Exhibition

Seeing the world with blood in his eyes

by Ramon E.S. Lerma

Having made several trips to the Philippines over the past two years, viewers of David Griggs' most recent works may be tempted to attribute the gritty images that he creates to a Westerner's exoticising gaze at the strange and unfamiliar. Such an observation is certainly not without basis - indeed some might even think it only natural for the artist to manifest his culture shock and fetishize - but it does tend to oversimplify their rationale and gloss over the context in which they were made.

What interests me primarily about Blood on the Streets, his most recent painting and video installation, is the fact that the work presents an interesting case study of what I would refer to as routes of transference - in particular, the reversal of roles whereby the subject, the so-called marginal or 'other', is seen to colonize the artist - creating an altered view that Serge Gruzinski refers to in The Mestizo Mind as one that 'sketches a space reinvented ... as real and as fictional ... [creating] composite otherworlds ... [that are] no longer geographical landmarks but [are] instead ... parts of a recreated universe'.

That Griggs employs such 'hybrid and mestizo processes' - revealing this awkward confrontation of cultures - is clearly manifested by the assorted elements that make up his work:

A set of billboard size canvasses commissioned from a movie advertisement painter the artist befriended in Manila, and later reworked by the artist in his Sydney studio, skirts the boundaries of process and creative practice. These portray skeletal, toothless, tattooed salt-of-the earth types swathed in Brillo colours; Holy Week flagellants; armed cohorts; ammunition magazines; and Christian iconography inflected by amulets inscribed in bastard Latin.

A looped video projected on one wall shows a group of children wearing rubber Halloween masks, their miens shifting from comedic to menacing as they preen for the camera. Coaxed to perform with the promise of a Jollibee hamburger at the end of filming, they are literally transported across Manila on a makeshift tram pushed along by a human tag team racing against rickety trains that rattle the slum dwellings built alongside the tracks.

A curious adjunct to all of this is a bicycle hung upside down a la Duchamp, its two wheels sticking out of an orange rack displaying kitschy wooden bric-a-brac.

A common thread is seen to run through this installation. What at first appears to be seething, in-your-face rebelliousness, reveals itself instead as a well-considered measuring of principles, a coming-to-terms with worldviews or standards.

There is a palpable energy here, an immediacy presented with a frontal monumentality and directness unmitigated by perspective: a grungy, neither here nor there, West meets Wild, Wild West in the Far, Far East hybrid aesthetic.

Perhaps the most apt way to describe Griggs' art at this juncture in his career is that it bears an unmistakable baroque flamboyance that throttles bourgeois reserve and diplomatic nicety, choosing instead to wax solidarity and empathy and - in keeping with the fraternizing spirit of his Bleeding Hearts Club of last year - collude with the genuineness of lived encounter.  

Little attention has been given to this aspect of the creative process - the tendency being to turn to teleology and obfuscate or deny altogether the nature and sources of relationships and the way in which contacts between artist and subject are built and maintained.

It is also without any aversion for introversion that I reflect upon this exhibition with a hint of amusement, seeing it as the outgrowth of a residency program that teetered on the edge of disaster - as real a confrontation of stark reality as any between the so-called First and Third worlds.

If there is anything that viewers should take from this exhibition, it is not so much the push and pull of hegemonies or the palimpsest of civilizations, effects, images, or interventions, which make the genre of privation or suffering - at least in the Philippine context - appear to the uninitiated as transfigurations of reality through painterly texture, filmic speed, or bricolage, altering usual ways of seeing. I would prefer to point to the interconnections that result when an artist takes on the mantle of blood brother and attempts to establish frameworks to contain the brutally attractive and enthrallingly repulsive elements that circumscribe the human condition.

Ramon E.S. Lerma is the Director and Chief Curator of the Ateneo Art Gallery, the premier museum of modern art in the Philippines. He is the editor of the book "Tanaw: Perspectives on the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Painting collection", which received the 2006 Alfonso T. Ongpin Award for Best Book on Art from the Manila Critics Circle.

Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind, (New York: Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, 2002), reprinted in Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg (eds), Contemporary Art and the Museum, (Ostfildern: Hatje Kantz Verlag, 2007), pp.184-5.

Jollibee is the leading fastfood chain in the Philippines. The country holds the distinction of being the only market in the world where McDonalds has a presence and has failed to garner the largest market share.

Griggs first came to the Philippines in August 2005 on an Asialink artist-in-residence grant hosted by the Ateneo Art Gallery. Upon arrival at Manila airport, he was rushed to hospital, stricken by a food borne virus he contracted in Thailand. Weakened from being transported from one hospital to the next, he remained confined for two weeks until he was fully recovered and, much to the chagrin of friends and family back home, stayed on for three months to complete his residency.

Gruzinski, p. 185.