Scapular Gallery Nomad: A traveling body of work

Did you know that the smallest gallery in the world was created by Filipino artist Judy Freya Sibayan? It is called Scapular Gallery Nomad (SGN) and Judy has been traveling around the world with it for six years now. The creation has been a life-enhancing experience for one of the country’s premier conceptual and performing artists.

It has been a long time since I talked to Judy, former director of the erstwhile Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines. Today, she is an assistant professor at the Department of Communication of De La Salle University.

Our three-hour lunch unraveled an amazingly creative and remarkable journey into the endless possibilities of new and different art mediums, interacting with international artists and imbibing artistic energies from other brilliant minds of various and diverse cultures. All these brought about the success of Judy Sibayan and her portable gallery

The animation and excitement with which Judy described her traveling work made it is easy for me to imagine the thrill of her experiences.

Here, Judy tells us about her most important exhibits, interactions and performances.

Scapular Gallery Nomad: Beyond The Limits

Six years ago, I started to perform Scapular Gallery Nomad, projected to be a two-year-long "performance art gallery." As curator, owner, artist, and vehicle of a nomadic gallery, I had planned to wear scapular-like pouches containing the works of a good number of artists daily, filling up a two-year schedule of performance/exhibition. A month into the work, I fell terribly ill. Abandoning the project, I attended to the more urgent task of healing a fast deteriorating body. This helped me realize that I needed to weave myself back to health by means of recreation, for the central myths of art-making are those of creation as integration/ordering. I needed to imagine myself back to life.

I took up the work again in 1997 with 38 artists, each scheduled for an exhibition at the Scapular Gallery Nomad. I continue to accept more exhibitions and the gallery is now fully booked up to the year 2002. For each exhibition, I do what every art gallery does for its artists: the writing and publishing of exhibition notes, curatorial design, publicity, documentation, archiving, openings, shipping logistics, artist-gallery contracts, the cultivation of an audience, and even the design and construction of the gallery.

The idea of the scapular is based on the miraculous Scapular of Carmel. Catholic tradition has it that the Blessed Virgin and the infant Jesus miraculously appeared at Mt. Carmel in 1251 and placed upon the shoulder of one Simon Stock a brown scapular. Salvation from the eternal fires of hell was promised to anyone who would wear this grace garment as devotion to the Virgin.

Placed upon the shoulders of all artists is what Victor Burgin calls an endgame: Roles are handed down by a particular history through particular institutions, and whether we choose to work within or without these given history or institutions, for or against them, our relationship to them is inescapable. Further, he perceives the canon of art as a graveyard made up of masterpieces. "To be admitted to it is to be consigned to perpetual exhumation, to be denied entry is to be condemned to perpetual oblivion."

Like an amulet to protect me from becoming a victim of the endgame, I wear the gallery placed on my shoulders daily in the hope that I will attain salvation from the eternal fires of oblivion.

Scapular Gallery Nomad – a piece of clothing, a habit – is a space I have created where I can essentially curate upon my body. Just as I care for myself in this performance, I also care for the artists by curating their works in my body gallery.

Being a nomadic artist with multiple roles (curator, critic, gallery owner, gallery architect and builder, publisher, as vehicle of the gallery and its infrastructure), I deal with the possibilities of an art  practice that gives me the speed, the immediacy and the fluidity to ceaselessly  create connections deep or fleeting, forming a "rhizome" in a variety of situations with all kinds of individuals.

Having performed the work for the past five years, I would like to describe the shape the work has taken thus far. I would also like to imagine its future. Scapular Gallery Nomad’s maintenance and integrity are dependent on the resources and reality of my daily living. It has no demands beyond the small scale of my life. I sew the scapulars by hand; write and desktop publish the exhibition notes in my bedroom; print them, each copy costing from 10 to 15 US cents. I only carry small, light, delicate artworks: photographs, prints, books, computer diskettes, egg-white meringue and textile sculptures, oil paintings on paper. They are unframed, unpropped on pedestals; protected, wrapped only in cloth, never a burden on my shoulders.

My movements too are conservative. Except for the intimate dinners hosted by the artists during their opening events, I hardly go out of my way to make a separate event of it, separate from the usual flow of my life, that is. Some openings are quiet, unattended, unseen events. On some occasions these are just the simple undonning of the old scapular and donning the new one with the new works on the set date, wherever I am. The adding of artists, now   numbering 47, to the exhibition list also happens as I meet them in my daily life. I never go out of my way to find them.

The performance is never a spectacle. The artworks are now removed from the context of the pure gaze. In fact it always surprises me when I get to see photographs of the event. There doesn’t seem to be anything exceptional happening except for two or three people looking at something held on the palm  of their hands. Often, I am a small event within bigger events. Several artists have invited me to perform during their own gallery openings.

My body clothed with the gallery becomes a specific site for art. At the same time, once clothed with the gallery my body can constantly create specific spatial and temporal sites for the performance. People hold and view the artworks in elevators, in airplanes, at wakes in funeral parlors, at theater lobbies during concert intermissions, while queuing in banks and supermarkets, during lunches in cafeterias, in church weddings, dental clinics, taxis, in beauty parlors, restaurants, shopping malls, classrooms, parks, street concerts, picnics by the sea...

The work overwhelms me at times. I take my cues from my body. Once, for a period of one month, lethargy set in. I refused to wear the work nor prepare for the next exhibition. Having accepted the reality of my inevitable relationship with the very same system I profess to work without, and secure in my autonomy as an agent critically aware of the co-opting discursive powers of these institutions, I have performed briefly within four major museums: the Vienna Secession, Vienna, capcMusee d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, and the Hayward Gallery, London. I have exhibited artifacts of the performance and continue to critique the system with works installed within these institutions. I sincerely feel that I have not compromised the integrity of the work since it existed and it continues to exist independent of these institutions.

Recently, one of the SGN pouches became part of a larger work submitted by an artist from Tokyo to an art competition. His work was purchased for $10,000, which he generously shared with me. I was uncomfortable at first about this purchase, feeling that the gallery’s autonomy was compromised if it could be collected. But later I realized that although one of the scapular pouches is now part of an art collection, the "performance art gallery" could not be collected materially.

As to the future of the work, two events quietly showed me the way. One day, a little girl in my neighborhood who usually plays outside my yard grabbed the scapular and demanded to know what it was. My response surprised me: I did not show her the artworks. Then at a market, I brought out the artworks to show them to a family of fruit vendors. They showed polite appreciation, held the works with care, gave them back to me. I handed out the little exhibition brochure in return to end the transaction. I realized I could not perceive the child to be part of my audience. The brochures I publish do not communicate to market vendors nor to children, who comprise part of the audience at the periphery. Should I produce a text for children? A text in Filipino? Should I produce a text at all?

This June, I sent via e-mail a call for an alternative practice of exhibiting art by inviting some 700 artists and independent curators to perform their own version of Scapular Gallery Nomad. By the mere wearing of an art gallery cloth daily or by practicing being an art gallery daily, with which I have been able to constantly sense my own scale and the order of things, I believe I have attained this self-sufficiency, the ability to empower myself proportionate to and within the limits of my own energies and subjectivity.