Guided by Sausage: Links to Contemporary Painting in Manila
As Prepared by Manuel Ocampo
"Guided by Sausage: Links to Contemporary Painting in Manila" presents the double standard in artistic production and cultural consumption that form connective links exploring issues on taste, craft, content, and representation currently being produced from Manila, Philippines. The "Sausage," filled with the desire to reproduce likeness of culture and aesthetics accordingly, serves to guide opposing ways of taking it in, using a rhythmic dialectical method of conception, which links assorted bodies of expression to disseminate a vast orgy of interpretation as performed through painting.
Far from being outdone by the captivating snatch of networked media's relational promiscuity, painting remains a chaste medium of conception - baffling in its dogged resistance to be of service to anything else but itself, as art's very own Don Juan, lest it would lose its libidinal liberty on the instinct for life; nonetheless, the seduction of truth beckons painting to produce so many heirs to the task of transcribing experiences pictorially, that, with the emergence of relative claims to the understanding of existence, painting very much remains a capable self-reflexive mirror about ourselves which translates the enigmatic human quality that without end eludes the hands of time. Thus in its ability to be about anything at anytime and anywhere, painting is dialectical by its nature, consisting of opposite approaches to social convention and individual libertarianism, or to social democracy and individual values.
In the desire for cultural production two modes of expression regularly appear, two ways of application that give form to desiring production. The first is an anarchic modality that forces its way into the world without compromise and breeds upheaval. This is a "raw" type of production, which is of an expressive nature. The second involves more sophistication, more conceptual in planning and strategy, which places its concern on craft and tact, formally cultural in its ramification, and thus considered "cooked." These terms follow Claude Levi-Strauss' book on "The Raw and the Cooked," which loosely appropriated here by saying cultural development is guided by how a people would apply their desires, whether or not the means of its production is "cooked" or "raw." That is, "cooked" relates to technological sophistication, therefore promoting cultural advancement, while "raw" remains with nature having indeterminate value but full of potential.
The Philippines, where the exhibiting artists hail from, is a country of contradictory conditions. An apt cliché depicts the Philippines as having a consciousness of four hundred years cloistered inside the convent (under Spanish rule) with a hundred defrocked and liberated by Hollywood U.S.A. Thus, opposing mannerisms of tradition and modernity act as constant rivals in the struggle for national consciousness and sovereignty. Not to say the least that the economic condition in the Philippines perpetuates the polar opposites between the have and the have-nots with barely a middle ground (or middle class) to act as social lubricant between the two. Such prevailing scenario condones a double standard in artistic production that presents an immeasurable guide for cultural consumption. In matters of articulating cultural desire and establishing aesthetic taste, whether or not it's pertaining to the social, the political, the historical, or simply the personal, these two modes between nature and culture persist in order to achieve a certain level of awareness of the world we live in. This dialectic between the cultural and the natural also becomes the bifurcating point that creates the separation between "developed" works of art that appears within official art worlds from those that are considered "underdeveloped" and marginal. The works in this exhibition blur the distinction between the expressive and the conceptual, the critical and the autonomous, the beautiful and the sublime, craft and de-skilled, between the "good" and the "bad," to invite a double bite on art and cultural assumptions.
Participating Artists:
Manuel Ocampo
Louie Cordero
Dex Fernandez
Arvin Flores
David Griggs
Robert Langenegger
Romeo Lee
Pow Martinez
Jayson Oliveria
Juan Carlos Quintana
Carlo Ricafort
Gerry Tan