PABLO

When Hangover Becomes Form: A Dialogue on the Art Market and Audience 

“When Hangover Becomes Form” is an open forum on the conditions of contemporary art practice and product in the Philippines framed within the context of globalized distribution of objects, services, and information.  Art, as both practice and product, serves as a source of multivalent readings relating to personal narratives that migrate into communities of shared experiences and common history.  This exchange contributes to the development of social markers such as taste and value, and the consequent distinction of art as goods for consumption.  But when art assumes the role of arbitrary sign, it may have realized the Platonic curse of shadows in a cave representing something that which is not.  The work of art then appears as an inverted or distorted mirror of reality, as obscure objects of desire laden with the seductive snare of authentic experience and universal good.  But the reality of the production of art and its outcome parallels that of the condition of a hangover after a questionable dalliance with intoxicating spirits (whether in forms of distilled liquor, mass mystification, or psychological projections of the starved mind) in favor of precarious pleasure, discretionary camaraderie, and grandiloquent taunts of individual superiority.  The art world being a sum of parts thus transforms into a large operating machine that regurgitates the constant flux of desire, and where the excess of such churning becomes art itself.  The challenge therefore is to build a discerning audience that can distinguish what is “vomit” (i.e., when hangover becomes form), from the work that is critical, sustainable, and progressive. 

Pablo Gallery invites the artists from the Mag:net Gallery show “Galleon Turd: Circumnavigating the Diaspora of Excess” to facilitate the discussion about Filipino art now.  The forum will be on Wednesday July 22, 2008, 5 pm, at Pablo Cubao Gallery, Space 7, Cubao Expo, Araneta Center, Cubao Quezon City.  Please join us.