Drunken Revelry by Poklong Anading at Ateneo Gallery

an opening exhibit by poklong anading's "drunken revelry",
a sound project with inconnu ictu, pow martinez
and
common room bandung artists
at ateneo gallery on thursday july 2, 6:00 pm.

POKLONG ANADING’S DRUNKEN REVELRY
Ramona Rivera

Around 30 km north of Bandung in Indonesia, there is a popular volcano that looks like a boat from afar. Called Tangkuban Perahu, its name translates to an ‘upturned boat’ and recalls a legend of a beautiful woman who lived in West Java. One day she banished away her son for disobeying her, which caused her deep sadness. To appease her, the gods gave her eternal youth. After many years, her son returned but the two no longer recognize each other. They fell in love and planned to marry, until the mother saw a familiar birthmark on the son’s body. For the marriage to take place, she set two conditions: he must build a dam on the river and construct a large boat to cross it, both before sunrise. The son summoned the help of mythical ogres in order to complete the task. Seeing that they were almost done, the mother commanded her workers to spread red silk cloth all over the east side of the city, to give the impression of daybreak. The son was fooled, and in his frustration, kicked the dam and the unfinished boat, causing a great flood and the emergence of a volcano from the boat’s hull.

As part of his return exhibition from his residency in Bandung last December 2008, Poklong Anading’s latest installation Drunken Revelry fittingly anchors on the boat. The boat is such an elemental figure in the consciousness and history of island people. It is the manifestation of our inherent desire to explore, trade, conquer, and be lost. In Indonesia, as in the Philippines, the way of the sea is so palpable, that it seems as if we each carry a wave within our bodies that pulls in stronger as we draw closer to open water.

During Anading’s two-week stay at Common Room, he had the opportunity to meet and hang out with a community of artists and musicians. Before he left, Anading, together with Ega Lesmana, Sandy Ate, Indra Jenggot and others from Common Room did a sound project, recording the sound of the perahu in a large cauldron filled with water. The perahu is a traditional Javanese handmade tin boat, which can be easily found on the sidewalks and markets of Bandung. The shape is reminiscent of a warship, with gunners on the deck. A flame propels it; inside its hull is a wick. A charmingly crude toy, it makes a clanging rat-tat-tat sound as it crosses the water. Anading used the sound of the perahu as the initial layer, upon which the musicians instinctively responded to, adding their own particular sonority to the mélange. The resulting dissonance can be drowning but at the same time its atonality can be quite harmonious, a typical characteristic of electronic music.

For this year’s exhibition at the Ateneo Art Gallery, Anading did a new video of his friends’ children playing with the perahu he brought back from Bandung. The shot is taken from the top, and shows five colored boats – red, yellow, blue, black, and white – floating in this makeshift pool. The children are no longer seen, only their hands as they reach out for the boats. Tightly cropped, it is focused on the boats as they circle around, trapped in the water. From that angle, it’s almost like a volcano’s crater enclosing a lake.

Anading appropriately installed his video inside the gallery’s stockroom, the core of the space. It is a narrow enclosure within the gallery, where artifacts, files and precious objects lie in wait. The gallery’s lights have been turned off and the only source of light is the video. The room is empty except for the cornucopia of sounds - several layers of recordings of spontaneous jammings and other sound projects that Anading has collected over the years. Apart from the recording in Bandung, Anading incorporated sessions with Manny Migriño, Sam Kiyoumarsi and Gary-Ross Pastrana during the construction of Paul Pfeiffer’s stadium for the 2008 Sydney Biennale at the 18th Avenue compound in Cubao, wherein the artists merged their sound with the sound of building materials and other sounds happening at the time; and the most recent recording with Pow Martinez and Roger Lopez (Inconnu Ictu) at the Ateneo with the children playing with the perahu.

In Anading’s archive of sounds, traces of early experimental, avant-garde strategies and one-off happenings can be found. In an earlier project Visible Darkness, Anading also experimented with sound and the absence of light when he brought a band of blind musicians for a performance in a darkened theater in Intramuros. (NCCA, 2005) In Drunken Revelry, however, it is disentangled from the spectacle of live performance and instead, it is presented as a recording, a documentation, an abstraction of the real event. Its ephemerality is further heightened by the absence of light and objects in the space. Distance is carved out from the layers of sounds, unidentifiable already since they have all merged into one.

With Anading’s works, the social context of the work and the site are usually strong elements. As soon as we enter the gallery, we – the audience - become participants in the gesture, walk-in collaborators in the performance. In Light Suffers Where There Is No Place To Fall From (Finale Art Gallery, SM Megamall, 2007), we are enclosed in the void, the white cube gallery, with only sound and air between us. The sounds and traces of our bodies – the talk, the footsteps, the shuffling, the ruffle of our clothes, our shadows – all converge in this heady brew, this atmosphere, this moment. We packed ourselves in the gallery, and posed for a picture. For the work in Ateneo, as in Intramuros, we huddle in the dark to listen.

Anading’s earlier collaborations have posed the difficulty to bridge distance, and the forced isolation imposed by certain social situations. (Walking Distance with Ringo Bunoan, 1999, and Three Chairs with Chico Beltran and Jose Beduya, 2000) In Drunken Revelry, he uses sound as material, expression, communication, and a way to connect with others. This time, he highlights free play, spontaneity and intuition in human interaction and the ruptures that occur with each encounter. Transcendence is similar to several rounds of drinks, after which we give in to more communal, primal urges. Our dissonant barriers dissolving, like the ice in our glass.


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