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ART WORLD/ NO:12 OCTOBER2015 RES NOVEMBER 2012 1 EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION RES NOVEMBER 2012 2 3 EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION NOVEMBER 2012 RES Relatively (and unjustly) unknown in many quarters outside of his native country, Achille Bonito Oliva is one of the finest brains art criticism has produced over the past 50 years. His extraordinary resume, that goes from organizing ground breaking exhibitions like ‘Contemporanea’ in the parking lot of Villa Borghese in Rome in the mid 1970s to co-creating with Harald Szeemann the Aperto section at the 1980 edition of the Venice Biennale, speaks for itself, not to mention the many books he wrote on a wide variety of subjects, including ‘The Italian Transavantguarde’, the publication/manifesto that hailed the return of painting as a fully acceptable practice following years of conceptual art domination, consecrating the talent of artists like Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria and Mimmo Paladino. A free spirit at heart, Bonito Oliva never settled for the safety of a steady directorial role in a museum, going instead for the society of independent minds – a move that if on the one hand cost him something in terms of visibility and reputation, on the other hand earned him a great degree of freedom. His tart comments on the current status of art writing and exhibition making in the interview he gave to Paola Marino in this issue, are incredibly refreshing, as well as reminiscing of a time when being an independent curator meant aspiring to break away from the institutional world rather than breaking in. To honour the wide palette Bonito Oliva worked over the years to discuss and represent the creativity of our times, this issue of RES confirms its commitment to offering the richest variety of contents to its readers. Clayton Campbell’s insight into Kiki Smith’s art, Max Weintraub’s reading of William Anastasi’s conceptual practice, Tony Godfrey’s introduction to the work of Geraldine Javier, and the conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ida Applebroog are only a few of the exceptional group of artists and writers who contributed to this issue. All you have to do to discover the rest is just flipping through the pages. Hope you will enjoy the reading. Michele Robecchi GERALDINE JAVIER TONY GODFREY WHY IS IT THAT IN SOUTH-EAST ASIA the most interesting installation art is often made not by sculptors or conceptual artists but by painters? The Filipina artist Geraldine Javier (b. 1970) is no exception. In a nation such as the Philippines where there is a big division between those who paint and those who make conceptual works, any artist who like her, can move across the division is especially interesting. Her background like many of her contemporaries lies in the conflict between the critique of art offered by the doyen of Filipino Conceptual Art Roberto Chabet, under whom she studied, and the dominant tendency of Filipino art in the Nineties, Social Realism. Her paintings seem, if not realist, realistically painted and narrative; what she has taken from conceptual art is less obvious: semantic complexity and a taste for making odd objects and installations. In the past few years Javier has made and exhibited collages, photographs, installations, sculptural objects, prints, paper pulp works, fabric works and produced a film. Given that her paintings are amongst the most sought after in South-East Asia it may seems strange she should devote so much time to other media – all of which far less desired by the market. Are there common themes underlying such diverse materials? It is normally assumed that because the Philippines is so intensely Catholic all artists there are obsessed with Catholicism – along with poverty and political corruption. However this cliché is not true of her – nor for that matter, of most Filipino artists. Rather, it is clear that her key themes are death and childhood. Less immediately obvious is that she is a profoundly sensuous artist and that her work has much to do with engaging with the world’s tactility. These three themes are evident in a painting such as ‘Blackbird Singing (diptych)’ of 2008. It is a painting ostensibly about childhood but the girl’s crumpled pose and the blackness of the birds implies the shadow of death. However the girl’s pose is disturbing in other ways: is she in reverie or post coital collapse? The weird juxtapositions of humming birds, potato chip packet and nursery frieze ducks hint both at something private and hidden, and a range of differing sensual experiences. Such a covert appeal to sensuality is heightened by the painting’s varying factures. We are presented not so much with a narrative as a situation. We don’t know what is going on, so we have to try and put ourselves in the picture and make up our own story. When asked, she replies tersely that is a tense painting made at a difficult time in her life. She has described herself as a story telling artist, but it would be more accurate to say she creates narrative situations, or situations waiting for a narrative. Many of her paintings and RES installations depend on the viewer’s recognition of some possible archetypal scene – often from childhood or puberty. NOVEMBER 2012 4 Oil oncanvas,60.5x152cm. Blackbird Singing(diptych), 2008 RES NOVEMBER 2012 5 Red Fights Back, 2012 Interactive installation Yesterday’s Gone, We’re Waiting for Tomorrow (The Happy Bones), 2013 Wood, resin, tatting lace, tree 213 x 91 x 122cm | Dog skeleton 61 x 91 x 61cm. | Human skeleton 91 x 46 x 46cm. RES NOVEMBER 2012 6 7 NOVEMBER 2012 The desire to involve and animate the viewer even more led her in 2012 to create an environment RES ‘Red Fights Back’ in which people could enter a forest glade (or a 20 square metre simulacrum of one) put on a red cloak, then play and pose with such archetypal objects as a sword, a crucifix, a wooden snake. Red’s cloak was however an elaborately tatted garment: to be in and participate was not just to role-play (and who one was role playing was uncertain: one was, but one was never quite Red Riding Hood), but also to be in a very tactile, sensuous environment: fabrics, wood, canvas covered with hammered leaves. (Her favoured way of working with fabric is tatting, a complex form of lacemaking.) As with ‘Blackbirds Singing’ this seemingly presents or stages a moment of decision: who is Red about to fight? With what weapon? Where should she go? It was also at least part humorous. The strain of quirky humour in her work should not be neglected: she may be a serious artist but she is never pompous. Remaking fairy tales such as Red Riding Hood is a familiar trope for women artists and writers (witness Marlene Dumas or Angela Carter). Javier has perhaps gone that extra step in actually making characters. A 2011 exhibition revolved around a woman known only as Madame A, who, exiled from Europe, settled in the Philippines and built a collection of ethnography, natural history and other curiosities. On the shelves of six cabinets were stacked over forty vitrines filled with embroideries, preserved insects, branches, knick-knacks, and frog skeletons. Typically one vitrine was entitled ‘Frog Pissing Competition’. The back of the cabinets, as a contrast to this collection of curious, sometimes macabre, sometimes humorous, sometimes poetic ensembles, constituted in effect a six part decorative painting of trees and birds. Life and nature here is being presented as the opposite to the darkness of death. In the third and final installation of this work in a late nineteenth century Manila townhouse the effect of melancholic and faded elegance was enhanced by adding an old portrait allegedly of Madame A, an old chaise longue and hangings of canvas covered by hammered leaves. Although people have often assumed she has an obsession with death and characterised her work as dark and gothic, such morbidity is always leavened with a perky sense of humour. A recent painting of a skeletal Death sitting chatting to Mary Magdalene does not suggest gloom so much as curious company. It is a wonderfully witty detournement of the familiar trope of Mary Magdalene sitting in the desert holding a skull contemplating sin and death (see Titian, Georges de la Tour, El Greco etc.) Are they discussing mortality or has Mister Death made a lewd or improper suggestion? The held hands suggest a surprising intimacy. There is no definitive interpretation. Why for instance are they meeting beside a dark pool: is this the entrance to the underworld with the waters of forgetfulness or is it just a good backdrop for the extraordinary red cloak? There is something strange about the scale of the figures in this the largest painting she has made: why has she made them so distant from the viewer? There is no foreground, only middle ground and background. For an artist who normally calls for empathy such a refusal is uncanny. It may be, as she herself says, speaking of the recent exhibition that this painting was made for, that ‘I think this is my way of putting an exclamation mark to that body of work that deals with death. This exhibition is not me talking about death as something to accept calmly, but as someone kicking and screaming and being basically scared.’ A consideration of death as she recently said leads to many other themes. ‘These include the loss of freedom, the loss of innocence, revenge, grief, resolution, acceptance, horror, humour.’ One could add beauty.