'End Frame' series at the CCP closes with Banal's 'A Reading...' 

(Updated 8:12 a.m., March 4) - The most memorable thing I saw was a projection that seemed broken, but viewed from a precise spot became a garden door. This was at the third “End Frame Video Art” series that was started in 2011, with "Passage", Tad Ermitano’s use of projectors to create a Lewis Carroll-inspired world of fantasy and illusion. 

 

The two-person team of Rica Estrada, now connected with the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and Lisa Chikiamco have been working on this series on and off for the last two years.   

Chikiamco, who has been curating most of the “End Frame” shows, became fascinated with video art when she visited the Australian Center for the Moving Image on a holiday in Melbourne. Unlike the first and second End Frame shows which were jury-selected group exhibits, the long-running series involves full-blown solo shows by contemporary visual artists who have been using multimedia art as a way of seeing the world. 

 

Artists included Bacolod-based experimental filmmaker Manny Montelibano, curator Charo Ramirez, and Kaloy Olavides, who is also involved with the sound art ensemble Elemento.

 

I have seen most of the work in this series, and I have also seen that it was a challenge to get this series of exhibits off the ground. While it shares a long history with experimental cinema in the Philippines, video art has taken a smaller place in the overall art landscape. 

 

For one, it is not a collector-friendly medium. It was only in 2012 that the Ateneo Art Gallery became the first museum to acquire a substantial collection of video art, including another "End Frame" work by Maria Taniguchi. However, even established artists like Roberto Chabet have started exploring video art. Chabet had a 2012 installation at the Lopez Museum using video footage of the waters of the Pasig River.

 

The last “End Frame” exhibit in this series, Yason Banal’s "A Reading of Brightness, Dark Clouds Surrounding", is an interesting commentary on the role that patronage and the art market play in the current arts landscape in the country. This is the most elaborate show to date, and takes up most of the exhibit space on the fourth floor of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. 

 

First inspired, as the exhibit notes said, from the process of restoring the Senate chamber at the National Museum (formerly the Congress building), and from the now-closed White Cube space at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, the show took quite some time to complete, and took on shape once as developments finished. 

 

The most notable was the decision of the new Metropolitan Museum management to place stronger emphasis on contemporary art, and this is reflected in Banal’s use of video footage from, among others, a February 2 gala involving the “great and the good” in which, it is laconically noted on a nearby extended caption, the works were present but the artists were not (They had their own reception on February 7).   

To highlight this sense of exclusivity, the main video used can only be seen from a closed door. Banal revisits themes from recent and past work in this installation: a recent satire of the art market, artworld.biz, from Art Fair Philippines sits alongside a glass cube assembled from broken wine bottles from a Central Bank event, reminiscent of a show for Blanc Peninsula last year which involved broken bottle cubes from nearby hotels.

 

But the exhibit extends beyond that. Taking the Thirteen Artists Award as a starting point, Banal took blow-up photos of male visual artists in magazine-spread style in a space meant to evoke the aforesaid White Cube. The models, some of whom are other visual artists themselves, are supposed to remind one of past winners of the awards, and it was a guessing game at the opening reception as to who was who. Banal’s work is a comment, I surmise, on the paradox that, while galas can be thrown where the artists are absent, their presence looms large, but only at the fiat of the new gatekeepers.

 

This last work in the “End Frame” series is a commentary on the landscape in which it was situated. The galleries in which these were shown were among Manila’s more open-minded commercial art spaces (and in one instance, the Vargas Museum, a non-commercial space) who were, for a time, willing to give up a month of potential financial loss to allow for these works to be seen. 

 

Even video art exists in the landscape of patronage in which the art world has always been situated, whether from the old guard or from the newer players in an uncertain art market. With this swan song, Banal’s work brings us back to the messy reality of the contemporary Philippine art scene, one which cannot merely be read through mere theoretical readings that fail to take a glimpse back at history. – KDM/KG, GMA News 

 

"End Frame Video Art Proj 3" art festival runs until April 12 at the 4th floor of the CCP Main Theater Building. On the closing day, curator Lisa Chikiamco and Yason Banal will speak at the MKP Hall at 3PM.