Fluxus in the Philippines – Resonances and Translations
Eva Bentcheva –
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Recent studies on the ‘global’ history of Fluxus since the 1960s have focused on contacts between networks in Western Europe, North America and Japan, with artists working behind the Iron Curtain and in Latin America.[1] While highlighting Fluxus as a gesture of interpersonal exchange in the face of political regimes, these exhibitions have also emphasised the role of interpersonal contacts. As noted by art historian Monica Juneja, this idea of ‘global’ art as an abstract and unimpeded spread of ideas is an elusive concept.[2] Artistic practices, Juneja argues, are rooted in lived experiences and localities where multiple layers of history converse, without necessarily always engaging direct contact. Thinking along these lines, this paper discusses the lesser-known histories of Fluxus in Southeast Asia.[3] While I have detailed the relationship of Fluxus practices to Southeast Asian discourses around Installation, festivalisation and collectivity elsewhere,[4] I will focuses here on the Philippines between the late 1960s and 1980s.
The Philippines has among the most rigorous histories of modern and contemporary art in the region of Southeast Asia after the Second World War. During the 1970s and 1980s, the dictatorial government of President Ferdinand Marcos (1968-86) and his wife, Imelda, developed a programme of cultural politics which saw the building of newinfrastructure for culture, most notably the convention centre known as the Cultural Centre of the Philippines on Manila Bay.[5] With a space devoted to the visual arts known as the CCP Art Gallery, this institution aimed at presenting the Philippines as modern and progressive within the region and internationally.[6] To this end, the Marcos government looked in particular to developments in modern art within the USA. They furthermore provided special support for abstract, minimalist and conceptual projects deemed universal and modernist, without displaying explicit political critique.
Concurrent to the state’s cultural politics, this period also saw the development of a burgeoning ‘experimental’[7] art scene in the Philippines. This operated parallel to, and at times even in conjunction with, state-backed institutions as forms of “veiled critiques”[8], in the words of Ringo Bunoan. During this period, a number of artists working with conceptual and performative art came into contact with Fluxus practices.[9] This contact, however, did not come about through interpersonal exchanges, but rather by way of publications, visual documentation, interactions with artists from East Asia (particularly Japan), regional exhibitions and festivals, hearsay and homage. This mode of transmission may be described as having operated through ‘resonances’ and ‘translations’ – two concepts which I propose in this paper as a way of shifting beyond the homogenous framework of a ‘global’ Fluxus.
Unlike the notions of exchange, influence or spread, ‘resonance’ implies the circulation of ideas in more nebulous and conceptual ways. As elaborated by Reiko Tomii in her 2016 book, Into the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan, the idea of ‘resonances’ in artistic practices after the Second World War invites thinking about mode of transfer which are not strictly dependent on interpersonal contacts or concrete exchanges.[10] Instead, ideas and practices were seen to circulate in a transnational sphere. Artists came to into contact with these via multiple avenues, including word-of-mouth, gossip, texts, documentation, gifts, anecdotes, and imagery, among others. This understanding of ‘resonance’ is crucial to the history of Fluxus whose basic principles centred on exchange, multiple authorship, playfulness and collaboration. It invites examination of works beyond the canonical Fluxus networks, and highlights different modes of response. One form of this is the practice of ‘translation’ which, as noted by Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, entails not only a one-to-one linguistic configuration.[11] In cultural practices more widely – particularly those taking on a decolonial agendas – translation denotes a willingness to question epistemologies and relinquish one’s own cosmologies and worldviews in order to understand the perspective of the other.
In what follows, I will consider instances of resonances and translation in light of two artists who have historically engaged with Fluxus forms and principles – Judy Freya Sibayan (1952 -) and David Cortez Medalla (1938-2020). While neither Sibayan nor Medalla have been explicitly recognised as part of the core Fluxus network, both developed practices committed to playfulness through ‘transitional objects’, multiple iterations of an ‘original’ (what Natilee Harren has termed the ‘allographic’[12] nature of Fluxus), and the collective production of art continually ‘on the move’. Their works are highlighted here as two different entries into Fluxus. Sibayan was an undergraduate student at the University of the Philippines in Manila during the 1970s. Her encounters with Fluxus came about via her peers, teachers and documentation. In contrast, Medalla was an expatriate artist, living a mobile lifestyle within experimental artistic circles in Europe, the USA and Asia between the 1960s and 1980s, during which time he developed an awareness of Fluxus forms and referenced them in his own performative practice. Seen alongside one another and in connection to artistic trends in the Philippines, Sibayan and Medalla’s works embody a transnational trajectory of Fluxus which contest the idea of a homogenous ‘global’ spread of ideas.
Encountering Fluxus Traces
Judy Freya Sibayan has recalled first explicitly learning about Fluxus in 1983 during an MFA class visit to a Fluxus exhibition Baxter Art Gallery at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.[13] Nevertheless, her earlier works from the 1970s demonstrate a strong interest in instructions, working with readymade objects, shared authorship and exchanges, or what the artist has described as a „performative decentering modality of art-making.“[14] During her undergraduate years in Manila the University of the Philippines between 1972-76, she developed a series of ‘early classroom performances’ which engaged everyday actions and objects.[15] These were staged in the context of classes taught by the locally renowned artist, Roberto Chabet, who had risen to fame in the Philippines throughout the 1960s and 1970s for his experiments with readymade objects, mail art and collage.[16] During his seminars, Chabet notably provided his students with magazines such as Artforum, Art in America and Art International. These were not meant to be read in-depth; rather, students engaged fleetingly with their contents, without delving into theories and critical writings. The focus instead lay in the perusal of images and documentation to gain impressions of current trends and practices. When asked by an art critic in 1973 to what extent Filipino artists influenced by New York art world, Chabet responded:
Indirectly, yes. These influences are mainly ‚fringe benefits‘ from Madison Avenue advertising lay-outs and television commercials. I mean, I don’t think many Filipino artists read magazines like Art Forum! Our influences are mere ‚feedbacks‘, and rather disorganized, too.[17]
Chabet’s reference to disorganised ‘feedbacks’ here marks an important connection to Tomii’s notion of ‘resonance’. Impulses and impressions came to play one important influences on Sibayan’s early practice. In addition, in 1978 Sibayan was gifted a copy of Yoko Ono’s publication Grapefruit by the fellow artist, Raymundo Albano. At the time, Albano was also the director of CCP Art Gallery and in the process of building up a library of art texts for the Centre. Through his own practice, he had become acquainted with artists working in East Asia, particularly in Japan.[18] His transfer of documentation and literature from Euro-America and East Asia to Manila thus represented an instance where references to Fluxus permeated without direct contact and exchange to artists in its core network. Coupled with Chabet’s pedagogy of ‘disorganised feedback’, Albano’s collecting impulse served as an important Fluxus resonance within the early practice of Sibayan.
Upon graduating, Sibayan and Albano, together with artist with Huge Bartolome, developed a series of collaborative performances which channelled Fluxus engagement with found objects, sound and audiences. One performance in particular, Sound Bags (1979), alluded to the instructional nature of Grapefruit by taking on the form of happening where the artists read a script and ‘gifted’ the audience with sounds. Importantly for Philippine context, this work was not staged in an alternative space, but in the CCP Art Museum. Unlike the common perception that Fluxus existed beyond institutions, Sibayan’s iteration Fluxus in the Philippines resonated with cultural institutions, often operating within their parameters.
Reflecting upon the relationship of her works to institutional contexts, Sibayan retrospectively remarked that this performance, alongside others, was intended as a parody at a time when explicit political critique was highly censored.[19] For the artist, her work within government-back institutions was intended to call into question who had the power to define art – the government, institutions or artists?[20] During the 1990s, she further developed this line of inquiry and more explicitly adopted Fluxus forms to develop Institutional Critique and parody.
The durational project, Scapular Gallery Nomad (conceived in 1994), took on the form of a peripatetic art gallery. Sibayan designed as a piece of clothing in the form of a scapular to serve or devotional ’space‘ for art. She wore this daily between 1997 and 2002 as a parodic inversion of the art gallery as a ‘white cube’. Embodying the role of a mobile, person-bound gallery, the artist took on all the roles of running a gallery. She invited other artists to exhibit artworks small enough to fit the front pouch of the scapular.
On both a visual and conceptual level, Scapular Gallery Nomad echoed the form of the Fluxkit and Fluxbox: it comprised a portable object which avoided the confines of institutions and cultural politics, all the meanwhile serving as an archive of exchanges and interactions. With the ability to be activated or ‘exhibited’ in other spaces,[21] Scapular Gallery Nomad also further evoked the practice of mail art, yet continuing to draw upon her long-standing practice of using her body as the medium for conveying resonances of international art movements, as she had previously developed during her classroom performances for the seminars of Roberto Chabet.
Translating Fluxus
In contrast to Sibayan’s channelling of Fluxus forms through playful parodies of institutional practices, David Cortez Medalla’s approach to Fluxus may be described as a mode of translation. Returning to Mignolo and Walsh’s reframing of ‘translation’ as conscious process of response in which inter-personal empathy and openness to multiple meanings play key roles, Fluxus surfaced as a recurring reference point in Medalla’s performative and participatory practice.
Arriving from Manila to Europe in 1960, Medalla first lived in Paris and later relocated to London. Here, he became a core figure of the Kinetic Art movement. His best known works from the period include ‘auto-creative machines’ such as Cloud Canyons (also known as ‘Bubble Machines’), the Sand Machine and the Dream Machine. These incorporated readymade materials and mechanical movement in an evocation of transition, flow and ephemerality.[22] During this period, he also co-founded the influential gallery, Signals, devoted chiefly to showing international Kinetic Art in London. Here, he edited and published the Signals Newsbulletin, a publication devoted to cross-pollinating ideas from different contemporary art groups and movements working with the theme of ‘movement’ in art. The newsbulletin, moreover, came to function as a form of network; its broad range of contributors provided an expanded definition and personal relationship to the notion of movement, among the Fluxus ethos of art in a state of eternal flux. Medalla ‘translated’ this principle within his own practice, describing his own practice as one of participatory propulsions or participation production-propulsions. This entailed collective production, exchange and gifting, harnessed into convivial meetings in which friends, acquaintances, and members of the public partook in the joint making of an object or performance.
One of his most iconic “participatory propulsions”, A Stitch in Time which began in 1968, demonstrated a strong affinity for Fluxus forms. The work proposed a simple instruction: to stitch small, portable objects and messages onto a suspended stretch of cloth. The origin story around the work sustains a mythical character in the form of an exchange of love tokens: in 1967, Medalla claimed to have parted ways with two of his lovers, giving each a handkerchief embroidered by him with his initials. Years later Schipol Airport in Amsterdam, he saw a tattered cloth hanging on a backpack densely stitched with various objects. The handkerchief had been transformed into a living archive of cherished and symbolic objects belonging to others.
In the coming years, Medalla developed A Stitch in Time as an interactive installation which echoed the concept behind the Fluxbox as an assemblage of objects by multiple contributors. Yet, rather than producing a contained form, he translated this idea into a soft, malleable form which, as noted by Sonia Boyce and Dorothy Price, had an „ongoing, open-ended, unplanned futurity.”[23] Speaking of the fact that A Stitch in Time belonged not to one, but multiple national and historical contexts as it was restaged over the years, art critic Guy Brett claimed that the work could „could travel across time.“[24] This came to play an important role between 1969 and 1970 when Medalla undertook a journey across Africa and Asia to visit the Philippines. There, he witnessed the early stage of a transition of power toward Martial Law, as well as encountered contemporary art at institutions such as the CCP. With an emphasis on installation and readymade materials, Medalla criticized the institutionally-backed practices (as well as the ‘experimental art’ scene) as lacking fluidity and multiple voices. Upon returning to Europe, he developed a more explicit political framing for A Stitch in Time. By presenting the work at exhibitions such as documenta V, the projects’s central act of sitting together and stitching evoked reference to socialism and the working class fight against oppression. Found materials now took on new lives as ‘transitional objects’, evoking gestures of care, empathy, and solidarity with the causes of peoples oppressed in the face of authoritarian and capitalist expansion.[25]
Expanding Fluxus
The evolving nature of work such as A Stitch in Time, coupled with Medalla’s engagement with Signals and his participation in exhibitions such as Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969) and documenta V (1972), led him to be considered a key figure in the broader ‚global‘ trajectory of Fluxus. In 1992, he was invited to contribute as one of only two Southeast Asian artists to the exhibition FluxAttitudes at The New Museum in New York. Emphasis was placed here on Medalla’s crossing paths with Fluxus-associated figures, as well as his role as a ‚contact point‘ for Latin American and Asian artists while in Paris and London. Rather than restaging earlier works such as A Stitch in Time, however, Medalla painted of a figurative mural inside the exhibition space. On the surface level, this gesture appeared as a rejection of Fluxus histories and forms. Yet, given the central role of translation in Medalla’s works, his actions may also be seen as an affirmation of Fluxus’s rebellious and playful attitude, and refusal to be pinned down to one medium.
Looking to this spirit of Fluxus as what artist Robert Filiou described as an “eternal network”, both Medalla and Sibayan’s homages to Fluxus coupled with their refusals to be contained its networks speak to an unresolved history. Within the Philippine context, ‘peripheral meditations’ on the global history of Fluxus begin to illustrate how the modes of transfer offer as much illumination as the final ‘output’ of creative practices. Looking to resonances and translations, we begin to see Fluxus unfold as a living medium which continues to have a lasting legacy around the world.
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[1] Examples of recent exhibitions and events examining Fluxus influences in Eastern Europe and Latin America include Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980 (2015) at MoMA in New York was curated by Stuart Comer, Roxana Marcoci and Christian Rattemeyer at MoMA, New York, as well as Subversive Practices: Art under the Conditions of Politics Repression in 1960s and 1980s Europe and South America (2015) at the Württenbergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart was curated by Iris Dressler, and Fluxus East (2007) at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, along with its accompanying symposium „Fluxus East–Fluxus Networks in Central and Eastern Europe“ (27–28 September 2007) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.
[2] Juneja, M. (2023). Introduction: Can Art History be Made Global?. Can Art History be Made Global? Meditations from the Periphery, Boston/Berlin: de Gruyter, p. 11.
[3] The presence of Fluxus practices in Southeast Asia has recently surfaced in exhibition and research projects related to the histories of conceptual, participatory and multimedia art across the region. For example, the exhibition Awakenings: Art and Society in Asia 1960s–1990s (2018–19) at the National Gallery of Singapore, and Nam June Paik: The Future is Now (2023-24) at the National Gallery of Singapore. See also Ng, R. ‘(2023). Fluxus and Southeast Asian Art. National Gallery of Singapore, https://explore.namjunepaik.sg/essays-interviews/fluxus-and-southeast-asian-art/ (accessed 30 August 2023).
[4] See Bentcheva, E. (2022). Fluxus Resonances in Southeast Asia. Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 6(1), 33-68.
[5] The history and influence of the CCP has been detailed in Cruz, J. (2005). Transitory Imaginings. Pananaw: Philippine Journal of Visual Arts, no.5, pp.18–29; Suddenly Turning Visible: Art and Architecture in Southeast Asia 1969–89, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Singapore, 2019.
[6] See Narvasa, P. (1970). The Cultural Center of the Philippines – Asia’s Mecca of the Arts. Business Chronicle, 31 May.
[7] For a discussion of the term ‘experimental’ in relation to Southeast Asia art, see Rath, A.K., & Dirgantoro, W. (2022). Editorial Introduction In the Making: Experimentation and Experiment in Southeast Asian Art. Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 6(2), 2-9. More specific information on the history of the term ‘experimental’ in the Philippines during the 1970s and 1980s may be found in Bentcheva, E. (2022). Three Kings and Sound Bags: Revisiting Three Kings and Sound Bags (1979) as Philippine ‚Experimental Art‘ of the 1970s. Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 6(2), 187-194.
[8] Bunoan, R. (2015). Seeing and Unseeing: The Works of Roberto Chabet. In Ringo Bunoan (ed.), Roberto Chabet, Manila, p.73.
[9] Fluxus is listed among the influential artistic practices circulating the Southeast Asia prior to the 1990s by curator Apinan Poshyananda in the catalogue for the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (1999). See Poshyananda, A. (1999). „Con Art“ Seen From the Edge: The Meaning of Conceptual Art in South and Southeast Asia. In Luis Camnitzter, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss (eds.). Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s. New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), p. 144.
[10] Tomii, R. (2016). Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[11] Walter D. Mignolo, W. and Walsh, C. (2018). On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 5.
[12] Harren, N. (2016). Fluxus and the Transitional Commodity. Art Journal 75, 1: 44–69.
[13] Conversation with Judy Freya Sibayan, February 2021.
[14] Ibid..
[15] Sibayan described her relationship to performance in Sibayan, J. F. (1981). Performance. Philippine Art Supplement 2, no. 6: 10.
[16] For an overview of Chabet’s practices, see Bentcheva, E. (2019). Conceptual Slippages: Reading between the Lines of the Roberto Chabet Archive. Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 3(2), 13-44; Bunoan, R. (Ed.), Roberto Chabet, Manila: King Kong Art Projects Unlimited, 2015.
[17] Chabet in Reyes, C. (1973), Roberto Chabet, in Conversations on Philippine Art, ed. Kristina T. Subido and Emmanuel Torres, Manila: Cultural Centre of the Philippines, 1989), p. 126.
[18] For an overview of Raymundo Albano’s artworks, curatorial work and writings, see Flores, P. (ed.), Raymundo Albano: Texts, Manila: Vargas Museum, 2018. Albano described his experience and observations of participating in the Festival of Asian Art at the Fukuoka Art Museum in the article ‘Dateline: Fukuoka’, Philippine Art Supplement 2, no. 1 (January – February 1981): 12-13
[19] See Sibayan, J. The Hypertext of HerMe(s). London, 2014.
[20] See Sibayan, J.(2022). A Permanent Process of Self-Instituting Performative of a Critical Art Practice. Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 6, no. 1: 259–72.
[21] The project could be transported and activated in different sites. It was performed as part of the Gwangju Biennale
[22] See Praepipatmongkol, C. K. (2020). David Medalla: Dreams of Sculpture. Oxford Art Journal, Volume 43, Issue 3: 339–359.
[23] Boyce, S. and Price, D. (2021). Dearly Beloved or Unrequited? To Be ‚Black‘ in Art’s Histories. Art History 44, 3: 462–80, 466.
[24] Brett, G. (2004). David Medalla: On a General Attitude and Two Works in Particular. In Carnival of Perception: Selected Writings on Art. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, p. 85.
[25] The concept of the “transitional object” originally derives from the writings of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who described children’s toys as intermediaries that detach children from their parents and so help them form identities of their own, see Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34, 2: 89–97; Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing: A Theoretical Statement. In Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications, p. 51. It has also been widely used to describe the practices of Fluxus artists working in Europe, North America, and East Asia during the 1960s and ’70s. Event scores, for instance, provided simple instructions to be shared and executed by others within everyday settings using basic materials.