Opening Reception
Saturday, August 29, 2009
7:00pm

Monuments to the Institutional Critique of Myself
By Arvin Flores

Pablo Gallery at Fort, August 2009, presents “Monuments to the Institutional Critique of Myself” by Manuel Ocampo, an exhibit incorporating paintings into sculptural assemblages that explore the indeterminate nature of art as a site of meaning and function.

History precedes the work of art. Even prior to its production and reception, the artwork bears the burden of the viewer’s expectations and judgment. Painting, with its very long history as a representational medium and iconographic carrier, is laden with the task of communicating experiences and thoughts on life in general. Each mode of narration fittingly becomes the stylistic signature of its author, which manner distinguishes his singular work from the rest of the objects in the world with regards to the succession of formal styles through time. At least that has been the way the story of art was told right until about the time of modernism when works of art became non-representational or abstract. Modernism’s critique of its own practices, specifically with painting, became the beginning of art’s self-awareness of itself not merely as mimetic device but more as an autonomous state distinct from other things in this world. Later on, modernist art gave way to works that made use of conceptual systems to re-define itself (via text, language, or theory) and predict the presentational form that it should use (i.e. anything non-painting like performance, land works, film, etc.). Such purgative inquiry evidently set off the critique on authorship as the establishing origin of (cultural) authority, and would eventually lead to the author’s demise in postmodern thinking. The death of the author as institutional critique is where we have been pussyfooting on the subject of contemporary cultural production that defer towards cybernetic systems and multi-disciplinary conceptual practice with the promise of socio-political change and new intellectual breakthroughs. Such networked conditions seem to replace the individual author’s function as primary source of cultural material. In light of this situation, where does that leave painting now? Knowing that painting is singular work typically done in studio isolation, does the apparent death of the author as primary narrator of ontology also mean the death of painting as expressive ontological medium? With its historical account, how can painting surpass the expectations of the market as commodity form as well as formal precursors that constrict the work to predictability?

Such is the context an artist will find today from which Manuel Ocampo had given several proposals for a monument regarding the critique of art, and the artist, as institution. Expecting a signature line of provocative paintings from Ocampo, the artist instead had addressed these questions in the form of sculptural works, which makes the project ironic (because it points to painting but is actually sculpture) and perverse in his revivification of expired avant-garde tactical clichés. Although the sculptural works appear to have some narrative elements in them, the image made is certainly not rendered, and the picture plane has all but vanished. Incidentally, the objects normally formed in the painting are catapulted into the space we’re in, into the realm of the three dimensional real. There are things assembled on the sculptures: clothes, stuff toys, studio ephemera, liquor bottles, domestic implements, etc., that almost call to be decoded as symbols loaded with social and individual meaning. But such readings could detour into areas that are beside the realm of the artwork, into territories of psychoanalytic and material theorizing. Making extraneous readings would then be academic, and will further the mythology of the subject. Such claims would also contradict the very aim of the critique, which is the question of authorship in relation to authority. Hence, an alternative option is to approach the artwork in a manner that we can comprehend it as the thing-itself, as nuomena that is known only in the imagination and not perceived the same way our physical senses do as phenomena; and essentially, as an abstract thing that is unintelligible in life having the capacity to render indeterminate meanings vis-à-vis its inability to relate to other things outside of itself being an autonomous state of consciousness and of self. Here, in our incomprehensible yet existential condition, we return to art, and the practice of painting, as site of ontological production. The sculptural objects do appear self-determining by turning their backs on the audience: what is facing up front and looks empty is actually the backside of the artwork, and its reverse, hidden from plain view, is filled with things to look at (e.g., a broom, plumbing tubes, drawings, toys, etc., that are inserted behind the frame of the canvas giving it real substance as opposite to the rounded illusion of the painted picture). Such inversions can be construed as gestures of withdrawal, negation, autism, or states of sovereignty. So, it would be a misrepresentation to read the artist’s sculptural fence or gate as a late-modernist frame corrupted by the very same consumerist doctrine and detritus that modernism had universalized around the world. Further misreading: the makeshift galvanized-iron shanty as another postcolonial metaphor on the inadequacy of means and the disparity of tools, the hanging clothes as secondary skins of the author in absentia, or taking things hiding behind appearances as the author’s subconscious remarks about the id and the ego, so on so forth. Thus, as an autonomous object that can be perceived as a representation of another, the artwork becomes a decoy that will provoke the audience to look even deeper than what is actually there. The artwork here functions as a reflecting pool of consciousness, or a mirror that questions the appearance of things – in other words like painting as we know it to be, in the role of container of the imagination and site for open-ended philosophical discussion.

But Ocampo’s project doesn’t stop at the mere reminisce of painting’s past glory as a site for ontological production. Instead he continues to work on the audience’s expectation of extracting meaning from nothing, and uses the condition of painting as false representation to form a trap so as to derail the work’s capacity to reflect – in other words, to use failure as a negation of its own being, in order, ironically, to assert its own existence. As thing-itself, an object of incomprehensible reality, the artwork becomes a prosthesis of sorts that stands in place of the thing that is absent – meaning. But what was once present that is now absent, whether it be meaning production or status of painting, now only appears as false representation – decoy. It is like that bone hanging on one of Ocampo’s sculptures that is used to lure the dog of painting (perhaps “The Dog” of Goya) to return, so that in its return painting could become the vicious attack dog it once was, the one which used to destroy our perception and comprehension of reality before it was replaced by newer imaging technologies like photography and digital media. But what those other disciplines lack is not painting’s capacity to represent, which they very well can do, but it is in the enigmatic quality of humanity expressed in absurdist terms that we find only painting can do perfectly well, so far.

ABOUT
Born in Quezon City, Philippines. Lives and works in Marikina City, Philippines.

EDUCATION

1985 California State University, Bakersfield
1984 University of the Philippines, Quezon City

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2009 Monuments to the Institutional Critique of Myself, Pablo Gallery, Manila
Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Brussels
Galerie Baerbel Graesslin, Frankfurt

2008 Uplands Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
Galeria Tomas March, Valencia, Spain

2007 Guided by Sausage, Nosbaum & Reding – Art Contemporain, Luxembourg
Guided by Sausage, Le (9) bis, Saint-Etienne, France
Kitsch Recovery Program, Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
Finale Art File, Manila, Philippines

2006 En El Cielo No Hay Cerveza sin Alcohol (with Curro Gonzalez), Galeria adhoc, Vigo, Spain
Down with Reality, Galerie Jesco Von Puttkamer, Berlin, Germany
Kitsch Recovery Program: An Image is Just a Pathetic Attempt to do Justice to a Picture, Nosbaum & Reding – Art Contemporain, Luxembourg
No System Can Give the Masses the Proper Social Graces (with Damien Deroubaix), Haptic at La Maison Rouge, Paris, France
Gray Kapernekas Gallery, New York, USA
Down with Reality, Galerie Jesco von Puttkamer, Berlin, Germany

2005 Mumu Territorium, Artcenter Megamall, Mandaluyong Metro Manila, Philippines
The Holocaustic Spackle in the Murals of the Quixotic Inseminators, Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, Los Angeles
Bastards of Misrepresentation, Casa Asia, Barcelona, Spain
New Works, LAC, Lieu d’Art Contemporain, Sigean, France

2004 Moral Stories: Fuck the Third World, Galeria Tomas March, Valencia, Spain
Bastards, Galerie Baerbel Graesslin, Frankfurt, Germany
Finale Art File, Mega Mall, Mandaluyong, Philippines
Miserable Intentions (with Gaston Damag), Art Contemporain – Nosbaum & Reding, Luxembourg

2003 Sprüth Magers Projekte, Munich, Germany
Wunderkammer, Gesellschaft Für Gegenwartskunst, Augsburg (Society for Contemporary Art Augsburg), Germany
Lee Almighty, Mag:net Gallery, Quezon City, Philippines

2002 An All Out Attempt at Transcendence, Galerie Baerbel Graesslin, Frankfurt, Germany
Comprehensible Only to a Few Initiates, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris
The Inadequacy of the Struggle Against the Inadequacy of the Struggle, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco

2001 Presenting the Undisclosed System of References in the Loophole of Misunderstanding, Galeria OMR, Mexico City, Mexico
Free Aesthetic Pleasure Now!, Babilonia 1808, Berkeley, California

2000 Those Long Dormant Pimples of Inattention Counterattacking the Hyper-Convoluted Dramas of the Gaze, Sprüth Magers Projekte, Munich, Galerie Baerbel Grasslin, Frankfurt
Those Long Dormant Pimples of Inattention Meandering through the Cranium Arcade of Pitiless Logic Swastikating between Love and Hate, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
The Stream of Transcendent Object-Making Consciously Working towards the Goal, Galerie Michael Neff, Frankfurt

1999 The Nature of Culture – Manuel Ocampo/Gaston Damag. Interventions in the Monasterio de la Cartuja de Santa Maria de las Cuevas, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville (catalogue)
The Inversion of the Ideal: Navigating the Landscape of Intestinal Muck, Swastikating between Love and Hate, Galeria Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid (catalogue)

1998 To Infinity and Beyond: Presenting the Unpresentable – The Sublime or the Lack Thereof, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris
Yo Tambien Soy Pintura, El Museo Extremeno e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporaneo, Badajoz, Spain (catalogue)
Why Must I Care For a Girl Who Always Scratches Wherever She Itches: 1-1/2 Centuries of Modern Art ,Twelve Step Program, Delfina, London; Centre Cultural Tecla Sala, Barcelona (catalogue)
Galerie Philomene Magers, Cologne, Germany

1997 Heridas de la Lengua, Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica, California (catalogue)
Hacer Pintura Es Hacer Patria, Galeria OMR, Mexico City (catalogue)

1996 Annina Nosei Gallery, New York

1995 Ciocca Raffaelli Arte Contemporaneo, Milan (catalogue)
Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris
Musee d’Art Contemporain de Montreal, Canada

1994 Paraiso Abierto a Todos, The Mexican Museum, San Francisco
Stations of the Cross, Annina Nosei Gallery, New York

1993 New Paintings, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries/Fred Hoffman, Beverly Hills, California
Manuel Ocampo, Galeria OMR, Mexico City

1992 Grupo de Gago, Weingart Center Gallery, Occidental College, Los Angeles
Matrix Berkeley 150, University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley.par

1991 M.J.O., Jay Chiat residence, New York
Manuel Ocampo, Fred Hoffman Gallery, Santa Monica, California

1990 Substancias Irritantes, Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman College, Orange, California

1989 John Thomas Gallery, Santa Monica
The Onyx Café, Los Angeles

1988 Lies, Falls Hopes, and Megalomania, La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2009 The Making of Art, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

2008 Problems with style, Green Papaya Art Project, Manila, Philippines
Magnet Gallery, Manila, Philippines
In the context of : La dégelée Rabelais, organised by FRAC Languedoc-Roussillon, France :
Morts de rire, La Panacée, Montpellier, France
Et tout pour les mange-tripes !, 
Musée Pierre André Benoit & Espace de Rochebelle, Alès, France
A Thélème, Priape s’est cogné…,
CIRCA – La Chartreuse, Villeneuve-les-Avignon, France

2007 Rooms, Conversations, Frac Île-de-France, Le Plateau, Paris
L’Explosition, Frac Languedoc-Roussillon, Montpellier, France
Messages Abroad, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris, France
Kinky Sex, Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
Nosbaum & Reding at Artnews Projects, Berlin, Germany

2006 Five Stories High, Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, USA
Wonder and Horror of the Human Head, 4-F Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Painting Codes, Galeria Comunale d’Arte Contemporanea Di Monfalcone, Italy

2004 Birth – Sex – Death, Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium
La Alegria de mi Sueños, Seville Biennale, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporanea, Seville, Spain

2003 End of the Start, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, USA
The Broken Mirror, Leroy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University, NY, USA

2002 Extranjeros: Los Otros Artistas Españoles, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, Spain
Disarming Parables: Collection Highlights, San Jose Museum of Art, CA, USA

2001 49. Esposizione Internazionale, Plateau of Mankind, la Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (catalogue)
Berlin Biennale II, Berlin, Germany (catalogue)
Les Chiens Andalous, Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, USA (catalogue)
Vom Eindruck zum Ausdruck: Grässlin Collection (From Impression to Expression), Hamburg, Germany (catalogue)
Contemporary Devotion, San Jose Museum of Art, CA, USA
Circos Globulos: Selected Works from the Babilonia Wilner Collection, Babilonia 1808, Berkeley, CA, USA

2000 Salon, Delfina, London, UK
Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA (catalogue)
Faith: The Impact of Judeo-Christian Religion on Art at the Millenium, The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, USA (catalogue)
Partage d’Exotismes, 5th Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, Lyon, France
Sammlung Falckenberg (Falckenberg Collection), Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany
The Sensational Line, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, USA

1999 Vestiges of War, 1899-1999: The Philippine-American War and Its Aftermath, Asian/Pacific/American Studies Gallery, New York University, NY, USA
Jardin de Eros, Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, Palau de la Virreina/Centre Cultural Tecla Sala, Barcelona, Spain; Bergen Kunstmuseum, Bergen, Norway (catalogue)
Sensibilidade Apocaliptica, Festival Atlantico ‘99, Lisbon, Portugal (catalogue)

1998 At Home and Abroad: 21 Contemporary Filipino Artists, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, USA (catalogue)
Double Trouble: The Patchett Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, USA (catalogue)
Pop Surrealism, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut, USA (catalogue)
Cien Años Despues, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila; Puerto Rico; Havana, Cuba; Valencia, Spain (catalogue)

1997 American Stories-Amidst Displacement and Transformation, Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (catalogue)
Arte Chido!, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City
Memories of Overdevelopment, Irvine Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine, USA (catalogue)
Nu-Glu, Joseph Helman Gallery, New York, USA
Past Time, Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh, USA
Pervasive Referents, Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York, USA
Unmapping the Earth, ‘97 Kwangju Biennial, Korea (catalogue)
Art and Provocation: Images from Rebels, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Colorado, USA

1996 Annual Exhibition, American Academy in Rome, Italy (catalogue)

1995 Eye Tattooed America, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California, USA
In the Light of Goya, University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Post-Colonial California, San Francisco State University, USA

1994 Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, The Asia Society, New York, USA (catalogue)
Icastica, Galeria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy (catalogue)
Jean-Michel Basquiat & Manuel Ocampo, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, USA
Manuel Ocampo & Don Ed Hardy, Cavin Morris Gallery, New York, USA
Sacred and Profane, Studio Nosei, Rome, Italy
Unholy Wars, Postmasters, New York, USA

1993 43rd Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA (catalogue)
Drawing the Line Against Aids, 45th Venice Biennial at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy (catalogue)
In Out of the Cold, Center for the Arts at Yerba Beuna Gardens, San Francisco, USA (catalogue)
Medialismo, Trevi Flash Art Museum, Trevi, Italy (catalogue)

1992 Documenta IX, Documentahallen, Kassel, Germany (catalogue)
Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA (catalogue)

1991 Individual Realities in the California Art Scene, Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan (catalogue)
Mike Bidlo, Manuel Ocampo, Andres Serrano, Saatchi Collection, London, UK

AWARDS

1998 Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Artists at Giverny Program
1996 National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Arts
1995-96 Rome Prize in Visual Arts, American Academy in Rome
1995 ThePollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc.par The Art Matters Foundation

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California
Oakland Museum, Oakland, California
Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California
The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (MNCARS), Madrid, Spain
Museo Extremeno e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporaneo (MEIAC), Badajoz, Spain
IVAM Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain
Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, (CAAM) Canary Islands, Spain
Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna, Lisbon, Portugal
Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris
Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan
Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Mudam Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Frac Languedoc-Roussillon, Montpellier, France
Frac Île-de-France, Le Plateau, Paris, France
Museo Berado, Lissabon, Portugal

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY- BOOKS & CATALOGUES

Manuel Ocampo, Bastards of Misrepresentation, Edicion Casia Asia, Barcelona, 2005

Art Now, 137 Artists at the Rise of the New Millennium, Taschen, Cologne, 2002
Vitamin P, New Perspectives in Painting, Phaidon, London, New York, 2002

Les Chiens Andalous, Track 16 Gallery/Smart Art Press, Santa Monica, California, 2001

Asian Collection 50, From the Collection of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan, 2000

The Nature of Culture-Manuel Ocampo/Gaston Damag. Interventions in the Monasterio de la Cartuja de Santa Maria de las Cuevas, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville, 1999
The Inversion of the Ideal: Navigating the Landscape of Intestinal Muck, Swastikating between Love and Hate, Galeria Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid, 1999
Why Must I Care For a Girl Who Always Scratches Wherever She Itches: 1-1/2 Centuries of Modern Art, Twelve Step Program, Delfina, London; Centre Cultural Tecla Sala, Barcelona, 1999

Yo Tambien Soy Pintura, Museo Extremeno e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporaneo (MEIAC), Badajoz, Spain, 1998

Hacer Pintura es Hacer Patria, Galeria OMR, Mexico City, 1997
Heridas de la Lengua, Smart Art Press, Santa Monica, 1997
Station to Station, Edizioni Programma, Cagliari, Italy, 1997

Virgin Destroyer: Manuel Ocampo, Hardy Marks Publications, Honolulu, 1994

MUSEUM PUBLICATIONS

Lussier, Real, “Serie Projet 15: Manuel Ocampo”, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, 1995

Chagoya, Enrique, “Notes for a Nonlinear Interpretation of the Work of Manuel Ocampo”, The Mexican Museum, San Francisco, 1994
Enriquez, Lucia, “Jean Michel Basquiat/Manuel Ocampo”, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, 1994

Rinder, Lawrence, “History and Retribution in the Art of Manuel Ocampo”, University Art Museum, Berkeley, May-June, 1992

Kent, Sarah, “Mike Bidlo, Manuel Ocampo, Andres Serrano,” Saatchi Collection, London, August, 1991