Ronaldo Quiocho Ruiz and the Performative Eye:
Works from 1992-2005
By: Reuben Ramas Cañete
Ronaldo Quiocho Ruiz was born to a peasant family in 1971 at the crowded fishing town of Navotas. Moving to his mother's hometown of Aparri, Cagayan for his grade school studies, he returned to Malabon to finish his high school studies. Ruiz was an active, if indifferent, classroom artist. His father wanted him to take up Engineering after he graduated from high school in 1989, but due to financial constraints, wasn't able to enroll. It was his fascination for illustration art and punk music, however, that primed him to contemplate on an artist's life. With its nihilistic rebelliousness and anti-establishment values, punk music glorified subversion and self-gratification, "cool" themes that Ruiz would imbibe in his youth. His take on punk band posters would get notice from a friend taking up Advertising at the nearby University of the East-Caloocan City, and he invited Ruiz to enroll.
As a student, Ruiz was active on three campus organizations: Buklod Sining, the organization of Fine Arts majors; and the League of Filipino Students (LFS), the radical leftist student organization. Being a campus populated mostly by working-class students, UE Caloocan was a battleground between contending ideological forces during the Eighties and Nineties. This mélange of contradictory pulls (self-sacrifice in the name of the country; contribute to the downfall of the established capitalist-imperialist order; and artistic self-expression and individual creativity) would yield interesting results on the impressionable Ruiz. With punk music ringing in his ears, and the plight of the urban poor a part of his daily existence, Ruiz resemanticized his developing aesthetic to achieve two goals: to progress in one's material condition in order to avoid want; and to performatize the anger and frustration that goes with the poverty and helplessness that one is escaping from. The first necessarily came with the second, for only through (self) capitalization and material production could a discourse of deprivation be 'staged' in the most sacrally legitimated space possible, the Artworld.
But first, Ronaldo the aspiring artist needed a reputation, and the student art competition was a key Manila artworld trope to further this process. His first modest win, an honorable mentioned at the on-the-spot competition at Tondo's Santo Niño Church in 1990 (for a painting that concentrated on shanty houses rather than the main theme itself, the church), would cement his resolve to remain in the artworld system. Subsequent paintings, done as either pieces for the various student competitions like Metrobank or PLDT, or as standard "plate" pieces, would dwell on the native as a theme, which Ruiz highlights with wide oval eyes, round heads, and native garb.
Another strategy was the agit-prop "impromptu performance" tactics that were common to both leftists and far-rightists: unrehearsed and illegal public performances done mostly within the UE campus quadrangle and men's comfort rooms during its Fine Arts Foundation Day. A particular impromptu performance in 1992 was noteworthy. Here, Ruiz displayed his acumen for appropriating rituals of his native Cagayan culture, particularly the atang-atang, or "sacrifices for the spirits" done mostly throughout the Ilocano-speaking part of Luzon. Caking himself with fresh mud, Ruiz offered his body in the middle of the UE quadrangle as a conduit for healing the land-and by implication, naming the invisible conquerors that have decimated the environment. He subsequently expanded this theme in another, now legitimated performance at the now-closed Museum of Philippine Art (MOPA) during the exhibition "Looking Forward, Looking Sideward," using discarded flowers from the Malabon Public Cemetery as his installation/commentary on environmental degradation in the city.
In another vein, his contributions as a street muralist to rallies organized by LFS (1992-94) made him aware of two aspects that shaped empowered forces battling for supremacy on the streets: the dominance of red, and the pedagogical-if not heuristic-application of human figures in defined poses and states of expressive agitation. The speed, urgency, and representational requirements with which he had to produce these murals also instilled upon Ruiz the discipline and necessity of engaging the human figure as a device in aid of an idea: the individual figure as metaphor for society; and genre as allegory of the 'universal' conditions of humanity.
These various-and varied-forms of student artistic production would also serve as crucial vehicles that Ruiz would continue to mine in the subsequent years. That the resulting body of work is heterogenous is already an index of the complex processes of working out a strategy of naming not a Self, but Selves: multiple personalities working in various aesthetic trajectories that, when seen in the monocular vision of Modernism, becomes anathematic, chaotic, "unfocused," and "unlearned." And yet, the history of Modern Art also reveals the ruptures upon which its own search for authenticity and autonomy results in subversion, resistance, and revolution. This is the case especially for avant-garde Performance between 1909-1924, when artists like Filippo Marinetti, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Oskar Kokoshka, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and George Grozs explored the outer regions of aesthetic sensibility, and railed against the stasis of the artworld's capitalistic status quo. The nihilism and autocratic nature of Western Performance, however, is mediated and transformed into a participatory and ritualistic aesthetic by Filipino performers, perhaps anxious of the loss of democracy and-ironically-nativity during the Martial Law years. Hence, a synthesis of consensuality, expressiveness, anarchism, and a fundamentally aching sense of self-searching, is palpable among the post-EDSA avant-garde.
Graduating after a series of schooling gaps caused by lack of tuition funds in 1994, Ruiz set off to find work in the most profitable place possible for a young Filipino graduate: the deserts of the Middle East. His two-year stay as a graphic artist at a Riyadh, Saudi Arabia-based company (1994-1996) would also renew a long-standing struggle within his psyche: to have a comfortable-if mediocre-existence as a corporate animal, or to be his own animal. In his lonely existence, populated only by fellow Filipinos furtively constructing a semblance of ethnosociality (gambling, Christian prayer services, liquor-drinking) in a land that is the very antithesis of these ideals, Ruiz finally rediscovers Modernist alienation and angst. His previous "native" painted figures are recomposed (illegally-depicting the human figure in art is a criminal offence in Saudi Arabia) into pained, wide-eyed individuals whose very muscular sinews burst with linear tension, suffused in the red of death/life.
Crucially, Ruiz's understanding of the dynamics of overseas labor, which he was an integral by-product of, also connected with his resolve to depict the evils of his times. Concentrating on its victims, the overseas contract worker (OCW), Ruiz begins a process by which human figures are depicted as commodities: products of an age where global capitalism, allied with neo-colonial inefficiency, forces the migration of skilled labor to unwelcoming lands where they are needed. Close behind them, and deepening the despair, are unskilled laborers whose other talents (domestic work, singing, dancing, sex) are valued not so much for their quality as for their quantity: cheap, disposable, and by the dozen. Constructing a unitary scheme of individuals contorted into a square-shaped canvas, which is then repeated as a grid, but with individual poses and expressions marked on each person. Ruiz expands his repertoire by constructing series of human figures stuffed into various oddly shaped clear glass jars and bottles arranged in a cupboard (1997-98). Named the Kinahon series (1996-1999), the metaphor originates from the ubiquitous balikbayan box that is the eagerly-anticipated item of exchange for the departed relative, stuffed with various newly-bought or recycled/picked-from-the-dumpster items. Simultaneously, Ruiz also invests his figures with a stylized native-ness that repeats and reinforces the identity of the performer as "Filipino:" brown skin, wide oval eyes, thick lips, flat noses, and robust bodies. At certain occasions, he even ciphers them with an exoticized skin of Pintado tattoos.
Ruiz's permanent return to Manila in 1996 allowed two things to occur simultaneously: to work at a 'day job' as a visual merchandiser for the Giordano Company (1996-1998) and subsequently Bobson Jeans Company (2000-2003), thus fulfilled material expectations of him by his extended family; and to enact his painting vocation, eyeing the occasional art competition to gain more leverage. Bagging the Juror's Choice Award at the AAP Annual Art Competition in 1996 (for Bagahe) and 1997 (for Sexportation), Ruiz would convincingly be conferred artworld legitimacy upon his winning a Juror's Choice Award at the 1997 Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards with Human Smuggling-all three awards courtesy of works from his Kinahon series. Two more competition awards would cement this artworld interest in Ruiz's figurative work: Best Entry at the 1998 AAP Centennial Painting Awards (for Reshuffled Identity); and Juror's Choice at the 2000 Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards (for The Master).
In between Reshuffled Identity and The Master, however, another strain was being mined. Not content with merely depicting the price for exporting labor overseas, Ruiz sets out to visualize the awesome galaxy of human oppression and suffering from within and without, based on his experiences of life, and love. In his first solo exhibition, Kinahon (1999), Ruiz clears the decks of his boxed but otherwise unharmed figures, and focuses on sexuality, pain, and physical suffering meted out by living in the big city. The same doe eyes now gaze out of angular, lengthened faces, featuring youngish lives spent crammed inside box-sized rooms, or sprawled out on the sidewalk. Bodies are shown on sale, and dismembered as an act of consumption at the sex bar, or engulfed by the hypocrisy of abused love heaped upon a suffering partner.
By his second solo exhibition, Naapges (2000), Ruiz displays an even more focused attention on the very act of inflicting pain on the body. Young, male bodies are shown frontally or in back profile, lacerated by whip marks or bullet holes, silent vignettes that recalls the bodies of penitentes displaying themselves in front of an audience, performing their role of the sufferant as if caught in an endless looped cycle of the Good Friday Passion. In addition, the rendition of the figure undergoes a dramatic change: from the stylized Expressionistic coloring, exaggerated features and surreal treatment of his 1998-1999 paintings, Ruiz concentrates on a naturalistic rendering of brown skin and highlighted 'native' facial features that points towards his most technically demanding painting period between 2000-2002, that of naturalistically depicting the "alienated young Filipino urban male"-his homuncular clone and alter ego-that began with Naapges and continued in subsequent solo exhibitions eK-se ku "shun" (2001), and Love/Lust (2002).
Tellingly, Ruiz's artistic production did not stop with painting alone. Between 1998-2002, he had continued undertaking Performances as his "avant-garde productive aspect," that would still enable him to reconnect to the nexus of ambivalence that continued to constitute his aesthetic outlook. Most of these Performances took off from the same vein as his paintings: the experiences of pain, alienation, and death as a modern transnational worker; the continuing social violence within the nation as a result of the AFP-NPA/MILF war; as well as the social impact of poverty resulting from state corruption and collusion with lending/trading states. Undertaken as an opening night "happening" within his solo exhibition spaces, Ruiz's 1998-2002 performances are webbed with paintings, installation, and video to produce a contemporary avant-garde version of the Wagnerian Gesamkunstwerk (an agglomeration he calls "painstallaction"), consistently underwritten by the themes of confinement, pain, alienation, annihilation, and-as a counterpoint-lust.
Thus, in Kinahon, he performs Bagahe, where he has himself wheeled into the Ayala Museum by an assistant while double-packed inside a balikbayan box, and then proceeding in breaking himself free, with a symbolic participation of the audience (threading strings from punctures in his plastic inner wrapping, which are picked up by audience members, and then at a signal pulled to liberate the artist from within). In Naapges, he enters the Boston Gallery carrying an attaché case, opening to reveal balikbayan plastic packaging filled with ice, a bloodied doll, and photos of salvaged and unidentified/missing persons. He then proceeds to wear a skinned pig's face, after which he carries in his mouth a pig's tongue, and having it sliced by members of the audience. He ends the performance standing in the icy water inside the suitcase and screaming. In eK-se ku "shun," Ruiz collaborates with two former UE students in a performance at West Gallery Megamall involving frontal nudity and tongue piercing-clear allusions to homoeroticism and sadomasochism. Finally, in Love/Lust, Ruiz enacts the politics of heterosexuality and birth control with a performance involving audience contributions to an installation at the Boston Gallery, comprising a light box table, displays of pig's hearts sealed in glass jars, and thousands of small dolls through which Ruiz gingerly steps through to enshrine the said audience contributions at the center of the installation.
As one can observe, installation, allied with performance, becomes a fundamental aspect of Ruiz's avant-garde production, and one that is also embedded in his artistic biography as early as 1992. Finding its subsequent articulation in Ruiz's grid-like boxed constructions of his 1996-97 paintings, it finds its first full expression as a major production in Iatangan Tau Dagiti Kararua (Let Us Give Offerings to the Spirits), an installation at the defunct Junk Shop Gallery in Cubao in 1998, which utilized masks made from sawdust and construction shovels, as a ritualized memorial to victims of unexplained disappearances. Continuing this theme as a series, Ruiz utilizes masks, shovels, rubber gloves, and acrylic paintings in Desaparesidos (2001) at the British Council Library. For the eK-se ku "shun," exhibit, Ruiz also integrates installations with his paintings, in the form of disembodied hands (taken from mannequins) placed on tall stands, and an armless female mannequin adorned with dragonfly wings made of computer circuit boards. The notion of dismemberment and disembodiment, complicit to the production of social violence (an artistic concern traceable as far back as Goya's Disasters of War etchings), is central to these installations. In addition, the utilization of electronic technology, like circuit boards, microphones, video monitors, and projectors, also elide to its dehumanizing and intrusive and pervasive aspect. It is also noteworthy to add that Ruiz's work experience at Giordano and Bobson had inadvertently facilitated a transfer of technology and display concepts from the advertising world to "enrich" the avant-garde art world, not unlike strategies enacted by artists whose prior vocation was into advertising, such as Andy Warhol in the early-1960s, or Barbara Kruger in the mid-1980s.
By extending his avant-garde output into a rarified global art world trope, in the form of participations to national and international installation-performance art festivals between 1999-2005, Ruiz assured his continuous performativity as a member of a now consciously global avant-garde, while still retaining the material mobility afforded by an indulgent but nevertheless increasingly tenuous corporate post. At the Australian Perspecta '99 in Sydney, Ruiz collaborated with Yuan Moro Ocampo in an installation-performance titled Iatangan Tau Dagiti Billit (Let Us Give Offerings to the Birds), which treated the issue of environmental awareness as a matter of renumeration, using mechanical birds caged in bamboo baskets, and then hung at the eaves of the Art Space, within the context of a ritualistic offering based on the atang-atang. In addition, Ruiz also performed Trust as an Artist-In-Residence at the Art Space Sydney (1999), which dealt with sexuality and violence, using luminous condoms, rubber gloves, talcum powder, found objects, and flashlights. At the Asiatopia International Performance Art Festival in Bangkok (2000), Ruiz performs Maleta, which continued the theme of trans-portable pain and dismemberment at his Naapges performance. At the Nippon International Performance Art Festival in Tokyo (2001), Ruiz adapts his Bagahe to the appropriate setting, complete with a Japanese-issue balikbayan box.
For the 2003 "Densities: Making Sense of Dense Cities" Installation Project at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), Ruiz is assigned a container van as his installation space, and produces Haannak Makaanges (I Cannot Breath), where his imagery of ladders, symbolizing the social stratification and relentless drive to go upward, becomes a dominant element. This motif was maximized effectively for two different installation-performance projects, also in 2003, Agum-umok (Nesting) at the Bagasbas International Eco-Arts Festival in Daet, Camarines Norte; and Upo-Opo (Sit, Yes Sir/Madam) at the First Bulacan Art Festival in Pulilan, Bulacan. With Agum-umok, Ruiz deploys a vastness of scale unprecedented in his work, as he assembles with the help of a local community of volunteers a series of tall ladders (up to 12 meters) stuck vertically, and a central wooden platform on 7,500 square meters of beachfront as the site of his performance dealing with the depletion of the sea's resources. In Upo-Opo, he piles discarded school chairs into a rickety tower fronting the Pulilan Municipal Trial Court, allowing the townspeople to re-experience their memories of these chairs as schoolchildren. His offbeat performance at Pulilan, 2Tuté, turns performativity on its head (not to mention a subconscious acknowledgement to the work of Josef Beuys and Vito Acconci) by mimicking the colors and actions of a pet dog leashed to him named Tuté while both casually strolled about in the streets-another takeoff of the ambivalence of power relations transposed to a linguistic setting. These productions, memorable for their integration of avant-garde concepts and the necessity to reconnect to a social context in both production and display, would ultimately garner for Ruiz the crucial artworld recognition sought by every young artist, the CCP Thirteen Artists Awards of 2003.
Ruiz's decision to resign from his corporate job in late-2003 to concentrate fulltime on art making resulted in two crucial changes in his production: the first was a continuation and expansion of performance as a key medium that continues his avant-garde output, that included not only solo performances, but more importantly, expands into performance collectives; and the transition of his visual art from a naturalistic figuration to a highly minimalist abstraction. The first change was brought about by the already prevalent practice of soliciting assistants for his performances in the late-1990s, which also served as impromptu "workshops" for these younger artists to learn key concepts of Performance from Ruiz. One can also note that Ruiz's tendency to work with a group of performance artists in "collaborative projects" started as early as his UE student days, when, as a founding member of Buklod Sining, his impromptu performances would be mimicked by younger members in subsequent Foundation Day events, leading to further collaborations. His advocacy for 'collective anti-commercial artistic expression' in the campus (no doubt informed by his experience with LFS) would also continue when he continued to serve Buklod Sining in his capacity as an alumnus-adviser throughout the Nineties.
By 2002, Ruiz had been joined by young performance artists like Kleng de Loyola, Jevijoe Vitug, Mideo Cruz, Boyet de Mesa, and Mitch Garcia in his various performance projects. Ruiz decided, in the spirit of his Buklod Sining involvement, to convene an informal series of performance events called Tupada. A Tagalog term referring to the illegal street cockfight, Tupada became a series of well-advertised, but nonetheless unregulated (in the sense that official permits were often never solicited to perform, say, in public places; and more crucially, that each artist was not prevailed upon by its convenors to conform to a general performative regimen) events where each member of the grouping basically "did their own thing" within a generally loose thematic framework, united only by a common performative space-time continuum.
Currently totaling 41 performances (held in such disparate sites as the Rizal Park, the Main Gallery of the CCP, SM Megamall, the Podium, the Pasig City Museum, the UP Faculty Center, and the Philcoa pedestrian overpass), the Tupada collective demarcates a significant practice that contravenes the traditional idea of Performance as 'staged.' Rather, it resignifies Ruiz's own performative aesthetic of subverting dominating surveillance systems utilizing a provisional, unformatted and consensual form of critical production-making do with the intestices provided by the inability of the law/artworld to either police its space or digest its protesting players.
This sardonic re-amplification of contra-mimicry, on the other had, is now juxtaposed with a visual art output that integrates itself within the metropolitan-oriented space of the ultra/late Modern, an act of schizo-utterance that can only be pulled off with a constancy of aesthetic experience that only someone with Ruiz's background can manage convincingly. Manifesting itself as early as his student-era paintings of expressionistic color-fields using watercolor or linear minimalism using acrylic (1992-96), Ruiz's introduction to Abstraction was neither haphazard nor untutored, for he had Florencio Concepcion as one of his teachers in UE. Concepcion's own aesthetic preferences for chromatic ambivalence, textural contrasts, and minimal purism, which he shared with fellow UE alumni Philip Victor, Lao Lianben, and Gus Albor, formed a parallel school of Abstract practitioners that challenged the dominance of the Diliman School (Constancio Bernardo, Jose Joya, Bobby Chabet, Nestor Vinluan, etc.) in the Manila artworld-an appeal to an essentially East Asian minimalism that was to find increasing resonance with Ruiz as the new millennium dawned.
'Abandoning' Figurative Art, therefore, was neither done unpleasantly nor with seeming haste, but with a sharp break from an output he felt he had exhausted into another that beckoned to him like a luminous, virgin world based on a trace memory from his tutored past. To be sure, antecedents and preliminary groundwork are evident in the 'painstallactions' he mounted for Naapges and Desaparesidos, in particular, wall installations of acrylic on paper paintings in gray, blue, white, and black, that increasingly relegated the outlines of Ruiz's recognizably 'nativized' human face into a ghostly, translucent phantasm, bereft of solidity via its minimalist tonal wash, and overdetermined by dark, oozing drip marks and bullet-like holes.
With his appropriately titled 2002 solo exhibition "Hi Risk" at the defunct Red Dot Gallery in Legaspi Village, Ruiz's entirely abstract output is shown for the first time in public. Focusing on heavy textural patterns utilizing acrylic medium, he demarcates mostly circular forms floating on a squarish plane, its composition suggestive of the microcircuitry found on computer processors, motherboards, and digital network systems, but utilizing a bright palette of emerald green. By his 2003 solo exhibition "Code Red" at the Kulay Diwa Gallery, Ruiz's abstract output had expanded and unified the motifs first introduced in "Hi Risk," utilizing a discourse of technology-as-dangerous power. Named after a malicious computer virus that originated from mainland China, the "Code Red" series amalgamates his use of digital technological forms with a compositional strategy that reminds one of classical Sung Dynasty calligraphic paintings from the Chan School of Buddhism, which is the direct ancestor of Japanese Zen: whorls, circles, squares, and dramatic comb-like brushstrokes (accented by the acrylic texturizer medium) are arranged into grids and counter-pointed schemes in rectangular vertical or horizontal panels, looking like electronic landscapes finished entirely in red and black. With the circle as his primary form, Ruiz slides easily between several meta-languages that demarcate/name this shape in accordance with its normative associations: symbol of perfection and wholeness; perimeter of a besieged/besieging body; fortune and good luck; malevolence and death; classicism and modernity; order and chaos.
In his mid-2004 solo exhibition "Game Over" (at the West Gallery, Ayala Glorietta 4), Ruiz expands on these formal devices and the general theme of appropriated technology, formulating a series of polished abstracts in red, black, gold, silver, and copper brown, that continue the use of contrasted main motifs of square-versus-circle forms, whose rigidity is softened by gestural lines and wipes that cross over their demarcated bodies. Alluding to the mass appeal and simulacral power of the computer video game, "Game Over" traces its ancestry to Ofelia Gelvezon Tequi's color viscosity etchings of the End of Days, fusing medieval art and pinball machine formats to convey a sense of randomness and agency in the enactment of doom. In the hands of Ruiz, the Apocalypse becomes an impersonal, minimalist but primal force that utilizes the very form of its materiality as a cipher of destruction, fuelled by human greed, and preventable only by the act of realizing one's own annihilation in the pursuit of the other's erasure.
The 2002-04 abstracts convey a consistent development of the theme of advanced technology co-existing with traditional media, and imposes as its dialectic the idea of technology as both benign and malevolent simultaneously, depending on its application as either beneficial to intellectual and material progress, or destructive in its capacity to cripple the wired world with a single keystroke. The object of attacks by the "real" Code Red virus (reality in the digital realm being always a nebulous fact), military command centers in the United States, also bespeak of the always intruding realm of the political and economic even in this most supposedly formalist of devices, and reminds us of the historical circumstances by which imperial power has configured/performatized social and aesthetic relations between nations. On the other hand, the relationship between agency and structure, as implied by "Game Over," also overdetermines its affect through the enactment of performance as the stabilizing sign, its pre-determined dialectic enforced by the willingness to play a role, or enflesh a position, in this case, the existential performative extended by the encoded power of technology.
The 2004 abstracts continue the motif of technology as a discursive effect of power relations, notably in the solo exhibitions "Virtual World" (Renaissance Art Gallery, SM Megamall) and "Wired" (Big & Small Art Gallery, SM Megamall). Whereas the pieces of the former continue Ruiz's older concern of the alienating effects of the urban metropolis (signified by its grid-like impersonality), the latter fully immerses itself in the uncertain nexus of interconnectivity-of identities flowing and ebbing from one source to the next via its webbed existentiality, a consciousness formed and bounded not by one body, but by several wired together, a being-ness whose existence is dependent upon its very multiplicity. Motific introductions are also introduced in "Virtual World" that are expanded in "Wired," such as the use of long spaghetti-like abaca fibers Ruiz discovered in a wholesale store in Divisoria. On the other hand, "Virtual World" also continues motific strains left over from exhibits as far back as Naapges, such as the vertical drip, or the spermatozoa-like gestures seen in "Red Code."
The defining quality of the "Wired" pieces, though, is its format: the circular panel, which moves from a mere motif to a major structure. Theorized by Ruiz as the Surveying Eye (literally inferred from the shape of the camera lens), the circle also continues its previous performative as a multilingual sign, confusing/capturing its audience like schools of fish ensnared by the bright lights of a trawler. Its tropical coloration of yellow ochre, crimson, viridian, and metallic blue certainly seems to enact a hypnotic effect, as the audience looks into the Eye and is drawn by its Gaze. The interconnectivity inferred earlier also reinforces an "identity ambivalence" (since identification is presumed to be singular and bounded, not plural and networked) that concludes the theme of technology as a site that refunctions power relations.
With "Refreshed" (Art Center, SM Megamall), Ronaldo Ruiz enters his thirteenth year of artistic production, and his third devoted entirely to abstraction. A summary of the motifs that he has exposited and developed since "Hi Risk," it concentrates on the problematics of scale (larger works sized 5' x 5,' 5' x 8,' and an array of 100 panels of 1' x 1' each), while it resemanticizes the grammar of his abstract language: the bright green of "Hi Risk" fuses with the dark red of "Code Red;" the spaghetti wiring of "Wired" is layered on top of the textured deposits of both "His Risk" and "Code Red," and the minimalist disposition of "Code Red" fuses with the linear progression implicit in "Virtual World." This most recent exhibition is the opportunity for Ruiz to pause and take stock of his artistic progress. At thirty-four years old, Ruiz is still a young artist by the standards of the Manila/global Artworld, and hence ranked on the lower-median scale of the legitimation hierarchy. Nonetheless, this is also the point in time to ponder on the implications of his aesthetic performance over the past one and a half decades as a series of strategic engagements that outlines an alternative to the monolithic production of art.
Symptomatic of the breakdown of dominating discourses resulting from the failure to sincerely engage in the reciprocal relations of exchange implicit in hegemony, the pluralistic and multi-form production of Filipino artists since the mid-1980s (I have in mind Jose Tence Ruiz, Alfredo Juan and Isabela Aquilizan, and Wire Rommel Tuazon, to name a few) bespeaks of the inability of the art establishment in fomenting material-ideological conditions of artistic autonomy, despite the frequently-avowed protestations of the metropolitan-leaning avant-garde, and in alignment with the post-EDSA overhaul that attempts to umbricate national artistic "progress" through a nativist turn to the 'sources and influences' of Philippine art/society. The rise of Performance Art as a cathartic native ritual (those of Roberto Villanueva, Santiago Bose, and Rene Aquitania, for example) best exemplifies this turn, one that continues in Yuan Moro Ocampo's own appropriations of both Filipino and Southeast Asian religious rituals. However, in the intermeshing of Western concepts of artmaking, and the global dissemination of Western-originating avant-garde art production, both Performance and Installation in the Philippine context of the late Eighties/Nineties becomes hopelessly intertwined with local productive forces-and the indigenous dynamics that propel them-that hybridizes any output into a critical mélange, a questioning potpourri of ciphers and texts that raises its ambivalence to authenticity at the very moment that it pretends to perform it.
Thus, the consequent schizophrenia could only be resolved through the construction of the Self through repetitive performance. Jose Legaspi calculatingly exhibits his disdain for entrenched Philippine social establishments-and revels in his homosexual identity-by repeatedly reconstructing his own history as trauma, hatred, and desire in performance, installation, and "automatic drawing." In the case of Ronaldo Ruiz, it is in his reflections of the historical conditions of his nativity-race, class, and material status-that determines the metanarrative of performing his artistry, and on what linguistic terms they are elucidated. The concerns of an emergent young Filipino urban-based adult originating from the impoverished class, in the form of dreams, aspirations, fears, and memories, are spoken through painting forms, enacted as Performance Art, and constructed as Installation.
Viewing the works of Ronaldo Quiocho Ruiz, therefore, we literally gaze into the Eye of the Performative, the continuing player of the disruptive discourse through which a pluralistic, negotiated Philippine visual culture is in the process of being continually negotiated, reconstructed, dispensed, and deconstructed in a socio-historical space mediated by globalist/post-colonial conditions. This role/agency is provisionally named within the body of the personal, but is transacted across the body of the social through the medium of the aesthetic. No boundary, therefore, is spared. The interconnectivity of the relationships between artist, audience, and system guarantees the fluidity upon which the naming of a Self becomes temporally possible. The artistic body of work that arises from these conditions, therefore, is cast within the framework of the performative eye/I.
