0004 Asian Art News, Turn On And Read, January-February 2011

by Gina Fairley (Asian Art News)

Text in the visual arts can be both illuminating and idiosyncratic. For more than three

decades, this duality has seduced the Filipino artist Cesare A.X. Syjuco, who today has a cultlike following in his country. His literary hybrids waver between poetry, Indie lyrics, and assemblage. He is truly a cerebral artist.

Described as “a living underground

legend” Cesare A.X.

Syjuco occupies a place of

mythology, a recluse and an

eccentric, within the Manila

art scene. A triangular neon in his recent

solo exhibition, The Ancestry of a Stone at

Manila’s Galleria Duemila, perhaps best

sets the mood—GOD SPEAKS TO CESARE

it emphatically states in a red glow. In a

country where 90%

of the population is

Roman Catholic, one

starts to read Syjuco’s

text works in a different

light. Laced with

humor and a probing

assault on banality,

they mesmerize and

confound through the

very media ubiquitous

to advertising and propaganda—

slick graphics

and clever language.

Text saturates

our world. It is not surprising

that language

has been an important

critical feature across

20th century art, from

the Cubi st s to the

Dadaists, key to the

advertising premise of

Pop art and the more

avant-garde Fluxus

artists of the 1960s,

and later where text

itself increasingly became the standalone

artwork within conceptual practices.

Cesare A.X. Syjuco, however, does not fit

into any mould.

As his son and fellow musician

Augusto ‘AGR’ Syjuco described his father

in A Sudden Rush of Genius, a book/

CD set of performed avant-garde poetry

launched in late 2010: “As a crusading music

critic, underground radio jock, and later

as probably Manila’s first important Indie

promoter and record producer—pivotal

roles he assumed in rapid succession while

still a teenager majoring in literature at De

La Salle College in the early 1970s—it is

even easier to forget that he himself was

a musician and performer of immense

capabilities, vision, and technical prowess

....” He continued, “Everyone knows

that Cesare the Art Legend is notoriously

anti-social, publicly distant, and painfully

reclusive, preferring to work in total seclusion

for months on end, missing meals and

staying sleepless for days in a soundproof

glassed loft four-and-a-half story’s above

the secured street where he lives in virtual

anonymity in suburban Alabang ... [his]

obsessive preoccupation with detail and

impatience with mistakes, his stubborn

insistence on things usually considered

technically impossible ....” It is certainly

a different picture to the award-winning

‘Golden Boy of Philippine Art’ touted by the

press. How much is myth and how much is

genius is a curiosity relatively uncharted.

The sculpture PERFECTIO(N)

(2004), in this writer’s opinion, defines

Syjuco superbly. A white neon glowing on

a white wall, its purity flawed by its imperfect

spelling through its unlit N. But this

is no technical malfunction. Meticulously

considered, it is a succinct critique on society’s

perception of correctness

and its parallel

postmodern debate on

what construes ‘good’

art, or perhaps just

a jibe at both with

tongue firmly in cheek.

In the hands of Syjuco,

conceptualism is reduced

to a neat cerebral

cul-d-sac, and it

is an intriguing place

to dwell.

First exhibited

in Syjuco’s landmark

exhibition, Flashes of

Genius (2004), at the

Cultural Centre of the

Philippines [CCP]—

Syjuco’s first appearance

in twelve years

following a sudden

self-imposed seclusion

in 1992—the neon is

as current today as

we move into a new

decade where globalization’s

ideals are increasingly proven

as flawed. Exhibited at Galleria Duemila

adjacent to two works: a dead bonsai in a

Perspex vitrine and a religious statue with

a missing outstretched hand hovering imperfectly

off the edge of a gallery pedestal,

the collective conversation between these

three works taps into—and perhaps even

amplifies—the social landscape of our day.

This is the genius of Syjuco.

Cesare A.X. Syjuco made his debut

into the visual arts scene in 1977 with

a solo exhibition in the Rotary Arcade

Building Makati, curated by the esteemed

Emanuel Torres. It was to set a trajectory

that can be traced to Syjuco’s current

‘Literary Hybrids,’ that fusion of found

text and found object that has defined his

later career. Using iconic Roy Lichtenstein

images minus the dots, Syjuco replaced

Lichtenstein’s text with Tagalog colloquialisms,

usurping American pop culture with

a local intonation, such as Lichtenstein’s

iconic Crying Girl (1963) with the caption

Nagdadalantao (oh no I’m pregnant.) The

Literary Hybrids are merely an updated appropriation

of popular culture with a more

sophisticated understanding of their quips.

Syjuco’s text really became his own,

however, through the TANKA

series of the mid-1970s, abstract

paintings of texture likened to

wood, where he worked back into

the surface with scratches that eventually

became simulated scribble turned into

text. This more gestural, personal sense of

the hand in his work reached its endpoint

with the site-specific work, The Shape of

Writing (1989), simulated writing in Pentel

black pen directly onto the walls of Perth’s

Institute of Contemporary Art, Australia.

Abstraction by its very nature

speaks of non-verbal processes. What

emerged from these early foundations

was the need for greater clarity of language.

It was a transition that won Syjuco

the Grand Prize for painting from the Art

Association of the Philippines in 1982 with

the work, Be Wary of Green / Be most wary

of Memory, collaged magazine and graphic

transfers. It was the precursor to the next

two decades of plucked images overlaid

with sans serif text moving from crudely

backlit tarpaulin in the style of shrunken

billboards ubiquitous to the Philippines’s

skyline, to today’s slick acrylic panels with

interactive fluorescent tubing. Syjuco had

worked out how to use text to engage the

viewer spatially, as well as cerebrally.

It came at a time when Syjuco had

performed his Table of 0 (1981), for the first

time, an auto-canceling found poem that

would punctuate nearly 30 years of his career,

moving among poetry, performance,

and sculpture. This simple multiplication

table of zero defies logic by using a systemic

pattern of acceptance. The meter

conforms to the formality of poetry and its

graphic quality allowed a neutral slate for

aesthetic meanderings, whether performed

or written. In its mere articulation it defined

absence—it offered a delightful parody

and a way forward. When one speaks of

Cesare Syjuco it cannot be without mention

of Jean Marie—a team as watertight as

Jean-Claude and Christo, or Ulay and Maria

Abramović. Their lifetime of collaboration

began as students in 1968. Still practicing,

Jean Marie, a visual and performance artist

herself, today is largely the spokesperson

for Syjuco and curated the aforementioned

exhibition The Ancestry of a Stone.

While their most public project

was the alternative space Art Lab, which

operated as the primary venue for conceptual

art in the Philippines during the

early 1990s, presenting, among others,

Cesare’s painted shadows and one-line

poems in plastic ‘movie’ letters facing EDSA

boulevard, performances by the “Electric

Underground Collective” (an avant-garde

open-mic platform emulated today by the

Manila space Green Papaya Art Projects

and groups such as “Sleepy Heads” and

“Radioactive Sago Project” combining

experimental sound and voice works,)

and Jean Marie’s minimal monochromatic

airbrushed paintings, Art Lab was at the

cutting edge—and of its time.

While the space dissolved with the

1990s—along with Syjuco’s active presence

in the scene—performance has remained a

contingent component to Syjuco’s oeuvre,

spontaneous and orchestrated. “His brain

is upside down. It’s always going opposite,”

Jean Marie says, not so much as

an excuse for his eccentricities,

but with infinite wonder. She

continued, “If music is the space

between the notes, for me art

is the space between the work,

then for Cesare it is the space

and time taken to experience

the words and conversation between

the words—it is a literal

conversation.”1

Enter center stage mark

I I—Cesare Sy juco

reemerged onto the

Filipino art scene in

2004 with an exhibition

of new text works at the

country’s premier art institution,

the Cultural Centre of the

Philippines. It was a production

on a grand scale. Divided into

two groups: The Room of Absence

consisting of multi-media works

such as PERFECTIO(N) and

Table of 0 [presented with the

title Invisible Man in Pictures]

that moved toward a position of

nihilism; and The Room of Small

Talk where Syjuco presented

the first substantial collection of

graphic manipulations, aka digital

tarpaulins as light-boxes—it

again bolstered the legend.

Not unlike his international

contemporaries Barbara

Kruger, Joseph Kosuth, Jenny

Holtzer, Lawrence Weiner, or indeed

Andy Warhol, and others,

Syjuco turned to text-infused appropriation

of popular culture as

the raison d’être. The static light

fitting became an active player

as a defining element within the

artwork itself, such as a formal

division and later a more literal

application as horizon, territorial

demarcation, or discharged ammunition,

further suturing the tools

of advertising with visual poetics.

On the modern experience

Foucault wrote: “What is essential

is that thought, both for itself and

in the density of its workings,

should be both knowledge and

a modification of what it knows,

reflection and a transformation of

the mode of being of that on which

it reflects.”2 Key to these artists

was their intention to dismantle

prescribed semantics and use the

deliverable message as a vehicle for

finding new meaning.

Perhaps this is more simply

illustrated through the Syjuco’s

poster hybrid, Please Notice the

Air (2010), an image of a barren

indiscernible landscape with

uncontrollable air particles expedited

by an explosion. Is it toxic?

Why is there no vegetation? Is

it legal? Are we in danger? It is

the unspoken dialogue between

printed text and image that is

the real progenitor for thought.

It is easily read again in Keep

the Change (2010), an image of

a tank engaged in combat with

the tag line ‘Have a Really Swell

Day / And Keep the Change,’ a

fluorescent tube slicing the line

of fire with military precision.

Syjuco milks the cliché with razor-

sharp wit. His ability to play

with preponderant imagistic and

textural conventions—that is to

convolute, charge and confound

processed thought—is like a slap

in the face with the proverbial

slimy fish to awaken our doze.

It is affronting, real, and memorable,

and he pulls it off again,

again, and again.

I am reminded of the

words of Swiss-born artist Olaf

Breuning, “They (clichés) have

to be very powerful, otherwise

they might not be recognized by

people. It seems that reality in

itself rushes by so fast that stereotypes

are very welcome breaks.”3

Cesare Syjuco has appropriated

images—clichés—for

posters since the beginning: a

limited-edition graphic accompanying

each exhibition and since

1994, a neighborhood Halloween

intervention that, like his Art Lab

EDSA slogans, takes visual poetry

to an unassuming public, an example,

Dracula Sucks, in reaction

to the Macapagal-Arroyo government.

Today, working closely with

daughter Maxine Syjuco, also a poet

and artist, he now plays the role of

director in this stage act, technically

vigilant and as acerbic as ever.

One wonders, however, at

what point do the words no longer

become words, but rather a permeable

elastic state of meaning? The

fabrication of myth, weaving of a

lie, or revelation of a truth? A superb

example is reworked hybrid,

Veneration of the Lie (1996/2010),

a dented common copper kettle

enshrined in a vitrine as a rare

artifact emanating from Portuguese

explorer Ferdinand Magellan, its

label stating, “This prototype of

Magellan’s invention was recovered

from his flagship, the Maria

Christina, around 1523. On loan

from the Vatican Collection.” Killed

in 1521 in the Philippines, this benign object

doesn’t sync with its label, illuminating

our lost ability to comprehend and question

the information we are fed. Furthermore,

today’s manipulated visual world, under

the auspice of ‘contemporary art,’ has the

ability to throw open debate on history and

recast it anew into an abstracted form not

interested in truth, but rather narrative. The

found object becomes found history—a

simple opp-shop kettle no more.

This contemporary apathy to read,

to take the time to understand—or worse

still, not to want to understand—is brushed

off with the pun ‘it’s all Greek to me’ and

the dismissive catch-all phrase ‘whatever’

in the similarly toned work, Greek to Me

(1997/2010). A stone etched with the Latin

phrase ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’—I think therefore

I am—René Descartes’s foundation

to Western philosophy (and in context of

visual poetry Barbara Kruger’s signature

appropriation ‘I shop therefore I am.’)

Printed on the Plexiglas vitrine hovering

in front of the object in intermittent

black and red text (another Kruger reference?)

is the exchange: “: It means I love

you in Greek. / : No, stupid. It’s Latin. / :

Whatever.” Context is challenged by text.

This is not a mining of the Filipino psyche

or fashionable global-political diatribe; its

anchor is in the human condition. One is

encouraged to think beyond the literal and

question our place—the solid foundation

of a rock upon which to build. In the rush

to move forward what is placed in jeopardy?

Whatever ....

Is religion equally as scrutable as

history? Syjuco’s Literary Hybrid, A Simple

Case of Arm Robbery #2, suggests so. It

parallels the museum case with the homeshrine

housing a ‘sacred’ object—a seat of

authority and respect. Sitting in proximity

to the neon PERFECTIO(N) in the Duemila

exhibition, one cannot help but enjoy the

pun as the Christ-figure is

worn, derobed, and missing a

hand. Its text is the nonsensical

banter about the ownership of

the hand, perhaps the maids?

The charitable gesture to offer a

hand is taken full circle. Humor

and banality veil a deeper critique

without being preachy.

It is this balance that is signature

to Cesare Syjuco’s works.

Laced with punchy wit,

clearly there is a serious side

to the work often overlooked.

A dead bonsai arrested from

its meticulous grooming is an

affronting image. It is an assemblage

of object/text that

sits central to Duemila’s exhibition,

and perhaps a profound

summation of Syjuco’s

hybrids. Space Water (2010)

was made at a time when Pakistan was

flooded, China and Australia were afflicted

by drought, and COP15, the Copenhagen

Climate Conference, fell over. Its text reads:

“:What is Paramount? / The conquest of

space or the price of water? / : The inexhaustibility

of water / : But space is so vast!

/ : And water is so scarce here.” It begs the

question: At what cost?

The influence of language on our

perception and representation

of landscape is ingrained. As

an Australian I can’t help but be

framed by the narrative and mythology

of a threatening ‘outback,’ and an

ever-present, razor-sharp horizon. While I

realize that is a very different landscape to

that of Cesare Syjuco’s, where a horizon is

perpetually smudged by pollution, it is a

shared concern. This connectivity is more

literally suggested in the visual poem, “A

shadow is never blacker than its shadow /

A hole in China is not a mountain in Peru,”

manifest as a text work on acrylic panel in

2004, and in 2010 the graphic of a learjet

and fluorescent horizon added—a constant

reinvention that defines our times. One can

never fool one’s shadow and every action

has a repercussion. It is a lasting message

amidst this blanket of popular culture, cool

graphics, and punchy lines.

While we can quickly glance over

Cesare Syjuco’s works with a knowing

smirk, it is their residual imprint that’s

lasting, not unlike the retinal burn of

fluorescent light that underscores many of

his texts. The image of a dead bonsai is

wrong, its Zen [im]perfection as potent as

a malfunctioning ‘N’ in that opening neon

PERFECTIO(N)—we go full circle.

While there are countless Literary

Hybrids that could describe the genius

of Cesare Syjuco, this is the one I want

to leave you with as it forces

viewers to consider the work of

Syjuco in a different light. Turn

on the switch and read.

Notes:

1. Jean Marie Syjuco in conversation

with the writer,

Manila 2010.

2. Foucault, Michel, The Order

of Things, An Archaeology of

the Human Sciences, (1970)

p. 327.

3. Olaf Breuning, 2004.

Gina Fairley is regional contributing

editor for Asian Art

News and World Sculpture

News. She is based in Sydney