Jean Vengua introduces BEHIND THE BLUE CANVAS by Eileen R.
Tabios
(Giraffe Books, Quezon City, 2004)
VARIATIONS ON A CIRCLE IN
BLUE
Serve me up some pretty, pretty people
Serve me up somebody I can believe
You’d never know it to look at me
I got a Dracula moon
Love comes out any way it wants to
Doesn’t ask for your permission
Joan Osborne, E. Bazilian, R. Hyman, R.
Chertoff, “Dracula Moon,” Relish
I
went around all day
With
the moon stickin’ in my eye
Don Van Vliet,[1]
“Sure ‘Nuff ‘N Yes I Do,” Safe as Milk
My immediate reaction to
the “aesthetic affairs” in this book is both attraction and repulsion. This is
not negative criticism. Both exist, and are crucial to any work of art. And I
find here a certain repulsion to the world inhabited by these artists. That is,
one is attracted by the promise of eros, but to see artists as they exist
within the economy and spin of the art world, and to read this as a narrative
of sexual desire, is also to be repulsed. For sex itself, and sexual desire is narrative. To paint, to construct,
sculpt, conceive (as in conceptual art, as in artistic creation) is, after all,
to make oneself, or the extensions of oneself, interesting and desirable. In
one sense, it is to love. Even that which appears repulsive wants to please someone.
At the same time, there is
the lie. That is, the nostalgic and very western vision we have of the artist’s
seemingly autonomous, or at least democratically independent, purity of vision.
But the valorization of independence and autonomy obscures the relations of
economy beneath the surface. We have here a counter-narrative that runs against
the grain of the romantic notion of the artist, the genius in his garret, or in
her expensive loft studio, working on some “pure” or original vision or
concept. The New York City art world in these stories is itself stripped and
exposed. You, the reader, are a voyeur into its intricate social and material
network, not unlike that in the mansion from the Story of O
by Dominique Aury (using
the pseudonym Pauline Reage). The galleries of New York City
provide the context. They are the mansion, the community, and city. But none of
them, no matter how tasteful or avant garde, transcend the marketplace.
The artists in these tales
are bought and sold. Even an artist of such seemingly organic purity as Richard
Long, whose works narrate and travel through the natural landscape, must
eventually channel his visions and experiences into book form, some object for
consumption. Like the “Little Tramp” in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, artists feed the machine, and are fed by it.
Yet, ironically, the artists also desire, consume and collect. Like the
incestuous author in Garcia Villa’s poem # 103 (No;I,
will,not,speak,softly--/I,am,Thy,lover,Lord!”), the beautiful replicants in the
postmodern film, Bladerunner, and the artist-collector in Tabios’ story,
“The Art Collector,” the artists in this book are also lovers in love or in
lust with the master, even while subverting his/her authority. Garcia Villa’s
commas signal the ambivalent and shifting position of authority; relatedly, Tabios’
prose slides into the lyricism of the poetic line, subverting the boundary
between genres: words and phrases are replicated like numbered canvasses, even
as artists replicate their work as commodities for the public. Even while Tabios’ stories slyly pander
to our erotic hunger, they morph into the unexpected. For example, “The
Lucidity of Detachment” evolves into notes for the poem with which the story
ends. In “Einstein’s Love Story” the expected erotic encounter becomes a
“traditional” motif of desire and love followed by marriage. Surely its
placement at the end of this collection whose stories offer a multiplicity of
possibilities for the unraveling of love and/or desire must be deliberate. Is
it naivete -- or deep intelligence -- on Tabios’ part not to allow the
machinations of the art economy to demolish (her) hope?
It’s all about “taste,”
after all. But what is “taste”? Before consumption, whether sensory or
alimentary, the function of “taste” is discrimination. It has its roots in the
imperative to survive. But warped under the pressure of the global, capitalist
economy, “taste” becomes fetishization, the intimate, compulsive concern with,
and categorization of that which we consume through our senses. In making such
distinctions, one journeys into the labyrinth of intellect, and away from the
senses. And yet, in the marketplace, intellect too often settles for
simplification: one categorizes “good” art from “bad,” “heterosexuality” from “homosexuality,” “normal”
sex from “kinky.”
Eavan Boland,
in "Letter To A Young Woman Poet" (American Poetry Review,
May/June 1997), suggests: "the past needs us. That very past in poetry
which simplified us . . . now needs us to change it. . . .Therefore we need to
change the past. Not by intellectualizing it. But by eroticizing
it.” What
does it mean to eroticize this process of discrimination? To eroticize, not
just the art, but the players, the machinery, the “mansion” that keeps it
humming? In her previous books, Tabios has footnoted
Boland’s statement, so it obviously has significance for her. In eros, control
slips, as the object of domination revels in “losing” control. Categories become unclear; the submissive may
control the master, as Tabios reflects (in her poem “Beginning Lucidity”): “And
what joy to recognize the curved line as both convex and concave -- a moment
close to my backbone.” Her statement
suggests a wish to turn away from nihilism, a longing, as Nina says in “The
Caustic Surface,” for relationships in which colors (or lovers) “exist side by
side without encroaching on each other’s fields” and allowing “space for
generating an emotional response.” Indeed, in all of these stories, I think
that it is the emotional and sensate response that remains cherished and
sacred, though often hidden or degraded.
Throughout Behind the Blue Canvas, ideas of
perfection and fragmentation emerge metaphorically in the circular and linear
forms painted on the artists’ canvasses, and in the circularity and linearity
of personal relationships and social interactions upon the larger stage of
world affairs. “Lucidity of Detachment”
bares the narrator’s wounds to the reader in a longing that returns again and
again to scenes of departure and detachment, broken lines and half-circles.
Perhaps it reveals a disturbing cynicism, an acceptance of unfulfilled and
doomed eroticism based on a society that profits from artists and art,
diaspora, and elitist hierarchies maintained within the New York gallery world.
These ekphrasic, erotic explorations of submission or domination, and all the
labyrinthine machinations of power that lie between subject and object, reflect
the global arena of politics and power, the densely layered realities of
post-colonial hegemony. In “The Lucidity of Detachment,” the art gallery is
named “FRACTALS” for good reason: fractals micro-pattern the larger world.
Maxwell, the owner of “FRACTALS,” is an arbiter of taste; he seemingly rules
the lives of artists in his “stable.” But he may also be the front-man for
dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s son, Bong-Bong, who launders his unearned wealth
through, among other ventures, New York art galleries.
Recently, in only his
third state dinner since beginning office, U.S. President George Bush hosted
Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Tabios, an oenophile, understands
the irony of the Pride Viognier and Schramsberg wines served at the state
dinner celebrating the alliance between Presidents Arroyo and Bush. Galleries,
like nations, have their alliances, too. They have their compromises and back
room deals. Like nations, they nurture the feeling of lack in their consuming
patrons, and in their artists.
Imperialism defines itself by keeping its friends and enemies in a
constant state of desire and hunger. The wines served are considered fine wines
in the same way that works exhibited in various New York City galleries are
considered “fine,” with all the marketing accoutrements of expanding “cultural
capital.”
Yet,
while these conflations of couplings and sexual triangulations with global
imperialism play themselves out in these stories, Tabios does not let the
reader lapse back into nihilism. She offers spaces for redemption in “Red
Afterbirth” and “La Luna ‘Before the Silence of Winter Comes.’” In the latter, she observes that the virgin
moon is red, and pales as it rises – a metaphor for how life, which is “not
easy,” may sap us – even though our light may shine the brighter for it.
We consume the erotic or
pornographic narrative because of its predictability. But Tabios’ stories are
not predictable, and they swerve into poetry, even as a musical note might bend
into blues. What makes these narratives blue? The fact that love exists,
suffers and enjoys, alongside that which is distant, cold, calculating,
imperative. “Keep your eyes open,” commands the object of one artist’s desire
in the story, “Blue Richard.” In the midst of struggle, in the midst of
cultural disjunction, diaspora, and subjection, the artist is drawn to the
authoritative voice that makes everything seemingly easy, simple, fluid.
The blues as music rarely
gives us “answers,” in the intellectual sense; blues is itself an answer
to alienation, separation and violence. If these narratives constitute an
alternative, then I suspect that it is in the cognitive experience and
recognition of distance, desire, and love. In the world of monetary values, of
critical exegesis, of categorizing and so-called “discriminating” taste, we
must come to recognize how we swerve, bend, and slip, how we desire to be
mastered and to master, how we desire to destroy and be destroyed, and how we
love. If sex and sexual desire is narrative, it is also knowledge.
[1] Don Van
Vliet, also known as Captain Beefheart, once called the “Fellini of Rock” by
New Musical Express, may arguably be described as the Godfather of American alt
rock and nu blues. In 1982, he gave up his musical career to become a visual
artist, exhibiting his expressionist paintings on both coasts. He is currently
represented by Galerie Michael Werner in New York.
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