Ramona Rivera
Painting may be dead in major art capitals in Europe and America, but it is well and alive in Asia, particularly in the Philippines, where the scene is dominated by ever-younger generations of highly – prolific artists and their likewise young and eager to buy yet mostly conservative new breed of art collectors. At the recently concluded Manila Art Fair, which gathered over 50 galleries from all over the country, it was obviously clear that painting is the main preferred commodity. Nearly every booth was filled to the brim with canvasses, mostly gleaming with well – rendered figures in oil. The image is not far from the early day Salons in Europe at the turn of the last century. Except perhaps for the fashion and the music to remind you that you are in Manila 2010; nothing much has changed at all.
Sculpture, on the other hand, has always been on the sidelines. There are fewer sculptors compared to painters, as many are deterred by the demands of a practice that is more difficult to sustain and turn into a profitable enterprise lest one is lucky to receive grand commissions or is content to reproduce small table – top decorations. Sculpture asks for so much more, and is so much more, beyond the appreciation of an audience more easily drawn to familiar painted images and illustrations rather than a more encompassing awareness of the poetry of actual objects and material in space.
Outside the usual orbit of commercial art galleries, two ongoing exhibitions at the Jorge B. Vargas Museum at the University of the Philippines (UP) in Diliman and at MO_Space in Bonifacio High Street provide Manila audiences with a rare opportunity to see new sculptures by Gaston Damag and Götz Ardnt, two artists who have long called Paris as their home. Despite coming from two entirely different traditions, their work intersects in a shared investigation of material culture, whether ethnographic, modern or urban, as a touchstone for contemporary sculpture.
Gaston Damag was born in Banaue, Ifugao in 1964, to a family long immersed in traditional sculpture and woodcarving. After his studies at the UP College of Fine Arts in Diliman, he left the Philippines for France where he has been living for the last two decades. He took up further studies at the renown Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and has created a body of work that integrates ethnographic symbols and images culled from his Ifugao roots with modern and industrial processes, materials and contexts.
Götz Ardnt, a German artist born in Calw in 1962, also studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, finishing his studies in 1994. He continues to teach there, specializing in stone and wood – cutting. His concerns are grounded on contextualized sculptural interventions, the physicality of his material and how these affect our perception of space. He has created a number of works situated in public spaces, exploring the history and specificity of each site.
In conjunction with their recent residency at the University of the Philippines, both artists unveiled last June 29, 2010 two new outdoor works created especially for the lush grounds of the Vargas Museum. Mr. Damag’s “L’Envie De Faire L’Amour” is a grove of Ifugao handcarved pestles held together with metal rods and erected into a clearing in a garden beside the museum. Surrounded by towering old trees, the sexually – charged installation is a familiar juxtaposition of nature with a phallic – centered culture. Mr. Arndt’s work “Kidlat”, overlooking the remains of National Artist for Sculpture Napoleon Abueva’s former foundry, is a concrete plinth upon which blue painted steel rods jut out in dialogue with the what is left of the old foundry – Abueva’s unfinished and abandoned projects mostly also in concrete and metal. While the two works thoughtfully considered their location, they were short of being arresting enough to stand apart from their expanse and weight of their surroundings.
“Ah-hud” and “am.pm,” their other exhibition that opened shortly after at MO_Space was more successful in showing the combined strength of their material and the beauty of their form. The more confined space of the gallery provides a better frame for their sculptures that effortlessly blend into one another. Mr. Damag’s “Ah-hud” extends his current interest on the pestle and the repetitious acts of pounding and heaving. His video shows a tight shot of his bare torso, its rise and fall in unison with the throb of the pestle as he continuously pounds and chants. Laid on the floor of the gallery’s main exhibition space, is a giant pestle carved from the entire trunks of a pair of mango trees. Cut into parts, the segments are installed with only a few inches in between, creating gaps that echo the pauses in between the body’s rhythmic pulsation and primal utterances. Mr. Arndt’s “am.pm” likewise follows similar trajectories as his work at Vargas. Without the burden of Abueva’s monoliths in the background however, his work at MO achieves a more transcendental quality, a stark lightness evoked through the use of iron rods appended with thin white fluorescent tubes that gracefully bounce off from various points across the gallery space.
The pairing of Mr. Damag’s and Mr. Arndt’s works illuminate and evoke issues that remain pressing in sculpture, such as the choice and transformation of material, the juncture between site and sense, the complex of tangential references and uncertain relations, and all the gaps and discrepancies that mark contemporary practice.
Gaston Damag and Gotz Arndt’s works will be on view on the grounds of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum, University of the Philippines, Diliman until December 2010, and at MO_Space, 3rd Fl. MOs Design Building, Bonifacio High Street, Taguig until August 22, 2010.
(Photos courtesy of the author, Jorge B. Vargas Museum and MO_Space.)
