I spent two consecutive days doing gallery and museum visits with my fellow ACC grantees. And for these two days I was all over New York City.
I had begun packing my stuff last Friday, as I mentally prepared myself for the final week of work at the LMCC Art Center and of the few weeks that remain for my ACC program. I was indeed attempting to lay down some frames of closure to some of the problems Ive found some form of resolution to and among them of course was the dichotomy that tore at the very core of my practice: the relevancy and legitimacy of my artistic practice. Yet even as I did not find a direct answer, I was able to examine the parameters of the anxiety surrounding the problem and found out, inadvertently and by accident, that the question was, even though articulated in reasoned arguments, was essentially an emotional one. The shadow that I have been trying so hard to pin down - almost through paranormal means but almost always through my sculptural work - turned out to be very underdeveloped Feeling/Sensation, if I reference the Jungian Myers-Briggs test. Having ignored processing feelings and sensations for the majority of my life due to their associations of pain, these aspects of my self have accrued into an alterego, a shadow; curiously these found an outlet in my artistic working mannerisms and approaches. And overflowed, unfiltered, into the discourse that surrounded my awareness with a tension, akin to aggression versus concept-driven art. I was not really looking to forge a new theoretical approach in framing my work (that is easy), but I was having difficulties expressing my desire to make people accept them and thus establish their relevance.
The desire to be accepted was being channelled into the desire to be relevant. The first is a personal matter that needed articulation and the second is a discursive and contentious stake that can only be addressed in the engagement of the work with the community and space it seeks to gain value. And that is knowing how to locate oneself in the politics of space.
Interestingly enough the loosening of the entanglements of my feelings and my aesthetic propositions found their stage when I decided to join Jeff Leung and others to see an exhibit opening at Interstate Projects in Bushwick, Brooklyn. In a chance meeting, Jeff introduced me to Madeleine and Clinton, two artists working in Brooklyn and living within a community where artists have their studios, lofts and workspaces in proximity to each other. Madie is a HongKong-born New Yorker, and unaware I was at that moment, I already her at Tung Pang's Dont Miss Me Party in John Street. (We discovered that later over dinner). Clinton is an American abstract painter, who according to Jeff, used to do projects under Sol Lewitt, although this is still vague at the moment for me. But in the course of our conversations, especially over the subject of strange food, and into the paranormal, we discovered an uncanny common ground: we both work from Jungian theories. (Which Jeff couldn't also believe since he also began to read Jung coming to New York a month ago). And what was more surprising was we were both working on the concept of the Shadow from different artistic persuasions and disciplines. While I approached the subject by means of hand-made objects, traditional crafts and figurative iconography, Clint was able to paint using gestures and layers, and by channeling the energy of his own unacknowledged darkness. But we were both using art as means to a goal: integration and balance of the psyche.
After visiting Fuchs gallery in the Bushwick studios and having a "non-Asian" dinner at Madie's insistence at an Italian restaurant near Graham St, Clint offered his stock of beer to us at his place. Over at his apartment I was able to see what the living quarters of local artist would look like. (And I understood what Jeff said that the environs and models of artists' spaces in Brooklyn reflected those of the same with Asian artists living in the metro.) After sharing ghost stores and encounters with apparitions, Clint pointed out that these images - although fecund with the dark mass of the unknown shadow - are projections. And that I adjoined, was the starting point of my own work: I was trying to give shape and body to these projections so I can handle them concretely as a form of Shadow Work. Clint on the other hand, does a form of shadow work by calling out to the spirit of his Anima and by channeling the energy of Her presence, he paints, sans images. We spoke on the Myers-Briggs typology and noted the polarity of our types.
If that wasn't strange coincidence enough, I have to say that the one work that drew me in the exhibition in Interstate was a supposed project to create a "Psychoanalyst Park" attraction on Coney Island. Though that project was taking off from Freudian theories, I cannot but help thinking that unconsciously I was being guided to consider the Mind, not its constructs, as the subject that had significance at the moment.
Could it be possible, that what appeared to me as a contention of aesthetics was actually the dynamics of psychic compensations: the dynamics of projection, acknowledgment and integration to forge a balance? To discover another person like Clint who was working the same problem as I am but with different perceptual sets and skills - made me reconsider this. Brenda Fajardo once told me a decade ago that most Filipino artists tend to be of the Extrovert-Intuitive-Feeling-Sensation type. Perhaps, Roberto Chabet (An Introverted-Thinking-Perceptual-Judging type) was indeed bound to happen as a matter of balance. (As Clint said that Conceptual Art, Minimalism and Color Field were bound to happen in the trajectory of art practice from Duchamp.) I mean, I begin to be hopeful, that art and its institutions and practices and works operate from within promptings of the various dimensions of the Psyche.
It looks like the storm is over in my soul.
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