Apoem of that title by the Nobel prizewinner Tomas Transtromer came across my mind when I learned that the artist Lani Maestro was in town for an exhibit/installation in collaboration with Poklong Anading, “Digital Tagalog,” at the Mo_Space in Bonifacio High Street in Global City. Maestro, whom I hadn’t seen in more than 20 years, the artist having relocated to Canada and northern France, has relied heavily on the conceptual and text-based side of art, almost as if it were the driving force. She has in the past employed as intertext the poems of Carolyn Forche, especially in work in the late ’80s at CCP, “Silent Scream,” where the voiceless cry became a freewheeling metaphor for victims of political violence.
Transtromer’s Breathing Space July begins: “The man lying on his back under the high trees/ is also up there. He rills out in the thousand-fold twigs,/ sways to and fro,/ sits in an ejector seat which releases in slow motion…”
A past CCP Thirteen Artists awardee, Maestro has created work that has been exhibited in such diverse places as Cuba and Vancouver, including “Her Rain” also text based and leaning on white fluorescent light and reflections on passing objects, making the work, as they say in art circles, site specific. Her rain plays around the double phrase “No pain like this body” and “No body like this pain,” which could suggest that the artist has had more than her fair share of angst, but not really. Work is always separate, almost a disembodiment of the artist, and the mind with all its tricks can imagine what it wants.
Mo_Space itself is not hard to find, located on the third floor of a chichi furniture shop building (the sculptor Agnes Arellano’s words, not mine) on the sprawling High Street, which upon entering “Digital Tagalog” the gallery seems to tilt a bit, or leans rather groggily to a corner of old familiar souls.
Here’s Transtromer again: “The man down by the piers narrows up his eyes at the/ water./ The piers grow old more quickly than people./ They have silver grey timber and stones in their stomachs./ The blinding light beats right in…”
The first question to be asked upon surveying the digital divide of Maestro/Anading is perhaps, how the Bonifakyo were they able to haul those bamboo poles up three flights of stairs without breaking a leg or two or resorting to various hideous contortions not unlike done by the boxer Bradley to survive the onslaught of Pacquiao in Vegas?
Then again the uninitiated might wonder, is that it? Well, you could say that’s more than it. That’s more it than it can ever get. Easy come and easy go but not so easy does it. All those bamboos, when tied together end to end, can reach Port Area or at the very least Luneta, kilometer zero where all reference to distance goes back to square one. Starting over can be the gist of things.
Again one can venture that the viewer must know where Maestro/Anading are coming from, both students of the conceptual minimalist master Roberto Chabet at the UP College of Fine Arts, though several batches apart. In the book of Chabet art is not so much creation as it is participative, short of being a work in progress because already complete in its sublime self, and “Digital Tagalog” more than lives up to that tenet. It might have been meant for the exhibit to be somewhat of a foil to the modern glitzy Global City, how fun it is to get lost in a grove of cut bamboo in the inverted intestines of high street. Digital gives us both the high and low of it, and what’s more the gallery correspondents can even make simple music by tapping out a rhythm or two on the sectioned, unexposed nodes, different nodes of course emitting different, varied hollow sounds. Echoes and thrums too like a walk in the park. By golly it was like Billy Bonnevie let loose in a playground of percussive dreams. Little wonder that no one was shouting Happy New Year! Or letting out some sort of primal scream every break or so, where was Roxlee when you needed him?
The breathing of Tomas wraps up thus: “The man traveling all day in an open boat/ over the glittering bays/ shall sleep at last inside a blue lamp/ while the islands creep like large moths across the glass.” (Selected Poems, translated by Robin Fulton, Penguin books 1974)
There were lounging easy chairs to better appreciate the percussion, and a project room to the rear of the gallery where a few notebooks encouraged anyone to click mouse to play an overlaying soundtrack to mesh with the natural ambient sounds.
How they got all those bamboo up to the gallery is a feat itself in sheer perseverance. One observer even said that the poles might have been used in the nearby construction projects, the area having gone through a kind of boom where gondolas were necessary to put up and paint the high rises.
But the gondolas in Mo_Space were in disarray, no tunnel of love anywhere around. You however have to hand it to Poklong and Lani, they’ve set free art from inside a blue lamp over which glass assorted moths creep.
It was a poem I read at a place called The End House in Dumaguete many years ago, in the residence of the late art patron Albert Faurot. And because the end of art can also be its beginning, the viewer or critic can be set free of any preconceived notions or biases concerning the work at hand. We have another more than 20 years to come to terms with the freewheeling metaphors, meanwhile sipping sour mash in a plastic cup under a slight drizzle in the dark, the day a second longer, not a second too late.