Series of dreams

There is likely a secret gift waiting for you at the end of the gallery after walking through “Without a Murmur,” which features the installation work, raw video, soundscapes and assorted rare footage of artists At Maculangan, Lani Maestro, Roderico Daroy, and Maria Taniguchi at the College of St. Benilde’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Design along Vito Cruz, ongoing till next February. Not the obligatory freebie or incendiary giveaway flyer with critical notes, rather some god-given space as if the viewer were suddenly cut free of the furies in this urban jungle.

Right off, and you can imagine here a handheld camera following willy-nilly a street cartoonist as gallery visitor perhaps played by the actor Soliman Cruz, entering the museum and greeted just above the left of his head with a panoramic CCTV view of an airport tarmac somewhere in the south we are told, the ground workers patiently unloading stuff from the baggage hold, or so it looks from ground level. No pusila pusila or streaker to highlight the seemingly mundane proceedings, at least not while the subject Soliman was there.

Maculangan, a photographer well versed in lomography, makes a statement on the present-day prevalence of the CCTV, whose footage or at least parts of it recording a crime or related misdemeanor completes the evening news, only here no news is good news, and our cartoonist is baffled without so much as a murmur, having been trained to use forthright the left side of the brain to illustrate editorials. There is no editorializing here, although placement of camera and the generally sweeping view transport the viewer to yet another unidentified waiting lounge, most likely between planes or the semblance of planes, without the barest gadget to preoccupy oneself. To which our poor Soliman can only mutter, wazak.

In the middle of the gallery is a moving picture cum aural triptych by Maestro, an artist by way of France and Canada and Project 2 or 3, in which dead center is a dark nook that relocates not quite a full moon in night sky, streaks of clouds gently moving across its face. One could well be on a hillside overlooking a valley of tears and detachment, watching the moon’s lovely face as if it were a never-ending circle. Soliman remembers a weird cryptic quote texted to him by the mask-maker Willie Arseña from far-off Zamboanga: the intemperate essence of time is the eternity of life. In a heartbeat the cartoonist goes from wisdom to wazak.

On one side of the moon is a niche that plays an endless loop of a view from what could be a second floor window, branches hanging over part of the frame and sudden stills of a woman weeping, why that could be the artist herself and Soliman asks, why could she be weeping or what could have upset her so much? The viewer waits until fate or chance decides to throw a copy of a newspaper through the window, a vain hope for the ultimate installation. In real time all loops are endless.

Soliman then tiptoes and leans toward multiple mini speakers on the opposite side of the overlooking window, the artist reciting a litany of regions like a prayer or mantra for peace. This region of sutures, this region of Mokyo, this region of haikus a la Juan Pula, this region I am solely making up. But the voice is an unmistakable region by itself, something that Laurie Anderson with background music by Jean-Michel Jarre would never have dreamed of. In the region of the blind, the one-eyed cartoonist is king.

At the far end of the gallery is Daroy’s “Anus of the sun” installation, whose centerpiece is an obelisk amidst newly planted bluegrass, a bonsai or two in the periphery, cracked parts of a mysterious larger whole strewn beside the little tower. It is like walking through an inverted black hole to have come into this, but there’s more: across the obelisk directly facing it is a large empty canvas, but is it truly empty or is poor Soliman again imagining things? We will leave that to the viewer to decide, but presently Mokyo is saying wisdom, wisdom be gone and away, no more Gangnam Style now kept like a genie in a Grecian urn.

At the mezzanine you could catch a view of more transplanted bluegrass atop one of the building blocks of the sun’s anus, though the grass at such a height could easily wither without the use of a state of the art laser point sprinkler. Also at this deftly placed section of the museum is Taniguchi’s video piece of a pair of men excavating something on a hillside of the town of Zamboanguita in Negros Oriental, we’re told by show organizer Mary Ann Josette, the black and white angle worthy of the current noir craze that is the stuff of Lavrente’s labyrinth. What are the men looking for and should streetwise Mokyo feel slightly inferior if he has barely an appreciation for this dizzying art of the philosophical?

To the second question the answer is no, and to the first maybe a thread of dreams that leads the viewer following the actor Soliman through the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design along Vito Cruz, outside of which pedicab drivers weave through traffic and hawkers ply their ambulant merchandise deep into the night, a wellspring of space and intemperate time through February.

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Note: This is a rough script for a short film starring Soliman Cruz as the cartoonist Rene Aranda.

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“Without a Murmur” is on view until Feb. 13 at the College of St. Benilde’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Design.