An ephemeral Sea on a piece of parched earth

There were no whitewashed walls of delicate paintings or glass boxes of intricate sculpture, as people are wont to see in conventional art exhibits. Instead, there was only the parched ground with brown grass, with kids running around in the scorching heat of the sun and leafy trees all around. It was not a posh gallery all right. On a breezy Friday afternoon, however, the popular Sunken Garden inside the University of the Philippines-Diliman campus was transformed into an art space. In the middle of the expansive field, there were balloons of varying hues of blue stuck to the ground, moving as one with the wind. At 3 p.m. the bright afternoon sun on the brink of summer was not conducive to leisurely walks. But notwithstanding the collective look of confusion, distress even, among curious pedestrians, the swaying balloons created an absorbing sight. “The ephemeral Sea" – that’s how three Fine Arts students from UP described their attempt at site-specific art. By installing at least four thousand balloons in the middle of the dry field to simulate the soothing blue of the sea, they wanted to make “the perfect oasis for contemplation, revelry and relief in the summer time." Sophomore students Isaac Sion, Jocel Yabes, and Joseph Morong (who is also a GMA News reporter) originally planned to fill the field’s expanse with green balloons, hoping to recreate the lush green of the grass, especially at this time of year. They finally settled on filling a more manageable 200 ft x 200 ft portion of the field with white and blue balloons, as a class requirement for a course on visual studies.

Bringing art to the people Morong says it took the group, as well as a few paid workers, the whole day of Thursday to attach balloons to sticks. They started fixing them into the ground the same evening, but a few minutes before 3 p.m. last Friday, when they planned to officially start the exhibit, a few dozen more still had to be inflated. Following the principle of pointillism, a technique in painting using small dots of distinct colors and applied in patterns to create an image, the one-day exhibit Sea uses balloons to form an image of the sea’s waves. The group spent about P25,000 of their own funds and donations from friends, relatives and sponsors for the project. The installation is called public art, or more particularly, site-specific art. Public art refers to artistic works created with the particular intention of mounting them in a physical public space. Site-specific art is artwork created solely for a particular location, in this case, a dried field such as the Sunken Garden. “Public art emphasizes interaction. People can involve themselves in that art," Morong explained. He said Sea would have a different effect from what was intended if it was done in a different location, say, the streets. UP College of Fine Arts Prof. Ambie Abaño, who assigned the project to her class, asked her students to do a site-specific artwork by picking a particular place and recreating its meaning as their final requirement. “Site-specific projects are intended to make viewers experience art. I’d like the students to experience exploring space and give it a new meaning, and in a way reach out to the public," said Abaño. She says she is an advocate of the kind of art that is “of, for and by the people." She described her students’ work as a “good attempt" at achieving public art, saying the three were only sophomore students who believed they can do it in spite of the scale. Question on social relevance The project, indeed, was difficult to pull off. Other college professors, Morong disclosed, were skeptical of the group’s plan. They said such an attempt may be too hard to manage, even impossible, given its scale and the extent of preparation and execution. “It’s hard to work with balloons, that’s what we realized," he admitted. Even before the group was able to fill the intended space, many of the balloons had deflated under the afternoon heat or got blown away by the wind. And then there were the kids, who would stealthily pluck balloons from the edges of the area and run away with their loot. Several times during the exhibit, the three members would dash across the field, begging the children to wait until 6 p.m. when they can have all the balloons they want. Even so, students, professors and community residents flocked to the Sunken Garden past 4 p.m. particularly along the section of the field where the sunlight was blocked by the Main Library building. It was the perfect spot for taking photographs, or simply indulging in a calming sight. One of the viewers described the exhibit as “impressive" especially when viewed from a vantage sight above the field. Another remarked that the view was “nice" and it did have a cooling effect, but it would be better to have used lightweight ropes instead of plastic rods on the balloons to allow them to move more freely with the wind. A more cutting remark, however, was that it was “socially engaging, but not socially involving." One could always give the exhibit a political reading and question its social relevance (or the lack of it), say, in light of the long-drawn dry season and the government’s apparent inability to deal with its dire effects, particularly in delivering basic services such as water and electricity. The public, ultimately, would be a community confronted with both general concerns and locale-specific issues. There will always be a group of people who would like to see how art responds to such contexts. At the very least, the public reacted to Sea, reveling and taking pictures amid the multitude of blue balloons They may not have been aware that it was supposed to be a site-specific installation art, or at least it intended to be. But if only for the fact that it encouraged the people’s participation and gave a little relief, however brief and psychic, from the oppressive summer heat, it would not be too much to say the exhibit achieved its basic purpose. - YA, GMANews.TV