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.