ALTERNATIVE : X By Gina Fairley

EYELINE
ALTERNATIVE : X By Gina Fairley

One of the most over-used terms is ‘the alternative art space’. Alternative to what we might ask? Furthermore, how do we define ‘alternative’ today where a proliferation of blogs, zines and virtual spaces present the new ‘alternative’? Surely the sustained presence of the alternative space has become such a fixture of the contemporary art scene that it has become mainstream. This is the case in the Philippines.

In a country where there is no public institution committed solely to contemporary art, this alternative scene has shaped a generation of artists. It has become so ‘acceptable’ that a third of the exhibitions nominated for the prestigious Ateneo Art Awards since its inception have been drawn from ‘fringe’ venues. Just look at the 2006 line-up: Blacksoup Project Artspace with Wawi Navarroza’s photographs, Yason Banal’s digital prints at Silver Lens Gallery, and Jay Ticar and Bembol dela Cruz’s installations at Mag:Net. Similarly, Big Sky Mind Artist Project Foundation (BSM) and Green Papaya Art Projects (GP) have collaborated with foreign organisations like Australia’s Asialink, The Japan Foundation and the Asian Cultural Council, and have played host to a swathe of visiting curators over the years, most recently GP’s introductions resulting in Yason Banal and Jose Legaspi inclusion in Singapore Biennale 2006 and Nona Garcia for The 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2005) – endorsements that clearly legitimise their position.

One could argue that the modus operandi of these spaces - rejection of the institutional structure and art market – has indeed slipped into the same stream; alternative as ‘counter’ has been replaced by alternative as ‘extension’.

The X pedigree
Now in their second generation, these ‘Art Projects’ (the preferred Filipino term) are run by 25+ year-old artists who have a sense of responsibility to provide similar venues to those that ushered them into the exhibiting environment. These are typically X-U.P. artists (University of the Philippines) who grew-up with Third Space Art Laboratory, Surrounded by Water and BSM in the late 1990s. Today they are loosely referred to as Cubao X – a gulch of projects near the grinding heart of Manila’s suburb of Cubao, a five-layer intersection where streets swarm with ukay ukay (second hand clothing shops) in a fusion of fashion, graphic design, indie music and art. What may appear at first glance to be a disjunctive collection of subcultures scattered across Metro Manila, is so interwoven it is tighter than a French tapestry!

Simply draw a line from the mid-1970s and the activities of Roberto Chabet - artist, curator and teacher who nurtured the emergence of conceptual art in the Philippines - catapult to 1999 and the opening of BSM with the exhibition “Roberto Chabet: 300 Drawings”; to 2006 and Chabet curating projects for Future Prospects. It is a thread of connection over three decades that still has the contemporary art scene stitched up.

This ode to Chabet is just one tenet that has shaped contemporary Filipino art practice. In the post-Marcos era there was a desire to present a different voice from the high modernism promoted by The Luz Gallery (curiously now the site of alternative café+art venue Lumiere), which launched the careers of many artists under the patronage of Madam Marcos. The environment was pre-determined and it became necessary to create a fissure in the art scene. It occurred with Malate’s bohemian set centered around the bar+art venue Penguin, laying the path with artistic anarchy for the next generation.

Dilettantism and incubation
The artist-run space was embraced with the frenzy of a trend and attitude of “just go out and do it”, not fully cogniscent of the ripple. We saw The Junk Shop, Third Space Art Laboratory, Twisted Sun Gallery, Surrounded by Water, Big Sky Mind and Lupon open within the space of a few years. None of them exist today, however the artists that initiated these spaces, Lena Cobangbang, Geraldine Javier, Wire Tuazon, Katya Guerrero, Ringo Bunoan, Yason Banal, Eng and Russ Chan have graduated to fertilize a new crop to pick up where they left off. The crazy part is that at the ripe age of 30-something these artists are ‘burnt-out’, saturated by the activities of their own spaces. If you are lucky, that interest will be picked up and carried off-shore; if not, it is a tough task to reinvent yourself ‘post-art space’ and maintain that buzz in the local mainstream.

If we trace the lineage of one of the founders of Surrounded by Water (SBW), artist Geraldine Javier, we start to understand how interwoven the scene is. Opening in 1998, SBW moved to EDSA (1.) in 2000, the same year Javier made her regional debut in the exhibition ‘Faith + the City’ curated by Malaysia’s Valentine Willie Fine Art, a connection made through SBW. Javier went on to win the 2003 CCP 13 Artists Award (which Chabet started during his tenure at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines) and was awarded the 2004 Ateneo Art Award (awarded also to Luisito Cordero who went on to start Future Prospects). In 2006 she was included in Taksu’s “Emerging Fires” (Kuala Lumpur / Singapore) and had her first international solo with Valentine Willie. What’s apparent is that these alternative spaces act as the incubator for a vital contemporary art scene and provide the launching pad for young Filipino artists abroad.

This pacey-evolution however, is dangerously more about splash than professional development. Founder of Green Papaya, Norberto Roldan explains, “being alternative doesn't mean maintaining a shabby space and mounting sloppy exhibitions… the ‘alternative’ is really in our program. We did not establish GP to run counter with the established and commercial gallery system. We are more interested in looking at how we can work with the few professionally run galleries as partners in the development of a new paradigm for arts and culture management in this country... We subscribe to the more accurate definition of ‘alternative’ spaces [used] in Canada as ‘parallel initiatives’ to the existing structure.” (2.)

Roldan’s position raises an important point. Many younger Filipino artists are unable to contextualise their work or understand the complexity of the art historical references they use and, more often, the venues lack the maturity to expand upon that dialogue. It is a problem concurrent in many Asian centres where educational institutions err on the parochial, and artists don’t have access to reference material, or a culture of reading.

Spaces such as GP and Mag:net, which are managed by senior artists, provide an important balance to this independent scene. Here the whiff of dilettantism that we usually associate with artist-run spaces is replaced with slick presentation, professionalism, and in the case of GP, a probing international presence through exchange and forums. This is not a new concept. BSM’s “18th Avenue Artists Compound” provided a venue for dialogue and residencies, housing artists from Singapore, Australia, Jogjakarta and Koyoto, however GP delivers beyond the ‘back-shed’ approach, cognisant of museum practice.

Cubao X
Over the last two years, this alternative scene has become fractured. There’s a push/pull as the gulch of galleries at Marikina Shoe Expo - a historic strip-mall and home to shoe vendors - is expanding beyond this precinct, the sweep stretching as wide as Pasig with Cubicle, The Blue Room in Bangkal, The Theo Gallery, Lumiere and a.r.i.a.s. (artist run independent art space) in Makati, Barewall in Greenhills, The Living Room in Malate, and Mag:net in Quezon City, Katipunan and Makati. Significantly, the dialogue has moved beyond the UP-ring.

The downside is that Manila’s sprawling geography makes these spaces relatively impenetrable to outsiders. Coupled with a culture of SMS messaging - the main vehicle for disseminating event information – it encourages a kind of clubish clique, fuelling their unsustainablity.

What is interesting about Marikina Shoe Expo is that it presents a left wing version of ‘cultural malling’, the phenomenon that has taken over Asia placing the gallery in the mall. In the neighbouring suburb of Mandaluyong is Manila’s veteran Art Walk located at Megamall, and with impinging new developments in Cubao, the Marikina Shoe Expo stands as a defiant curiosity. In this one location we have Future Projects, Blacksoup Art Projects, Pablo Gallery, Chunky Farflung and Vintage Pop.

One of the more interesting spaces here is Future Prospects (opened 2005). Initiated by Luisito Cordero (a resident at BSM for two years), Gary-Ross Pastrana, visiting Japanese curator Mizuki Endo, Cocoy Lumbao and Lena Cobangbang (earlier involved with SBW), it shows quarterly exhibitions and is essentially an intersection between experimental music, performance, film and mix media – the usual suspects.

Having heard the hype surrounding this space, I wondered what made it so exceptional – was it just another alternative art space excited by its own re-invention of the wheel? At the time of writing, the exhibition showing “two packs of cigarettes & four cups of coffee” by Bembol dela Cruz and Ranelle Dial did have legs in a ‘grunge-banwagon- kind-of-way’. But then, these spaces don’t profess to be anything other than what they are. Like most Filipino art is was technically adroit, but it didn’t subscribe to the usual histories. It was about being urban, not Filipino, conditioned by a grunge culture.

Mix-media + MacDonalds
Today’s hybrid of alternatives has developed to a level not foreseen in the late 90s, and perhaps offers the most interesting intersection of contemporanities. Hybridity in this context doesn’t refer to the barrage of exhibitions as entertainment / incidental décor in a café experience, but offers a more conceptual link, fusing art + design shop, editing suite or magazine kiosk which fuel them financially and creatively. The most interesting case is Mag:net, a chain of galleries incorporated into magazine shops. As the first tenants in Makati’s Paseo Centre, along with MacDonalds, founder Rock Drilon was presented with the tension of these two readings of ‘pop’. It takes the historic précis of alternative spaces and updates it with a 21st c. slickness, blatantly placing hip culture within a quasi-franchised outlet. Alfredo Aquilizan hit it perfectly with his 2004 exhibition, where he removed the contents of the shop, arranged them as an installation in the gallery space and left the shop as a white cube. We also see an amusing version of this redefinition at Mag:net Katipunan, where the CR (the toilet) has become a gallery complete with a monthly program.

Pablo Gallery (opened 2005), run by architects Yo Garcia and Osie Tiangco, similarly explore these intersections. Many artists in this region work as graphic artists and, as a result, their work has a strong design element. We just need to look at the recent paintings of Kiko Escora and their urban chic reminiscence of an ipod advertisement. Pablo makes no excuse for these intersections and presents them with a refreshing honesty.

Raffy Iggnacio’s The Blue Room in Bangkal (opened 2005) chose the intersection of a thrift shop selling vinyl record and players; The Theo Gallery (opened 2004), like Future Prospects and also curated by Gary-Ross Pastrana, is a bar and alternative music venue. Alongside Mag:net, other interesting ‘alternatives’ that enter this conversation are: Carlos Celdran’s The Living Room, a ‘venue’ offered entirely as a blog and series of forums in his living room; Judy Freyha Sibaya, who as a performance artist uses her own body as an exhibition site, and ‘Manila Envelope’, a publication independently produced by advertising guru David Guerrero. It is a blatant intersection between accidental art, digital media and design, and has the immediacy of a blog or virtual gallery.

More than a fruit
From the furthest point left of field provided by Celdran, Guerrero and Sibaya, the place that allows such bold extrapolation is Green Papaya Art Projects. Founded in 2000 by Norberto Roldan and contemporary dancer Donna Miranda, GP’s history is complex like all these space, shifting curatorial direction, and locations. It is initiatives such as their Art Market (a laboratory confronting issues concerning art as commodity), Shoptalk (informal conversations among artists, writers, curators and collectors) and Amplified Assemblage, (regular music-spoken word-video screening events) which have yielded some of the most engaging experimental works in Manila today.

It has also provided a portal for visiting curators to engage with contemporary Filipino art. Between 2001 and 2005, GP was visited by curators Hilda Rodriguez (Havana Biennale), Valentine Willie (Valentine Willie Fine Arts), Holly Block (Art in General NY), Tomomichi Nakao (Fukuoka Asian Art Museum), Jorg Loschmann (Henrich Boell Foundation), Binghui Huangfu (formerly Asia-Australia Art Centre/Substation) , Roger McDonald (Arts Initiative Tokyo/Singapore Art Biennale), Ricardo Mosquera (New Museum of Contemporary Art NY), Paige Moud (Queensland Art Gallery), Low Kee Hong (Singapore Art Biennale), Masanobu Ishii, (Sezon Museum of Modern Art) and Ark Fongsmut (Bangkok University Gallery), and in 2003 was commissioned to produce an exhibition for the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. (3.)

This year executive director Manuel Chaves moved on and GP set up its first board, ushering it towards its next vision. Its residency + exchange program hosted the ‘Chasing the Whale’ project which included artists from Denmark, Turkey, Brazil, Thailand, Afghanistan, Japan and the Philippines, and it plans to collaborate with SLOT, an alternative venue in Sydney, with an exhibition-exchange series in 2008.

GP has proven that an ‘alternative’ space can be both professional and experimental. It is a model we can witness globally, from Singapore’s Plastique Kinetic Worms, to Hong Kong’s Para/site, to Indonesia’s established Cemeti Art House, where the ‘independent’ is feeding contemporary art practice, curatorial selection and biennale buzz.

Maybe it is premature to draw assessments of the ‘real’ impact these independent spaces are having in re-defining contemporary Filipino art, however they have clearly moved beyond a local engagement, and their absorption into off-shore programming, indiscriminately places them within a global mainstream.

NOTES:
1. Surrounded by Water was first located in Angolo, Rizal, EDSA is the infamous Edifanio De Los Santos Avenue where the People Power Revolution took place and slices Metro Manila from the bay to Quezon City.

2. & 3. Email interview with Norberto Roldan, Founder Green Papaya Art Projects, August 2006