Issue 15 - Pdf Ctrl+P - CTRL+P: a journal of contemporary art

or gallery. It did not help that when my grandfather was dying of prostrate cancer in
1994, I’d tenuously explored the possibility of following in my mother’s footsteps, only
to find out that the vultures (who were unabashedly banking on how their ‘investment’
in Cesar Legaspi would double in value upon the public announcement of his passing)
were circling around the family holdings so menacingly there was hardly room to move.
So, pardon me please if I’m not so readily able to share the optimism of New York Times
critic Holland Cotter, here cited by Irene Leung about the artworld getting back to the
making rather than the hyping of art (aka the bogus claim to being able to reduce the
validation of art to auction figures, collector profile, museum outings, and such).
The artworld does in fact operate amidst the contestation and collusion of agents
within it. And by agents, I do invoke here the entire spectrum—from those who make
work to those who encounter it in some degree of public engagement or other—even
within a private space where the art is no longer up for grabs but merely there for contemplation
or as intended object of covetousness masquerading as public educational tool.
Art really makes for the strangest bedfellows—note how edge and safe haven occupied
the same physical space in the Singapore Art Biennale (SAB) as mentioned in Gina
Fairley’s account Re-framing the Biennale 2010. SAB’s physically situating its parallel
art fair literally in the bowels of one of its main sites is, to some degree, replicated in the
recent Philippine art fair which literally positioned non-selling agents of the artworld at
the fringes of the Bonifacio Global City’s The Tent.
One is tempted to ask, is this what it has come down to then? The once heady
power-wielding and presumably less market-implicated institutions like museums and
cultural centers merely orbiting around the moneyed as mere satellites in the cosmos?
Specifically in the case of the Philippine artworld where the intersections between
collectors-dealers-curators constantly get crossed, with catalogues primarily getting selfpublished,
exhibitions self-curated and promoted, and too many artists producing work
primarily for auctions, the indications are troubling at the very least. In a world where
everyone gets to have a say, which voices will ultimately drown out the rest? How do
such savvy ways to circumvent the webbed systems of art valuation bode for the making
and meaning-making around art? In one sense of course, the dispersal of power is
welcome given the decentralization but then that also too easily tips over to populist
excess. How will this juggling of roles and fence-demolition play out in an environment
where the field remains dramatically uneven between those who look at art as the
last bastion of imagination and unfettered thought vis-a-vis those who perceive it as just
another economic cog to be left to the workings of an already discredited invisible hand
that reduces it to pesos and centavos?
Kubilay Akman, in Flashing Emin,Critical Analysis of “Spectacular” Contemporary
Arts, posits that the artists implicated in exercises in specularization subject themselves
to “harming the innocence” of the production process, wherein they lose the possibility
of making art that is more than passing fancy in this highly mediatized world. His text
begs the question: is the gallery floor always a scene of a crime then given this daily
ritual of instrumentalization? Does art in fact die when it becomes consumable monetarily
or becomes of use to those in power? Ergo, can such art be rescued from this
plight by being physically effaced or literally destroyed? To my mind, such questions
are particularly pertinent to us in the Philippines, in that locally, even the ‘bad boys’ are
constantly under threat of being defanged by rabid hoarders only too eager to render the
discordant mute.
The next question perhaps would be, if all ‘critical’ art is removed from the center,
doesn’t the gap get merely filled with the palatable and toothless? Enough recent undertakings
both in institutional and alternative spaces hereabouts demonstrate this bind—occupy
or abandon? Undermine or forfeit? To this now admittedly cynical mind, the luxury of
keeping to an either-or posture is precisely untenable because the stakes are too high.
In the end, perhaps art’s saving grace rests in its being a largely speculative endeavor.
Precisely because the compass is constantly being reinvented and tweaked, the
mechanisms are just almost always difficult to get a handle on. Thrust into the difficult
position of evaluating some 50 portfolios for the recent Thirteen Artists Award, we three
Ctrl+P September 2009