A large retrospective of art works by Pacita Abad (1946 - 2004) is on show at the Walker Art Center. Abad was born in the northern Philippines and, during the mid-sixties, protested the Marcos dictatorship. Marcos, an authoritarian strong man (supported by the American CIA), had a sinister way of making political adversaries disappear and Abad, who was then studying law, had to flee the country. (She seems to have never returned). Her plan was to continue studying law in Madrid, but, as often happened at that time, she made a detour to explore the counter-culture in San Francisco. This divagation turned out to be decisive and she, apparently, married and moved to Washington DC, apparently, renouncing her studies in the law. She studied art but didn't find her signature style until 1981. When a white table cloth in her apartment was spoiled by a spill of red wine, Abad recuperated the linen by sewing applique patches onto its surface. The result was a pillowy-looking, bas relief quilt, accomplished in an embroidery style that she called "trapunta" after an Italian word that means "quilted" or "stuffed." Trapuna became her metier and the hundred works in the show, with the exception of a few early paintings and a striking-wrought metal sculpture (it shows a figure framed by a barred security door), are all accomplished in that style. (Her first trapunta, done on the ruined table-cloth, and called "Baguio Fruit" is, I think, her best; it was made between 1981 and 1983 and represents various kinds of fruits and vegetables, each a quilt patch and all jostling one another, more or less life-size across a tapestry banner that is about four-feet wide and seven feet long. The colors of the fruit are represented with remarkable fidelity -- there's a regal purple eggplant, grapes, a great cream-colored cauliflower opening like a pale floral blossom, cabbage and carrots and all sorts of tropical fruits; the composition is an intense field of color, an "all-over" effect like Jackson Pollock, abstract from a distance but resolving very neatly into individual vegetal specimens as you approach the piece -- Abad's works have the characteristic of seeming abstract and, yet, figurative at the same time. It's a magisterial work of art and demonstrates that Pacita's mature style sprung forth full-blown in her very first work in the "trapunta" style.) Her art, as represented in the retrospective, falls into four categories -- there are huge masks with a bright, archaic aspect depicted in tapestry, some figurative works that have a social criticism aspect (she's concerned with immigration and poverty), abstracts, her weakest works in my estimation, although all of them are pretty enough, and, then, a spectacular series of undersea scenes, representing, it seems, the denizens of coral reefs. In a hallway, there's a huge tapestry of Marcos and his cronies, a giant bugaboo with staring mask-like features, surrounded by ten masks of various sizes that have the effect of a tropical and hallucinated painting by James Ensor. The masks are spectacular, decorated with cowrie shells and fragments of mirrors so that the objects sparkle in the light and the colors are brilliant, curves and patches of quilted materials, tie-dyed fabrics and Batik, all stitched together in huge radiant banners. (This is the brightest show that I've seen at the Walker for years, a nice antidote to the exceptionally dour and ugly art of theJannis Kournellis retrospective that preceded this exhibition.) Abad's stuff is undeniably cheerful; even when the subject matter is dire (for instance a kid in metal cage called "Caught on the Border"), her trapunto-style has a gaudy, flamboyant, and jolly aspect. (She signs her work "Pacita" in big broad white script prominently displayed on one the quilted patches.) A work called "Girls in Ermita", a group of half-naked go-go dancers quilted onto a pop art column of ads for peep shows and dance halls is cheerful, vibrant, and, more or less, devoid of any social commentary about the American military base and the prostitution that it inspired -- rather, the big banner is more of an advertisement than a critique or lamentation. The most startling work in the show called "My Fear of Night Diving" covers an entire wall and has at its center a pink, flesh-colored octopus with fat writhing tentacles; above the octopus, there's a horrific open jaw, a barracuda or lamprey or something with huge needle-like teeth. In the inky darkness, phosphorescent-looking fish, really just fish skeletons (they look like fish as imagined by Paul Klee) gleam with sequin eyes. It's remarkable, but too pretty to arouse the horror, that, perhaps, she wished to convey. Abad seems to have been indefatigable -- she married an artist, but divorced him and, then, gravitated toward men presumably like her politician (and legislator) father; she married an economist and, then, an American banker working with third-world countries. Everything that she touched, she decorated and pictures show her clad in vibrant tie-dyed outfits. She felt her colors were darkening and, perhaps, become more weak and so she moved to Singapore where she spent the last part of her life luxuriating in the tropical glory there.. She was directing an army of assistants in painting a long bridge in that city when she died from cancer in 2004. The show is fascinating, cheerful, and, I think, uplifting. It brightens your day.
Also on show is an austere installation by Kahlil Robert Irving. This is a room-sized wooden platform on which you walk to inspect various cut-outs in the floor boards. Three or four of them open to tile sub-floors embedded about a foot below the level of the platform. Some of the tiles are spattered with what seem to be droplets of molten gold. In one corner of the platform there's a black barrel-shaped canister. A wall like a chimney rises from another part of the platform -- but the wall is just a wall; there's no opening for a hearth that one expects and, so, it appears to the eye like nothing more than a naked obstruction of brick. The subject of the installation is modern "archeology" and the insertions in the floor open into a substrate of the past -- at least, this seems to be the intent. I didn't like the work and thought it was trivial but it engages all the senses: you look at it and hear it as your footfalls echo on the hollow platform and the plywood comprising the flooring has a sweet, fresh smell. If you want, you can touch the bricks and the enigmatic barrel (I didn't).
An artist named Paul Chan is responsible for some gimmicky provocations occupying three galleries. Chan uses inflatables wafted about by industrial fans to create spooky figures that wave their puffy fists at you like advertising at a used car dealership. The figures move in a looping repetitive way, alternately flailing and drooping and there is something nightmarish about their limited repertory of gestures -- they are caught in endless futile repetition. Some of the works represent groups of the figures, hooded and ghastly, headless or with cone-shaped, faceless tops that writhe as the air fills them. You can imagine some of the installations as perverse figures mimicking, for instance, the three graces -- that is, three more or less shapeless forms with flopping arms and strange hoods like inquisitorial figures or monster Klansmen all holding hands and infusing one another with air jetting from the fans. Chan runs a publishing house and, curiously, has printed Saddam Hussein's essays on democracy written when the dictator was a young man; there's a big, elaborate black and white portrait of the dictator as he looked before he was executed hanging on one of the walls as well as some virtue-signaling in the form of anti-racist and anti-fascist slogans. The writhing inflatables have jokey names like "Pillowsophy". They're fun to watch as they go through their futile machinations, but there's not much substance to the show.
By contrast, Pacita Abad's evocations of harried immigrants, kids in cages, and her masks of thugs from the Marcos regime all have an inadvertent effect of being precisely and remarkable attuned to the Zeitgeist. Her art is strong, however, and I think that it is characteristic of most good art that it somehow seems adapted to the world in which we find ourselves living -- even though made more than 35 years ago. Even her images of the coral reefs seem now to have a sort of elegant elegiac effect.
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