‘Piege’ of RV Sanchez

Piege is the French word for trap. This is also the name of RV Sanchez’s thesis exhibit which closed last March 19 at the Halad Museum in Cebu City. Few exhibits require the onlooker to read up on a subject.

This one did. One may argue this is proof of the art’s failure. But the opposing view holds just as well: That it lead us to read is how we can tell the art works.

It was Marcel Duchamp who might have been the first to assert that the day will come when all that the artist will ever need to do is point. The artwork is a sign or a complex of signs that point to somewhere, to a field the onlooker might already know about or can easily know more of.

Whatever, the artwork cannot tell the whole story. Nor does it need to. Nor is it morally obliged to. Nor should it even want to. Indeed, there are contemporary theorists who argue that such a goal (to tell the full story) works only to commodify the art work.

Making it “useful” and therefore “marketable” to a public conditioned always to consume without much thought, like an essay with an actual conclusion, or a story with a moral lesson and an actual ending.

The artwork in question are two installations involving video that loops back to its beginning. The first installation lay at the staircase of the Halad Museum. This building used to house The Freeman newspaper.

It now houses memorabilia of Cebuano music culture from the Gullas family. At the top of the staircase, behind you as you land at the 2nd floor, a projector casts a short video into the wall. The wall holds an arrangement of commercially available flypaper. The flypaper, yellow in color, contains pop culture imagery so common in media they are anonymous.

They are only signs which point to either media in general or to nothing at all. The images are not intended to gestalt into a message. But even so, they do. But we know it only us, our minds, our brains automatically doing the “gestalt-ing”. The artist himself might be laughing at us while we do this. We should just laugh with him.

Except for the second layer of imagery which permeates over the first. The flypaper is only substrate. Over this, RV Sanchez floats a series of short video takes of flies landing on the flypaper, struggling there, waiting to die. The imagery reminds us of Hieronymus Bosch. Reminds us of the visual stench of death. Reminds us of “yellow”.

It seems even more “real” than “real” itself. Which is how the art works. There is also the third layer, sound, the deathly buzzing scream of flies going into our heads and finally dying there, somewhere. If the purpose of art is to make us feel funny, or sad, or happy or whatever, this one does. And that is how we know it works.

The second installation is a repetition of the first except that we see it even more up-close. The installation is inside a closet that we peer into as if we have made a wrong turn somewhere and ended up disturbing the holy ritual of some thing’s death. We are voyeurs looking into an obscenity, stealing a glimpse of something we should not see but do anyway as if we are used to seeing it in the day to day. As perhaps we do.

There is a long narrative towards which the art points. Some will say it is a narrative too esoteric for most traditional viewers of art. The narrative comes with an uncomfortable name, a title-word incorporating some of the meanings of “obscene”, a word we are not supposed to say in pleasant company. The name is postmodern.

But if we cannot say the name then how are we supposed to talk about it? The narrative in question are the theories of Jean Baudrillard, French theorist, who wrote the treatise on Simulacra and Simulation. His theories are relevant to new cinema in particular, but also to all in general, who consume media.

Baudrillard warns how we all exist inside the “the ecstasy of communication”, which is the title of an important essay he wrote. Which essay invites us to look closer into how new media creates for us a particular reality which has nothing to do with “reality” as it is or how we once knew it. New media produces for us pornography.

He puts it another way. But that is what the text means.

Baudrillard is interesting reading, perhaps required of all of us. But in the end, one has to accept only a few will read.

In the same vein as that we must accept that of the many who saw “Piege” by RV Sanchez, graduating student of the University of San Carlos, only a few will enjoy and seek to understand more. But that does not matter at all. Art like life is only occurrence, an un-replicable event. When it is not that, it tends to be less than it should be, becoming only a simulation of that which never was.