Past

Eccentric Windows

Annie Cabigting

10 - 23 October 2011

Venue: Richard Koh Fine Art

Lot No. 2F-3, Level 2, Bangsar Village II,
Jalan Telawi, Bangsar Baru,
59100 Kuala Lumpur.

Open daily, 10 am - 10 pm

The Artist

A painting major who sometimes references past painters in history, Annie Cabigting’s work bridges some very different art world ‘scenes’. Her personal experience as a contemporary artist who lives and works in the Philippines is placed under a magnifying glass in comparison with the worlds, during their lifetimes and now that they have passed on, of many of the artists whose work has inspired her. Cabigting’s choices of subject matter suggest she holds a global view, and the artist is an increasingly popular figure in Southeast Asian contemporary art for her wide-eyed-wanderer mindset as well as her artistic skill.

Previous paintings such as After Yves Klein (2009)and An afternoon with Rothko (2010) show an art museum audience member or two standing in front of popular canvases, a comment on the visitor/viewer experience. Another series, in 2007, was created after the legendary Francis Bacon, using his instantly recognisable style without attempting the impossibility of replicating the original artist’s horror and personal pain. Indeed, rather than go back in time to the stories of Cabigting’s famous figures, her work pulls certain artists and certain works into a contemporary limelight, giving Southeast Asian audiences in particular a local reference point for entry into a multi-layered lesson in art history.

Stylistically, the paintings in the current exhibition Eccentric Windows, all new works, are a welcome departure from Cabigting’s previous efforts. The six-piece series on display is in effect colourless, the works play with shape, and their appropriated content is fresh and exciting. In particular Cabigting this time references artists Rene Magritte, Gordon Matta-Clark, John Baldessari, Rachel Whiteread and Christo who throughout his life worked together with wife Jeanne-Claude. In addition to their own unique appeal, Cabigting’s latest paintings do ultimately continue her practice in producing the kind of works that can initiate interest in Southeast Asian art from outside the region and, indeed, vice versa for her contemporaries and fans as to what goes on in art elsewhere.

At deeper levels, Cabigting’s work also carefully approaches issues of painting, cross-medium appropriation between artists, and appropriation between the ‘cultures’ of Western art history and Southeast Asian contemporary art, whilst most specifically highlighting the importance of the conceptual nature of all art, not only those considered of the genre. In this vein, Cabigting’s current series is not dissimilar and certainly as striking as the Readymade Remade series by national fellow contemporary artist Al Cruz in 2009.Considering her overall body of after... paintings, one also gets the feeling that these in Eccentric Windows are the latest six in a parade of works in art history that intrigue and even haunt Annie Cabigting. It becomes understandable that she physically (re)produce them to release the imagery that is recurring or a constant weight in her mind, and the results are gifts of contemplation for audiences both initiated or uninitiated in art.

The Subjects

After Rene Magritte (2011)
The image of surrealist Rene Magritte’s Clairvoyance (1936) is shown here in a copy of a photograph of the artist producing the work. Cabigting has chosen a canvas shape to mirror the egg laying on its side on the table that the artist is referencing in both the painting and the photograph and which, in Magritte’s original painting, is famously interpreted as a bird in flight.  Her work brings to mind the words of Andrew Hay who wrote in the introduction to From Self to Shelf: The Artist Under Construction that“Magritte’s imagesengage with situating himself both in and out of his own previous works… and, ultimately, life and death itself. [And] death, of course, actually pre-empts the fame of some artists.” (Bayley & May 2007). Hay, who could not have known the artist would again be once removed from one of his paintings and situated further outside it, made a statement that applies not only to the situation of the work itself but as a precursor to Cabigting’s exploration of famous subjects, some of whom have passed away.

After Christo (2011)
Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude are famous largely for having wrapped man-made and natural objects and buildings the world-over in kilometers of fabric, creating giant public art. Famous large-scale wrappings include Greater Miami, Florida (1980-1983) and The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Paris (1975-1985), famous non-wrapping projects include The Gates, Project for Central Park, NYC (1979-2005)and The Umbrellas, Japan USA (1984-1991). Wrapping paintings, Christo created a small-scale work that leant towards the beginnings of conceptual art, concealing imagery and highlighting an unexpected object, thereby awakening discussions of the value and definition of ‘art’. Christo’s work as a subject for Annie Cabigting suggests a playful side to inherited meaning in contemporary art. In one sense it is a semi-serious study of periods and experiments in art history, but to a larger extent the work stands on its own as a contemporary painting with clear imagery that is easy to understand, and with a more immediate approachability and less intimidating complexity than the other pieces in the series.

After Rachel Whiteread (2011)
Whiteread’s Turner prize winning House (1993) was sculpted in concrete using an abandoned townhouse as the mold. The actual house shell was then stripped away leaving immortalized the ordinary living space of middle-class London. Whiteread’s work was destroyed by the local council a year later and yet, over fifteen years later, it remains very much at the forefront of many levels of discussion surrounding contemporary art. Here Cabigting recreates the work with a triptych of canvases, shaped and dedicated to the Grove Road public sculpture with far more emotion and intimacy than a photograph could ever provide.

After Gordon Matta-Clark (2011)
Indeed the only possibility of a direct interpretation of ‘windows’ in the exhibition (while all the works can of course be considered conceptual ‘windows’ to other times), two of Matta-Clark’s building cuts and their resulting views are painted by Cabigting. She paints them without any surrounding remainders of the actual building, thereby addressing their circular and flower-petal shapes with greater emphasis. Matta-Clark, known for both his rebellion and devotion to the field of architecture, is one of history’s most exciting artists. With buildings as his playground, he took an intensely physical role making art with extreme action content that both commented on society and use its very structures as materials and tools in his art and message. His work is mostly continued today through photographs and the artist was granted a retrospective at The Whitney in 2007. Bringing landed pieces as those by Matta-Clark and also Rachel Whiteread to painting in this exhibition certainly adds a new dimension to Cabigting’s body of work.

After John Baldessari (2011)
Baldessari’s cover of ARTFORUM with the instructional text ‘This is not to be looked at’ was a reference to art magazines, art criticism and efforts against - or in spite of – potential judgment, as well as once of his many pieces of conceptual art. It fits in Cabigting’s series not only as a link to the genre but also by representing an inevitable section of the art world that has the power to add or subtract value in art. Cabigting seems to be extending Baldessari’s voice through the work, and its mild treatment further illustrates the original artist’s tame tone. In another connection between subjects in the series, Baldessari also referenced the Magritte painting The treachery of images (1928-29), which showed a pipe and the text ‘This is not a pipe’, in other works he made that combined images of objects with text.

Suraya Warden