Gerilya tactics: When street artists take on an exhibit

In computer games, you don’t bleed.

Your life is measured by numbers, in green bars that slowly dissipate the more battles you encounter, or increase with every enemy that you kill. Life is a commodity, something you prolong through the bartering of items, the garnering of experience, and the overcoming of hurdles.

When you die in a game you never really die; life can be found in the most innocuous of places — in a treasure chest, underneath a rock, at the top of a hill, inside a room in a fortress. Second chances abound in the form of checkpoints, save points, and restarts.

In computer games, you’re always immortal.

Of course, the computer game is a space presented in aspects — in neat levels designed to walk you through quests, in planted bonus items and convenient pop-up tutorials, in the option to adjust the mode of difficulty so that you never want for anything.

In computer games, you know that what you’re playing is only a game.

But out in the street, nothing is only ever a game.

Vision Mission

Enter Gerilya, the UP-based group of street artists who’ve made a name for themselves with their high-impact, social-realist art, found anywhere from major highways to random street lamps to the walls along Katipunan extension. Their art is always uncompromised, usually illegal, and never in one place for any drawn-out period of time. The group, composed of graduates from the UP College of Fine Arts and former artists of the Philippine Collegian, have admitted that, technically, what they do can be viewed as vandalism. They’d like to point out, however, that there is no willful destruction or defacement of any kind. Only the propagation of art, art, and of course, consciousness.

In a city that cleaves to state-sponsored, uncritical art, I personally think they’re doing us all a favor.

Interestingly, the group will allow themselves a semblance of conformity from time to time, with actual exhibits in actual galleries. In fact Gerilya’s latest exhibit, titled “Press Start,” is currently on display until Feb. 9 in Kanto Gallery, located at The Collective in Makati.

The exhibit revolves around the fusion of Philippine street games and computer games, a juxtaposition that, in itself, speaks volumes. Their set-up is simple; five vivid paintings of typical Filipino games against a whitewashed wall, with only the faint outline of a gaming console or a computer keypad to represent computer games. It’s a sparse set-up, but it works.

For one thing, the virtual world as a space of opulent display is turned on its head. What is instead given attention is the reality of actual street games, which, while unable to paint a world as fantastical as the one in computers, remains just as demanding, and just as violent. Except this time, the violence is real.

From images of children engaged in gang wars (“Agawan Fortress”), to a basketball game conducted knee-deep in a flood (“SK13”), to the bloody consequences of being found in the game of hide and seek (“Bang-sak Version 1.3”) — what Gerilya attempts to show aren’t idyllic pictures of a bygone era. Out in the streets, where the poorest of the poor have no access to a computer and no knowledge of how to use one, their games take on a streak of intensity.

No save points, no restarts, and no second chances.

Collective experience

Interestingly though, Gerilya says their idea for the exhibit was born out of a nostalgia for the days when their playground was epitomized in dusty side streets, replaced today by the realm of computer games.

The root may have been nostalgic, but the seed is nothing but. On one level, the exhibit is a critique of the preference of urban Filipino children for computer games, and the forgotten pastime of traditional Pinoy street games. On another level, it is also an attempt to satirize the violence of popular computer games via the exaggerated gruesomeness of the actual games played on the street. On another level still, Gerilya says viewers can sense the dark comedy in their work, brought to light by the manic glee on the painted faces of the children, laughing through the bloody noses and dribbling snot, the broken teeth and the glass-eyed looks.

Indeed, the virtual game is an imaginarium invested with the memory of the player. It’s a world that continuously recreates itself at the click of a button, and an instrument that erases all traces of class antagonisms.

But while you’re limitless as a player in a computer game, out in the real world, imagination can only take you so far. In the end, as Gerilya bravely shows, it’s all about survival.

No blood, no foul.