A Mag:net for smart art

When art galleries are mushrooming across the metropolis hawking expensive wall fillers to neophyte collectors, you know that something is painfully amiss.

What makes the situation even more disturbing is seeing some of the strongest works being produced by young, contemporary Philippine artists today languishing in gallery back rooms, or worse, simply getting mired underground – underrated, under-appreciated and undervalued.

Fortunately, a handful of venues are doing their best to rectify this, as they seek to bridge the chasm of inanity that the commercial art scene is threatening to fall into. Their hope is to develop visionary collectors who will support burgeoning artists with integrity – artists who, in my book, create truly meaningful works that deserve to go mainstream.

Mag:net Plus in Paseo Center, Salcedo Village, Makati City is one such place, a major stop for artists who’ve finally abandoned the romantic notion of working with careless abandon in pursuit of "good art." This is a space for professionals to show, and not a place for greenhorns to bust a move and strut their stuff. Here, the heady whiff of intellectual idealism is palpable, and arrogance is mercifully left outside a door that is open for anyone wishing to appreciate the paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations on regular display.

In its most ideal form, I see Mag:net as a staging area for beatniks who’ve grown up to realize that the only way to be truly significant is to cut away from the comfort and validation provided by academic confreres. These artists would be leaving their creations open to derisive comments and baffled stares, true, but they would also be sharing a part of themselves – their unique take on reality – with a benighted public, affirming the utter unselfishness that should be at the heart of art.

For now, this isn’t quite the case yet, judging from the gallery’s recurring line-up of former UP-Diliman College of Fine Arts school buddies and former Surrounded by Water habitués. But the attempt to reach out is certainly there; and I would suppose there is strength to be derived in numbers, particularly when it comes to venturing into new territory. Mag:net’s tony dig and urbane milieu is certainly a long way from the sylvan idyll of alma mater, the gray anonymity of Megamall, or the polluted quagmire of EDSA.

The last exhibition that I saw there, Advanced Problems 101, titled to sound like an entry level college course, yet, with true postmodern irony, referring at the same time to more complicated stuff, addressed the need to instruct a general audience untrained in weighing the significance of conceptual or idea art.

Conceptual art is a style of art making that traces its roots to late 19th century Symbolism, with its focus on evocation rather than literal description, and early 20th century Dadaism – an attitude, a world view, that inspires the creation of "absurd and playful, confrontational and nihilistic, intuitive and emotive pieces" – readymades – to emphasize art’s intellectual basis. In this way, artists are transformed into provocateurs rather than being seen simply as studio-based producers of commodities, a new role which later inspired the rise of Fluxus art, where "events" are organized to disrupt everyday routine.

Interestingly, this show was all of these rolled into one: a meeting of ideas and dilemmas meant to challenge bourgeois sensibility – a crash course in art history curated by the guru of Philippine conceptual art, Roberto Chabet.

My idea of Chabet is that he is the very embodiment of his practice, so paradoxical, unpredictable and inflammable as to gain cult status and, some might even say, notoriety. Here, I was delighted to see him in his element: rollicked yet contained, focused, balanced, nuanced.

Jayson Oliveria was the clear standout among the artists featured in this exhibition; his bricolages – sculptures formed by gluing or welding together non-traditional art materials or junk – are evidently not the work of a crazy magpie.

Three of my favorites reflected the Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé’s negated object, described by the critic Robert Hughes as "a sense of reality, impalpable, uncertain, veiled in the clumsiness of language, that poetry must somehow approach." And what rhyme and reason there was, thoughtfully placed near each other as if in conversation, from "Last Piece," a reductive study of mass and volume relationships; to "Cave," a box of memories and purposeful introspection; to "Candle Maker," empty tea light holders linked by a zigzag of conjoined pieces of wood, triggering the conception of a silent, immanent force.

Ably playing supporting roles were Ringo Bunoan, whose series of backlit films depicting Cubao apartments suffused in light, captured what seemed to me intractable hints of passage, and demarcations of presence and absence. To a certain extent, Poklong Anading of "Line Drawing" fame, and MM Yu also had works that blithely cusped at the ineffable. I was a tad disappointed, however, to see Anading still hankering at the same subject, much like his video loop, ad infinitum. Yu’s oeuvres, on the other hand, reminded me too much of the more mature gravitational drip works produced by the Sydney-based Maria Cruz.

I would like to see more of Louie Cordero, who is fast gaining repute for his darkly disturbed paintings of alienation – the virulent, emotive tenor of his canvases perhaps explaining their placement outside of the main exhibition space.

Lena Cobangbang though seemed quite lost, her work being relegated to the upstairs loft cum office. Perhaps, with tongue-in-cheek, this was thought to be the most fitting place to stash away her eight-book volume of musings, journals and clippings?

I am excited by the prospect of Mag:net Plus taking a leading role among the country’s more progressive commercial art galleries. In these maddening times, as inescapably immersed in boorishness as we are, it is certainly good to have spaces like this to help us make some sense of it all.

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Mag:net Plus is at the ground floor of Paseo Center, Paseo de Roxas corner Sedeno St., Salcedo Village, Makati City.

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For questions, comments and suggestions, write to rlerma@ateneo.edu.