Making the invisible city visible again

Art has found a new home in old Manila, at least on that street full of history at the foot of Jones Bridge. On Escolta is the First United Building, an art deco structure where the multi-platform exhibit “Escape: ILoveYouVirus” recently culminated a weeklong run. A brainchild of the cryptically named community 98B Collaboratory, “Escape” might just be anything you thought you knew about art but were afraid to ask.

On the Feb. 13 opening in the street outside First United, kids were milling about like armies of the night; it reminded you of the crowd hovering around lower Timog during the early days of Red Rocks. This was counterculture and a growing cult following, not in Doc Martens but in their willingness and mindset to stand art on its head, well, the Philippine kind anyway, and once inside the art deco building the metaphysical graffiti seemed to leap at you from all directions, a philosophy borne of concrete spontaneity and nothing else.

Some 20 artists are participating in the group show, easily a majority of them homegrown. Yet there is a melting pot in progress seen in the works of, say, Bjorn Calleja, whose curtains of reconstructed photographs may recall the winsome memorabilia of MM Yu, though the current does get to hugot from underlying force when the artist reimagines a simple wooden door and overwhelms it with assorted Post-its and gewgaws, certainly something to tickle the likes of Santi Bose in the great beyond.

More doors open in serial collages that may or may not verge on the obscene. A thick literary volume that has obviously seen better days placed upside down on a stand; printouts from the ceiling that remind us of the glory days of fax machines and printers; a midsized adolescent or human like figure in what could be papier mâché playing with himself underneath his boxers. Somewhere in the gallery the likes of Leeroy New waits in ambush.

The unassuming viewer more versed in the art fairs and art walks and art in the mall type of thing might at the outset be befuddled and think: if this is art I don’t know what is. All the better for his or her edification because the boundaries of the four-cornered canvas are at once broken, and the mind is free to wander in the cracks and crevices of the Escolta, where years and years ago a character from an Eric Gamalinda novel had fallen to his death in an elevator, (maybe it was based on his grandpa if we read a subsequent interview with the writer correctly.)

There is anyway something about the street that lends itself not only to art but also to culture, being a stone’s throw away from the ferry station and Yuchengco nee Nueva Street, at whose end teems the renowned Mezzanine and its sister carinderia at ground level with the camto and kiampong, soul food on any fine day. But the Book Sale is no more, the bargain bin which used to be somewhere near that store called Syvel’s was it? Memory plays tricks, and not just on Borges.

But back to the virus: the construct dates back to 2000 when the Iloveyou agent was released worldwide from Pandacan, wreaking havoc on computer systems across time zones. It was a pioneering malware, antedating the hackers and other masters of the dark cyber arts, coming from a Filipino no less. Little did the low-key Voldemort know that 16 years later, he would inspire an art exhibit on one of the great forgotten streets of Manila and, as the performance artist and tour guide Carlos Celdran would have it, make the invisible city visible again.

There were of course parallel events like a freewheeling video screening virtually endless loop, the unusual lecture and open forum in that shell of a warehouse with the nondescript pylons and columns. Who would have thought that 98B, sounds like a clothing brand, would change the usual perception of art, and in so doing rearrange the writing of art criticism as well?

It is, in short, a walk on the wild side of unpredictability, a refresher course in that the only art worth mentioning is something short of a cultural terrorism, and thus a wake-up call for those so much in their comfort zones they’ve fallen asleep in the art park.