Keeping the trail warm: Leslie de Chavez’s ‘Stirring the Ashes’
Memorializing draws on a tense and delicate process. Amongst hefty negotiations and, supposedly, scrupulous selection, lies the crucial task of the artist who is to translate individual experience into a language that elicits some semblance of shared sentiment towards an event; a vocabulary of collective remembering that implicates immense privilege.
This authority of the producer and the capacities of memento and monument are dextrously tangled in Leslie de Chavez’s “Stirring the Ashes.” It is a meticulous array of ideas. State and historical symbols in different configurations and contexts fluctuate in scale and function invoking the intricate role of icons as objects. In “Anggulo,” we find Jose Rizal’s huge, imposing head on its side, darkened with graphite and lodged in-between charred scaffolding, staring at us vacuously from across the room. Beneath it is a small, ornate frame in gold with the word “reporma” written in dust. Referent and figure again collapse in the monstrous “Palingenesis.” Here are more lopsided body parts this time of Ferdinand Marcos, whose heads have become the tips of a scourge, tethered to its enormous rubber handle by thick, rusty steel chains.
“Subjugating the Nuclear” evinces the same rigorous rendering of the human skin present in the artist’s more recent paintings. The large panel, propped up by scaffold, has the body’s dark, rugose surface floating against the sheen of gold leaf from behind.
It is useful to view this seeming partiality for mimesis in the context of De Chavez’s past work. His often bleak and densely composed paintings are rendered in painstaking figuration. Previous installation pieces have also leaned towards a more literal articulation of the artist’s concerns: in 2014, an army of crying, santo-like Michael Jackson figures immersed in tubs of water is titled “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” bringing to mind popular mechanisms of sentimentality, faith and empire.
In “Stirring the Ashes,” the symbol as representative of ideology is replete. Bullet-shaped key chains (“Souvenir Item”) and small wooden M-16s with the initials of the 44 SAF soldiers killed in Mamasapano (“Operation Exodus”) impart anchors for interpretation that are able to condense meaning and generate reassuring responses. It’s been over a year since Mamasapano, and, yes, the trail must be probed and kept warm. It is an accessible and clever maneuver.
This cleverness is manifest repeatedly, from one historical or social moment to another. A lot is attempted to be covered here — Marcosian necropolitics; Rizal as reformist; the aforementioned police operations in Mamasapano; the country’s ongoing territorial disputes; military clashes with drought-striken farmers; the conflation of Catholic iconography; and the ubiquity of violence under the current administration’s drug “war” among others.
We may ask, though, after being confronted with item after item in various arrangements and permutations, after a visual survey of recent news snippets in mainstream media, when the conceit has sunk in — what now? What further introspection can be gleaned from these objects and arrangements?
The works are admittedly, interesting assemblies and juxtapositions of materials, some even to the point of suspicious beauty (“Tension- Attention- Retention” is an attractively lit floor piece of bullet casings sandwiched by sheets of clear glass resembling a display of precious gems) but they also often leave limited space for unaided and unconstrained thinking. Little room is left to interpret, contemplate, and attribute further signification beyond the singular meanings offered by scattered bullets and small wooden guns with tiny inscriptions.
It is evident that the artist is keen on experimenting with material and producing a range of work and propositions. Visual and verbal codes between work and title endeavor towards purposeful interpretation (although the relationship between the two can also be difficult and opaque as in the esoteric “Quicksand”). The effort is well-meaning and well-done. Perhaps a more concentrated exercise, even if it means taking on less historical and social “material,” would encourage more careful reflection between the pieces and within the exhibition.
The works, instead of appearing to be competing for attention either through scale or iconography (or gilt), could support each other towards a sharper discourse between object and symbol. Headlines could be particularized, examined and disentangled from the forceful hold of mass media, resisting the latter’s tendency to accumulate and distribute these stories as cut-and-paste ephemera. It is the art object (or art spectacle), after all, that could potentially offer more compelling and perceptive mediation of these brief, fleeting stories and images that literally “flash” on primetime or flit in and out our scrolling and swiping activities on Facebook. But to cut out unproductive noise is no slight task and if not the art object then perhaps something else.
Perhaps it is within these shifty spectacles and mechanisms of media where its frailties lie that some form of joyful, discordant noise can be found. We stay awake, all ears and hopeful, in active anticipation.
