Strident times and sensible forms: The mutable nature of objects in Mark Salvatus’s Salvage Projects‍

Mark Salvatus examines the notion of ‘active shadows’ in his recent solo exhibition. It is a term used to describe the heavy presence of the unwritten and the unrealized alongside words that were uttered, narratives that were recorded, or in this case, art that has been crafted. The artist came across the phrase in a book by historian and literary critic Resil Mojares (2013). The chapter takes from George Steiner’s reflection on the books he did not write, which he regards as intimate companions of his published works. While unwritten, they do not occupy a gap or a void but remain “active shadows.”¹ Mojares cited Steiner when locating the place of the “unwritten, unfinished, fantastical, fictitious [and] fabricated” in Philippine history and literature.² They speak to historical knowledge, which in many ways, is riven by aspiration and anxiety. Historical accounts thus are tenuously caught between future and past.

Salvatus re-articulates this complementary relationship by way of circularity, by reviving previous art projects, reworking materials, and unraveling existing forms to generate new meanings or, in the artist’s words, to channel new energy.³ He explores another manner of coming into being by revisiting several series of works from his overarching Salvage Projects. Added to them is a nascent project whose material impetus is a set of printed piano pieces with notes obscured by his inked fingerprints. He ventured to consider the possibility of having someone play the parts from a piece he tinkered with. Cues littered the trail of our conversations, whose uses might be deferred or discarded altogether. The piano pieces he bought from the flea shops he frequented exemplify this mutability of meaning and purpose. They were once purchased for a specific function, discarded, and transformed for something tangentially related to their intended use. In their altered forms, the pieces speak to a structure that has been taken apart, put back together, and revived towards an outcome the artist cannot easily predict. In this sense, Salvatus personifies the contemporary bricoleur. Lévi-Strauss defines bricolage as the “science of the concrete,” which encapsulates “an attitude to the material world.”⁴ Bricolage is “the construction of something from whatever comes at hand.”⁵ It is “subject and subjected to the material world, to concrete reality.”⁶ Bricolage is apparent in contemporary art, but we can trace its roots to the practice of assemblage in late 1950s and 1960s America. Debates surrounding assemblage revolved around the “recognisability and transformation” of objects and materials.⁷ Critics and artists have likewise noted the performative dimension of assemblage and the various temporalities that arise from interaction with objects.

Assemblage flourished in the Philippines⁸ throughout the 1960s and the early 1970s, with works by artists Marciano Galang, Lamberto Hechanova, Edgar Doctor, and J. Elizalde Navarro as early examples. Objects that were discarded, popular images that have been reworked, and light, sound, and movement incorporated into installations can be found in the works of Gabriel Barredo and Jose Tence Ruiz from the 1980s. Assemblage also evidenced a significant turn in the works of Roberto Feleo and Santiago Bose through their references to indigenous cultures and local histories. These approaches to assemblage continued well into the 1990s and the 2000s, in artworks that can be considered multi-dimensional in form. Artists like Imelda Cajipe-Endaya and Norberto Roldan incorporated everyday objects and textures into their paintings. Others experimented with paper, textile, and photo collages like Pacita Abad and Nona Garcia. At the same time, Alwin Reamillo, Noel Soler Cuison, and Gabriel Barredo used sound and elements of theatre to construct environments. Repurposing is also evident in the art of Alfredo Juan Aquilizan, a practice that is a lively strain in the works of contemporary Filipino artists.

Dezeuze (2008) noted that bricolage in contemporary art focuses on two central themes: as a “studio practice for artists revisiting the failed utopias of past avant-garde movements, and bricolage as an everyday model of activism…related to survival in developing economies.”⁹ Repurposing and reinvention best describe Salvatus’s attendant approach to art-making. It is keenly attuned to the material world and its latent possibilities and limits. He ambivalently positions himself within the nexus of production and consumption, mobilizing creation as an experimental, lively yet necessary, and critical act. Salvatus’s travels across landscapes are often mentioned as greatly influencing his artistic process. While he traverses locations, he also inhabits and enacts different temporalities— the resurrected time of the reworked object, the cyclical time of the Mount Banahaw locale where he grew up, and the accelerated and frenetic tempo of the cities he has visited and lived in. The latter is the temporal frame his works attempt to decelerate, as when the objects he transforms and reinvents disrupt and recycle the linearity of globalized production and consumption.

We discern this in the artworks for the exhibition, notably the “Code” series, a collection of maps whose markings have been deliberately erased, and the paintings he calls “Scratchings,” where solid and faint lines intersect on thickly layered paint. The markings or scratches appear like hair-line cracks on eggshells, glass, deep crevices and craters on asphalt roads and earth. We intuit a form of transience alongside a mutable quality to these works alongside his collages, cut-outs, and prints. While playful and buoyant, they succeed in disrupting the order and structure of the world. The artist insightfully mentions that his travels, whether in life or art and across time and space, follow a circuitous path with stop-overs and detours. Heeding the call of material and form, working around a loose structure that combines randomness and deliberation, and emphasizing close attention to the minute and overarching cycles in nature and life, Mark Salvatus succeeds in creatively mediating the seemingly intractable aspects of our fractious world.

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