This exhibit review by Francis Eduard Ang is his output for our Art Criticism Writing Workshop last September 2024.
Mispaced Heat: A Review of Fever Dream
by Francis Eduard Ang
Curation typically covers what is within the space of a creative project. Curators are expected to direct the use of space and control the way art is experienced within a museum or gallery. But perhaps in the curation of Fever Dream, the people at Vargas Museum went above and beyond what is expected of curation and what is deemed possible by natural law. It cannot be pure coincidence that the exhibition that dealt with the ways humans situate themselves in the changing climate took place during the harshest heat wave in recent memory. How else could they have mounted an exhibition named after the very malady that had plagued us for weeks?
The exhibition claimed to inquire about the planetary and human condition that it described as “the urgency of the burning earth.” We “rush headlong towards self-destruction” as ecological collapse becomes a fact of life. The fever metaphor was used to refer to the “corporeal state of heat” that signals that something is wrong with the body, in the same way that increasing global temperatures hint at something wrong with the earth. Art is then a natural expression of one’s concerns and sense of powerlessness at our simultaneously rapid and slow heat death.
While the curatorial concept was relevant, there is reason to scrutinize its execution. The exhibition was part of an international collaborative project between the museum and three other art spaces: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Panama), Absolute Art Space (Taiwan), and shhh Project (South Korea). Collaborations are a wonderful way for the greater art community to exchange insights on shared problems, especially considering the post-colonial subject-position of these nations. But such collaborations also provide a source of pragmatic challenges that may lead a curatorial project to a compromised vision. As with any group show, one wonders how many of these works can truly claim to abide by the conceptual parameters and how many are simply slotted in for diplomatic and relational purposes.
Make no mistake, the exhibition had its fair share of works that provided insightful commentary on the ways our human existence cohabits with the natural world and the consequences of this on the future of both. Even Vargas’s permanent collection was used in a clever way, with landscape paintings form the permanent collection displaying the beauty of nature brought down to the ground floor. Aside from blurring the lines between the fixed and the temporary, this curatorial decision sent an important message: that the ecocritical discourse, however current, makes meaningful connections with the art of yesteryear, a message that fits right in with Vargas’s penchant for bringing art and archives into conversation. By seeing the beauty of an environment that has arguably been stolen from this generation by climate change, we are forced to bridge the gap between these landscapes and our current world. And the juxtaposition of passages from Rizal’s “The Indolence of the Filipino” takes this a step further, linking the relaxed and comfortable lifestyle of our ancestors to a much more amicable relationship with nature, a seemingly forgotten relic from our past.
Attendees were tempted to experience this very relaxation by Corinne de San Jose’s Noise herding, a sound installation that arranged a ring of speakers around a space suitable for one person. By placing oneself at the center, one could listen to a mixture of droning vibrations, radiant tones, static, and distorted voices, all woven into a symphony that allows one to lose oneself, slowing down one’s internal rhythm, disrupting the frenzy modern life, while concurrently reminding of its inescapability. The unassuming work might not have looked or even sounded impressive from afar, but in the right position, it encapsulated the nuances of our urban existence in a surprising way.
Urbanity was also at the center of a few of the other works in Fever Dream. Veejay Villafranca’s photographs printed on aluminum sheets managed to depict the fast pace of the city by overlapping images of its most vulnerable inhabitants with highlights of its most inhuman aspects. Concrete scenes superimposed over the city’s denizens embody the chaos of city life. The choice to print it on material that calls to mind the barong-barong was quite bold, as the viewer would slowly realize how these snapshots are a product of a harsh and proximate reality. A photojournalist by training, Villafranca used these near-impressionistic images to reveal a different kind of truth through glimpses of our interconnected sense of disconnect. Similarly, Mark Salvatus’s Codes provided a bird’s eye view of Manila through a cartographic understanding of human development. In these prints, maps of the city were shown with redacted street names, removing the human element from our understanding of space. And in a display of biting the hand that feeds, Salvatus placed these maps beside archival documents highlighting the role of Jorge Vargas, once the director of the Bureau of Lands and the National Planning Commission, in the catastrophic urban planning, or lack thereof, that is Manila and how it plagues us to this day. But, one wonders, was there no more inspired way to show this history than just framing these documents?
The city as an image of environmental degradation culminated in the short film of Jaekyung Jung. Projected on the far, corner wall of the Vargas lobby, a stone’s throw away from Salvatus’s work, was Jung’s Metal, Pine Tree, a speculative story of how a contagious disease wiped out a once-bustling city, forcing the remaining residents to cannibalize each other for survival. The scenes evoked unsettling industrialization coupled with arrhythmic sounds of construction and a broadcast that drives the narrative forward. The short forces one to question the value of human life amid the retaliation of the natural world. Placed so close to Salvatus’s maps, one was challenged to ponder on one’s place in a present between the development of the past and the breakdown of the future.
However, curatorial choices may have proved the undoing of similar video installations at the West Wing Gallery of the museum. Derek Tumala’s Sunspots (1978) might have been an intriguing reflection of our rather miniscule place in the cosmos, with archival footage of solar activity and how it affects our climate. But such visions could hardly come across when they were distorted by Vargas’s trees casting their shadows through the museum’s glass walls, which made it impossible to properly digest the work, much less comprehend it. Not too far from this was Posak Jodian’s Lakec, a short documentary that chronicles the drying up of a river in Cilifenam. The river now exists only in the memory of the Fata’an people, who now struggle to even locate the river, carrying only passed-down stories of its significance to their people. The screen showing the video was placed within a wall printed with a black-and-white still from the film, a choice that was rather inconsequential to the viewer’s overall appreciation. What did end up consequential was the placement in the West Wing Gallery, that might have proved too claustrophobic to allow for the twenty minutes of concentration necessary to absorb the film’s full impact, even with the provided headphones. It was difficult to watch the film without being distracted by other museumgoers. Personally, I would appreciate the opportunity to watch Lakec in a setting that would allow its ideas to simmer.
Outside on the museum’s front lawn, Micaela Benedicto’s Four Figures, sculptures made of steel sheets formed into shapes, provided an interesting contrast between the artifice of the sculptures and the natural flora. In understanding the place of humankind in nature, one must reflect on how the works of man and those of the earth can truly coexist, especially given the increasing number of natural disasters. However, the shapes Benedicto chose didn’t really seem to contribute to this effect. There was a sense of impermanence to it, with shapes coming and going throughout the course of the exhibition, which suggests a sense of fickle mindedness about what these shapes are supposed to represent.
While the works I’ve detailed so far may have had varying degrees of success in terms of forwarding the discursive aims of the exhibition, I can say for certain that they were at least going in the right direction. Unfortunately, some of the other works had a rather tenuous relationship with the overall theme. One that deserves special mention is Buen Calubayan’s Management of Fever Diagram, a rather haphazardly draped installation depicting a homeopathic understanding of how fever circulates throughout the body. Through one of the talkbacks, it was revealed that this work was originally part of Vargas’s previous exhibition. In an attempt to have a sense of continuity from one exhibition to another (a choice that comes with its own set of problems), the museum kept this work as they felt it fit. The result was a rather literal interpretation of the exhibition’s title, not even its theme, with the museumgoer forced into the role of pun-recipient (“Get it? Fever dream?”).
The works of Cos Zicarelli and Troy Ignacio, both in the already crowded West Wing Gallery, also feel misplaced. Zicarelli’s Dust of Men prints were a rather well-made depiction of his nostalgic view of his childhood, particularly his consumption of old media. Ignacio’s intricate watercolor paintings portrayed a labyrinth of what looked like semi-organic architecture one would find in a video game. Both artists’ works have their merits, but the exhibition hardly provided the proper venue to appreciate them.
And behind a black curtain, in the museum’s isolated video room that could have been used for Jodian’s Lakec, one could watch Ana Elena Tejera’s A Love Song in Spanish, a rather poignant short film about Tejera’s grandparents, focusing mostly on her grandmother, who in her old age, busies herself with daily tasks, punctuated by flashbacks to the domestic dictatorship she faced at the hands of her husband, whose military training turned him harsh and despotic. The viewer was made to confront how memory lives in the skin, as certain hardships can never truly be forgotten, nor should they be. The film is moving and brilliant and has absolutely nothing to do with this exhibition.
I can’t help but look at the exhibition as an international endeavor with the possible function of establishing and maintaining linkages between art establishments. It cannot be a coincidence that the works of Jung, Jodian, and Tejera, the sole works coming from South Korea, Taiwan, and Panama, respectively, were all video installations, which has the logistic advantage of being sent digitally. This, however, pushes the limits of Vargas’s space, which is simply not designed to house that many video installations.
However, considering how ecocritical discourse is often dominated by Western guilt towards a past that ignored environmental concerns in favor of rapid development, Fever Dream, to its credit, was able to bring alternate perspectives from individuals whose colonial histories cannot be separated from their artistic practice. The colonized environment was and continues to be on the losing end development, and Fever Dream does manage to reflect this history.
As of this writing, the Climate Clock, which uses peer-reviewed scientific data to track how much time we have left before the rise of global temperatures becomes unmanageable and irreversible, is at less than five years. We are approaching an inevitable environmental tipping point of no return that dooms us to hotter days and a more uninhabitable habitat, so projects like Fever Dream raise important questions. And while the curation could have done better to incorporate these works into a more cohesive whole, the exhibition had a sound concept coupled with quite a few impactful works.
There is much more that can be said about how our species is headed toward ecological collapse, and how we seem to be excitedly moving it along. And while Fever Dream may not have been a comprehensive manifestation of this concept, the works in the exhibition provided an important starting point that hopefully gets us talking about why this is a problem, how we can solve it, and the role that art plays in all this. Hopefully, future exhibitions won’t feel the need to have a heat wave accompany the art.
SOURCES:
Climate Clock, 19 Sept. 2020, climateclock.world. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
Dong, Hung. “A ‘Fever Dream’ at the UP Vargas Museum.” ArtAsiaPacific, 21 Aug. 2024, www.artasiapacific.com/shows/a-fever-dream-at-the-up-vargas-museum.
UP Vargas Museum. “Fever Dream.” Facebook, 6, 25 Apr., 7, 21 May 2024, www.facebook.com/vargasmuseum.upd.
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Photos by Lk Rigor.
Francis Eduard Ang is a teacher at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, specializing in Philippine literature in English. He holds an MA in Comparative Literature and a BA in Creative Writing. When it comes to art and literature, he focuses on seeing works through a materialist lens, as cultural products that interact with the social, economic, political, and cultural forces of their given context. Utilizing his background in literary criticism, he looks at a work of art as a text, with the aim of understanding the narrative contained within it. He also takes brewing coffee too seriously.
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Kalaw-Ledesma Foundation, Inc (KLFI).