Sacred Idolatry
His works engulf the narrow, restrained space of the Green Papaya Art Projects’ gallery. From the doorway, you can see two massive pieces welcoming your approach. A couple of steps reveal four slightly smaller ones. “It’s a set of idols,” artist Gaston Damag states about this exhibition, which he has named Wanted. “Wala nang mga idols. Hinahanap na natin. [There are no more idols. We are missing them.]”The huge drawings depict images of the bulol—the carved wooden figurine of the Ifugao rice god. Damag shares, “Most of these are made by my hands, with no brush. I call them ‘digital drawings.’” It is a counter-reference to how modern day development has transformed the use of one’s hand. “I’m so tired of all these ‘digital’ [things]. So I said, okay, I’ll do some digital drawings, the most primitive way.”
He stands next to the bigger pair of paintings and demonstrates, “Dito, parang sinasampal ko. [Here, it's as if I'm slapping the work my hands.]” He extends his arms to show that the width and height of the drawing correspond to the length of his extended arms.
The traditional idol has actually been featured many times in his exhibitions. “It’s idols that I really know,” Damag points out. “I’m from Banaue. It’s part of our heritage.”
Damag, who is of Ifugao descent, is known for his use of ethnographic symbols to create his very contemporary works. His engagement with cultural artifacts—whether bulols, or African idols, or the likes—in his various exhibitions can be traced to a trip where he found himself viewing his heritage in the Museum of National History in the U.S. “The objects were from the Philippines, from Banaue,” Damag relates. “Most of the objects in the showcases were from my family. Inside, you could see pictures of my uncles. It surprised me to see my ancestors, the first generation, in that museum. And there I was, a modern man looking at these things. It’s a question of cultural representation.”
It is this cultural question that has changed the course of this artist’s journey. Damag clarifies, though, that his search is not one of identity but one of comprehension. “Some artists think about pure representation. Some artists are more conceptual. For me, it’s more the search for representation of cultures. How cultures understand other cultures. I analyze about an ideal way to present these things. I am artist, I make suppositions. There’s no reality. All propositions.”
It has been four years since Damag has been in the Philippines. Paris has been home for many years, a move that began quite romantically. “I followed my (then) girlfriend, a Frenchwoman,” he divulged. But it was study that he pursued in Paris, taking up Civilisation Française at Faculté de la Sorbonne (Paris) and earning his Diplôme National d’Expression from Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris.
His participation in major exhibitions is a growing list of international shows, his most recent ones included Greece, Germany, and Luxembourg. His return to the Philippines this year is marked not just by Wanted, which echoes his ethnographic objectives, but also by a more special work. Further inside Green Papaya, past a wall that divides the space, is Monument.
“Monument is more personal,” the artist muses. When Damag was in third grade in the ’70s, he and his classmates were summoned from their classrooms by the military. The children were brought to the barracks where they saw a woman lying on a table. The story told was that she was a rebel killed in an encounter. “Palagay ko tinadtad s’ya ng bala. [She was peppered with bullets.] I still remember the brain, the blood falling down on the semento. I made this piece because every time I go back to the Philippines, I would think of her.”
Damag says that while this project was difficult to put together, it was even “harder not to do. It was a release.” He tells us of his plans for it. “I want to see where she came from. And maybe from this big painting, I’ll do a film about this woman [tracing back] to when she’s about 16. [When she was probably happy and went to fiestas.] I need to find her friends, talk to them. Who’s this woman? What was she doing? How did she get involved? How did she become an insurgent?”
The space that Green Papaya houses plays a particular role in this first step. “When I started working with Peewee [Norberto Roldan, the curator], and I saw the space, I thought this is nice here. When you enter, you don’t see it because we have that wall. This is a very personal space. It needs to be personal.”
Damag discloses that he doesn’t expect people to totally understand his ideas, but he would like to get his ideas as close to them as possible. “What I don’t like so much in art is when people come and see and they see what they think, but they do not to see what they’re supposed to look at. They see what they think because they always see the thing as a mirror of themselves. So they make interpretation of what they think. And if they see what they think, the art doesn’t exist. It’s dead. When you create, you have something you want to give to your audience.” [Note: original quote unedited goes, “May ginagwa kang trabaho, may gusto kang ibigay. Eh kung yung tumitingin, tinitingnan lang ang sarili nya, it’s nothing. It’s a massacre.”]
We do get some insight on how to navigate our way to this artist’s ideas. “Most artists have this concept of windows. They like to zoom [an idea closer] to them. I prefer the contrary. These images,” he waves his hand at his works on the wall, “masyadong malapit sa akin [sic]. It’s what I really know.”
Wanted/Monument was presented in cooperation with Alliance Francaise de Manille at the Green Papaya Art Projects. Green Papaya Art Projects is located at 124a Maginhawa Street, Teacher’s Village East, Diliman, QC, tel. (02)9262096. Thanks to curator Norberto Roldan.
published in Mega, October 2007
