source: realtimearts.net

Pinning down flux: writing and Philippine Performance
Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez reflects on Tama '06

Conceivably more than any other of the recent performance art pow-wows this side of the planet, Tama '06: Tupada, Action and Media Art, held in Manila and Pangasinan in March demonstrates the delicate, even schizophrenic relationship between ephemeral, time-based art and the scholarship that allows intangible actions to continue to exist in our imaginations.

Writing, in other words, has allowed the fleeting ghost of performances past to at least go on record. Perhaps that is tall enough order for a milieu that provides just enough room for actions to exist in what appears like a parallel universe, the flipside of which practically has no inkling that such things are going on in the first place. With the Philippines being a place where art of any sort still registers poorly in the minds of people dealing with the urgency of the daily grind, performance often comes across as a toss-up: self-indulgent acting-up, sardonic comic relief and in-your-face stagings before an extremely tight circle that follows these action marathons along their nomadic path.

A live art limbo?

Drawing from a motley crew of visual artists, writers, designers, sound artist/musicians, cultural workers, theatre, film, dance and new media artists, performance in the Philippines is still decidedly, if not passionately, marginal. As is the case where performance still continues to play at the fringes of the artworld, Tama and the group of artists filling up the roster of Tupada's events have plugged into the slowly but surely impressive muscle-building that seems to cut across several continents as far as artist-run-networks go. Juiced up on DIY fervour and minimal external support, Tupada (which translates as bootleg cockfight) at the moment seems to have settled on a guerilla pace manageable enough for its small core of Filipino artist-organizers. Having begun at a rather ambitious bi-monthly stride, the performance event series has since metamorphosed into intermittent gatherings of local artists punctuated by an annual international fete of sorts in sites ranging from public parks, university auditoriums, bar-cafes, pedestrian overpasses and the odd-one-out cultural centre/museum/gallery space. Despite its liminal status, the present strain of performance as practiced in the country reveals how validation has come through underhanded, sometimes backhanded attempts at public exposure, and a cultivated alienation vis à vis the market and state institutions.

Underpinned by an expressed dissatisfaction with what the artworld currently privileges yet opting to widen the art domain rather than working outside it altogether, these artists exist in a sort of indie-conceptual-activist purgatory where reception to their work wavers between kindred embrace and a cold shoulder. Not wishing to be tainted by, but still pining to stay within the ambit of art despite its conflated status in relation to the moneyed, rabidly individualist and unapologetically frivolous, they continue to work out their practices in a self-constructed limbo that opens up and closes off with seemingly intended ambivalence and randomness.

Getting organised

This tenuous stance is visibly illustrated by how 2 loosely organised artist collectives, New World Disorder and Ugat-Lahi, have emerged among the growing number of artists choosing to affiliate with Tupada and other parallel artist alignments which came before it. These were artists associated with the Philippine International Performance Art Festival (PIPAF), Baguio Arts Guild, Davao-based Katribu, Bulong, Big Sky Mind, Surrounded by Water, Third Space, Jean Marie and Cesare Syjuco's Art Lab, going all the way back to David Medalla and actions undertaken in Sining Kamalig, Penguin Café and the early days of the Cultural Center of the Philippines in the 60s and 70s. Both NWD and Ugat grew out of patently leftist inflected art practices though with decidedly different degrees of acquiescence to the impositions coming out of political pedagogic concerns. While NWD presents a clearer break with the dictates of collectivist aesthetics, Ugat-Lahi continues to play indispensable cultural armature to the national democratic movement. At this specific juncture, both enjoy some form of legitimisation with at least one of its members sitting as committee member on the government's art grant giving body and another cited as one of the Cultural Center of the Philippines' Thirteen Artists awardees.

Performance in words

Unavoidably this comes down to the readings and interpretations of performances that necessarily bring artists face to face with writers, critics, academics et al who are definitely a mixed bag themselves when they tangle with the market and the state. Leading up to Tama '06, the only other planned (more importantly, realised) encounter between artists and writers was during Ugnayan '05: The 4th Philippine International Performance Art Festival which took place across 2 platforms succinctly divided into live art and art dialogues. It is of course easy to understand why such verbal engagements would be pursued and viewed as beneficial in such a fiercely cutthroat field that often enough can be construed as an archetypal scenario of what theorist Shannon Jackson describes as He-Who-Is-Preoccupied-With-Meaning vis-à-vis She-Who-Is-Preoccupied-With-Making (Shannon Jackson, "Practice and Performance", Professing Performance, 2004). It is also in this context that, imaginably, some form of territorial bruising is bound to take place-classic tussles between intellectual critic-artist/writer-thinker-doer, boundary drawings between theory and practice, canonisation and resistance—none of which are today still seriously considered hard and fast categories, despite the continuing debates on how discourse figures in the way art is produced and received.

What does add a promising complexion to this mix is the increasing prominence of artists who can also write. And this is the case with Tama '06's roster that has Jevijoe Vitug, Allan Rivera, Vim Nadera and relative latecomers such as Kaye O'yek and Maki Calilung among others. Their emergence augurs the possibility of artists ably doing their own articulating rather than being merely subject to the often tangential interests of art-writers, academics and critics who may or may not have sympathetic agendas. That this is already happening is evident in Vitug's recent pronouncement on the way NWD's collaborative work plays a "crucial" role in "validating the language of performance art." As a case in point, Vitug displays an expressed consciousness of how his ilk are attempting to breach the traditional realms of art for subject matter yet still opt to produce work within spaces intended for art.

So again, it boils down to artists wanting to be visible but also wanting to have a hand in setting the terms for such re-presentations, where their performances simultaneously become acts of artworld disavowal but also constitute their ticket to trump up mileage for the artist jetset. This brings us to the question of who all of this work is directed at in the first place since, unlike early Philippine performances which were almost strictly undertaken in gallery contexts, this recent strain is unarguably a more decidedly public and populist-inflected sort.

In the end, all this tangling with visibility may still be construed as a capitulation to the always overreaching grasp of the mainstream artworld colluding with the crafters of written discourse. The final question that begs an answer though is: who will do all this reading?

3rd Tupada International Action Art Event: Tama '06, Manila and Pangasinan, Philippines, March 9-12