Dick it to Them

YESTERDAY evening, the art gallery Mo Space opened Stick it to the Enemy, an exhibit of stickers. The invitation asked guests to bring their own stickers. Manila's avant garde responded enthusiastically. In attendance: Jayson Oliveira, MM Yu, Poklong Anading, Lena Cobangbang, Pow Martinez, Louie Cordero, Romeo Lee, Ringo Bunoan, Pardo de Leon, and I cannot remember who else. Also there were photographers Frankie Callaghan and Paul Mondok, Green Papaya's Peewee and Donna Roldan, and of course Mo Space's David and Mawen Ong.

Mawen is herself an artist—her last show was at Greem Papaya—and it was part of the internationally acclaimed artist Manuel Ocampo's objective in bringing Fil-Am artists to the Philippines in July to show them an impossibility in the US, artist-owned galleries. In the Philippines, this includes not just Mo Space but Green Papaya and Mag:Net Katipunan. Atop the flagship of the designer furniture chain Mawen owns with David, Mo Space does not need or care to make a profit. As such, it is a bastion of the most experimental art.

At Stick it to the Enemy, the stickers ranged from the expressly vulgar to the labor-intensive and refined. There was a bunch of French kids sticking chewing gum into lacy patterns on the wall. With a wet hand, one of them grabbed me and said, "Look, I made this." Never one to discourage the making of art, I said, "Good job," despite the saliva on my arm. Someone had brought in a huge plant crawling with snails decorated with stickers. On a glass door, someone displayed a large cut-out sticker that looked like simultaneously like a cartoon and an abstract. It was a thrilling moment of communal creativity, a window of subversion that could be shared by adults and children alike.

One sticker was a picture of a vagina with lines pointing to its different parts identified under the image. Some of the artists were assigned different parts. Poklong had the pubis, Pow the clitoral hood. Misogynistic? Yes.

Pow is a great beauty. He looks like a Donatello--not the Ninja Turtle, you understand, but the Florentine sculptor of the Renaissance, the one who did the pedophillic David, the diametric opposite of Michelangelo's. Pow's stickers were all Filipino beefcake, guys in various states of undress  striking sultry attitudes. For guys like Pow, the beefcake represents the outer edge of their desire, the point of its abjection,

In their territorialization of the vagina, however, Poks, Pow and the rest of the gang were in a space Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick inventively called the homosocial.

"Tangina n'yo mga boys," said Lena as she and Donna ran down the stairs. She had passed the hat around for a booze run, and she found herself having to go do the buying herself.

Jericho

 From top: Jericho Rosales, originally uploaded by mlq3; 'Jericho' by Barnett Newman, 106 x 112 1/2", acrylic on canvas.

JERICHO is a work of Barnett Newman, one of the greatest, most influential modernists. Although his work looked like pure abstraction, titles indicated a preoccupation with myth, notably Jewish lore. Vir Heroicus Sublimis (Man, Heroic and Sublime) is a key piece in the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. It is a huge canvas in blazing red with the artist's trademark vertical stripes (or "zips") running down at four intervals dividing the plane into almost-but-not-quite symmetrical patterns.

Jericho is most likely to refer to the ancient city in the Jordan plains, one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements on earth. It is famous in the Christian and Jewish worlds for its walls being brought down by the trumpets and shouts of the Children of Israel under the leadership of Joshua after they emerged from 40 years in the wilderness after escaping Egypt. The story is told in the Old Testament in the Book of Joshua (1-6).

Before besieging the walled city, the Jews sent to spies who hid in the house of a prostitute ("harlot" in the King James version) named Rahab. She made them promise to spare her and her family when they took the city. The Jews killed everyone else in the city but spared her and hers and brought her to Israel.

And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.
   But Joshua had said unto the two men that had spied out the country, Go into the harlot's house, and bring out thence the woman, and all that she hath, as ye sware unto her. (Joshua 6: 21-22)

 Newman's Jericho is "zipped" just a little off the middle, slightly to the right of the triangle's apex. It is then a little off kilter, so that it has innate instability, and at any moment might be knocked down.