ELUSION LOUIE CORDERO / MARK SALVATUS

Patrick D. Flores

Figures that scatter: a character mired in shit, an eye that sees everything. a story and drawing that are passed around, photocopied by strangers, cherished by cult. an icon that is stuck in lightning strike on posts, walls, any free surface or palimpsest of bills. signs that defy demons. louie cordero’s Nardong tae (Nardo of shit) is a comics’ character, hewn from the folk hero Nardong Putik (Nardo of Mud) both of cavite, where he is leonardo Manicio, and the cinema, where he is immortalised by the star ramon revilla. Mark salvatus’ Boy agimat (Boy talisman) is an image for stickers, posters, graffiti, and objects that is lifted from the alloy amulet peddled around the church of Quiapo, shrine of the miraculous Black Nazarene. these restless beings are exceptional personas: their spectres stem from folk belief, persisting in a metropolis of crime. cordero grew up with the komiks, reading issue after issue of sagas that struck and seized him, renting the newsprint serials from makeshift convenience stores in the neighbourhood in the fishing village-turned-flooded suburb Malabon, or borrowing them from his father’s collection. While he was waiting for the tales to turn, he watched reruns of old local action films on television with fondness. the komiks and the sine formed his visual constellation, his temper thriving on the oeuvre of Nonoy Marcelo, Hal Santiago, Francisco Coching and the so-called B-movies of the previously bustling Philippine film industry that cranked out almost two hundred films at its most solvent. Salvatus spent his childhood and youth in lucban, a rustic town south of Manila quite close to the holy mountain Banahaw. When he moved to the country’s capital to study in a catholic university built by the Spanish Dominican friars in the seventeenth-century, he was overwhelmed by its stimuli and later found himself moving from boarding house to boarding house. it might have been this series of transfers that led him to probe the urban sprawl and evoke those that refuse to dwell. cordero and salvatus were reared in this mediascape, in which image and movement, or better still, the “moving image,” is stellar. such charisma is channelled through the vehicle of the talisman that traverses many worlds of possession. the Nardo in Nardong tae is Nardong Putik, the mythical filmic folk-hero crafted from the local myth in internecine cavite of a robin Hood archetype, supposedly a gangster who turned against the warlords who had hired him.as avenger, he sought power from the talisman, descending into the muck every time he needed to disappear. in cordero’s take, Nardo is Nardong tae, a regular boy named Bornek (slang for “hair in the ass”) who adores the film Nardong Putik, which he views in improvised Betamax home theatres and is bullied by peers partly for being such a die-hard. One day, a “shit alien” releases his copious load through the window of a spacecraft hovering around the earth. this proves to be catastrophic, according to the narrative, because when “extraterrestrial excretion comes in contact with the cosmic interplanetary particles, it undergoes molecular synthesis and attracts the nearest cometary body, resulting in a gigantic shit comet… Such shit comet then propels itself into an earthbound trajectory, ensuring a cataclysmic disaster wherever it hits.” this putrid mass crashes into Bornek, suffusing him with the offensive matter and reducing him to a walking morass. He comes home as a boy-shit much to the horror of his mother, who is appalled but does not abandon the child, to whom shit clings inveterately and seemingly forever. He would later aspire to become a policeman and be accused of blowing up the police academy, thus the chase from authorities in the planet and elsewhere; the shit aliens likewise would hound him, seeking to recover their last precious shit from him. the travail ends with his realisation that a more hapless person, a man-shit like himself, has been wallowing in Siberia. Cordero confides that he did Nardong tae with offset editions (of the first to the fifth and the twelfth, minus the sixth to the eleventh) that morphed into toys when he had no money for painting and lived in a compound that used to be a komiks empire. According to Cordero: “I thought of just drawing with pen and paper and the strategy of DIY zines… just cheap black-and-white photocopying… and disseminating my work around Manila. For me one of the best parts was how things could spread by word of mouth and people just photocopied the book themselves… From this poor situation, things could happen and could reach many young people not from the art scene.”1

the agimat in Boy agimat is the “eye,” a representation of omniscience in the symbology of the anting-anting (talisman). it is an attribute of the “supreme being” that is quoted or cited by salvatus to design his character as the “eye of the city,” which suffers no narrative unlike cordero’s yarn. this production of a logo may be traced to street art, a kind of urban form-making into which the artist has been drawn. He co-founded Pilipinas Street Plan in 2006, a motley community of visual artists, musicians, skateboarders, and like-minded denizens. One of the aspirations of this platform is to offer an alternative visual landscape of the city, one that may be able to resist the commodification and instrumentalisation of its space through advertising and political propaganda. it strikes anywhere, from street to store, as it critiques the failure of modernisation and development, laying bare the helter-skelter planning of Manila. Salvatus is very much in this territory, the scenography of the decaying and slovenly Manila that may be gleaned in two other projects: the ongoing Neo-Urban Planner (2009), in which he takes on the role of the governor of Manila, a position held by former First lady imelda Marcos, who christened Manila the city of Man, and proposes to rethink urbanisation; and the imaginary museum Manila street art Museum (2008), in which the nom de guerre Boy agimat, pseudo-curator of found art, repatriates art from detritus. in the work of cordero and salvatus, what might be considered the archaic or residual culture of the talisman, which in present-day capitalist society prevails largely as apotropaic in the everyday life of those who are exposed to permanent crisis, reemerges in contemporary art, its primitive potency harnessed to produce current visual form. the spanish chronicler Wenceslao retana had remarked that Philippine natives went around with weed, bark, hair, bone, stone, and other things in which animist force was instilled, the better to shield the self from harm and for it to pursue its desires. the intersection lies at the artfulness of the belief and the artifice of an aesthetic proposition. In other words, the anting-anting is meant to disarm. the conversation with the life world of the talisman, which is replenished in liminal moments like lent and consecrated and put to the test in rituals, creates a space for the artists to partake of the condition of elusion. the komiks and the graphic device circulate prolifically but intractably. Nardong tae walks around as a blob and is nearly invincible; Boy agimat multiplies as an all-seeing print, potentially visible everywhere, given away gratis. Here, the reprographic and the mythic cohabit, their makers unnamed, their brand preceding them, their followers perpetuating the image by way of low-tech distribution, very much like the pass-on readership of the komiks. there is something about the “law” that runs through these dispositions. Nardong tae, like Nardong Putik, is an outlaw in a lawless milieu in which the State, putatively the monopolist of violence, has preyed on its subjects, often with impunity. Boy agimat pilfers the tool of surveillance—the mystic eye that encompasses the Trinity, the Sun, the Virgin, among others—of the spiritual lord-in-dominion to mimic its panoptical efficacy. Both of these schemes foil capture, seeking refuge in the otherworldly: the supernatural, the extraterrestrial, the excessive. these ventures came out around the same time—Nardong tae in 2003-2004 and Boy agimat in 2005—when the country was reeling from betrayals. Its movie star-President, charged with shameless corruption, had just been deposed by a confluence of civil-society charades and sheer mob rule by a discontented plutocracy. the tragedy was that the one who replaced him, an indefatigable woman, who dreamed of a “strong republic” and a First World Philippines, proved to be his equal. and equally tragic was the aftermath of this reign, which would be helmed by the simpleton son of mystified “icons of democracy”, themselves heirs to a retrograde plantation society who sought to topple Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s. Not a year into his hyped presidency and amid the grinding poverty wearing down a much-deceived people, he bought a Porsche. It is this kind of farce that most probably informs the political unconscious of cordero and salvatus, in which the talisman foregrounds itself as materiel. this vital nexus between the talismanic and the insurgent is best remarked upon by a scholar of the history of Philippine uprisings:

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Opposite: Mark Salvatus, Boy Agimat (mural, Manila), 2009Photo courtesy the artist

almost without exception, brigands claimed miraculous attributes. outstanding chieftains were widely reputed to be protected by potent anting-anting. The wonder-working talismans—ranging from simple amulets and charms to elaborate uniforms bearing mystical designs or quasi-Latin formulas—allegedly shielded their owners from malign sorcery and physical misfortunes. Famous ladrones (thieves) often maintained they were immune to death. some even averred they possessed the capacity to extend invulnerability to followers. less pretentious tulisanes (brigands) asserted they could resurrect dead comrades. The most influential outlaws, however, posed as reincarnations of divine beings or deceased popular champions. on a limited scale, their appeal was comparable to that exercised by prophets of old and new religions. Bandit leaders, in brief, gained prestige among their supporters, and notoriety among their adversaries, by surrounding themselves with supernatural auras.2

it is tempting to play cordero and salvatus in the key of postcolonial resistance, an effort to decolonise by redeeming the folk through the talisman. there is a level of fecundity in this argument. after all, in the struggle for emancipation, it is necessary to renew, to convert, to return to a primal local moral world—or pagbabalik-loob. it is only to those who are uncorrupted that the potency of the talisman is gifted; it only fulfills its promise under the aegis of purity of heart. the notion of a “loob”, an inner life that is the vein of virtue, mutates in contemporary art as a kind of performance, a palabas, an inclination to stage an appearance, to trick or to conjure a ruse. This passage outward is salient, this very vulnerability to the risk of society that disciplines. For Nardong tae, to go about quotidian life dripping and reeking of excreta is a way of forsaking alterity and a mode of belonging to a discriminating world no matter how inhuman the terms of affinity might be. For Boy agimat, to proliferate is a type of poaching on prime space for commodities, a parasitic settling on prohibited/prohibitive domain. these are contaminations, in other words, that gather strains even as they are ludic and light, and ultimately enigmatic. For in the end, it is the “earth” that is re-formed here: human waste and the incarnation of a god in this realm. the inchoate nature of Nardong tae and the alacrity of Boy agimat are critiques of form, of borders and fixations. Cordero has heard of some students in a public university flinging shit onto cars as some kind of take-off from or homage to his slick creation/creature.

The redemptive sensibility is one pole; the other might be the abject. It is equally alluring to conceive of these sorties as springing from the lineage of certain modernist and contemporary stylistic movements in which excrement is a cogent trope. A theorist has asked: “Is this then, the option that the abject offers us—oedipal naughtiness or infantile perversion? to act dirty with the secret wish to be spanked, or to wallow in shit with the secret faith that the most defiled might reverse into the most sacred, the most perverse into the most potent? What then could be the cultural politics inscribed in this perverse gesture?”3 the response could gesture toward a psychoanalytic critique of tumescence, “a symbolic reversal of this first step into civilisation, of the repression of the anal and the olfactory. as such it may also intend a symbolic reversal of the phallic visuality of the erect body as the primary model of traditional painting and sculpture—the human figure as both subject and frame of representation in Western art”.4 this said, could there be a line then to be drawn between cordero and Piero Manzoni, John Miller, Mike Kelley, Andres Serrano, Chris Ofili, or closer to home, Manuel Ocampo? Or is cordero crawling out of another woodwork? He discloses that living in Malabon meant living with turds at every turn: shit of stray dogs, faeces wrapped in paper, more of the same washed up from the bay or floating in flood. it is interesting to situate cordero and salvatus in the tension between visual culture and invisibility, between the valorisation of the “eye” and the overinvestment in odour (the unmistakable scent of the ‘other’) that “appears.” surely, there is a theory to be contemplated in this equation. But what must be stressed, too, is that both of them may not be speaking the parodic argot of the avant-garde or conceptualism when they confront urban life. Cordero is sort of surprised that people who read Nardong tae think the story is exclusively zany and wicked when he had intended it to be dramatic as well. He finds an irresistible aesthetic in popular culture’s crudeness and admires the talent of folk artisans (jeepney artists, carvers, furniture makers), and so is not inclined to mock this facture or consign it to nostalgia or construe it as kitsch. salvatus for his part links up his practice with the advocacy of the socially motivated muralists of the 1990s in the Philippines, but reasons that his politics comes from another direction, perhaps from both traffic and displacement of his city. Finally, they have explored careers in the contemporary art scene. cordero is an accomplished intermedia artist and salvatus is an astute initiator of collaborations. the latter’s Wrapped suite is exemplary; he would invite anyone who happens by an area of his choice to offer a personal article, the contours of which he would sketch and fill out with a bandage motif. in a town in a peninsula south of Manila, the artist worked with a barangay, the smallest social unit, to contrive the installation salabay (Jelly Fish) (2008) on the beach facing the Pacific. They scrounged for used plastic bags, shredded them and hung them from strips of bamboo twined to form the shape of a jellyfish. Suspended from a pole, these synthetic tentacles swayed, or better still bloomed or swarmed with the wind and hinted at the unknown perils of the deep. His collaborators cherished them and vowed to recycle them as christmas ornaments. the drawing in cordero’s Nardong tae is quick and simple, quite easy to execute, in contrast to the tedious, time-consuming art of the Filipino komiks in its heyday. His more well-known paintings proffer entrails and dollops of brain, quite scatological depictions of the human body staggering in the symbolic order. Drawing and painting derive from a vast reserve of storybook inspirations, from Filipino komiks to the work of Jack kirby, Basil Wolverton, r. crumb and Zap Comix. His stint in America in 2003 took him to the underground scene of comics at a time when there was a revival of hippie psychedelia in illustration and signboard and graffiti-based visual culture; this further inflected his long acquaintance with the comics’ aesthetic and so-called lowbrow, popular art of the jeepney and the movies. To a certain extent, this was a pivotal swerve in his career that up to this point was practically driven by art-market demands and burdened by certain academic habits and dualisms between figurative painting and conceptualist art. His temper transcended these antinomies, infusing the conceptualism he learned with the hometown intelligence he knew by heart. He did Nardong tae before going to America, where he finally would breathe the refuse of its culture. it was in this universe that he found his signature and keenness for sculpture and installation. Where before he flipped through magazines and books for templates, here he would begin to build on his own drawings and fixation on the idiosyncrasies of popular taste, manifested in how a komiks character like Zuma, for instance, posits a faux aztec culture in the Philippines. this ersatz quality of Filipino lifeways intrigues Cordero so much; he styles Zuma, the snake-demigod, as an armature and monument of green gum chewed up and spat out by several men for five days. surely, the “adventure time” of cordero and salvatus that yielded Nardong tae and Boy agimat was a fertile period that deserves to be revisited; those gains could be made to redefine their art-market engagements altogether. It must be mentioned, too, that the involvement of both artists in artist-run initiatives has honed their sensitivity to a more extensive social sphere. cordero’s role in the defunct space Future Prospects (2006) has been well acknowledged and Salvatus’ continuing relationship with the multi-platform organisation tutok (2005) is critical to his work. This underground, guerilla, cult, outsider youth

culture may be a crucial trajectory in the practice of the artists, something not remote from the global coordinates of ‘zine makers, gamers, bloggers, cosplayers, manga and anime coteries. Nardong tae has been translated into Japanese. the history of Philippine modern art is not wanting in important artists who were able to ferry across discrepant media, tending to a transdisciplinary practice that rendered their art robust and fulsome. carlos Francisco was an incipient modernist in the first half of the twentieth-century whose home was the province of angono and whose passion was painting history in murals. He also authored and illustrated a komiks story and designed costumes and sets for film. Francisco Coching’s kindred career flourished in the same season; he is the revered master of the komiks who penned and drew his komiks epics, all of which became films except for a handful. Francisco and Coching embodied the stalwart tradition of drawing and design in Philippine art as well as the leanings of artists to cross disciplines, perhaps to reach a wider public. this kind of modernism was not confined to the academy, the urban centre, or the gallery system. The images of Botong and coching crystallised the visuality of an era: the Philippines at war, the heroic Filipino rebuilding the nation, and the inalienable entitlement to origin and destiny. this is one tendency that may be discerned in both cordero and salvatus: the penchant for design that is the basis of its sympathies with local colour and the common culture. in salvatus’ own tenor:

i work across different media from paintings, drawings, installations, photography, video, street/urban art, designs, illustrations, blogging to interactive and participatory projects… to question memory, nostalgia, existence and space, making a new perspective between the viewer and the work… i was trained as an advertising practitioner but did not pursue a career in advertising; rather i incorporate some theories and ideas of advertising that deal with people, mass produced objects, consumerism and combining them with my personal ideas. ideas that makes a strong impression and emotional tension, establishing an intimate and charged dialogue with the audience—will they be familiarised by it or be alienated?5

The other is bricolage, compellingly fleshed out by the filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik (or Eric de Guia) who in the 1970s was using his silent Bolex 16mm camera to shoot Mababangong Bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare) (1976). Indeed, the mingling of design and bricolage has offered Philippine art an essential source of instinct and phantasm for artists, who have to grasp at once the fragments of history and the inevitable continuity of toil toward a wellbeing that knows no expiration. In Tahimik’s film, the auteur-character drives a jeepney, the improvised decorated public transport cobbled together from the Willy’s jeep of the ‘American occupation’, and gathers together the Wernher von Braun fan club in his village. He is enamoured of the radio broadcasts of Voice of america and the moon landing. He gets the chance to travel to europe and there he is dismayed by capitalism’s rapacity. He comes back to Manila to memorialise the martyrdom of his father, who was executed by the americans. as the writer Patricia aufderheide puts it:

This film has very crude production values… intended to look very much a ‘home made’ film… It melds found footage, stock footage and narrative footage, tied together with voiceover. there is a strong narrative line, with occasional magical touches. the central character, seemingly authorial, is clearly a fictional creation. The naivete of the character serves as a disarming device for tahimik to put forward a critique of Western progress. The film is explicitly allegorical, and full of metaphors, puns, sly ironies and jokes.6

this sequence of the anting-anting, the komiks, and the jeepney is key to apprehending Philippine art. they are vehicles to another world in the future and the lasting world of the past. this is why the von Braun reference is compelling. a cold War operative who worked for the Nazis and the americans to develop the merciless V2 ballistic missile during World War II and the superbooster Saturn V that made the moon landing possible, he had straddled conquest of earth and the colonisation of the rest of the universe, ruination and science-fiction. An attentive observer of Mexican social life reminds us that living in the city entails making trips around it, and therefore, imagining it in flux:

cities are made of houses and parks, streets, highways, and traffic signals. But they are also made of images. these images include the maps that invent and give order to the city… novels, songs, films, print media, radio, and television… imagine the sense of urban life. the city attains a certain density as it is filled with these heterogeneous fantasies. the city, programmed to function, and designed in a grid, exceeds its boundaries and multiplies itself through individual as well as collective visions.7

in the art of cordero and salvatus, this ‘unrest’ or restiveness is always present, inscribed in the city that is at once folk and mass, very much like the jeepney that plies multiple routes across the vast network of interstices. The jeepney is likewise a heady trope in Kidlat Tahimik’s seminal film, and foreign theorists like Fredric Jameson have been moved to comment that the mode of production of the pastiche jeepney and the political economy of Tahimik’s film forge a conjuncture. Jameson releases the film from a self-consciously art-film repertory and delivers it to a romantic conception of the third World as a possible space that overcomes reification. The privileging is instructive:

This is not merely the auto-referentiality of the naïf film itself, whose aesthetic consists precisely in this unremitting collection of miscellaneous footage that you put together at your pleasure. it is also in and of itself to be cannibalised and conceptually resoldered. Unlike the ‘natural’ or mythic appearances of traditional agricultural society, but equally unlike the disembodied machinic forces of late capitalist high technology, which seem, at the other end of time, equally innocent of any human agency or individual or collective praxis, the jeepney factory space is a space of human labor which does not know the structural oppression of the assembly line or taylorisation, which permanently provisional, thereby liberating its subjects from the tyrannies of form and of the preprogrammed.8

surely, the visions of cordero and salvatus are not only about the hectic and cruel city within an archipelago of the present, nor do they intimate the idealised condition where structure has been banished. their evocations of the place and its sociality—arising from deep-seated anxieties of belonging amid lurid evidence of violence—continually remake the future in the face of talismanic fixes. Nardong tae and Boy agimat will always leave traces, a trail of stench and seeing, a stinking feeling that we are being watched.

Notes1 Interview with Louie Cordero, 26 January, 2011

2 David Sturtevant quoted in John T Sidel, ‘Filipino Gangsters in Film, Legend and History: Two Biographical Case Studies from Cebu’, Lives at the Margins: Biography of Filipinos Obscure, Ordinary, and Heroic, Alfred W. McCoy ed., Manila: Ateneo de Manila Press, 2000:15

3 Hal Foster, ‘Obscene, Abject, Traumatic’, Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law, Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead eds, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999: 250

4 Foster 1999: 251

5 Email communication with the artist, 29 January, 2011

6 Patricia Aufderheide, ‘Perfumed Nightmare’, The Cross-Cultural Film Guide, Washington, DC: The American University, 1992

7 Néstor García Canclini, ‘What is a City?’, City/Art: The Urban Scene in Latin America, Rebecca E. Biron ed., Durham: Duke University Press, 2009: 43

8 Fredric Jameson, ‘“Art Naïf” and the Admixture of Worlds’, Geopolitics of the Visible: Essays on Philippine Film Cultures, Roland Tolentino ed., Manila: Ateneo de Manila University, 2000

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Opposite: Mark Salvatus, Boy Agimat (mural, Bandung), 2010Above: Mark Salvatus, Wrapped (site-specific wall drawings, Goyang, South Korea), 2007Photos courtesy the artist