On Erotic Art and Intermittent Blogging

OOOps. My last entry was over a month ago (bad, bad blogger!). Outside the deadlines and gawain -related schedules in the real world, I realized that most of little free post-dinner time I had last August was instead spent on watching back episodes of Eureka, Meteor Garden, and Rome (i.e. consuming hours of story lines premised on science and imperialism, capitalist conceptions of love, and old-school power plays). Sus ginoo! Anyway, I'm making up for missed posts by sending some things I've written over the past two months. For a start, here's a copy of the exhibit notes for Ars Erotica, a group exhibition of Philippine erotic art. It opened last July 24 as the inaugural show at the Sison Art Gallery in Malate and was curated by Ling Quisumbing:

Ars Erotica (Erotic Art) centers in on the aesthetics of desire, of inciting to sexual anticipation and display. Ars Erotica brings together the works of sixteen Philippine visual artists: Ambie Abano, Poklong Ananding, Lena Cobangbang, Juan Ariel Comia, R.M. de Leon, Christina Dy, Mario V. Fernandez, Julie Lluch, Riza Manalo, Fernando Modesto, Christina Quisumbing Ramilo, Popo San Pascual, Norberto Roldan, Gerardo Tan and Mm Yu.

The said artists work in a range of diverse artistic media and even more diverse representational inclinations: from painting and sculpture to photography, printmaking and installation, from the representational or figurative to the conceptual. The works in the exhibition range from terra cotta and soap sculptures, to photographs and oil on canvas, and installation pieces.

The exhibit occurs the context of what has been usually described as a predominantly-Catholic society—although not one without its contradictions as manifested in the symbolisms of folk Catholicism and secular, often commercialized, representations of commodified bodies. These particular contradictions are reflected in the soap sculpture entitled Hand Stuck by Poklong Ananding. Anading fuses bits and scraps of used body soaps collected from different households since 2001 and casts them into a form taken from a found object: an amputated hand from a traditional Sto. Nino icon, holding the world. The work's inclusion in the context of Ars Erotica recasts its parody: further severing the form from the religious function of its mold and recasting it in a commercial and sexual light.

Other works, such as the painting entitled Awakening, by Mario V. Fernandez, sources its images or influences from historical depictions of eroticism, conjuring through the covert symbolism of his images a "a dialogue of myth and folklore to entice the sexual sense".

Also present in the exhibition are installation works that dwell on the erotic through dualities, concepts that straddle traditional divides. Black and Not Blue, an installation of a decorated pole reaching up to the ceiling by Christina Dy, fuses several intertexts in its choice of objects, motifs, and colors: bondage and performance, costume and craft, utility and sensuality. The site of erotic encounter (the pole) becomes the phallic object on display, clothed in motifs of bondage and femininity.

Christina Quisumbing Ramilo presents objects constructed from everyday materials juxtaposed to create meanings different from their intended functions: a leather punching bag punctured with rubber nipples, and a collection of false eyelashes set in glass, for instance. The artist blurs the lines between masculinity and femininity, between the brutal and the delicate, between the aggressive and maternal: the object pummelled in the heat of anger is at the same time constructed as a source of nourshment, for instance.

Also explored in the exhibition is the capacity of the nude and the human body as a traditional subject and conveyor of the erotic. Juan Ariel Comia presents black-and-white nude photography on canvas in the works Handful and Flaccid, exploring smooth geographies of the naked body and visual puns. In contrast, Fernando Modesto utilizes his own body as a brush, a stamp on the picture plane by exhibiting an ink imprint of his lower half, entitled Bodyprint. Interestingly, both works utilize the veil of anonymity by cropping the head and face, stripping the nude form of recognition and therefore individuality.

Yet even the representation of the naked body with the face intact guarantees no shedding of anonymity. In RJ and Emmanuel by Popo San Pascual, paintings derived from pin-up images, the subject remains more of a symbol for eroticism than an portrait of an actual person. The works illustrate art critic John Berger's assertion why being naked is not the same as being nude, where "nakedness reveals itself" while "nudity is placed on display".

Sensuality may be conveyed through the literal representation of private parts. Gerardo Tan's installation, entitled Vulva, utilizes the mirror's properties of symmetry and reflection to construct the image denoted by its title. The dynamic quality of the work is evident in the way that the mirror is utilized to reflect representations in other surrounding works and juxtapose their images against that of the work. Menage a Trois by printmaker Ambie Abano, constructs the images of private parts through embossing their forms on white paper, meticulously filling in other details by hand.

Yet other works need not be illustrative to denote the erotic. Norberto Roldan's The Absolute Power of the Dragon Ruler, utilizes the symbolism of geometries and found objects to allude to power relations between the sexes. Mohair Berets, by Riza Manalo, constructs implements alluding to sexual play from found objects.

Also included are works rendered in traditional artistic media. In Thirst by Julie Lluch, the terra cotta bust of a woman looking towards the heavens becomes an unwitting phallic symbol when viewed frontally, her sinuous neck taking on the proportions and contour of the phallus.

In this historical juncture where images and texts may be mechnically produced and disseminated at will to publics, artists have utilized representations created through technology to critique the erotic, as conveyed through mass reproduction.

Declaring that Sexiness is Relative and Erotic Art is actually funny, the installation entitled Rude Nudes by Lena Cobangbang utilizes digital images on print-outs and texts on easily-reproducible bumper stickers to poke irony at the pornographic and the explicit. Mm Yu chronicles through a collage compilation, nondescriptly entitled Picture Book, various samples of sexually-explicit texts and images found in popular culture (B-movie billboards, graffiti, and magazine cut-outs, for instance), and finds humor in their juxtaposition. The scale of the collage compilation (scrapbook-size) also recasts the visual documentation of of seeing explicit sexual overtures in everyday locations into a curious collection of odds and ends. Analyze by R.M. de Leon, meanwhile downloads, utilizes and installs images taken from internet porn sites as a means of defining what is it to "break away from taboos, conventions, stereotypes and ironies".