EXHIBITED WORKS
Upstairs Gallery, Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound
MANUEL OCAMPO
Macho Fever
November 5 to 30, 2009
For his third solo outing at Finale, Manuel Ocampo has titled his show “macho FOREVER.” Although not without a heavy dose of irony, in this exhibition he has continued the path to “an institutional critique of himself”. Ocampo seems to be affirming the refractoriness of the public in their reception and presumptions towards modern art. He seems to revel in the misunderstanding that is created and has made it a strategy to locate other possibilities, once again if possible, for “carrying on” amidst renewed indignities facing the delegitimisation of non-objective and idea based art in the Philippine cultural context. The show’s title brings up memories of the ’70’s, from the disco era of the Village People’s “Macho Man,” to the institutionalized aesthetics of minimalism’s brazen manliness and conceptualism’s simpering ingratiation towards intellectual games-MAN-ship. But for Ocampo this reference to an outmoded era and language provides him once again a context to commit artistic faux pas in lieu of modern art's unheroic demise. For the upstairs gallery, Ocampo will stage a setting comprised of domesticated minimalist and conceptual objects ranging from Judd-like sculptures and pedestals adorned with toilet paper dispensers as well as liquid soap dispensers, McCracken’s erect slabs with coat hooks hiding behind a floral curtain, Sol Lewitt air conditioner cages, and a rearguard façade for Bruce Naumann’s “Live Taped Video Corridor, 1970” complete with a window and a separate entrance for mice and midgets.
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