave themselves with you.
A traced bag alongside objects already wrapped by Salvatus as part of his "Wrapped" project.
Then cover it up, change those remnants of people on the wall. Question their ownership of that object, question art’s ownership in general. Who owns this drawing of a real owned object? Where does that object even lie, wrapped up as it is, new as it looks? Whose is that wall of objects left behind, a wall that’s necessarily about memory and transience and community, as it is about concrete time and real static space? For the Singapore Biennale 2011, Salvatus did Wrapped on an interior wall for the first time, which meant having art spectators versus the public on the street as possible participants; this also meant an audience ready to participate, versus one that would shy away from it. For Salvatus, this meant a realization: a private wall means more things traced, and this dawns on him this rainy day after the vernissage. He had a lot of wrapping to do. But Salvatus brushes this off and chalks it up to experience. Now we know, he says, as he wraps a traced object in front of me. The conversation is one that hasn’t changed for Salvatus, despite whatever successes he has achieved. The humility is astounding to me, even as it is expected: much might be said of this ability at patiently covering up other people’s things, lives, selves. Much has to be said about art that’s about us all, who see these objects and can claim them as ours, as they are the artist’s, as they are no one’s. As they will be gone soon. Salvatus wraps these traced objects and makes them present and absent, newly here but also gone, always different and sometimes unidentifiable, familiarity melding into community into collective memory. And then it disappears. Such is the life we live every day, such is our life in Salvatus’ hands. Cordero’s garish pink room One of only four major works at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) is Cordero’s work commissioned by the Singapore Biennale 2011. This is a set of installations with music and video (like you can’t imagine) that fills a whole corner room of the museum’s first floor. This room is painted a particularly garish pink.
Cordero's pink room is filled with tacky images, the kind you'd see in your neigborhood beerhouse because yes you've been there before.
From the short narrow entryway to the room, the first thing one sees is a fiberglass statue of a man with a melting face, stabbed all over his head and body with every imaginable tool: the handle of a saw springs from his head, a bread knife from his arm, a cleaning brush from another, what looks like a ruler from his leg, it goes on and on. He holds a chain in one hand, a floor brush in the other. You look to the right of the room and another man is on the floor on all threes with one hand reaching out to you. His head is down, his shirtless back melting into his wounds, ones borne of all those things that stab him: exactly like man number one. Two more statues of this kind are in the room, the more powerful being the one that seems to have been thrown against the wall by a punch or two, maybe an invisible hand holding him up there. An FPJ movie comes to mind. These men are actually manongs: that Pinoy stereotype of the working class (think jeepney driver or butcher), with a beer belly and stocky built. These manongs in states of death or un-death are surrounded by the tackiest of paintings you will ever see, ones with images that would be familiar to any Pinoy who actually lives in the Philippines, with a sense of places that are wa class, baduy, cheap or all of the above.
The Singapore Biennale 2011 commissioned this work from Cordero, which should be a source of pride for us all really, despite the gore.
A bul-ol statue appears alongside a pot of flowers. Crudely drawn women in various states of undress and ugliness are in individual paintings. A rendering of the Mayon Volcano appears with an unreal blue river, on the shore of which are a bahay kubo, bancas, and two men in the skimpiest of swimming trunks. A cliché of an abstract painting here, a huge smiley with a sad mouth there, “The End Is Near" painted in huge bold letters, and what have you got? An absolutely surprising amount of control in Cordero. Yes, even as it all seems over the top, and I haven’t even told you about the videoke machine: on one side of the room is a stylized videoke machine that looks like a jeep on the one hand, just an overtly tackily designed machine on the other. From the back it looks like a house in itself, the two sides filled with tattoos of Bilibid prison inmates. In front it looks like an extreme version of the hood of an old school Sarao jeep and the interiors of a jeep from kitsch hell.
Louie Cordero's "My We" installs a videoke machine reimagined and fiberglass statues in states of undeath in a bright pink room.
The videoke machine is labeled: “My We" which is also the title of this whole installation. The machine plays only the song My Way, the one that ironically begins “and now the end is near," the one song that has an urban legend built around it. One that’s stuff for tabloids really, one that’s about a man being killed as he’s singing this song. On Cordero’s videoke machine the videos are that of Pinoy manongs on the street, willingly singing the song with feelings, without fear of death. There’s surprisingly no fear in this room either, despite the gore that’s in these statues around me, despite those stab wounds that ultimately look shallow, that aren’t so much about a literal killing, as it is an end in itself. As this room is: bombardment and redundancy remove fear, and in that sense this pink room with undead manongs and a loud videoke machine, is an end to the urban legend, even as it is a tribute to it. Yet as Cordero kills this space of legend, he also fundamentally ties us to it: it is familiar, it is ours in all its tackiness. It looks like a scene from a comic book, but it also looks like our lives unhinged, like a version of us that we deny exists, like a room in our homes that we keep padlocked, the key we wear around our necks. I shake my head in disbelief as Cordero walks me through this room. We share common knowledge and laughter, these things familiar to us both, the absurdity so contextual it’s like we’ve been neighbors without knowing it all our lives. At the same time it seems that the whole room is a finger pointed at us, these manongs both alive on video and as fiberglass statues, shaking their heads, telling us we’re but spectators of this life they live, even as we are considered complicit in these lives’ existence. Cordero’s imagination of this room is one that’s about our intertwined lives, a statement on class divisions, a finger pointed at those who hold it dear and refuse to deal. Cordero and I, both. You, included. A mirror to your face Crucial to both Cordero’s and Salvatus’ works is the notion of a public life, one that they hold up like a mirror to your face, Pinoy as you are when you enter their art spaces. It’s easy to see the sense of community that both invoke, though differently. What’s more difficult to deal with is its daring: it’s like a reflection that refuses to follow what you do, and instead tells you in no uncertain terms what you haven’t done. Which is to see community and live here, take it all in as a matter of fact, these class divisions, this social structure, that keeps us bound in a systemic dysfunction. One that’s about valuing materiality and objects, in the process sacrificing people, living with short-term memory. It’s a dysfunction that’s about the upper and lower class. It’s a system where we are allowed to refuse involvement, even as there’s no way out of it. In the art of Cordero and Salvatus, drawn on the wall and in a room set up like the cheapest of beer houses, we are forced into this third world terrain that is the Philippines, and we are reminded that it’s not so much that there’s no way out, as it is we need to insist on getting in. – HS, GMA News
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