I was in Queens for a whole afternoon yesterday, at the Bliss in Bliss art space on 46th and 43rd Ave. it is owned and run by a Filipino resident in NY, Ged Merino, a kumpare of Freddie Aquilizan. I was glad I went there as I have many insights at the opening, and met people I never knew I could connect to.
It was my first visit to Queens and since the 7 train wasn't running on weekends, I had to improvise and took the R train to Queensboro plaza where I took Vernon-bound shuttle and got momentarily lost in the middle of Long Island. I retraced my path by board same shuttle back to the plaza and took the 7 train that was running to Flushing and got off 46th Bliss St. Then thanks to the map and navigator app on my phone I was able to find the address, which was smack in the middle of a residential block.
I was first taken aback by the sight of the Queensboro bridge: its ugly to say the least and the area looks something like a place where thugs and the homeless could congregate. But as I learned later, looks can be quite deceiving: all that TV misrepresentation had to be purged before I could take a single step into anything. Fortunately Ive learned the art of being socially small in the Metro in Paris. I took no notice of people and they took no notice of me. If lost, look bored and upset.
Bliss on Bliss was something you can expect from an artist-run initiative. It is small, being the basement of the apartment building, yet it is charmingly rugged, authentic in its mishmash of drapes, knickknacks, studios and artworks. There was not much heating but the sheer number of human beings shuffling within this bowel of an art space provided its own warmth. Plus the alcohol and it was indeed really cozy. It was also refreshing to hear long conversations in Filipino...the vernacular does that to everyone stranded or lost or in exile. What is interesting here is that I do not know anyone in the crowd. Jeho Bitancor wasn't yet there but since I was tired I decided to sit through the five-piece repertoire of a jazz guitar-and-sax duo for close to an hour.
That musical performance was really good, and entertaining in most parts. Ive been a fan of jazz since the 90's but lost track when I began listening to grunge and then pop. I liked the thought of passing a wicker basket towards the end of the program as alternative to a ticket. You can give any amount you want that approximates your enjoyment and your willingness to support the artists. Later Ive learned how the flocking of artists from all over makes the scene competitive and difficult. It is not rare to find real starving artists in here, and this makes Andy Warhol's statement, "Think rich, look poor" a definitive slogan in this scene. Often when an artist makes it and achieves a breakthrough, there is a superstardom complex that robs the authenticity when the struggle is often won. I mean Basquiat suffered from that when his work was removed from the streets and into the galleries. I wonder if there is such thung asa middle field in the art scene of NY. Today Im off to see the big time galleries in Chelsea and MoMa. I want to witness what makes the art capital here tick from the top.
The show over, I felt intruding. I was already out of the door and ready to cross the street to Queens Boulevard when I bumped into June Yap, the curator-in-residence of the Guggenheim and formerly of the Singapore Art Museum. June and I met in Bandung and Jakarta in 2006 and as I reminded her of that she said, yes I remember your face. She was on her way to Rite Aid, a drugstore, to buy beer with Manny, a former UPCFA student who was a year behind me in college. Prior to this I chatted with Ernest Concepcion, whose work was part of the show and he introduced me to Ged. He told me Freddie was arriving in the evening. I asked him about sourcing local lumber for sculpture and he said he will ask around, and looked genuinely thinking of where he could point me to. I already said goodbye when I had to take it back when Jeho, Mideo, Kleng and Art Zamora were almost at the gate and invited me back into the basement gallery.
I was able to get information from Jeho, who is practicing his art fulltime in Jersey, of how the scene works and he was so anxious to know where he is located in the whole mess of the local Philippine art scene, the Singapore-centered regional art scene inasmuch as I was curious of his entanglements with the NY scene as well. I mounted Jeho's exhibit when I was still a curator and wrote about him in an exhibition brochure. He seems like a guy who knew what he was doing, got displaced and is now confused where his community lies. His involvement with Bliss and with Ged is a natural outcome as this space seems to be the only one that threshes the Filipino experience in New York. But it is really typical of all artists like Jeho (and also myself) reared in Bobi Valenzuela's paradigm of knowing one's context and community in artistic practice, although these concepts were not fully articulated years ago. Art in this realm of thought and living is all about sharing, provoking and engaging. Art is a form of existential reinforcement, one that makes the individual experience and narrative to be woven into the fabric of common vernacular history. In other words, art moves and is assimilated into the nebulous tsimis-world. In fact I think to be spoken of and about, is a secret normative desire of every Filipino. Fir good or bad. For fame or infamy.
While Jeho and I were discussing his work in the courtyard, June chimed in with her menthol cigarettes and her stories of battles with Guggenheim in organizing the show No Country. It was an insightful conversation as June intimated that her desire in organizing the event was a transactional device for Guggenheim to acquire South and Southeast Asian art. Good for Poklong and for Peewee to have their works bought by this cultural behemoth. But her intentions - not uttered in the board rooms - is not to promote Asian art but to inform the Americans that there is an independent, self-sufficient, and dynamic community of artists in Asia and that we are well. It was a curatorial subversion that left me laughing and amused. It would be something I would do, if I were a curator...and come to think of it...this is precisely my perspective when I came here. It was funny to understand what was intuitively clear and legible as an Asian artist is something of an exotic specimen still for the American culturati. I mean, this was the concept that we were critiquing in Bandung...the idea of consuming ethnicity as a late-capitalist folly, a post-colonial imperialist fantasy if you will. And the fact that there are multiple, non-public, vernacular coded ideas in the show living underneath the facade is SO Asian. I mean that is the indirectness that Ive intuited in Paris that characterizes cultural contacts in Asia...where the public face is constructed to be an exoskeletal structure to fit into the matrices of family, state, school, etc. The inner, deeper life is something opened up as a point of privileged relationship, and marks the sense of community. In Asia, it is really a transaction between what is made public and what can be discerned as private that marks everyday experience. At the front, at the facade of it all is Confucian-inspired or should I say generated sense of PROPRIETY. This is the normative force that permeates even to the very core of artistic engagement. To be public with one's private life is scandalous and rude. And if you dont know it yet, being rude is worse than being publicly bad.
That is why I found it so refreshing to know that June wanted a larger show and not the pipsqueak of a space grudgingly given by the Guggenheim to her efforts. And that her selection had to be trimmed by the stakeholders of the event, and that she has a personal knowledge of the artists themselves....no constructed professional distance here. (She even considered my work as well, which is quite generous)
I had to do a French exit and leave the event unnoticed (a craft perfected by Bobi). As I walked into the chilly, late winter evening in Queens and into Manhattan, I begin to understand why this residency had to take place. It is often good to see one's position from a distance or as Kahlil Gibran once said that the mountain is seen clearer from the plain. With this distance, I can see where I am coming from, and ironically again, I feel more Asian in America as I felt more Filipino in Europe. This is what the contemporary world is all about.
Now it is only a matter of crafting engagements and constructing encounters.
---
Performance
I was in Queens for a whole afternoon yesterday, at the Bliss in Bliss art space on 46th and 43rd Ave. it is owned and run by a Filipino resident in NY, Ged Merino, a kumpare of Freddie Aquilizan. I was glad I went there as I have many insights at the opening, and met people I never knew I could connect to.
It was my first visit to Queens and since the 7 train wasn't running on weekends, I had to improvise and took the R train to Queensboro plaza where I took Vernon-bound shuttle and got momentarily lost in the middle of Long Island. I retraced my path by board same shuttle back to the plaza and took the 7 train that was running to Flushing and got off 46th Bliss St. Then thanks to the map and navigator app on my phone I was able to find the address, which was smack in the middle of a residential block.
I was first taken aback by the sight of the Queensboro bridge: its ugly to say the least and the area looks something like a place where thugs and the homeless could congregate. But as I learned later, looks can be quite deceiving: all that TV misrepresentation had to be purged before I could take a single step into anything. Fortunately Ive learned the art of being socially small in the Metro in Paris. I took no notice of people and they took no notice of me. If lost, look bored and upset.
Bliss on Bliss was something you can expect from an artist-run initiative. It is small, being the basement of the apartment building, yet it is charmingly rugged, authentic in its mishmash of drapes, knickknacks, studios and artworks. There was not much heating but the sheer number of human beings shuffling within this bowel of an art space provided its own warmth. Plus the alcohol and it was indeed really cozy. It was also refreshing to hear long conversations in Filipino...the vernacular does that to everyone stranded or lost or in exile. What is interesting here is that I do not know anyone in the crowd. Jeho Bitancor wasn't yet there but since I was tired I decided to sit through the five-piece repertoire of a jazz guitar-and-sax duo for close to an hour.
That musical performance was really good, and entertaining in most parts. Ive been a fan of jazz since the 90's but lost track when I began listening to grunge and then pop. I liked the thought of passing a wicker basket towards the end of the program as alternative to a ticket. You can give any amount you want that approximates your enjoyment and your willingness to support the artists. Later Ive learned how the flocking of artists from all over makes the scene competitive and difficult. It is not rare to find real starving artists in here, and this makes Andy Warhol's statement, "Think rich, look poor" a definitive slogan in this scene. Often when an artist makes it and achieves a breakthrough, there is a superstardom complex that robs the authenticity when the struggle is often won. I mean Basquiat suffered from that when his work was removed from the streets and into the galleries. I wonder if there is such thung asa middle field in the art scene of NY. Today Im off to see the big time galleries in Chelsea and MoMa. I want to witness what makes the art capital here tick from the top.
The show over, I felt intruding. I was already out of the door and ready to cross the street to Queens Boulevard when I bumped into June Yap, the curator-in-residence of the Guggenheim and formerly of the Singapore Art Museum. June and I met in Bandung and Jakarta in 2006 and as I reminded her of that she said, yes I remember your face. She was on her way to Rite Aid, a drugstore, to buy beer with Manny, a former UPCFA student who was a year behind me in college. Prior to this I chatted with Ernest Concepcion, whose work was part of the show and he introduced me to Ged. He told me Freddie was arriving in the evening. I asked him about sourcing local lumber for sculpture and he said he will ask around, and looked genuinely thinking of where he could point me to. I already said goodbye when I had to take it back when Jeho, Mideo, Kleng and Art Zamora were almost at the gate and invited me back into the basement gallery.
I was able to get information from Jeho, who is practicing his art fulltime in Jersey, of how the scene works and he was so anxious to know where he is located in the whole mess of the local Philippine art scene, the Singapore-centered regional art scene inasmuch as I was curious of his entanglements with the NY scene as well. I mounted Jeho's exhibit when I was still a curator and wrote about him in an exhibition brochure. He seems like a guy who knew what he was doing, got displaced and is now confused where his community lies. His involvement with Bliss and with Ged is a natural outcome as this space seems to be the only one that threshes the Filipino experience in New York. But it is really typical of all artists like Jeho (and also myself) reared in Bobi Valenzuela's paradigm of knowing one's context and community in artistic practice, although these concepts were not fully articulated years ago. Art in this realm of thought and living is all about sharing, provoking and engaging. Art is a form of existential reinforcement, one that makes the individual experience and narrative to be woven into the fabric of common vernacular history. In other words, art moves and is assimilated into the nebulous tsimis-world. In fact I think to be spoken of and about, is a secret normative desire of every Filipino. Fir good or bad. For fame or infamy.
While Jeho and I were discussing his work in the courtyard, June chimed in with her menthol cigarettes and her stories of battles with Guggenheim in organizing the show No Country. It was an insightful conversation as June intimated that her desire in organizing the event was a transactional device for Guggenheim to acquire South and Southeast Asian art. Good for Poklong and for Peewee to have their works bought by this cultural behemoth. But her intentions - not uttered in the board rooms - is not to promote Asian art but to inform the Americans that there is an independent, self-sufficient, and dynamic community of artists in Asia and that we are well. It was a curatorial subversion that left me laughing and amused. It would be something I would do, if I were a curator...and come to think of it...this is precisely my perspective when I came here. It was funny to understand what was intuitively clear and legible as an Asian artist is something of an exotic specimen still for the American culturati. I mean, this was the concept that we were critiquing in Bandung...the idea of consuming ethnicity as a late-capitalist folly, a post-colonial imperialist fantasy if you will. And the fact that there are multiple, non-public, vernacular coded ideas in the show living underneath the facade is SO Asian. I mean that is the indirectness that Ive intuited in Paris that characterizes cultural contacts in Asia...where the public face is constructed to be an exoskeletal structure to fit into the matrices of family, state, school, etc. The inner, deeper life is something opened up as a point of privileged relationship, and marks the sense of community. In Asia, it is really a transaction between what is made public and what can be discerned as private that marks everyday experience. At the front, at the facade of it all is Confucian-inspired or should I say generated sense of PROPRIETY. This is the normative force that permeates even to the very core of artistic engagement. To be public with one's private life is scandalous and rude. And if you dont know it yet, being rude is worse than being publicly bad.
That is why I found it so refreshing to know that June wanted a larger show and not the pipsqueak of a space grudgingly given by the Guggenheim to her efforts. And that her selection had to be trimmed by the stakeholders of the event, and that she has a personal knowledge of the artists themselves....no constructed professional distance here. (She even considered my work as well, which is quite generous)
I had to do a French exit and leave the event unnoticed (a craft perfected by Bobi). As I walked into the chilly, late winter evening in Queens and into Manhattan, I begin to understand why this residency had to take place. It is often good to see one's position from a distance or as Kahlil Gibran once said that the mountain is seen clearer from the plain. With this distance, I can see where I am coming from, and ironically again, I feel more Asian in America as I felt more Filipino in Europe. This is what the contemporary world is all about.
Now it is only a matter of crafting engagements and constructing encounters.
---
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