The past three weeks since the end of June I allowed myself to indulge a little bit on the other "side" of my creative practice, that is literature. Its a guilty pleasure but to my defense I did learn the craft of writing and art-making at the same time when I was growing up. (My very first national competition was an essay writing contest, not art, for instance). In high school I took so many units of creative writing classes that it can be very well my minor (my major was of course visual arts). My chosen literary crafts were essay and poetry; my equivalent perhaps of drawing/painting and sculpture. I tried to unite these elements in my final thesis in 1994, using philosophy (phenomenology) as a framework. But it was shot down by my adviser, Roberto Feleo, who at time believed that I was taking on a rather obscure "Western" idea and exhorted me to go back to my roots. Thus I learned how to carve, which was my family's craft in Ilocos Sur, where I was born. Eventually I took up woodcarving and object-based sculptural practice to a more engaged level in 2008, when I finally said Ive had enough of ten or so more years as a curator, writer and teacher. Since 1997 I have been divided between words and images; literature and art. In my view that was a divide between the immaterial and the material, the conceptual and the tangible object. I thought it was time to end the division in my heart.
By July I toyed with the idea of coming up with an interface that will allow my two fractured sides to find a common platform. I have been attempting these since 2011, with the installation as my medium of presentation. Two works from 2011-2012 stand out as examples of these attempts. It was a Paradisiacal State: The Body was Allowed to be a Body (which won the Ateneo Art Awards in 2012) and Astral Projections (The Drawing Room, 2011). With the latter I inserted texts from Whitman, Rilke and Jung as textual support for the sculptural works. My series called Possible Full Body Apparitions (2013), done here at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Art Center at Governor's Island from March to June represents only one-half of the project that will be featured at the Drawing Room at Gillman Barracks, Singapore from September 13 to October 13. The other half has been what I was trying to percolate in New York for the past days and weeks, as my sculptures flew to Manila by air cargo. What is being brewed here is a platform that finally brings both my concerns for the material and the immaterial together, and therefore a resolution to an almost two-decade attempt. And my point of departure is a highly unlikely interaction between conceptual and craft, between text and image, between (immaterial) literature and (material) sculpture.
It was a fellow ACC grantee, Tung Pang Lam who gave me the insight when he said my sculptural works look poetic. I look at my sculptures again and I felt that it was the most apt description of what I think I was trying to do. I am doing Visual Poetry. But instead of a flat surface bound by the page, my words are the forms I make and the lyrical flow of the poem is the movement allowed within the ambulatory space of the installation! The material conveys the immaterial, while the origin of my works' images are in fact from the immateriality of dreams. I can demonstrate a poem by curating the space poetically. Ambulation and movement become the pauses and readings of the "text" in space. And my encounter with the works of Robert Barry and Robert Irwin, made me more convinced that I was headed in the right direction.
Conceptual and craft are not opposites: they complement. But they only complement in poetry.
This is what New York has perhaps, given me as it parting gift.
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