Membrane of Water

Passing by the works of Marina Cruz in an exhibition space feels like going through a house bursting at the seams with memory. But it may also be this: that Cruz thinks of the situation of art-making, or art-in-the-making, in terms of private rooms, interior scenes, everyday life happening by uneventfully but felt thoughtfully.  The latter inevitably makes us reconsider what to expect in an event that must matter. It need not, therefore, be the case of the gallery transforming domestically; or the domicile encroaching on the institution. It is rather a question of how Cruz intuits the media of memory so that the works on site activate themselves affectively, inform themselves as at once artifice and anecdote.

What are these species of things that Cruz charges with endearing familiarity as well as unique wonder?

Clothes are prominent in this suite. Well-worn, colorful, kept, spread out, sentimental, storied with designs.  Then there are the portraits of kin, faces and bodies, seemingly taken from albums of relations and strangers, tinged with melancholy and curiosity. The cabinet assumes a marked presence, too, as the device that keeps the clothes and other possessions. Images of potted plants are part of this constellation, enlivening predominantly human presences within the cherished dwelling, which is haunted by the memory of water.

We will notice that these species of things do not come to life without sensitive mediation. Photography, for instance, is key in the depiction of the clothes in the discipline of painting.  The cabinet is made miniature, cast in fiber glass or sometimes bronze. In this exhibition, Cruz prepares an array of repeating miniatures, put together from the wood of the cabinet hewn by her grandfather, and now cast from silicon rubber in pink and ecru. The canvas is subjected to stitching as thread and fabric embroider it like vine and vignette. Plants in the garden are portrayed as well, their parts sutured and so appear vulnerable but mended. The lamina seals the printed image of clothes and writing, recalling the custom of preserving and presenting school diplomas in Philippine living rooms as the pride of the clan.

In this exhibition that surveys two decades of the work of Cruz, we are initiated to the facets of a practice and its dispositions.

Portraits plot out the path, the earliest being a self-portrait from 2000 when she was still a student at the University of the Philippines. It mimics pixilation, prompting the viewer to squint so that splinters of color cohere. The rest are mostly pictures of kin like her mother and her mother’s identical twin sister; and her grandmothers, one of whom was afflicted with Alzheimer’s. At this stage of her vocation, she was trying out oil and pastel, painting on wood and canvas, sometimes simulating distress through scumbling, or superimposing opaque pigment to disfigure or slacken. Clearly here, she was setting the range of the possibilities of her media and the rhetoric of her imagery.

Cruz is known for the paintings of clothes. Because of the prominence of this kind of work, there could be a tendency to reduce the plastic presence as an iconography of dress.  This is why it might be productive to look into how she calibrates it in different scales, specifically adjusting the views towards it, zooming out or zooming in, testing to some extent the limits of its status as either image or object, or both. Key in understanding this calibration is her exposure to two divergent modes of painting in the fine arts school in Manila.  From the conceptual artist Roberto Chabet, she learned how to parse, or discipline, appearances in terms of grids, painting pure, preferably thick or at least flat, properties in cells laboriously and methodologically. At the other pole of sensibility was her other teacher, Norman Sustiguer, who made her appreciate alla prima, or painting directly and completing the task while the paint is still wet, as well as the virtues of seizing the effects of atmosphere in the tradition of Reubens and Rembrandt, robust and luminous. Chabet may have imparted lessons on reflexivity, dispelling the illusion of the picture to give way to the self-consciousness of artifice and analysis. But Sustiguer afforded her the chance of anecdote, to round out edges or glaze or insinuate tone, to breathe life into the carapace, as it were, through a subtle sheen or a slight curve. Cruz mingles these two approaches and alternates between the abstraction of the dress into a landscape of fascinating terrains, on the one hand, and the lyricism of fabric with the mesmerizing intricacy of ornament, on the other. She by turns defamiliarizes and comes to terms with the gait of paint.

Cruz has attempted to further complicate the utterance of painting. In her matching painting series, she divides the plane into two parts. One side is the painting of the dress. The other a stretched found fabric that serves as a background to the portrait of images of children sourced from antique sellers. The eyes of the children are crossed out with a black bar to elide their identity, referencing Cruz’s and her husband’s experience with adopting children who were also “matched” with them by social workers, as if some pieces of garments. Kinship, thus is laid bare, like the seams of an attire probed for the genetics of its sociology, or the sociality of its genealogy.

Another set of works in this exhibition that invests in process and moves away from the capture of painting as a fully accomplished métier are the printed photographs of dresses alongside excerpts from interviews with Cruz’s relatives, who talk about these dresses with familiarity. In these conversations, she would let her kin touch the dresses as they spin tales around them. There is a particular sensuousness to this cloth that attracts Cruz; it is made from repurposed packaging of chicken feed, a kind of cotton with prints that would be starched when washed, thus achieving a certain stiffness, the creases somewhat preserved, with the dress layered with a film of a fixative of sorts. She mounts the printouts and the texts on wood and collaborates with a shop specializing in lamination to envelop these panels with this coating, which yellows with time.

In terms of facture, Cruz takes keen interest in the cast; and she traces this to her sense of wonder whenever she visited her aunt’s dental clinic, marveling at how she would meticulously prepare molds for dentures using the elastic alginate, modelling the teeth, waiting for the molds to harden into shape, bearing delicate impressions and imprints. This sense of morphing and tactility amazes her, so personal and yet so protean. Her series of collagraphs is related to this scheme in which an actual dress is sealed with varnish, its crevices filled with ink, and then slipped into a press with paper enveloping it. The calculated pressure then transfers the ink onto the sheet; but the dress is impaired. She expresses anxiety over this, lamenting the sacrifice of the dress, an act that, however, crafts another form.

The interior scenes of Cruz reveal the ecology of the artist’s ancestral house in Hagonoy, a town in the province of Bulacan, north of the capital of Manila.  While this kind of painting is decisive, it also seeks an idiom that conjures the abstracted, deconstructed nature of the premises, rearranged considerably by the coming and going of water, made strange by the attrition of substances brought about by these flows caused by the tides and the rain: the floor subsides, the windows turn askew, the walls warp, the ceilings decline. Even the roads outside are raised above the entrances of houses. These telltale asymmetries configure a micro dystopia, but for her, it is, in the same spirit, realism. The house was built in the late forties and had witnessed how the water would force its way twice a month, every full moon and new moon. Hagonoy sits on a low area near the coast. It is a long ridge edged by a lake and the northern shores of Manila Bay, which is its fishing ground. Cruz imagines it as a strip of a territory, like a segment of an intestine; when seen from a map, it looks like it could be engulfed any time. It is said that the more intrepid among Hagonoy’s fisher folk would venture out to the South China Sea northward and the Pacific eastward to cast their nets. A newspaper once asked if Hagonoy is a town or a body of water.

Finally, as if her solfeggio in her studio, Cruz does visual exercises through fabric collages, the muscle memory of her practice. It involves swatches of fabric, machine embroidery, painting, and typewritten reveries coaxed by the collages, one of which is titled Mother Plant and reads: “Not all mothers are plant growers, some just prefer flowers, in a bouquet…but there are a few women who prefer those potted plants, may need patience to wait to flower, may need to water, may need to put in sunlight…that woman has a mothering heart and she will blossom one day.”

It is at this point that we begin to ask about the nature of the ordinary in Cruz’s art. In this regard,    Jeff Dolven lights up the concept of the ordinary from an exercise in listening and rendering the experience in some form of inscription like poetry or picture. As he explicates: “Any way of writing down the sound will do. Having done so: what is ordinary about the water sound?...On this account, if in listening you found the water sound surprising, strange, or beautiful, what led you to more listening, it was more ordinary for it: you were putting aside your idea of the thing to listen to the thing.”[1]

This instance makes us realize that the time of experience thickens the thing and such texture draws our attentiveness to the thing that has congealed, turning in many ways around the lifeworld and the situation of experience. This turning of the thing simultaneously defies and deepens the ordinary and gives us the opportunity to look at the ordinary again from the perspective of personal history, innermost and yet extensive, feminine and urgent, like moonlight that waxes and wanes to animate the tides.

It is uncanny that Dolven looks at water to reflect on the subject of the ordinary. In the work of Cruz, water has always been an element, calamitous and quotidian. Her family’s house in Hagonoy was frequently flooded, making the phenomenon of a flood seemingly an ordinary catastrophe, one that is internalized in the architecture of the house and so would sharply mark the scenography of some of Cruz’s paintings. This liquescent condition that alludes to routine inclement weather or dreadful climate change foregrounds water as one of the loci of the aesthetic.

Revisiting our experience of Cruz’s works will make us ponder a broader question on what governs her forms. This has something to do with the perceived duality of inside and outside as signaled by the attention to clothing and the house, both of which shelter the skin and the body. Beatriz Colomina, in her contribution to the anthology titled Sexuality & Space, begins her essay with a quote from the philosopher Walter Benjamin on “trace.” I cite this because it resonates poignantly with Cruz’s affection for the emotional politics of remembering.  As Benjamin states: “To live is to leave traces.” Colomina thinks this underlies the “birth of the interior.” Benjamin continues: “In the interior these are emphasized. An abundance of covers and protectors, liners and cases is imprinted. The traces of the occupant also leave their impression on the interior.”[2] Cruz, too, is drawn to the imprints that mark surfaces and index the task of memory as everyday and emergent. 

The notion of the interior as opposed to the exterior, however, may be unsettled if we review the nature of architecture in the making of the sensing subject, be it an artist like Cruz or not. Colomina states that “architecture is not simply a platform that accommodates the viewing subject. It is a viewing mechanism that produces the subject.  It precedes and frames its occupant.”[3] The interior is not just in other words a space to be occupied or inhabited; and without the occupant or the inhabitant, it proves inert. On the contrary, the interior informs the ways by which the subject regards the milieu. This said, the subject, limned by a prior history and reconstituted by the interior, overcomes the inside/outside binary, mediating it with what Benjamin calls “covers and protectors” that while they conceal things also absorb traces of passage, use, or engagement. It is to these layers that Cruz’s works speak, with the element of water offering another dimension, thus assembling three main tropes: fabric, interior, water. And there is yet another aspect that Colomina points to, and this is the role of photography in the production of space. According to her: “The organizing geometry of architecture slips from the perspectival cone of vision, from the humanist eye, to the camera angle.”[4] To remember is to investigate like forensic photography, or a film noir of a flooded house.

The work “Tide Table” acutely performs the presence of water in Cruz’s exhibition. The material is a type of fabric used for children’s diapers in an earlier time before they became disposable. The artist stitches them together to become tapestry. This wistfully weaves the various strands of the exhibition: the compelling ordinariness of linen and cotton ornamented by print marks from an assemblage or bricolage of table runners and crochet materials of her grandmother immersed in ink then parlayed onto the fabric scroll. On this palimpsest are drawings of charts gauging the temper of the tides in orange chalk used by dressmakers.  Indeed, like Benjamin’s trace, etched in this hectic slate is a series of migrations of tiers of  memory, encrusting objects, releasing them from their stasis or obsolescence or entropy or nostalgia.  Through but also beyond the physicality of cloth is a morphing brought about again by water. This tapestry refers to the tide table, a register of the extent to which water would seep into the vicinity, and therefore the house, during heavy rain or flooding in Cruz’s hometown. This is a function of meteorology and is based on science, although those who are familiar with the logic and caprice of the tides would hone a particular intuition responsive to its cycles.

While the tide table is released by a bureaucracy, how the level of water is measured follows homespun procedures. In the case of Cruz’s household, the gauge of water is inscribed in the architecture itself, usually on the walls on which pencil could indicate the fluctuations of water levels over time. It is like marking children’s changing heights too, also on walls. These inscriptions constitute memory that historicize the abode and its dwellers, including the natural forces around them. And here, as Colomina has brought up, the architecture is more than just an empty vessel. It is a medium through which a particular mode of registering data that becomes memory and history gains ubiquitous effect. The necessity to sweep away water off the floor after every flood is part of this ecological errand.

Water, however, does not stay in the house. It dissipates or abates. And what remains is the stain on the surfaces, a trace of the water and the granules of soil that comes and goes. Like the stitch, the stain further articulates the modes by which Cruz rematerializes the processes affecting personal history through quiet gestures like the stain and the stitch. At this point, we might want to consider the environment of textile in which text inheres and in which stain and stitch become akin to writing, or text. The anthropologist Tim Ingold considers textility (text and textile, writing and clothing) as the apt metaphor for making. For him, “making is a practice of weaving, in which practitioners bind their own pathways or lines of becoming into the texture of material flows comprising the lifeworld.” [5] After all, to make is to fashion, to fabricate, all tapping the vein of textile.

This is why the phrase tide table is vital in imagining this exhibition. The term tide pertains to the vicissitudes of nature, which have their own rhythm. The word table is an order of things, a system to record the action of nature. But table is furniture, too, which loops back the phrase to the paintings of interiors. It thus becomes an enigmatic phrase, partly surrealist in the sense that two incongruous expressions combine to form a fantasy beyond the lexical meaning. 

Like the Philippine woman artist Francesca Enriquez, who has likewise built up an oeuvre around interiors in paintings and installations involving cast house parts and actual clothes on a rack, the diligent house-keeper and home-schooler Cruz embodies the gendered and potentially feminist material of fabric, the trope of house, and the feeling of water that is at once a threat of a planetary crisis and the very channel of the memory of art. And it might have all begun with the painting of a face and of clothes under the auspices of a house of water. As Astrida Neimanis writes, “water entangles our bodies in relations of gift, debt, theft, complicity, differentiation, relation.”[6] This entanglement looms in Cruz’s works as remembrance and reflection. Neimanis continues: “Just as the deep oceans harbor particulate records of former geological eras, water retains our more anthropomorphic secrets, even when we would rather forget. Our distant and more immediate pasts are returned to us both in trickles and floods.”[7] The artist finds solace in clothes that are put on, shed, stored, resewn, handed down. These clothes are shelter of nature and from nature: “any body still requires membranes to keep from being swept out to sea altogether…There is always a risk of flooding.”[8]