FOR the seventh iteration of the Singapore-based annual Wuwei Performance Series, the event's organizers decided they could easily let the series go on this year in late April, even with the travel bans and global lockdowns. That's all thanks to performance art's not being restricted to live presentations, allowing other-media deliveries as still within its aesthetic perimeter, for as long as the other requisites are there, mainly the performer's presence in a singular locus. Of course an other-medium presentation of a performance may create confusion about whether it is still operating within the language of performance and not rather within the lexicon of the short film, for instance, especially when the camera being used veers away from the performer to scan parts of the venue. Then again, isn't one's pair of eyes that's witnessing a live performance in a gallery actually operating like a camera itself, panning here and there and at times cognitively zooming in on an interesting detail, and so on and so forth? Anyway, suffice to be in the know that other-media performances are embraced by the category as still within the scope of its favor. And so, this year, the 12 participants of the series were instructed to just video their performance in the location they were caught ny the lockdowns in. That, in essence, became the most distinct flavor that this Wuwei series ended up with that's now part of its art-historical added value.
    That doesn't mean that the performances themselves are lesser materials for conversation. We found Filipino artist Alwin Reamillo's entry, for instance, titled Untitled (Bodégon), to be quite a conversation piece for our Filipino bias, even as it had messages in it that may not have anything to do with the pandemic issue, at least nothing directly.
    Over Edgar Varèse's "organized noises" of a music, the performance video (filmed and edited by Bryan Reamillo) starts by the camera's entering a room, a room with the same sense of Varèsean organization towards what we we would see as "noise" pieces. The camera goes on to climb up the stairs, to a room whose noise pieces may be said to be in a still-ongoing process of organization, an artist's studio filled with materials being always like that after all (like a bodega or cellar, although Reamillo's is above ground rather than underground). Understand that art-making as a process of organizing pieces and thoughts need pieces as much as processing thoughts.
    But Reamillo's performance, being a performance, would here turn some pieces or objects in the room not into parts of a construction but into props. The use of props for an organized dramatization is no new thing to Reamillo, being likewise an installation artist who had collected items in the world's library of objects to be part of organized still-lifes or kinetic dramas he placed on gallery floors or hanged on their ceilings. He is also quite familiar with the use of tools necessary for the realization of a social sculpture.
    His present props-use in Untitled (Bodegon) leads us to a dramatization of a continuum of thoughts and actions that seem likewise to be processing a finale act to be made. That finale arrives as a "non-thought" with a "non-action." Let us guide you through that progress:
    Now, to those familiar with the artist's work, Reamillo is more interested in objects as carriers of historical and political noise. In the video, and consequently in his present performance, the objects in the room would necessarily refer to history (past and recent), but also to the artist's roster of exhibited constructions (and the contexts these pieces carried during their respective exhibitions).
    We here get a glimpse of that large plastic Thrall figure (from Warcraft) standing by the studio's window. He used this in a diskurso art magazine-curated show on religious art to parody right-wing political loyalists' virtual statuary in today's God-Building state of affairs. Specifically, to Reamillo that political sort of religiosity has been moving towards the worship of a cult personality in Rodrigo Duterte as a "hulog ng langit" savior. Note that in Norse mythology, a thrall is a serf, which intervening context Reamillo uses (in his wont to let contexts interplay) to highlight the fist-saluting Duterte as more of a snarling Chinese puppet of a fearsome orc than a self-sustained god.
    The camera pans to another Reamillo bricolage about a "fake history" concerning Jose Rizal (as supposedly a nationalist socialist hero) that some people from the Philippine alt-right have been peddling; this parody piece by the artist was also shown in another diskurso art magazine-curated show, one about the allegory.
    Finally the camera arrives at Reamillo appearing as a modern-day Makapili, ironic because he is here hiding his identity from a crowd of the populist right while the old Makapili of World War II hid his identity from the Philippine citizenry who were against the fascism of the Japanese Imperial Army and their collaborators.
    Reamillo's new Makapili is contemplating an action. Or is it a counter-utopia that he might be able to spread in the world from his head, like the air collected by an electric fan that the mechanism is able to spread in a room?
    He picks up another recent Reamilloan trope, the maneki-neko, that he has used to parody the Duterte fist salute. The Duterte salute is truly a cross-cum-variation of the Roman or Nazi salute and the leftist raised fist, and the appropriation of the maneki-neko as an image of irony seems quite apt, considering that the figurine beckons whilst the Duterte salute threatens. On the other hand, the maneki-neko is also quite a perfect image for an interplay of contexts, considering that it is historically by the Japanese, a people the Chinese historically hate, but has been appropriated by Chinese merchants to adorn their stores and living rooms. Are the Chinese treating the maneki-neko the same way the Ancient Romans treated an Ancient Greek figure or image, as symbol of a successful cultural appropriation equal to subjugation? Is Duterte a Chinese maneki-neko? And so on and so forth.
    Reamillo here pours one of his concoctions on the maneki-neko, either to do a voodoo healing on it, or a voodoo poisoning of it, or both. Representations of an herbalist's or witch's concoction such as this have appeared in many a Reamillo installation to reference the "arbularyo mix" that society or its leaders might imagine as the long-looked-for cure to their environ's social ailments. [These concoctions notably appeared in Reamillo's Mise en (Matched) Scene show and in the Manufacturer's Advice: Content May Vary group show (see those bottles behind gallerist Dawn Atienza in that photo with her).]
    Reamillo's new Makapili in Untitled (Bodegon) then considers the use of the rightist gun, or the Nazi gun if you will, against the rightists of our present. You know what happens next.
    Edgar Varèse's musical democracy referred to the "musical space as open rather than unbounded." British conservative writer Paul Johnson, meanwhile, writes in Art: A New History that a bodegón can refer to low-life or everyday objects that can be painted on to show the artist's mastery. That looks quite populist, too, doesn't it? Primarily, however, the word refers to a Spanish still life painting depicting pantry items arranged on a stone slab, or a painting with a figure surrounded by the same kind of items. Items in whatever sort of pantry or bodega, qua "noise" pieces, then, will always be for people's arranging or re-arranging for creating their own voices or bodegóns, an act that Reamillo urges them to complete in picking up from where he supposedly failed.