The Failed Avant-Garde - CTRL+P: a journal of contemporary art

Problematizing Artistic Labor
(The Failed Avant-Garde)
The very first time I was referred to in writing as an avant-garde was in Marian Pastor Roces’
article, “Outline for Reviewing the Avant-garde,” one of the rarest writings on the Philippine
avant-garde published in 1986 in San Juan, the official publication of the erstwhile Pinaglabanan
Galleries where I exhibited a few times in the mid 1980s. Roces, an independent curator, art
theorist, and a long-time friend discusses at length the works of Roberto Chabet, Ray Albano,
Mars Galang, Alan Rivera, Yoli Laudico, Johnny Manahan, David Medalla, and only mentions
me in her list of artists doing avant-garde work in the 1970s.
Among those who were doing works in this genre on the 70s…were: Susan de la Rosa-
Aragon, Genara Banzon, Mars Galang, Rudy Gan, Ileana Lee, Benjamin Libre, Red
Mansueto, Litz Nievera Benipayo, Mario Parial, Judy Freya Sibayan, Eva Toledo,
Fernando Modesto, Huge Bartolome, Butch Perez, Mon Habito, Santi Bose, Pandy
Aviado, Joy Dayrit. 1
It is not surprising that except for Libre and Habito, the rest were Thirteen Artists awardees. We
all frequently exhibited at the Cultural Center of the Philippines Museum, thus the basis for the
historical claim that it was here the avant-garde was birthed asserted by Roces in her essay.
Roces, who began working in this museum in 1974, was correct in her observation that we made
art based mostly on received ideas. Many of us merely mimicked artists in the West who we read
about or who were cursorily discussed by our mentors, which was to say, it was a very spotty
education. More inauspicious was the avant-garde thriving inside a cultural center built by the
conservative forces during martial rule. But it was probably our innocence or our apolitical stance
that made us blind to the realities of our compromised radicality. Roces writes about us as
earnest initiates:
The Piety! Many of the artists were true believers, full of the best anti-art, anti-money,
anti-permanence, anti-sacred, anti-social devotions. Everyone read Artforum, even those
who couldn’t understand that intensely narcissistic New York glossy. Certainly I—new
apostle of the faith after joining the CCP in 1974—scanned the words and pages with
something akin to the giddiness of sexual initiation. Understanding, of course, wasn’t the
point as much as the metaphoric communion with the American mainstream. And so
people like Joseph Kosuth, Walter de Maria, the many Richards (Diebenkorn, Serra,
Long) and the many Roberts (Rauschenberg, Morris, Mangold, Smithson) etc. became
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hyper-real presences, friendly ghosts. It was pretty hardcore stuff, involving the kind of
earnestness a Marxist or a charismatic might recognize.
Actually, I think only two people then had the kind of mind—extremely encyclopaedic;
anal compulsive is apparently the word to use now—needed to fully comprehend what
was going on in American art: Chabet, who teaches this sort of thing, and Manahan who
took up doctorate courses in Art History in Berkeley when a lot of this ferment was
brewing in the US. It was obviously an egg-head art which self-destructs without the
companion Heavy Texts. Judy Sibayan recalls Chabet assigning Tom Wolfe's The Painted
Word, and everyone tried to steal the single copy in Thomas Jefferson, otherwise having
to read the thing in ten minutes. It was absurd and more so because momentum was at
work which transcended the failure to grasp art history. What worked for the artists was a
certain non-intellectual level of internalization. 2
This cavalier attitude we had toward any accountability for a deep understanding of the historical
and theoretical basis of the work of the avant-garde as practiced and developed in the West needs
pointing out for it is only now in retrospect that I realize the stages of my art praxis: an early
stage, the mimic stage, the period of received ideas, a period of a body of work mimicking the
Western avant-garde. Then a later, more mature praxis issuing from and grounded on the
particularities of my own circumstance and history as an artist in the Philippines. These two
stages correspond to my two subject positions: being an avant-garde and the practice of
Institutional Critique. In 2007, tracing my propensity to collapse both my artmaking and curating
into one and the same work, I wrote “Curating Upon My Body” published in Pananaw, Journal
of Visual Arts where I cited two “beginning” works that also mark these two stages. I quote here
in full the first part of the essay. 3
I begin this essay by citing two of my earliest art works to put in perspective how
and whence my curatorial practice evolved.
1975 Work number 1: My first one-person exhibition at the Main Gallery of
the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP, the Center) Museum investigated
the exhibition space as the crucial context that defines any object displayed
inside it as art.
1975 Work number 2: Lemon Cake was my first performance art done outside
school. Three other art students and I gate-crashed the opening of an
exhibition at Shop 6, the country’s first known alternative space maintained
by a group of artists. 4 To celebrate my birthday, we parked a yellow Renault
in the middle of the parking lot, placed a lemon cake on the hood of the car,
and ate the cake. When approached by the audience, we simply responded
with the words “Lemon cake.” The performance ended once we consumed
the whole cake.
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Citing Edward Said on beginnings, I also wish to frame my present curatorial
practice within the past, within my beginnings:
Variations of the concept “beginning” designate a moment in time, a place, a
principle, or an action…the concept beginning is associated… with an idea of
precedence and/or priority…beginning is designated in order to indicate, clarify,
or define a later time, a place, or action. In short, the designation of a beginning
generally involves also the designation of a consequent intention…the beginning
is the first point (in time, space, or action) of an accomplishment or process that
has duration and meaning. The beginning, then, is the first step in the intentional
production of meaning 5
Beginnings and their consequential intentions
In setting out to test and investigate the spatial context of art production in these two
“beginning” works, I was looking into that instance when and how an object or an act is
defined as having meaning as art, or how meaning is produced through work that is
designated as art.
A spontaneous and uninvited participation performed in jest in a place that was not
designated as space for art (a non-site), Lemon Cake for all intents and purposes may
never have been considered as art. But because it was written about complete with a
photograph in MARKS, 6 the only publication on contemporary art at the time, by no less
than Ray Albano, the director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Museum,
historically it is one of the earliest performance art in Philippine contemporary art. 7 After
all, “in the context of any consideration of the historical entity ‘Art.’ Regardless of the
feeling of the artist, it just happens to be a fact that the art which gets seen (in galleries or
museums, in magazines or books), the art which becomes counted as ‘Art’, has been
subjected to processes of selection and legitimation which are beyond the control of the
artist…” 8
The CCP Main Gallery work on the other hand, was conceptualized for a long period of
time 9 and undertaken with full institutional support. Created inside the very center of
Philippine art, the project failed in its objective to lay bare, to “exhibit” the mechanisms
of the institutionalized site as originator of any object displayed inside it as art.
Historically Duchamp’s urinal ( Fountain 1917) and consequently the 1960 Yves Klein
removal of artworks in the galleries of the Musée d’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris
should have been my starting points but my project blindly insisted on the display of
objects that were in the final analysis still paintings (several pieces of painted plywood).
Klein followed the Wittgensteinian-Duchampian definition of art: if “placing an object in
an art context or otherwise designating it as art makes it art, then it is in the context or
designation, and not in the object that the art essence resides, and it is the context itself
that should be exhibited, not an object within it.” 10 But my first attempt nevertheless
pointed to an interest that was to sustain my artmaking for the next 31 years.
So that in hindsight, I see the trajectory or to use Said’s phrase, the “consequent intention”
designated by these two “beginning” works. Because both works were actually one and
the same in their aim to test and investigate the spatial sites of art production,
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I consequently ended up making, performing, and curating art that critiques a system that
valorizes objects or actions as art—the system that produces art.
But it had to take my having to work in the institutional monolithic Center of art for me to
experience (learning through lived life) the full force of this system, earning me the right
to an art and curatorial practice that “call[s]…into crisis 11 this system of art production; a
critique of art as site of cultural production.
In giving ourselves the task of eating a whole cake while hanging out in a parking lot as our
“work” of art, we intended Lemon Cake to make ordinary everyday acts such as eating, parking,
partying, and hanging out as performance art, blurring the lines between art “work” and leisure,
between art and life; thus problematizing what can be constituted as a work of art and proposing
that perhaps ordinary acts in everyday life can be incorporated into the work of art. Or simply
that art and ordinary daily living can be one. These were historically, two of the major concerns
of the avant-garde in the West.
My 1975 CCP Main Gallery work on the other hand suggested/anticipated a future practice that
has to do with the critique of the institution of art or the practice of Institutional Critique; a future
practice, since the term was not yet in existence in 1975, 12 and a practice that only came into
being after and because of the failure of the avant-garde. 13 Indeed, Duchamp and Klein were key
figures in the avant-garde movement in the West. It was also, a future practice for it was only in
the late 1980s that I had my crisis about working in an art institution, about the whole institution
of art and more crucial, I had to undergo a crisis about the very premise of being an artist—
a most fitting situation for any artist to eventually practice Institutional Critique. This crisis which
marked this second stage of my art praxis, began in 1987 when I accepted the directorship of the
Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines and the concurrent position of Coordinator of the
Coordinating Center for the Visual Arts at the Cultural Center of the Philippines—both difficult
institutional roles purposely created to accommodate the change of administration of the Center
issuing from a change of government: Marcos fell and Cory came into power. Nicanor Tiongson
who believed in the power of protest art (the Social Realists taking to the streets with their
painting/banners) contributing to the demise of the dictator, was appointed Artistic Director of the
Cultural Center of the Philippines. Social Realism, which preceded the avant-garde, finally
entered the Center. Tiongson believing in this art will figure in my crisis.
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It would seem then, that very early in my art practice, I was already inquiring into what it meant
to be an artist. The kind of art making that interested me was art that was self-reflexive. More
specifically, I was looking into what it meant to be a critical artist. And indeed, in many of my
works, I literally wrote myself into what I considered critical praxes by inserting myself within
genealogies of artists who I considered as having done critical work with this aspect of
“lineaging” as the reason for the work. My early works since they mimicked the masters were
commentaries on a very particular history of art ideas and practices. I made many “after” works:
art after Yoko Ono, Duchamp, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Carl Andre, Tom Marioni,
John Cage, and Allan Kaprow.
A review of my avant-garde works
Helen Molesworth in her essay for an exhibition she curated entitled “Work Ethic”
concludes that with the avant-garde, the logic of work started to permeate all areas of life and that
art became a mixed site of work and leisure, blurring the lines separating work, art and life. She
begins by arguing that
one unifying principle of the extraordinarily heterogeneous field of post-World War II
avant-garde art was a concern with the problematic of artistic labor. A historical
convergence had occurred. Just as artists relinquished traditional artistic skill and the
production of discreet art objects, the status of labor and the production of goods in the
culture at large were also changing profoundly as the American industrial economy, based
in manufacturing shifted to a postindustrial economy rooted in managerial and service
labor. The concern with artistic labor manifested itself in implicit and explicit ways as
much of the advanced art of the period managed, staged, mimicked, ridiculed and
challenged the cultural and societal anxieties around the shifting terrain and definitions of
work.
One of Modernism’s many promises was that art offered possible resistance to an
increasingly regimented and segmented life under the auspices of industrialization. From
the Arts and Crafts movement to the Bahaus, the history of modern art is shot through
with the dream of an integration of the realms of art and life, work and leisure, such that
the alienation produced by the fragmented nature of modern labor would be ameliorated.
This essay argues that in the period following World War II, artists came to see
themselves not as artists producting (in) a dreamworld but as workers in capitalist
America. They navigated the avant-garde desire to merge art and life under dramatically
different social structure than their modernist predecessors. Artists during the 1960s made
art in the midst of the corporatization of American culture, the professionalization of the
category of “artist,” and a burgeoning New York market for contemporary art. These
sociohistorical forces placed extraordinary pressures on artists to redefine themselves and
their work, and often they did so by thinking through and acting out the profound
transformation of late-twentieth-century labor in their work. 14
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It is necessary that I quote the lengthy passage from Molesworth above for the simple reason that
the history and the theories she cites are the history and theories of the tradition from which my
art practice emerged. She contextualizes the ideas and practice I received from my education both
in my undergraduate and graduate schooling and as a professional working as a curatorial
assistant at the CCP Museum. In brief, these quoted passage contextualizes the history, theories,
and praxes that interested me and informed and shaped my thinking and my art making. A crucial
point to make, the material and historical condition from which this particular art tradition
emerged is not my own historical and material condition but those of the kinds of art I made.
And it was largely from and through Roberto Chabet that I received these ideas. Although I
entered college in 1972, the year martial law was declared, this event did not impact on my art
education and practice. It was a person and not local crucial current events that had the most
significant influence on me. This was in the person of Chabet after he had left as the first director
of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Museum. Perhaps the only artist then who had a library
with the most contemporary art publications, he was the only artist in the Philippines in the 1970s
who was in-the-know of the most recent art activities in the West, in particular those of New
York. Erudite, charismatic, totally committed to art, he is considered the only true Philippine
artist in the 70s with the standard, writes Roces, being that “he eats art, reads art, speaks art,
fucks art, defecates art. It was said in awe.” Although I was in the Visual Communication
program (advertising, commercial art), Chabet’s classes, which were mostly elective courses,
were the only ones that made sense to me. Art as idea, as concept—conceptual art was a very
seductive and easy activity. Chabet had us make art out of ice, out of sleep, of wax paper, of
aluminum foil, of eating. Huge Bartolome and I went to class in our pajamas complete with
pillows and slept the whole duration of his class. Bartolome wrapped all of me in aluminum foil,
installed me in a toy pull cart and paraded me all over the hallways of the college like a mobile
sculpture. Bartolome and I did a skit taking the roles of Sesame Street puppets Ernie and Bert
with the script around the idea of melting ice. Classmates Ces Avanceña, Huge Barolome, An
Tison and I had a picnic on the path walk in front of the main library. Bartolome and I covered
the entrance to the classroom with wax paper and to signal the start of class, running into the
cover, we broke it to make way for the class to enter. All these works didn’t require much
technical skills. Molesworth attributes this “de-skilling” of artists to their increasing
proffesionalization in academic art programs in the United States beginning the early 1950s.
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As art departments continued their professionalization and artists continued to undermine
the significance of technical skill, contradictory ideas emerged about the teaching of art.
On the one hand, the idea arose that art could not be systematically taught. On the other
hand, the idea arose that art could be learned and that it was acquired in large measure by
being around artists and listening to them talk. This “talk” took place in the form of the
“crit,” the guest artist lecture, and the phenomenon of the studio visit, all of which
signaled a significant break with traditional academic training. In such training, the
“assignment and product are given in the same language”—life drawing, for instance. In
postwar period, however, a split occurred, and the language of the “assignment” was quite
different from the language of the finished product. For example, the assignment might be
to “make a void,” a kind of problem solving that could take any form. If the separation of
mental labor from manual labor is one of the hallmarks of managerial professionalization,
then…postwar artistic training was designed to train artists in theoretical discourse
separate and distinct from manual labor. The result was a generation of college-educated
artists whose skills were no longer manual and visual but largely theoretical and verbal.
The rise of the mfa artist—an artist trained in large measure to become a teacher in mfa
programs and whose proficiencies are mental rather than manual—reflects the shift in
labor experienced by the vast majority of American worker. And just as many Americans
now earn their livings without ever making any sellable commodity, many artists have
stopped making commodities such as painting and sculpture designed to be bought and
sold on the market. 15
My mfa education at the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles in the
early 1980s was exactly as Molesworth describes it. Students had studios in school that were
visited by uber artists like Bruce Nauman and Jim Dine. And in turn we visited artists in their
studios all over the city. We had guest lecturers the likes of Vito Acconci, Barbara Kruger, Paul
McCarthy, and Robert Irwin. And our teachers were artists in their own right—Stephen Prina,
Richard Jackson, and Jill Giegerich.
Jose Joya, Constancio Bernardo, and Napoleon Abueva were my only teachers in the College of
Fine Arts, Univeristy of the Philippines who received their mfa education in the United States in
the late 1950s and early 1960s. But it was only Chabet, who has no mfa degree, who taught like
he was a product of an American mfa education. He held court. His talk was his method of
teaching. We looked forward to his “crits” which were always positive in the sense that he would
simply discuss our works in reference to works by mostly artists in the United States and
strangely enough not in relation to works by Filipino artists, perhaps indicating that the kind of
art he was “teaching” still had to be made in the Philippines. And his assignments described
earlier, were like those instructions to make a void—a method of teaching minus the uber artists
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and studio visits, for in the early 70s, Filipino artists didn’t talk. Amongst all my teachers, it was
only Chabet who talked on art ad infinitum and did critiques.
But back to Molesworth, midway in her essay, she summarizes the factors, historic shifts and
conditions that impacted on artists in the United States towards their rethinking and redefinition
of “work” in the production of art.
Artists stood at the crossroads in the 1960s. The influence exerted upon them and their
conditions of possibility were extraordinary: the postwar reception of Duchamp, a
profound alteration in the conception of the artist’s role, the shift in the economic
structure of the Western world, the rise of a new type of academic art training, and a
dramatic change in the site of artistic production all came to bear on the production and
reception of avant-garde culture. This essay has argued that shifts in artistic practice were
bound up with a changing economic structure. The transformation from an industrial to a
postindustrial society is perhaps best described by Ernest Mandel, who historicized this
period as late capitalism. For Mandel, one late capitalism’s most distinctive characteristics
is the spread of the logic of work into all areas of life, resulting in an increasingly
bureaucratic and disciplinary society. He writes, “Mechanization, standardization, overspecialization
and parcellization of labor, which in the past determined only the realm of
commodity production in actual industry, now penetrate into all sectors of social life.”
Mandel continues with a particularly germane example: “The ‘profitability’ of
universities, music academies and museums start to be calculated in the same way as that
of brick works or screw factories.”20 The visual and plastic arts were particularly well
poised to negotiate this historic shift, as the value found in art has traditionally been
positioned within a dialectical set of social practices. Produced by both mental and
manual labor, it is also a mixed site of leisure and work. Furthermore, throughout the
twentieth century the avant-garde has set out to blur the distinctions between art and life.
All these factors contribute to contemporary art’s increasing porousness to the economic
and social conditions of its production as well as its ability to represent and critique these
transformations. At this crossroads, much of the most important and challenging art of the
period staged the problem of labor’s transformation, its new divisions, and the
increasingly blurred boundaries between work and leisure. Generally speaking, artists
responded in one of four ways. 16
1. The artist as mere worker
First, artists saw themselves as mere workers. They became “less interested in art objects as a
finished product and more interested in the activity of making art. These artists create[d] a task
for themselves, however mundane or obsessive, and complete[d] it as their artwork.” Examples
are 1) Richard’s Serra’s Hand Catching Lead (1968), a three-minute film of the artist’s “hand
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grasping at falling pieces of lead. While his hand is fully engaged in its work, it does not carve or
mold the material.” 2) Tom Friedman’s 1000 Hours of Staring (1992-1997) documents the artist’s
“arduous task of staring over a five-year period.” 3) “Hope Ginsburg’s Bearded Lady (1998-
2000) performance culminated in her ability to wear a beard of bees and market her own brand
of honey.” 17 Based on the many received ideas from my education, I list here my own art works
where I was a mere worker:
●Taking Pictures with my index finger right in front of the lens (1976)
Projected as slides in the exhibition Carousel at the CCP Museum Main Gallery. I gave myself
the simple task of using up a 36 exposures of Tri-X 400 ASA analog film. In all 36 exposures,
I always had my left hand index finger diagonal right on top of the lens. I photographed mostly
architectural structures and spaces empty of people.
●Three Pieces (1976). There were two variations of this performance. The first
was performed at the End Room of the CCP Main Gallery where I stood reading a script on
performance art while Bartolome marked the area I was standing on with a one-inch width
masking tape marking the floor with a one-square meter perimeter around me. At the end of my
reading, Bartolome, slowly ripped off the masking tape ending the performance. This work was
made for our Thirteen Artists exhibition. In the second version held at the Thomas Jefferson
Cultural Center Auditorium, I read a script on performance art using a microphone and walking
around a low rectangular coffee table. The wire of the mike kept getting entangled with the table
which irritated one of the audience. He attempted to remove the table. To my protest the table
stayed. In the meantime, Bartolome was making measurements of the auditorium which he wrote
down on some cards and which he handed to me to read to the audience. Albano armed with a
video camera all the while took images of the performance and audience seen simultaneously on
video monitors placed all around the audience who were seated on chairs installed facing
different directions. At the end of my reading, I laid on the floor to sleep with palms open which
prompted one of the children of the audience to place a coin in one of them. To end the
performance, Albano, Bartolome and I ran out of the place, leaving the audience without an open
forum.
●Three Kings and Soundbags (Janary 6, 1978). Bartolome, Albano and I each
brought to the event a bag of things to make sounds with. Sitting amongst the audience at the
End Room of the Main Gallery of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, we took turns bringing
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out an object from our paper bags and doing things with them to make sounds amplified using a
microphone as an act of gifting the audience with sounds.
●On Eating (1978). A collaborative performance with artists Huge Bartolome,
and Ray Albano performed at Roberto Chabet’s class at the College of Fine Arts, University of
the Philippines, Diliman. In addition to each of us eating ten pesos worth of food, Albano read
from the bible (as eating food for the soul), Bartolome wrote down on the blackboard each of the
items eaten and the price of the food, while I read a script on performance art written by Albano.
One of the students was upset and during the discussion started reading out loud from a Playboy
magazine. I guess as a mocking commentary that perhaps even her gesture was art.
●Thanksgiving, Mirrors (1978). Early morning of September 21, 1978, Albano,
Bartolome and I went to Liwasang Bonifacio, the area in front of the National Post Office in
Manila and placed on the ground mirrors measuring 12 inch by 12 inch as a gesture of thanks for
the lifting of Martial Law imposed by Marcos. We left the mirrors which were all taken away by
those at the park.
●Hide Park (1979). At some spot at the University of the Philippines Arboretum,
Huge Bartolome pitched a tent and hid inside. While at another location, I hid inside a cardboard
box and read a letter from Albano who was “hiding” outside the country as he was then living in
San Francisco, USA. Bartolome and I never saw the audience or never really knew if there was
an audience at all. I learned that a friend, photographer Neal Oshima, went searching for the
performance and never found us. I guess it was totally a hidden work.
●Artists Call (1984). Inside a shop window of a bookstore at Sta. Monica,
California, I read using a microphone and wrote on the glass window names of the desaparecidos
of Nicaragua. My artist friend Midge Lynn and I took turns doing reading and writing.
●Artist Alone (1985). At the Sining Kamalig Gallery parking lot I installed a low mound
of earth encircling me seated beneath a lamp and amongst a pile of art books and magazines. I sat
on a toy chair and quietly read an art book
●Elevations (1985). Huge Bartolome and I carried around a four-step
aluminum ladder during the opening of the 1985 CCP Annual at the CCP Main Gallery. We took
turns climbing the ladder and jumping down. We did this all over the gallery all through out the
opening event.
●Ules, Bungnon ti Agdawat (1986). Joining a picket line protesting the move of the
Cultural Center of the Philippines decision to give up its administration of the Museum of
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Philippine Art and return the building to the City of Manila. Working like a shaman, shrouded by
an antique Ilocano abel, (a hand-woven blanket) I performed a prayer to save the museum.
●Cabiri (1987). I played a game of sungka with a hobbit in one of the galleries of the
Pinaglabanan Galleries.
2. The artist as manager
Second, artists thought themselves as managers, merely supervising others to produce their work.
“…emboldened by the professionalization of the category of artist and liberated by an economic
shift away from manufacturing,” 18 other artists
simplified things by adopting a purely managerial position…Following Conceptual art’s
credo that the idea is more important than the object, these artists commission others to
bring their ideas to fruition. The artists set a task for others to complete, relinquishing the
act of creating the actual artwork to assistants and fabricators. Robert Rauschenberg’s
White Painting (1951)—a canvas painted with a roller and white house paint—is one of a
series of paintings regularly recreated by studio assistants according to the artist’s
specifications. Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can (Turkey Noodle) (1962) is part of a
series of mass-produced silkscreened works turned out by the artist’s studio, The Factory.
Sol Le Witt's Wall Drawing #280 (1976) was created in the BMA galleries by his studio
assistants, who transferred the artist’s instructions for a web of colorful lines directly onto
the wall. 19
Here is a list of my own version of works created with myself as manager:
●Painting No. 1 (1975). A work for the group exhibition “Painting No. 1 and
other Paintings” held at the CCP Small Gallery. I provided each my co-exhibitors cement floor
tiles and instructed them to paint the tiles any color they wished and to bring them to the gallery
on the opening night for installation on the floor of the first room of the gallery under my
direction. This is a work after Carl Andre's bricks.
●Imagine Pieces (1981). I was very sick and was not able to make a work for a group
exhibition at the Sining Kamalig Gallery. Not wanting to forgo my participation, I resorted to a
conceptual piece that required the audience to imagine what was written on a piece of paper
placed on a pedestal. I called one of the staff of the gallery a few hours before the opening and
asked her to type the words for three imagine pieces on three pieces of paper which the staff had
to tape on gallery pedestals. This is a work after Yoko Ono’s events scores published in1963 in
her book Grapefruit, a seminal work in the history of conceptual art, where she instructs anyone
to do “things” that one may or may not wish enact. My copy, a 1970 edition, was a gift from Ray
Albano.
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●Mud Painting (1980). I had two children play and paint mud on an unstretched canvas
which eventually became one of my shaped canvas work for my second one-person exhibition at
the CCP Small Gallery.
3. The artist as experience maker
Third, artists thought of ways to make the audience experience things and merely gave
instructions for the audience to participate in the making of art. Molesworth gives the context for
this artist response.
Still others had a prescient understanding that the burgeoning service economy would
ultimately give way to a leisure economy based on experience…These artists turned to
participatory strategies directly involving the audience in the art. In these works, the
viewer is no longer just an observer but a necessary agent for the completion of the work.
The viewer has to participate in order for the event to become art. Examples are the video
work of Yoko Ono's Cut Piece (1964) performance where audience members cut and
remove pieces of the artist’s clothing. 20
Here is a list of my works as an experience maker:
●Two Red Balloons To and Fro (1974). This work was for an audience of
one, my teacher Constancio Bernardo whose classroom at the last floor of the University of the
Philippines Main Library (this was where the College of Fine Arts was located then) overlooked
the field in front of the library. On At one end of the path that cut across the field which students
used as a short cut connecting the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Engineering
buildings, I stood with a red balloon in hand. And on the other end of the path was a classmate
Huge Bartolome holding another balloon. We requested students walking the path to bring the
balloon to the person standing at the other end of the path. Professor Bernardo watched the
performance of two balloons being carried to and fro from the vantage point of his window for
about an hour.
●Inch a Second (1976). Bartolome and I asked the audience to measure
the perimeter of the CCP Main Gallery with a ruler by marking the perimeter baseboard with a
pen with their measurements at the point where they left off with. They were to leave the ruler
and the pen also at the marked point for others to use in taking up the measuring activity where
they left off. A cuckoo clock was installed on one of the gallery posts with the intent that its
ticking will accompany the inch by inch measuring activity.
●A Prayer Piece for a Plant (1979). A prayer was distributed to the participants of the
12

The First Bukid-Tagalog Art-in held at a friend’s farm in Tiaong, Quezon. The participants were
asked to choose a plant and at sunset, face the plant and read the prayer.
●Imagine Pieces (1983). Sining Kamalig. Inspired by Yoko Ono’s seminal
artist-book Grapefruit, first published in 1964 which was a book of instructions. My work
consisted of three letter size pieces of paper with typewritten instructions for the audience to
imagine very specific things:
Imagine Piece No. 1: Imagine the artist flat on her back and very ill. Not able to
make the art object. Not able to come to the gallery and install these objects. Imagine her
unable to come to the opening.
Imagine Piece No. 2: Imagine a birthday cake on this pedestal to celebrate the
artist’s birthday today, the opening day of this exhibition. Imagine it lit with candles.
Imagine the artist blowing the candles while you and the other guests sing her “Happy
Birthday.” Imagine eating a piece of this cake in celebration of the artist’s birthday.
Imagine Piece No. 3: Imagine an object, any object. Imagine placing this object on
this pedestal in place of this text on this piece of paper. Imagine the object you imagine as
the artist’s artwork for this exhibition.
4. The artist quits working altogether
Fourth, artists went about their daily life and in some occasions considered one of their daily
activities as art.
And finally…there were those artists who experimented with not working at all, or at least
trying to figure out how to work as little as possible. These artists try to remove
themselves from the artistic process entirely. This often results in a meditation on not
working. Gilbert and George declare that their drinking in bars is art in Smashed (1972),
represented by beautiful black-and-white photographs of the artists intoxicated in pubs. 21
I only did two art works where I quit working altogether before I took up the subject position of
doing Institutional Critique, with the first done with three other friends.
●Lemon Cake (1975). Classmates Ruben Soriano, An Tison, Ces Avancena
and I parked a yellow car at the parking lot of Sining Kamalig to gate crash an exhibition called
1001 Artists, a Shop Six event. Performing uninvited, we placed a lemon cake on the hood of the
car. When the audience approached to talk to us, we simply responded with two words, “lemon
cake.” The performance ended once the whole cake was all consumed.
● Ob Scene Sofas Trans Planted Sala (1985). I was invited to do an exhibition
13

at Penguin Café Gallery and since I had just moved to a new place, I was not making any art,
but I was “making a home.” Not at all fazed by the fact that I had no work to exhibit but sure that
I was creating something even if it was merely my home, I simply transplanted all of my sala to
the café gallery as my art. I had recently bought a set of cheap sofas, the ones the poor have in
their homes. Upholstered with gaudy yellow mustard leatherette (fake leather) and impoverishly
made, they couldn’t seat a body properly, thus my reference to them as being obscene.
Fascinated by their “obscenity” as supposed useful objects, I installed them as sculpture, as
readymades in my living room as part of my art collection. The work was a proposition that
“housework” can be artwork. Cesare Syjuco reviewed this work in San Juan. He thought the
work provided “almost literally with a bird's eye view of what it must be like to be Sibayan
or at least to watch her at rest and at play.”
Beyond common reason, Sibayan has transported the physical assets of her own living
room, ceremoniously transplanting these items in a reconstruction of her sala at the
Penguin Gallery. Occupying a corner of the exhibition space, isolated from their new
surroundings by a raised platform on which they have been perched like a windowdisplay,
these elements of the artist’s everyday homelife—tables, sofas, portable
television, fragments from her own impressive art collection…on a formalist note, her
reconstruction is about as comfortable in its current setting as a Polynesian dancer in a
cathedral… 22
He locates my work first within the lineage of one of the pillars of the avant-garde—Duchamp
and his urinal referring to the urinal as a transplant rather than a readymade or a found object; he
continues contextualizing my work within other traditions that engaged art objects as transplants:
Dada, Pop Art, and Conceptual Art and ends this lineage with a few Filipino artists who had done
similar works hence “transplants are as old as the hills.” He concludes:
That Sibayan manages to stay afloat within this context is proof not only of her ability to
argue nuances of meaning into distinct differences in approach and scope, but is also a
tribute to her intuitive capabilities as an artist of worth. Experience is probably the key
here. Sibayan has complete trust in the instinctive impulse, displaying absolute confidence
in her own capacity to circumvent the pitfalls and to take up any slack. While a thinker by
nature and by her own admission, Sibayan is careful not to over-intellectualize her
situational attributes and plunge them into the philosophical hell of the hyper-scholar,
deliberately courting our bemused interest instead of engaging us head-on in the kind of
life-and-death struggle that only a boor would profess to enjoy. The result is a burlesque
that incites without derision, that stimulates reaction without seeking to intimidate.
Discovering Sibayan’s mirage in one corner of your favorite watering hole is a little like
Goldilocks and the 3 Bears. Suspense at least in this case, need not be fatal. Judy Freya
Sibayan at the Penguin Gallery is a small triumph for both the artist and her venue of
14

choice. It indicates the kind of thinking that has carried us through the disquieting 70s and
that will probably carry us well into a future resurgence of the intellect in art. 23
It is clear that the tradition of the avant-garde particularly the lineage of those artists who
problematized artistic labor—the avant-garde who questioned what it meant to work as an artist,
and thus what it meant to be an artist—is the tradition I chose to emerge from as an artist. And the
mostly American artists Roces cites as those the Filipino avant-garde studied and emulated are
some of the same major artists Molesworth discusses in her narrative of the American avantgarde.
Although in Roces’ list of Filipino artists, only three worked in this tradition: Johnny
Manahan with his 1975 Finally Resting, a photographic document of the artist covered with black
plastic sheet and lying down on the floor (the artist quits working); and I will Breathe/Scale in
Time: 1:27/Components: Plastic Bag Covering Head, CO 2 , O 2 , Photographer, (the timing and
calibrating of one’s breath as work). 24 David Medalla with his infamous Bubble Machine which
made it to Gregory Battcock’s seminal book Minimal Art (as artist as manager, he had the
machine constructed by someone else and the machine created some form of non-static selfgenerating
art form). And as manager and experience maker, there was Ray Albano, who in 1975,
was awarded honorable mention at the International Print Biennale in Tokyo for his work Step on
the Sand and Make Footprints. He instructed the biennale organizers to install sand on the gallery
floor and gave instructions for the audience to make prints by stepping on the sand. The rest of
the Filipino avant-garde Roces discussed basically did art that, in the context of Philippine
contemporary art, was new and original (ideas or materials), non-retinal (not oriented towards the
making of beautiful objects of art), and non-commercial (non-collectible, ephemeral).
The failure of the Philippine avant-garde
I refer to Roces’ perspective why the Philippine avant-garde failed: 25
The artists never quite formed a group or groups. An amorphous bunch, they formed little
loose circles of changing membership more or less abound Chabet, who was supplying
most of the scholarly or high-priestly motivation, and Albano, who was mainly into
proselytizing. They never pulled off the kind of homogeneity that, let’s say, the Social
Realists now have. There was a presence to be sure but is wasn’t anything like a café
society situation (I mean some of the guys never saw the inside of a café) and they
certainly didn’t have the impact of New Intelligentsia or New Lifestyle. At one point
though, they were exhibiting all over the place—Luz, Silangan, Kamalig, Rustan’s Bleue,
Hilton and later at the Museum of Philippine Art which in the beginning was the
Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines—with the desired disturbing effect. But in
15

Manila’s art community for the greater part of the 70s, most anyone doing this kind of art
was a babe in the woods.
The belief system that sustained the frenetic art-making was based on a certain Philippine
art version of, believe it or not, nationalism. There was this hyper-consciousness about
local art finally, ecstatically moving in synchrony with New York, San Francisco, Tokyo,
and possibly even pushing “ahead” more progressively that is than Paris, London Rome.
It was true, given this convoluted parochial logic. It might be argued that Juan Luna won
his Gold for his retrograde academic-style work at a time when the Impressionists were
already the heroes. It was true that we were into conceptualism in the same short five
years that Conceptual Art eclipsed everything else in America…Heroism, indeed, was the
spirit at work: it was a cultural heroism that closely followed the traditional ambitions of
all of Philippine art, but which failed to move many for a complex of reasons.
Two things went against the avant-garde. First, there was no discourse, and I’m hesitating
now to even count Albano’s oracular pronouncements. (In articles like the one titled “Are
We Now Ready for the Avant-Garde?” he wrote “At this point, it is inevitable to consider
contemporary Philippine art as a diversity of objectives, commercial on one hand and
relevant on the other.”) We were all quite innocent of the basic and irrevocable formula
of all of Western art: no words, no feedback loop, therefore no validity, therefore no art.
From the time Giorgio Vasari re-invented art writing in the Renaissance, the whole of
Western art co-existed symbiotically with the discourse it generated, and this is a tradition
we never had in this corner of the world. Second, we were such innocents, period. Few
(or no one) had the vaguest idea about the mechanics of power (that the association with
the CCP will deaden any sympathy-for-the-underdog dynamics); about hype (as for
instance, Indios Bravos had a deliberate Paris-aura, with intimations of genteel Pinoy
radicals at the turn of the century, no less); about the general resistance against (not the
art) thinking; about the essential operations of a rabid capitalistic society (how to run a
gallery, how to be well-known, how to write and publish a book, how to get a grant, how
to get a decent art education).
The failure of the avant-garde in the West
According to Gerald Eager,
The shift in the perception of the avant-garde in modernism—from being a functioning
principle of artistic development to being a complete fiction—was brought about by many
factors. Among them are included: the shrinking of the time lag between the creation of
the avant-garde work and its acceptance by the art audience; the disbelief in artistic r
evolution as causing social change; the disgust at the shameful marketing of “new and
improved” art. 26
The first three factors listed above are actually all intertwined. Because modern art proclaimed
itself to exist only for itself—a proclamation of its autonomy from being made instrumental by
16

the religious, political, economic and educational fields—and therefore “not for nothing and
nobody in particular…not for any specific audience,” but paradoxically “just for anybody with
the taste to appreciate it and the money to buy it,” 27 this very same autonomy released it “into the
anonymous freedom of the market place” rendering it a mere commodity which prevented “its
potential subversive freedom from having much of an effect on other areas of social life.” 28 One
definition of modernism that is relevant here is
the historical tendency of an art practice towards complete self-referential autonomy, to be
achieved by scrupulous attention to all that is specific to that practice: its own traditions
and materials, its own difference from other art practices. 29
This very autonomy inadvertently made it exist for the bourgeois society who had the means and
the reason to acquire and collect art. Artist-theorist Victor Burgin in plotting the history of ideas
and institutions that circumscribe our view of “Art’ today as having been assembled in the
eighteenth century, relates the struggle of the French bourgeoisie for its own birth as the dominant
class to the
impetus of modern criticism in the general assertion of the rights of the “good argument”
and individual entrepreneurship against the dictates of sovereign law. The Academy, by
emphasizing rule and reason as the foundation of art, itself inadvertently encouraged the
conviction that any lay person was qualified to arrive at a valid judgment of an artwork
through applying everyday morality and rationality. 30
And in removing
the judgment seat of criticism, and the spring of art production, from the terrain of
reasoned consensus to that of individual intuition, although it may appear as a radical
upheaval, [this] was in fact a symptom of the consolidation of bourgeois confidence in its
own political and ideological hegemony. 31
For Peter Berger, author of The Theory of the Avant-Garde “the autonomy of art operates as a
category within bourgeois society.” 32 He asserts that autonomous art
allows at least an imagined satisfaction of individual needs that are repressed in daily
praxis. Through the enjoyment of art, the atrophied bourgeois individual can experience
the self as a personality. But because art is detached from daily life, this experience
remains without tangible effect…[this] characterizes the specific function of art in
bourgeois society: the neutralization of critique…the historical avant-garde’s movements
negate those determinations that are essential in autonomous art: the disjunctures of art
and the praxis of life, individual production, and individual reception as distinct from the
former. The avant-garde intends the abolition of autonomous art by which it means that
art is to be integrated in the praxis of life. 33
17

It is art’s autonomy from everyday life and the resulting appropriation of it by bourgeois society
that the avant-garde considered their problematic. Self-critique became imperative. Berger
summarizes the avant-garde project thus:
As institution and content coincide, social ineffectuality stands revealed as the essence of
art in bourgeois society, and thus provokes the self-criticism of art. To this end, the
historical avant-garde used self-criticism to attack art as an arena separate from life, and
in so doing attempted to integrate art back into social praxis. 34
But eventually for the avant-garde, art could not be integrated into the praxis of everyday life for
the simple reason that for anything to be considered art, it has to be socially constituted as a
symbolic object or act (therefore as a signifying object/act, it is made different from other objects
or acts) with this constituting process carried out by a whole institution of “social agents which
help to define and produce…the meaning and value of the work,” 35 and another whole set of
agents or the same “agents whose combined efforts produce consumers capable of knowing and
recognizing the work of art as such.” 36 Further, the symbolic power of such objects must be
sustained by an extensive social apparatus incorporating museums, art galleries, art histories, art
studies programs, cultural centers, libraries and so forth. This has already been discussed at
length in chapter 1 as art’s intertextuality and the artist’s intersubjectivity. This is certainly not the
condition of everyday life where the everyday is “a place of no value,” of the non-spectacular, of
the profane, the infra-ordinary and the insignificant. By critiquing art that inadvertently served
the bourgeois society (institutionalized art), the avant-gardes thought themselves apart from the
institution of art. But the avant-gardes could not escape being essentially part of the institution
they wanted to critique as made evident by their demise as their work became commodified in
turn.
It moved from being a form of opposition, to one of commodification for consumption
and profit. This systematic assimilation demonstrates how the avant-garde’s commercial
incorporation marked the defeat of its central project; namely, its attack on the status of
art in bourgeois society. 37
Eager points to the other factors of the avant-garde’s demise: “the distaste for the war imagery
built into the term ‘avant-garde’; the dismay at the picture within the vanguard pattern of
modernism presented important artistic creation as essentially white male activity.” 38 With regard
to these factors, at the forefront of the attack on the avant-garde were feminists who took up the
cause of women artists in their condition of having been for the most part, excluded from the
18

history of art and whose place in art was not of those as producing subjects but as objects of
men’s representation of their desire and as Other with the effect of marginalizing women.
The last factor Eager cites as the avant-garde’s failure is “the discovery of postmodern art of the
deconstruction of the avant-garde.” 39 First, the avant-garde’s belief in their praxis of constantly
creating the original, the new, became itself a tradition—the tradition of the new. Second, artistcritic
Rosalind Krauss argues that
the strategy of appropriation in postmodern art reveals that repetition and recurrence, play
a part equally essential to that of originality in artistic creation, though their role is hidden
by the discourse of originality (engaged in by galleries and museums, art critics and
historians, and artists themselves) on which the existence of the avant-garde depends.
Thus the pictures of Sherrie Levine, which are photographs of the photographs of Edward
Weston and Eliot Porter (whose photographs are in turn based on models by other artists),
disclose the fiction of pure originality and along with it the expose the myth of the avantgarde
(1981) (1985). Donald Kuspit contends in The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist
(1933) that the appropriations of Levine not only deconstruct the original works they
copy, but also dismember them, stripping originality of its meaning. However, in the
process of emasculating the works of Weston and Porter, Kuspit sees Levine’s copies as
also acknowledging the potency of the originals, and thus her appropriations reaffirm the
avant-garde of the past. For Kuspit, then, postmodernism not only marks the end of the
avant-garde, but also the beginning of neo-avant-garde art, a decadent mannerism that
castrates, but at the same time authenticates, the avant-garde. 40
Third, artist Andrea Fraser points to the development of another art practice based on the
institutionalization that marked the failure of the avant-garde: Institutional Critique which
turned from the increasingly bad faith efforts of the neo-avant-gardes at dismantling or
escaping the institution of art and aimed instead to defend the very institution for which
the institutionalization of the avant-garde’s “self-criticism” had created the potential: an
institution of critique. And it may be this very institutionalization that allows for its
legitimizing discourses, against its self-representations as a site of resistance and
contestation, and against its mythologies of radicality and symbolic revolution. 41
The difference being while the avant-garde committed the fatal flaw of thinking itself outside the
institution of art and capable of integrating itself into the praxis of everyday life so that selfcritique
meant the critique of art that has been coopted and de-radicalized by commerce (art
which they considered they were not part of), Institutional Critique on the other hand, accepts
art’s and the artist’s condition as contingent on being part of the institution of art which is
understood as essentially a social site that needs to be problematized and changed. “The result is
a theory of postmodernist art as an art whose purpose ‘is no longer to proclaim its autonomy, its
self-sufficiency, its transcendence; rather it is to narrate its own contingency, insufficiency and
19

lack of transcendence.’ ” 42
Scapular Gallery Nomad as avant-garde work according to Roces
Roces again writes about the avant-garde 16 years later in a paper delivered as a “keynote
conversation” in the conference “Beyond Borders” of the International Society of the Performing
Arts at Sydney Opera House on June 14, 2001. Entitled “Are artists still the vanguard? Or, does it
matter?” the paper includes a discussion of Scapular Gallery Nomad (SGN), as one of her “homebased”
stories to nuance her reflection on the avant-garde, a modernist enterprise in the era of
post-modernity. However, in chapter 3, I will argue against the evaluation that Scapular Gallery
Nomad is an avant-garde work and claim that it is my very first response to my own failure as an
avant-garde. Roces writes, 43
Nuance, for me, resides in little stories. It is admittedly a bias for endless streams of
seemingly disjointed fragments linked with elusive "sense." An epic chant, in a manner of
speaking. Which is the manner of speaking I chose (perhaps affected) to address and
elude the question at the same time. I chanted. My little stories ran circles from home,
which is the Philippines, and meandered, because home can no longer, like anywhere else,
be excised perceptually from the global. In this extremely dense domain where inside and
outside form the most unexpected figurations, the vanguard ambitions so sacred to
previous generations of modern artists, will seem, I daresay, to be a terribly inadequate
paradigm…
A nomad
Which is not to say that I dismiss the avant-garde.
Still tracking a personal circling movement, I take, as an example, a friend. She is a
performance and conceptual artist, and presently she is undertaking a 5-year performance.
She wears a pouch, which she calls a scapular, daily. Rather, two pouches, one in front
and one at the back. This is her gallery. She is the gallery. She calls the work, Scapular
Gallery Nomad, and she curates exhibitions very seriously in this—sometimes of this—
pouch. The artist line-up is international. She undertakes all the usual work: negotiating
with the individual artists, discussing the curatorial plan, documentation, the entire lot. As
a professor in a university and a known artist, she does move around quite a bit, and she
shows the art to people—this is whomever she meets in the course of a day, could be
students, taxi drivers, the odd pedestrian, café habitues, relatives, and so on and so forth—
by inviting them to extract the art from her pouch. Very serious notes on the exhibition are
to be extracted from her back pouch. The limits of the circulation of the art are the limits
of her body movement. Scapular Gallery Nomad—this satire of the art market, this
sustained comment or alternative to the expensive art infrastructure—is of course poised,
ironically, as a will to exist within the international avant-garde circuit.
20

Again: the preposterous, farcical, playful, ludicrous. She is aware of the contradictions
she is playing out. Anti-art market, she nonetheless can only exist as an artist within the
international avant-garde circuits that depend so much on spectacular and costly art
events. As a person walking around the streets of the cities of the world, she is just a fool,
not an artist. Critical of the international art infrastructure, she is nonetheless aware that
hers is precisely the critical stance that is the nutritious fodder high art feeds on.
Narrowing the domain of art practice to the size of her small, peripatetic body, she is
nonetheless caught up in the high intensity exchange, for instance, as part of the
gargantuan exhibition, Cities on the Move. Removing herself from the frenzy, she of
course knows that she is allowing herself to be sucked in by the maelstrom of the
international art world that is constantly hungry for berserk creatures like herself.
The avant-garde idea is a persistent one, and will continue to excite us, both for the
intellectual engagement, the aesthetic pleasure, and the insights offered about the
imprisoning structures that were built to ensure that the modern world appropriates all
creativity. However, the market has always eaten up and regurgitated all the subsequent
avant-gardes of the 20th century. All extreme acts—including Dada, Baudelaire’s l’art
pour l’art which was a critique of the market, conceptual art which was a critique of the
object-centredness or product-centredness of the art circuit—have subsequently, in turn,
been folded back into the world art machine. Doubtless art continues to hothouse
vanguard fronts. But precisely because the very idea of vanguard art is dependent on the
idea of progress, of time as an arrow, of space as pierce-able by that arrow, of art as
rarefied commodity—no vanguard, by the nature of the beast, stays vanguard for long.
And the promise of liberation is usually stilled at the moment of breaching; at the moment
the front is conquered.
To offer a direct response to the question Are artists still the vanguard? I’m sure the
answer is yes. But it is a yes that in the next breath has to be qualified by remarking that
the global economy requires the existence of sequential vanguards simply because it is
ever hungry for the next high to market. And while all of us are primed to need that next
high, it is probably best to see that need in relation to the many other requirements of
social justice.
It is often posited with great fervor that the market drives innovation. There was
something deeply disturbing to me about this bit of popular wisdom, and it is to do with
the thought that I cannot quite disagree. A radical disagreement is only possible if we
qualify that word innovation, to only mean product innovation. This "innovation" has
little to do with what makes it possible for us to comprehend the plurality of ways of
being human, and to express humanness that can correct brutal asymmetries of power.
Scapular Gallery Nomad as my first work
in response to my own failure as an avant-garde
My argument with Roces claiming Scapular Gallery Nomad as avant-garde will be made on the
21

asis of the work being an Institutional Critique. SGN was created based on my disillusionment
with having once worked as the director of the most well endowed, thus the most powerful
contemporary art museum in the Philippines at one time. A division of the Cultural Center of the
Philippines, the erstwhile Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines was where I found
myself in deep crisis about artists having any form of agency. Art at the Cultural Center of the
Philippines as avant-garde (already an oxymoron), was delimited, prescribed, homogeneous, not
deeply rooted in theory and totally dependent on a state institution. Isolated from much of the
world, it had very little impact or use and it could afford to be indulgent. Even the discourse that
was produced about it was never disseminated beyond the few artists who were written about.
It existed totally dependent on the resources and validation of a monolithic institution whose
canonizing process logically excluded many in the art community. And finally, it was made
instrumental to the maintenance of political power compromising its claim to radicality. The
Philippine avant-garde at the Center was apolitical which is another oxymoron for the original
avant-garde project as conceived and practiced in the West aimed nothing less than the
overturning of the conservative forces that appropriated art for their own self-perpetuation.
Deep into this crisis, I needed to find a more tenable position so I could make and believe in art
again. It took seven years of “dis-ease” with what I perceived and experienced about art before I
arrived at Scapular Gallery Nomad which was not an avant-garde work because although it was a
five-year performance that I performed daily by virtue of my wearing the gallery daily once I
leave the house, I did not think of it as separate from the institution of art. In fact through parody,
and as a parody of the modern art gallery, SGN was a performance of the whole institution of art
understood as a crucial site of the struggles of agents competing over control of resources in the
construction of art and artists. In the next chapter, I will narrate the reasons for my failure and
how I arrived at Scapular Gallery Nomad as my response to this failure.
Back to The Hypertext of HerMe(s)
22

Endnotes
1 Marian Pastor Roces, “Outline for Reviewing the Avant-Garde,” San Juan, August 1985: 8-10.
2
Ibid., 9-10.
3
Judy Freya Sibayan, “Curating Upon My Body,” Pananaw Philippine Journal of Visual Arts, No. 6, 2007: 24-26.
4
Shop 6 was a vacant store shop at Patio Kamalig, a building complex with stores, an inn, and Sining Kamalig, a
commercial art gallery. This data is taken from Ray Albano’s endnotes in the exhibition catalog of “A Decade of
Developmental Art” held at the Main Gallery, Cultural Center of the Philippines, October 1979, 1-28.
5
Edward Said, Beginnings, Intention and Method (London: Granta Publications, 1984) 4-5.
6
Ray Albano, “1001 Artists at Shop 6,” MARKS, March 1975: 8.
7
It was also the first time that something I did was documented, thus historically represented, as art and more specifically as
performance art.
8
Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory (London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1986) 188–189.
9
Within the 6 months of its conception, I constantly wrote Ray Albano my thoughts on the project. It did not matter that he
never responded to these writings. It was enough that he read them.
10
Thomas McEvilley, “Yves Klein, Messenger of the Age of Space” Artforum, January 1982: 46.
11
I take liberty in using this phrase by Hal Foster. In locating his critical practice when the function of criticism in
contemporary time has become marginal, Foster states, “criticism for me enters with its object in an investigation of its own
place and function as a cultural practice and in an articulation of other such psychosocial representations; as it does so, it
seeks to separate these practices critically and to connect them discursively in order to call them into crisis (which is after all
what criticism means) so as to transform them.” Hal Foster, Recodings: Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press,
1985) 2–3.
12
Andrea Fraser argues that the term “Institutional Critique” first came into print when she used it in her essay on Louise
Lawler “In and Out of Place.” Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” Institutional
Critique and After, ed. John C. Welchman (Switzerland: JRP Ringier, 2006) 124.
13
Ibid., 134.
14
Helen Molesworth, “Work Ethic,” PennState, psupress.org, 8 February 2009 .
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid.
22
Cesare Syjuco, “Trans Planted Sala/Ob Scene Sofas,” San Juan, December 1985: 32.
23
Ibid.
24
Roces 9.
25
Ibid., 10.
26
Gerald Eager, “Avant-garde,” A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Payne (Oxford: Blackwell,
2000) 39.
27
Terry Eagelton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) 368.
28
Ibid., 369.
29
Burgin 177.
30
Burgin 149.
31
Burgin 151.
32
Peter Burger
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.
35
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993) 37.
23

Endnotes
36
Ibid.
37
Burger
38
Eager 39.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid.
41
Fraser 134.
42
Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism,” Art in Theory 1900-1990, eds. Charles
Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) 1052.
43 Marian Pastor Roces, “Are Artists Still the Vanguard? Or Does it Matter?” Music Council of Australia, 10 May 2007
.
24