ROBERTO VILLANUEVA AND JUNYEE: The nature and art of intervention

If creativity is born out of inner necessity, then the wellspring of environmental art is perhaps a primordial one. Spun around abstractions of yin and yang, night and day, endings and new beginnings, the flow of nature has become a metaphor for human life itself. Indeed it has been said that "the relationship between the external world (the environment) and subjective perception (the ideational aspects of human organization) must be deep and fundamental."

Assuming this notion as truth, one would be hard pressed to find a more explicit example of the coupling of cultural practice and the ecology than the relationship of interpretation and response-through-manipulation that exists between the artist and nature – what we more commonly refer to as "environmental art." As Jeffrey Kastner describes the parameters of this genre, within it the artist "aspires to leave (his or her) mark, inscribing observations and gestures attempting to translate and transgress the space within which (the artist finds him or herself)."

Inevitably, this is where the narrative of intervention embodied by environmental art begins: Fraught with notions of oneness, a sense of participation – a quasi-mystical unity.

Yet beyond this paradigmatic foundation, it is also interesting to see how artists working along these lines contributed to the polemic of the avant-garde.

Early practitioners, the so-called "Earth Artists" of the 1960s and ’70s – the likes of Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Dennis Oppenheim, Alan Sonfist, and Robert Smithson – raised the possibility of moving art and its production away from the museum-gallery setting. In this way, they rejected the commercialization of art (in the larger perspective), in as much as they concerned themselves with critiques of materiality, such as releasing sculpture from the rigors of self-contained three-dimensionality.

In Spiral Jetty (1970), for example, Smithson created a simulacrum of a whirlpool using a combination of rocks, salt crystals, reddened water, and algae. Subverting traditional norms of site-level horizontality and verticality, the effect is best appreciated from a birds-eye perspective.

Around the same time, Earth Art found an ally in the Italian Arte Povera movement, as well as the works of the Process artists. The former "coupled idealism about the redemptive power of history and art with a solid grounding in the material world to make metaphorical statements about nature or culture," while the latter – exemplified by the oeuvres of Hans Haacke and Richard Serra, among others – were imbued with values arising from the impermanence of materials, and an interest in experience for its own sake.

From an inherently formalist approach, to a more semiotic-driven, postmodernist raison d’etre, the works produced by these groups clearly showed the growth in the tenor of support for the ecological movement, just as these were reflected in more contemporary examples of environmental art. Rife with ideas of anti-urbanism, there appeared, as well, a noticeable implication of spiritual attitudes toward the planet, replete with feminist images of the "Great Goddess," a nurturing Gaia who seeks redress after being ravaged by the depredations of man.

While these developments further enriched the theoretical groundwork of environmental art, they nonetheless amplified what seemed to be the inherent contradictions of a progressive movement whose interventionism encompassed the transformation and working of the same natural materials that they sought to protect. This was the juncture that marked the emergence of the environmental artists Roberto Villanueva and Junyee (born Luis Yee Jr.).

To be sure, the development of this art form in the Philippines arose not only from the back-to-nature trend that was taking hold globally, but also from the specifics of the context in which both artists worked: The resurgence of nationalism which inspired artists to mine what it meant to be Filipino through the use of indigenous idioms and materials; the stranglehold of the Marcos dictatorship on the populace’s freedom of expression, which coaxed artists – not wanting to please the traditional exhibition forums of the New Society – to seek out alternative spaces; and the escalating costs of imported art materials in an economy sabotaged by the dictatorship’s mismanagement, which forced artists to look for an inexpensive new source of materials.

In my opinion, the creation of their body of works also proved timely because they appeared to address the dilemma of impossibility purportedly surrounding progressive, non-destructive intervention. This is not to say that Villanueva and Junyee avoided the reality of the "artifice." But what I will be imputing in this article is that both artists managed to address the irony of their practice by invoking: (a) The spiritual, utopian, or mystic dimension of their works, which correlates to (b) the possibility of re-assimilating these works with the earth, thus producing an art that truly acts not simply on, but also with and for the environment.

Roberto Villanueva: Animism And The Environment

Based in Baguio City, Roberto Villanueva established a career in the visual arts in his homeland, long before entering the consciousness of the international art community. After earning his BFA at the University of Santo Tomas, he started as a surrealist before holding his first one-man exhibit at the Ateneo Art Gallery in 1972. An educator, Villanueva likewise worked extensively with film, winning local awards, and sitting on the board of the United Filmakers Association of the Philippines.

Consistently drawing from the knowledge and skills of Cordillera traditions, which showed a natural proclivity for sourcing materials from the environment – reeds, grasses, wood – it would only be in the late 1980s when his creative energies began to focus on more large-scale, land-based installation works.

Contextualizing the inspirational source for Villanueva’s 1989 Manila installation "Cordillera Labyrinth," the artist and academic Pat Hoffie describes how she saw the landscape on a plane trip from Baguio City to the capital. Her narration elucidates the significance of the artist’s use of a woven spiral of bamboo and reeds, which altogether stretched for 600 meters in the grounds of the Cultural Center of the Philippines in the heart of this highly urbanized landscape:

"From the air, the massive folds of the Cordillera rise suddenly from the …plains of Pampanga. Even from this distance the massive magnificence of the range is palpable… Yet even from here the fragility of the environment is evident: the exhausted subsiding of the deforested slopes; the traceable veins of toxicity where effluence empties into riverbeds; opaque greening pools from the copper mines. From an aerial perspective, there is beauty in the destruction. But below, tribes, as well as the ranges, are dying. The art of Roberto Villanueva is concerned with the impact of such woundings."

In "Cordillera Labyrinth," Villanueva traces the source of the denudation of his locality’s landscape, and the poisoning of its riverbeds and streams to the destructive (capitalistic/industrial) structures situated in Manila: The transgression of his installation onto the cityscape, as well as the pathways traced by its form when viewed from above, clearly evidence this. In the landmark publication Art Philippines, critic Alice Guillermo ascribes the archetypal symbolism in this site work:

"The labyrinth leads the viewer through a high and winding bamboo corridor with several turns. The corridor ends in a central clearing, which is the Cordillera dap-ay, or ritual ground. The artist represents this sacred place as a round sunken pit, one foot deep and twelve feet in diameter. At its center, presiding over the ritual space lined by monolithic stone seats, is an archaic guardian spirit."

Two subsequent events served as further catalysts, showing the artist’s practice taking on a more interactive metier, in addition to "involv(ing) animistic and shamanistic approaches." Immediately after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, Villanueva collaborated with members of the lowland community in Pampanga, who were displaced from their homesteads by lahar in an installation/performance documented on video that reenacted traditional rituals meant to appease the anger of the mountain gods.

The artist also attached notions of participative spirituality to his installations. In July of the previous year a massive earthquake flattened Baguio City. "This time, a main access bridge had collapsed because of soil erosion caused by deforestation. In a work that involved the replanting of thousands of trees, the artist was able to get the citizens and the Mayor to participate physically."

Bereft of the artist and his collaborators, it would seem that the remains of that interaction would serve as a reminder to the community to avoid the mistakes of the past. This would be a permanent offering to assuage the temblors of the earth.

Guillermo recalls another Villanueva installation, "Soul Offerings," a light and sound spectacle, which Villanueva dedicated to the spirits of those thousands who died in the big earthquake:

"(It consisted of) a flotilla of three bamboo rafts lighted by candles, which he launched on Burnham Lake in Baguio City on All Soul’s Day in 1990. The rafts bore offerings – flowers, rice wine, rice cakes, crucifixes, incense, Ilocano cigars and rice straws. The main raft carried a bird-figure made of bamboo, with a tiny ancestor figure on its back, symbolizing the soul’s journey to the hereafter. Around the rafts floated coconut shells bearing candles; these drifted away in the wind, like souls on their separate journeys...

Not one to be boxed as an activist or as a reactionary, Villanueva also made installations, which brooked concepts of the personification or sexualization of nature, and meaning-conveyance. In his 1993 opus "Androgynous," for example, the artist traced and dug out an amorphous, tubular form onto an unspecified coastline where water would be allowed to flow in and fill this orifice in what seemed to be an extrapolation on the idea of intercourse.

Taking his installations overseas, Villanueva ran the risk of moving away from the comfort of comprehensibility, sharing common, if not familiar, traditions with his local audience. Yet in no way did this prevent him from carrying through his empathetic earth visions. In "Surrender to Nature" (1991), an indoor installation at Lincoln Square, New York City, Villanueva lit candles amidst a sea of stalks and strung up bunting bearing sheets of printed-paper. At the Naguri Open Air exhibition, Saitama-ken Prefecture, Naguri, Japan, he created a "Cross-Culture Bridge" which married Cordillera and Shinto animism by placing a bulol on a boulder in the midst of a rushing stream surmounted by an arch (reminiscent of those found in Japanese temples) formed by joining two reed stalks from opposite banks.

In 1993, Villanueva was selected as one of nine artists representing the Philippines at the First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT1) held at the Queensland Art Gallery. His work, "Ego’s Grave" consisted of an anthropomorphic "form carved into the earth within a deep outdoor pit…covered with terracotta clay…(which was then followed by the) performance of a cleansing ritual on the seventh day, (thereafter) the terracotta (was) set, using a traditional firing technique, and glazed with a natural glaze."

Seeing the resulting cast mold as the embodiment of what Guillermo described in her catalogue essay on the artist as "the animistic strain in the heart of Philippine culture," in which the creative life force is seen to dwell in and derive from nature, its environmental affinity, its subsuming of man under a shaman-like order, and its idea of art as having a communal function, can easily be pointed out. Moreover, Villanueva’s act of excavation points to what Simon Schama refers to as "one of our most powerful yearnings: The craving to find in nature a consolation for our mortality."

Ironically, "Ego’s Grave" would be among the last of Villanueva’s large-scale installation works. Two years later, he would die of heart failure.

Junyee: Paradise Reclaimed

Trained in the classical tradition as a sculptor, Junyee translates his knowledge, skill, and grasp of spatial dynamics into a number of assemblages and installations which draw upon a dizzying array of earth-derived materials such as feathers, butterfly wings, rocks, roots, twigs and vines, with dried pods, banana fiber, and coconut shells.

Indeed, like nature itself, his works are ephemeral and renewable. Best known for his recreation of an enchanted, verdant netherworld teeming with troglodyte-like creatures, oversized eggs, worm-like protrusions, insects, bugs and other creepy-crawly minutiae scurrying about, "Unpath" (1984) is both a hymn to an untouched planet, and a paean to a world lost forever, the woven screen in the background "resembling a sail tossed about in this ‘mystery-scape’" adding to the sense of piquancy. Interestingly, Schama also refers to an "unpeopled, brilliantly lit meadow… (with its)…vital shoots of nature, a vegetable resurrection" in his treatise on nature, eco-systems and memory.

Junyee’s "Breeding Ground" (1993), begins as a portrayal of man’s destructive encroachment on the landscape through the use of symbolist action and appropriation. Here, the participation that went into the recreation of a sanitized garbage dump right through to the associated performance in which the audience was asked to sort through the bags by torchlight in order to emphasize "the consume-discard nature of contemporary society" seemed to have been similarly informed by a desire not only to emphasize man’s responsibility for his surroundings, but also to reconfigure it in traditional spiritual terms of ritual, thereby reacquiring and re-apotheosizing it to its pre-colonial role as creation for collective communion and mystical interaction.

Coming full circle, it is certainly not inconceivable to propose that the works of Roberto Villanueva and Junyee, in as much as public identification and interaction form the basis of their eco-practices, hearken to the altars of our ancestors, where people gathered in the hope of finding mediation, leading to some form of resolution.

Ultimately, I see their visions to be attuned to a metaphysical reality, which forms part of a tradition inherited from the past that always considers the immaterial. In their minds-eye, it is possible for the discarnate to traverse into the present, to find a medium, incarnate, and, in all likelihood, impinge upon the collective future: e.g. an earthen grave as nascent source for self-knowledge; an accumulation of refuse as appeasement for degradation – both gathering places, animistic altars of anamnesis, for ablution, reconnection and, ultimately, intervention.

This is perhaps what the academic Patrick Flores, citing Macheray, is referring to when he foregrounds the notion of "surviving tradition" among the domains of concern being offered as workable paradigms for critical readings of contemporary art practice. And I quote: "In fact, one does not inherit only from the past… Rather, one inherits from that which, in the past, remains yet to come, by taking part in a present which is not only present in the fleeting sense of actuality, but which undertakes to reestablish a dynamic connection between past and future."

With this in mind, I see the past echoing through the present-day engagements between man and nature. Together, the works of Roberto Villanueva and Junyee shed light on Flores’ most recent advocacy – "a commitment to pursue an artistic and critical practice that are not simply reflective or descriptive of the present material condition, but programmatic and generative of a certain liberative future."

Any doubt about the progressive possibilities of environmental art should be put to rest on such a premise.

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This essay appeared in an online art forum in 2001, and is being published for the first time. For feedback, e-mail rlerma@ateneo.edu.