Title

Displace

Author

Roberts, Neil.

Publication date

1997

Type

Conference paper

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Displacements.
By Neil Roberts I took this photo in 1989 on my first visit to the Philippines. It was three years since a true peoples revolution on the streets of Manila had ended 20 years of the Marcos regime and installed Corizon Aquino, the widow of the murdered Opposition leader, as President. In that three years, the depth of the Marcos corruption and cronyism had become evident and disenchantment had replaced hope in a country still crippled by the International Monetary Fund debt and by multinational abuse, a country where 60% of the people lived below the poverty line.

The photo encapsulates something of my feelings for the Filipino people and their situation: light-heartedness in the face of danger, youth burdened with grave responsibility and a strong sense of theatre.

It was actually the theatre world that first took me to the Philippines. In 1989 1 went with two performers, a musician and myself as designer and visual artist to conduct a one-month tour of the country giving performances and workshops under the auspices of a left wing theatre organisation called PETA. This was my education about the Filipino situation and the underpinning of my experience of their country. I returned in 1991 to spend three months living in Manila and making work for an exhibition with an artist run gallery called ART LAB.

My thoughts today come out of those two visits and my experiences there as a tall white Western male in a so called Third World country of short dark people. I've still got a few scars on my head from repeatedly walking into bus shelters and shop awnings set just six feet above the ground.

Regarding printmaking, there is not a lot I can tell you. I make only one sort of print, only intermittently, and it is the direct outcome of an exploration of a particular material. I work with an industrial insulation paper called Sisalcraft that consists of two layers of brown paper sandwiching a layer of bitumen paint and fibreglass threads.

I tear and cut one surface of the paper to expose the bitumen underneath and using a turps release and any old press I can get my hands on I transfer that bitumen image onto printing paper through about ten slightly different states. The process is very fast and simple qualities that suit my working style.

I took some of the bitumen paper with me to Manila when I did the ART LAB residency. The Mt Pinatubo volcano had erupted devastatingly just before I arrived and I was working on this series called 'Eruptions' when I was invited to put work into a local group exhibition about the disaster. The prints were made very quickly at a local access studio called the Mariposa Print Workshop in the suburbs of Manila. Unfortunately, this is all I can tell you about printmaking in the Philippines.

There is though another connection in my mind between the concept of printmaking and my experience of Filipino culture. If printmaking is the transformation of an original into multiple copies then the Philippines is the home of printmaking. It's a country of duplication. Even in the most remote towns I would see little roadside vendors with photocopying machines on long extension leads engaged in helping the people produce the myriad copies of documents demanded by an out of control bureaucracy. I once saw a sandwich board on a footpath somewhere that read 'Real Xerox here'. I guess this is a reference to a hierarchy of quality, as so many of the machines were so old and cobbled together that they produced very degenerated copies, reproductions that I found interesting but that the bureaucracy might have found unacceptable. And Filipino manufacturers produce fakes, which I see as a form of printmaking, with great alacrity Fender guitars, Reeboks, cabaret artists who do note perfect renditions of 'Bridge over Troubled Waters'. Of course, these 'prints' have fatally give away flaws the Reeboks have no air in the soles, the singer looks Filipino even if he sounds perfectly West Coast but who hasn't seen or perhaps made an original much better than the generations taken from it.

In my remaining minutes, I'd like to tell you a few stories that I think reflect on this forum's notion of displacement and to a lesser extent on duplication. These stories are, as they say, all true....

In May 1991, about 6 weeks before I left Australia, a news story emerged about the deaths of 4 people on the South coast of NSW. The story focused on the two brothers, John and Brian Garrott, who had killed themselves and their wives by connecting a car exhaust to a sealed bedroom. The story was especially newsworthy because the Garrott brothers were the eccentric and reclusive world leaders in the specialised art of developing diamond styli and hi fi cartridges. The aspect of the story that caught my attention however was that the wives, who rated only the most scant of mentions, were Filipinas: Normita, 36 and Terisita, 34. There was reportedly a loving relationship within each couple. As the details emerged however, the media continued to ignore the possibility that the women, who had been separated from their important family networks when they were bought to Australia ten years previously, may not have wished to die with their husbands. Primarily though it was the absence of any substance to the women's identity and nationality as constructed by the media that interested and disturbed me.

Then, in Manila that July, a story appeared in one of the major daily newspapers reporting the murder of two young Filipinas married to Australians. The suicide had become a murder/suicide pact, the 36 and 34 year old women had become 20 year olds and the marriage of ten years had been reduced to the wives being bought to Australia a mere 16 months previously. The media in each country, as media everywhere does, had distorted whatever the so called facts of the situation might really have been to fit certain local agendas in Australia, disturbed and heroic creative genius and the myth of cohesive family; in the Philippines, dependency on, and abuse by, more powerful countries as embodied in the sexual trade of their women.

As an artist and a man working in Manila, this was the chasm of differing perceptions into which I tried to throw myself.

One of the projects I initiated there related to the third ARX event held in Perth the following April, 1992. ARX is, or was then, a biennial gathering and project based exchange of ideas and work amongst artists from Australia, New Zealand and the Asian region. In my proposal written during my time in Manila inl991, I made an inventory of the tragedies and afflictions of day to day life in the Philippines and expressed a sense of futility in the possibility of meaningful art being made eight months and half a world away. Metaphor, abstraction and my rarefied arte povera gestures seemed especially detached from the reality of mud slides and volcanic eruptions and a bankrupt economy.

So I decided to try and do a work which highlighted this disparity that I felt between our countries, about the question of art's capability to exist beyond the immediate concerns of survival, trade and economics. I was also taken with the Filipino practice of naming everything there seems to be given a name cars, horse drawn buggies, houses, the spirits, even the stillborn. In a coming together of widely diverse backgrounds such as the ARX event, it seemed to me that all we had to offer each other, at first, were our names. So I chose to create a name board, an honour roll of all the ARX participants. Romy Iral and his workers, who had made some of the components of my exhibition at ART LAB, were paid to make 56 nameplates from the ARX list and send them to me in Australia through the Embassy. The price we negotiated was, in Manila, ample, perhaps generous, and to me, very cheap. It was in this discrepancy that I saw a sort of birth tax, a gap between people that I wondered whether art events like ARX could ever hope to address in any meaningful way.

The name plates were set up in the foyer of one of the ARX exhibition venues, fortuitously opposite a university donor board. Participants were then encouraged to buy their nameplates for something between $15 and $30, and the money raised was sent back to Romy Iral through the Embassy. In my ARX catalogue notes, I described this part of the project as "nothing but a probably futile gesture of possibility and remembrance in a complex and convoluted debate." The work raised a bit of money that made a bit of difference and a lot of questions, as much for me as anyone else.

Finally, the work was also able to act as a sort of departure board. As each artist left the event in a staggered pattern of flights and buses, they would remove their nameplate and mark the wall with their signature or other form of sign. In this way, the manufactured naming became personalised, hopefully reflecting the fleshing out of identity and knowledge that happens between participants during events like these. And, I guess, a sort of print reverted to a sort of original, but I only said that because I'm speaking at a print symposium.

I'll finish with a short anecdote that I wrote while I was in Manila. I spent a lot of time on the streets of the city away from the more common tourist routes. I was, without respite, a spectacle. I was prey for the pimps, an object of delight or sometimes terror to the kids, a travelling word game that involved pointing out that the top of my head resembled the roof of a VW Beetle. I was looked at all the time. I found this very disconcerting, confronting even, and I became even more self conscious than usual. This anecdote was part of my reaction to that self consciousness:

Each fortnight since I arrived two months ago for my residency with ART LAB, I've been taking my picture in one of those automatic photo booths that abound in Manila, the city that lives by Xerox and I.D. It's a way of noting the passing of my time here and catching, theoretically, the changes wrought in my face by the experience, but change is not much in evidence. It's still the same face mostly, uneasily stem and caught staring into the mirror for the green light.

At one photo booth in a more remote suburb one week, the two girls attending the machine giggled as they lowered the seat as far as it would go, which was still not far enough. (Even automatic technology here is serviced by people every pump is operated, every fare collected, every button pushed on your behalf). There was no black backcloth in this booth, and I was wearing a plain white tee shirt. The notion of photographic equipment adjusted to register brown skin tones as the norm had not occurred to me before this, but when the photos appeared in the slot I was visible only as a pair of eyes in a ghostly visage.

A crowd gathered around to see what the girls were so embarrassed about and as they all laughed and gaped at me it was obvious what they were saying: white background, white tee shirt, white man. What's there to photograph?

© Neil Roberts, 1997.Last Updated

02 Dec 2024