Art Talk Manuscript of Displacement Series Exhibition December 2007

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE CREATIVE?

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my confusion.”
- Jack Kerouac

Before anything else, I would like to inform everyone that this Art Talk do not consist of personal works of art that is supposed to be the center of discussion. I am sorry I have nothing to show but I am here to present my less creativity as the center of creative production itself. As you can see in my exhibition, there is nothing aesthetically interesting to observe. It is because prior to this, I never really produced body of works that may give us the prerequisite to discuss the quality and quantity of my creative production. My Intention here is not to represent myself and/or my creativity as a commodity to establish a career in art. I hope that this will not disappoint anyone.

This sense of creative deficiency shall be the central problem of my talk as we journey along the topics on Geography, Migration and Displacement to understand creativity itself from the perspective of the Excluded. You may ask why I am interested about the Excluded? It is because I myself, just like anyone here in this room, is in the state of exclusion under the totality of authoritarian power and its dominating grand narratives. I will talk further about this on the issue of Displacement, which I will elaborate later. But for the moment, let me start this talk by looking and understanding the works of Gustave Courbet.

WHO THE HELL IS GUSTAVE COURBET

Gustave Courbet is a French painter who is a well-known forbearer of Realist movement in painting that proliferated during the mid-19th century. Courbet’s popularity coincided also with the emergence of Industrial Revolution that would later on crush realist paintings through the technological advancement of a photo camera.

The figurative paintings of Gustave Courbet depicted the real condition of common people, which the previous painters in the history of Western Art never capture in their canvases. One among the important realist work of Courbet is the oil on canvas painting entitled “Burial at Ornans (1850)”, the painting depicts a funeral that contained the very same people who were present at the internment that he witnessed.

Besides Courbet’s skillful depiction of the townspeople in Ornan, the said painting was also a symbolic attack against the prevailing artistic canon that exclusively represents Religiosity and Royalty as main subjects (Romanticism). This is why I personally chose Gustave Courbet in this talk, because in his realist paintings he was already capturing figures of daily life and at the same time addressing his sympathy towards the Excluded. And he was not just simply sympathetic towards the Excluded but rather he was deeply attached to anyone who seems to be outside of the exclusive social structure.

In his essay, Courbet wrote, “…in our very civilized society it is necessary for me to live the life of a savage. I must be free even of governments. The people have my sympathies, I must address myself to them directly.” Courbet as a painter clearly shows that he incorporate himself among the excluded rather than observing them from afar.

GUSTAVE COURBET’S DESTRUCTION OF VENDOME COLUMN

In March 1871, a spontaneous insurrection occurred in Paris, it was a response of the excluded inferior people against the perils of Franco-Prussian War. The insurrection was popularly known as the Paris Commune. During this period, Gustave Courbet was already a dedicated communard and a very important participant of the infamous Paris Commune. Along with the poet Arthur Rimbaud, they were appointed by the common people to take over the Museums in Paris. Inside the Commune, the Peoples Council makes all the decisions and this is brought by the free participation of everyone involved in the insurrection.

From here, I would like to discuss the shift to Postmodernity from the already Modern structure of early Capitalism in this period. But first, I would like to examine the effect of Gustave Courbet’s destruction of Vendome Column, as a point of departure to postmodernity.

Realism in painting, which Courbet himself has once raised, paved the way for its ending when Courbet transcended from painting pictures of reality to the actual destruction of symbols and representation such as in the case of the Vendome Column. [give a detailed description of how the column was dismantled]

In the usual art histories, art theorists consider the death of Realist paintings due to the birth of Photography, which is capable of mass reproducing realities that a painstaking realist painting is incapable. But for Courbet, the death of Realism is simply to put an end to the symbols of grand narratives that has long been perpetuating the state of exclusion.

Throughout the history of Western Civilization most of its representations of images and symbols always depict the victorious conquest of Western power against the Excluded inferior. The Vendome Column is one among the main examples of it. It was first laid out in 1702 as a monument to the glories of the armies of Louis XIV and was completed by Napoleon III to celebrate the victory of Austerlitz.

Gustave Courbet and his deep attachment to the Excluded inferior that is evident in his Realist paintings and finally in his project of destroying the Vendome Column, gave him the quality of an avant-garde Postmodernist. Although the term postmodernism during Courbet's era is non-existent yet. Postmodernist theories took form only during the late 20th century.

But if we try to understand Postmodernism according to Jean Francois Lyotard description of it, the act of destroying the Column, which symbolizes the grand narrative of Western Civilization, signifies the possibility that everyone has the capacity to subvert the absolute Authority. “Destruction is Creation.”, indeed, says the anarchist revolutionary theorist Mikhael Bakunin- a close friend of Courbet.

Therefore, the state of exclusion can only be undone through the will to power of the Excluded people themselves. And this realization of power, in the sense of Lyotard, paves the way for the cosmic confluence of micro-narratives of every excluded inferior. This is where I want to start the introduction of the possible unique creativity of the Excluded.

ON GEOGRAPHY

Now, let me step forward to the topic on Geography. In my art statement, I explained my exhibition as a study and observation of current Geography and how the excluded dwellers, under the New World Order, move from one space to another. Hence, I put the word Displacement alongside with Geography to understand such narrative of space.

As a migrant from the Philippines, being considered a Gaijin or Outsider by Japan is an example how a certain Nation has to exclude and/or displace in order to sustain its mythical concept of a Nation. Furthermore, if we attach the word “State” next to “Nation”, it is now clear to understand that those who do not belong to a particular Nation-State is considered a threat. No wonder Nationalism is inherent to the idea of War and racial prejudice by mindlessly exaggerating the differences between human beings by exterminating the Other.

But in contrast to the above mentioned, during the prehistory of humankind when Nation-States does not exist yet, “scientific evidence has clearly demonstrated that humankind’s ascent in the animal kingdom to be the most creative (and destructive) inhabitants of this planet was hastened by racial intermingling and cultural interlapping through trade and migration,” (Azurin pp. 214). In other words, without inter-cultural exchange human beings might not possibly evolve. Not until when settlements became more permanent hubs for trade and political control, the erection of defensive walls around citadels prevented the abundant interaction of human kind.

The necessity for territorial demarcations under Nation-States is now the basis for the grand narrative of space inherent to Geography. Now let us investigate the etymology of the word Geography for us to understand Nation-States. Geography came from the greek word Graphikos, which directly means “maker of pictures”. This is also a term etymologically linked to the word Grapho, meaning to draw and describe. The best example of a Graphos is the pictorial maps.

This pictorial description of space is an important tool for the Status Quos in taking control of their dominion. Furthermore, it also serves as a requirement to expand vast dominions through colonization by plundering Other cultures.

In defining territorial borders through the conquest of space, geography functions as a socio-cultural illustration that reinforces the grand narrative of Nation-States. Therefore, a mythical grand narrative is not complete if there is no visual illustration of its space and location. This kind of visual representation of space is somewhat analogical to the Vendome Column as a visual representation of power. From here, I would like to recall Gustave Courbet’s destruction of Vendome Column as a metaphor for breaking down territorial borders- to propose an idea against such exclusion in the narrative of space.

DISPLACEMENT: THE LANDSCAPE OF THE EXCLUDED

The reason why I am interested in bringing the issue of the Excluded inferior is that I wanted to articulate my condition inside this suffocating grand narrative that have contained us and/or displaced us for so long. And my concern about the singular narratives I represented in my series of works, which I divided it into three phases namely Pre-departure, Departure and Arrival, is to understand the story line in between intervals of these three different stages.

The commonality that binds these three different stages is the concept of Displacement. In the first stage, I did an online art performance by informing my network of friends that I am missing. This is to symbolically dramatize the concept of Displacement by confusing reality to fiction. I remember, there was this feature article about Precarity in Japan; it was an interview of an Internet Café refugee. In the interview, the refugee was asked by the journalist to identify his name, but he simply replied to the journalist that his identity and status doesn’t matter anymore because Japanese government doesn’t really care about them and although he is a Japanese, in this society he doesn’t exist.

Precarious labor is just another term for systemic Exclusion in Modern Capitalist societies such as Japan. This is a necessary occurrence to further sustain a certain exercise of power that depends upon barrier, prison and dispossession. And if we compare this in the Philippines, this could be translated as extra-judicial killings and forced disappearances of activists- a terrible scenario for the Excluded inferior. But what could be more terrible than the Nazi holocaust that exterminated thousands of Jews or the situation in Palestine where the Palestinians as Excluded inferior live their everyday lives in an open-air prison under the guards of Israel?

Last week I emailed a friend and informed him about this anti-migrant policy that Japanese immigration had recently enacted, it is known as the Biometric Law where every single foreigner has to submit his or her fingerprints and private identity to the authorities. And since I just mentioned the open-air prison in Palestine, this new policy in Japan targeting only foreigners is an example of surveillance society that is somehow a prelude to the terrible condition similar to Palestine.

CONCLUSION

So what does creativity means for the Excluded inferior? After all the years that we have been deprived of our existence, what does it mean to be creative?

If we go back again to Gustave Courbet and his great masterpiece of destroying the Vendome Column, perhaps some of us might get an inspiration out of it. But for me, to conclude this talk, my lack of creativity is my creative expression in itself. This is the only way for me to say that I exist.