Cross my heart and hope to die

Cross my heart and hope to die...

PATRICIA EUSTAQUIO'S Death to Major, Viva Minor

Translation threads along the tenuous border of deception. Along comes the inevitable process of either reading too excessively into a piece of 'text' or totally missing the point. Such is the double-edged condition of having to look at 'something.' To take things as they are is usually the most difficult of tasks. For maybe it's the fear of boredom, which hovers above any creative process. Yet even light, the purest of concepts, is never what it seems. Experiences and history cloud perception. Like a pill, the illusory tint feeds the machine of our imagination in turn igniting an obsessive preoccupation to painstakingly extract and make meaning out of nothing. For there must always be a reason behind everything.

 In performance, the artist is left to the task of merely setting up a situation upon which consequent action shall take place paradoxically on the other side of the fence where the spectator sits. Eventually what was once not known reveals it’s self, slowly lifted out of the frame the way an animal is being skinned, exposing both its strength and frailty. However the theatre unfolds as imagined landscape associates itself with that which we see in front of us in space: the systems and its procedures are gradually recognized; meaning emerges; and the mystique lifted to trigger the performance itself, like a bullet fired to the air. Never mind the seeming impossibility of isolating fiction from real life, the way memory keep betraying our dreams and flirt with the present. What matters is how with such clarity of intent and zen-like persistence that the artist manages to preserve the tension and maintaining the elasticity of time in the same manner that glass is tempered and bent. Good expeditions require sound navigation if not precise maps and spatial instruments.

 The pleasure of being transported out of the confines of the ordinary is a projected ideal we unconsciously carry. Now even more I have become fearful of the process of translation. Yet the half-witted perversion mixed with satisfaction of being let in into a secret is too appealing to pass. And so if a temporary resolve must be taken, translating accommodates a degree of constructive deception. Because no one wants to take things as they are.

 Patricia Eustaquio's Death to Major, Viva Minor lets in on this constructive deception, masking the beautiful and grotesque, lifting the veil and revealing the void that waits underneath. A reluctant ode to the twelve preludes of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, purposely aiming for the simple virtuosity of the music via its periphery. Despite the looming temptation of painting as visual metaphor for music, Eustaquio deliberately denies the viewer just this. No, this is by no means a visualization of a moving piece of music. She temporarily suspends her 'creativity' instead heeds the opposite through "simple imitations: hollow odes and vacuous praises" (P.Estaquio notes, 2008). The collection begs off the seductive appeal of metaphor that imbues projected fantasies about Bach's music. And yet seduces us back to the composers' mind through the symphony of objects crafted out of mindful understanding of the behavior of the materials she has chosen to work with: knit, lace, wood, leather, and ceramics. Meticulously fashioning delicate objects out of 'lowly' craft materials relegated to the 'decorative arts.' Sculpting out an absurd storybook picture into the shell of where used to stand a piano school. 

 The works in this exhibition is inspired by Eustaquio's investigation of and into music choosing one of Bach's prominent work, the Well-Tempered Clavier. Considered as one of the most influential pieces of music in Western classical music,  "for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study." The work is a collection of preludes and fugues for all 24 keys of the keyboard, indiscriminate of major of minor keys. It has since become a primary book used in piano schools to familiarize students with the entire range of the instrument.  Eustaquio examines her own position to music: "If I were to talk above my head about music I realize I would be a monkey on a typewriter. And yet this is what I've set out to do in this collection...though perhaps it is with slight mockery that I produce works from it: an act justified by my absolute ignorance of music." Citing Schopenhauer who speaks of music as the highest form of art as it is the manifestation of will, of idea itself. Generated from it’s own language. And if indeed music, art for that matter, were a language Eustaquio approaches it like a child through simple imitations. Composing her own tribute to music, creating a symphony of abstract things fashioned from the humble understanding of a listener.

 As in any tributes, the context will be haunted by shallow intentions and nit-picked for meaningful references. The work cannot escape the microscopic eye of a viewer who cannot risk to live in an absurd meaningless world created out of nothing–for there is always a reason behind everything. Eustaquio stares back at us by literally confronting us with shallow objects, skinned from their original context in a process almost violent yet poignant at the same time. Psycho-genic Fugue, a sculptural crocheted piece, alludes to a full-sized piano assuming its volume and former shape.  The crocheted white blanket, donning most homes to protect valuable furniture, stands in the absence of the piano. As if it has stood there all those years, gathering dust witness to history.  Divested and castrated of its utility. A poignant remembrance of its past perhaps? Or a silent violent erasure of its past, leaving behind a dense fragment of its former self? A fitting contrapuntal response to an instrument that now stands there as a ghost­­–muted, static, absent yet captivating.

 Whereas fragments meet to complete a big picture, Eustaquio holds off, keeping the viewer in anticipation. Freezing the moment of comprehension meanwhile saying it is done. The fragmented paintings never complete themselves, or so we think. She resists the temptation of repeating herself by not ‘finishing’ the obvious. Respecting the space between truth and comprehension. Exhausting the connective episodes for a narrative that completes itself in vitro. The image of a torn violin, a sneak peak to its distinct anatomical similarity to the human cavity or dyptich still life of a bird in differing states of death. She mutes the big orchestral sound to amplify the hissing noise in the background. Working with chance and carefully choosing the seductive accidentals that comes up. Whereas the viewer follows her lead, picking up incomplete pieces of a jigsaw puzzles. The absent spaces filled only by hollow events hinting at our memory. In fact this is all we need.

 And the ones left lying on the floor, seeming artifacts of half-forgotten dreams, betray an epic narrative that begs its own resolve–testaments to the frail beauty that lie in between the intersection of celebration and lament. Where a piece of music either calls its own repugnance or incessantly rings in the background, an ambient sound that bleeds into the wallpaper of a bedroom, unchanged all those years. The subtle movement of objects comes unnoticed as if their familiarity has left them subject to their eventual disappearance. Leaving behind but a trace of its former self, a carcass left to rot through time, fossilized and hardened.

 Memory according to Walter Benjamin “is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater.  It is the medium of past experiences as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.” As we approach the past like an archeologist digging deeper into the ground, we ask ourselves how far back can we go? For “he who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to end of its segments.” In Death of Major, Viva Minor we are invited to stay in the folds, traversing the intersection of opposing forces that between presence and absence, poignant and violent, dense yet hollow, anxious and calm.