# Myths Of Creation And Destruction
<WORLD>SCULPTURE NEWS Volume 7 Number 2 Spring 2001</WORLD>
<By>Alice G. Guillermo</By>
<The>sacred and the mythical, the physical and the erotic, the magical and the mundane, the religious and the profane, and music and song all permeate the art of Filipina artist Agnes Arellano. Drawing from rich personal experience and an extraordinary range of influences, she makes some of the most dramatic art in Asia.</The>
<For>Agnes Arellano, art is fueled by a restless search, a need to discover the secrets of nature and existence. "I am seeking answers to certain metaphysical questions which present themselves in the form of paradoxes, and concern the problem of existence or the juxtaposition of, but essential interdependence between, creation and destruction," she says. Her biographical entries bear out this quest. Agnes Arellano, who was born in Manila in 1949, first turned to psychology for the answers, finishing her bachelor's degree in 1966, after which she took courses in clinical psychology. But perhaps it was her program in French language and literature at the Sorbonne which brought her closer to the arts so that, upon her return, she took up fine arts majoring in sculpture at the University of the Philippines where she graduated in 1983.</For>
<Artistic>creativity was always second nature to Arellano, who was born into a well known family of architects and painters trained in Europe. But into their serene and culturally privileged setting, tragedy struck in 1981 when the ancestral home was razed to the ground by fire, claiming the lives of her parents and one sister. The traumatic event left the artist with a profound sense of the destructive aspect of existence. In her mind, she seemed to be caught in a precarious balance between life and death, creation and destruction, Eros and Thanatos. Later, it was this duality that would provide the thematic grounding of her art.</Artistic>
<In>the process of healing, she explored the possibilities of sculpture as a vehicle for the exploration of these universal and personal themes. And it was in Hindu-Buddhist philosophy and religious iconography that the artist searched for the answers. In this context, the deity Siva of the Hindu trinity, at once creator and preserver, became the central reference, and with him, the fearsome consorts Kali and Durga wearing the necklace of skulls. More specifically, Arellano was inspired by the mithunas (loving couples) of Hindu iconology, as in the famous erotic sculptures of the Konarak Temple, and by the Yab/Yum coupling figures of the Tantric sect of Tibet, which celebrate sexuality as the means to salvation. It is important to note that, in time, other sources entered her work, resulting in a syncretic iconography. A number of these have been drawn from Filipino indigenous myths and rituals, such as Bulol, the granary god of the Cordilleras and Bicol or Mebuyan, the fertility goddess of multiple breasts, Arellano has also been influenced by Mexican, Indonesian, and Japanese culture and art. But to these numerous mythological and iconographic sources she has always contributed her own personal insight and interpretation, thus introducing unexpected twists and surprises. She says, "My art is satori-cal. This may sound intuitive and loose, but one should not forget that Zen Buddhism has a lot of discipline.</In>
<Likewise>, a large part of the healing process after the fire involved setting up the Pinaglabanan Art Gallery where the old house stood. Creating a new venue for art, Arellano believed, would appease the spirits of the dead who had spent their lives in pursuit of art. For six years, the gallery in San Juan in the suburbs of Manila offered many young artists a multimedia venue which not only exhibited the visual arts but also held literary gatherings. But the artist suffered another blow when works which were being readied for an exhibition at a museum were suddenly engulfed by fire.</Likewise>
<Arellano>works in sculpture groups which constitute installations and which she refers to as "inscapes," a word borrowed from the poetry of English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, by which in her sense means an integration of forms and concepts to constitute a meaningful whole. She creates life-sized human figures by means of direct modeling in plaster of Paris, a quick-setting medium which requires quickness and spontaneity of execution. The original forms are later cold-cast in synthetic marble (polymer resin mixed with marble dust) in order to ensure permanence and facilitate transport. Arellano has, however, continually experimented with various materials to greatly enhance the semiotic potential of her work. These materials include bronze, sterling silver, wood, lead, wax, tar, used motor oil, metallic powder, sand and volcanic cinder. Her found objects include dead trees, human skull and bones, photographs and xerographs. Her sculpture has also been integrated into dance choreography and performance art, particularly her unique collaborative "sound sculptures,' while the lighter side of her art has included edible sculpture, soft sculpture, and living sculpture. She has also done a number of memorial portraits on bronze of prominent civic leaders. To date, Arellano has produced seven sculptural groupings or "inscapes": Temple to the Moon Goddess (1983); Bosch and the Hollow Men (1986); Myths of Creation and Destruction Part I (1988); Myths of Creation of Destruction Part II: Temple of the Sun God (1990); Three Buddha Mothers: Vesta, Dea, Lola, accompanied with a floor piece, Eshu (1995); and Dead Trees (1999).</Arellano>
<Arellano>'s debut in a group exhibition at the now defunct Museum of Philippine Art in 1983 showed an art permeated by a Sivaitic world view which simultaneously evoked eroticism and death. This first sculptural grouping or "inscape," entitled Temple to the Moon Goddess, consisted of two large works with life-sized figures, Recumbent Yab/Yum Sarcophagus and Haliya Bathing (both 1983) and a number of smaller works including Babboldibooda. Recumbent Yab/Yum Sarcophagus is a sculpture of a couple making love on top of a sarcophagus with a glass lid which provides a view of their double image in a pair of skeletons embracing in the enclosed space below. While the figures are done in a realist, if not a literal style, the white plaster of Paris annuls the erotic effect of the work, since there in no intimation of blood flowing in their veins and lending color to their skin, and it is also suspends the figures in time. The pure whiteness of the material likewise induces an elegiac silence environing the work while transposing the figures to a ideal plane above the banal and quotidian.</Arellano>
<This>same holds true for Haliya Bathing, a floor altar, where the life-sized figure of a pregnant woman, eyes closed in remote reverie, is half embedded in sand, half embedded in water. Her slim legs are flexed out on both sides, while with one hand she caresses her distended belly in anticipation of birth. The uncompromising whiteness of the body, and sand, and the water strengthens the connotations of the sacred and the mythical, even as there is a compelling sense of the physical and the erotic in her work.</This>
<One>of the salient features of this first grouping is the highly original "sound sculpture" of which Arellano is the sole practitioner in the Philippines today. To date, she has done at least three of these pieces for her "inscapes". In this unusual works which she calls "music composed through sculpture," the artist draws from her own musical background, having been a singer in her younger days. In the "sound sculpture" "Music for Watching the Moon Rise", the notes that make up the 'score' are indicated by an 'omphalos' of navel-like, round protrusions arranged on the parallel lines representing a musical staff in a long box filled with sand. For the first performance, these were interpreted on the flute and recorded on a cassette tape. A similar work, though more elaborate, was Music for Making the Sun Rise (1987), accompanying the "inscape" Myths of Creation and Destruction Part I. Based on the same principle, the work consists of a long wooden box filled with crushed marble. Arranged on the parallel lines of the staff are oval protuberances, singly or in pairs, which stand for notes. In variations of the work, the omphalos may be replaced by skull-like shapes with gaping holes for the eyes half embedded in the sand. But this time the musical sculpture was interpreted on synthesizers, Japanese kotos, male and female Filipino gongs, the triangle, among other instruments, along with male and female voices and the special participation of musical avant-garde artist Lucresia Kasilag. In a third work, Linga Mantra, accompanying Myths of Creation and Destruction Part II, the musical staff is a design of five concentric circles, the innermost circle corresponding to the lowest line. As the artist describes it, "omphalos forms, 20 of them are laid out on the circular box filled with raked fine white sand in the pattern of a mushroom fairy-ring." The whole is divided into four quadrants composed of 15 equal segments or beats, following a clockwise motion. In this work, which will surely delight avant-garde musicians, Western notation and texture is discarded in favor of a heterophonic structure with the use of the percussive bamboo angklung of different tones and pitches assigned to note numbers with the intervals corresponding to beats.</One>
<Myths>of Creation and Destruction Part I, which included Music for Making the Sun Rise, is based on the installation Carcass Cornucopia. It is a visually arresting work in plaster of Paris (later cast in synthetic marble), and its main figure is a human female torso suspended upside down by means of metal hooks dug into its feet, which, to our surprise, are the cloven hooves of a large beast. The entire length of its torso has been ripped open, revealing at one end a small gnome-like creature, a hybrid of Buddha and Bulol. From the inner space above the breasts where the figure is snugly ensconced spill out unhusked rice and egg-shaped stones as in a bountiful cornucopia. But there does arise some difficulty in reconciling, on the one hand, the slaughterhouse violence done to the headless carcass, the half human, half beast-its very hooves signify that it is an animal of sacrifice to be cut down on the altar of ritual or to be consumed as food at table-and, on the other hand, its giving life to a benign deity dispensing manna.</Myths>
<This>exhibition was followed in 1990 by a sequel, Myths of Creation and Destruction II: The Temple of the Sun God, held in Fukuoka, Japan, Arellano's first solo show. This instep consisted of two focal points or installations. The first involved Angel of Death, a V-shaped, two-panel work in relief with a male torso at the center flanked by a pair of large magnificent wings. The torso rests on a large mushrooming cloud, a symbol of the atomic bomb explosions which devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Below and all around the lethal cloud are small shapes like mushrooms or phalli, along with crawling lizards that symbolize chthonic forces. Scattered references to mushrooms, some of which are known for their hallucinogenic properties, slyly extend to mindbenders and aphrodisiacs, as in the minor work, Mushroom Rebirth.</This>
<At>the center of Angel of Death rises a shining bronze spear with its triangular tip above the torso where the head should be. The two diagonal borders of the relief are lined with fragments of colored glass that lend an ornamental element at the same time that they suggest danger from wounding. To go to this altar, one is to pass under an arch which features two giant clitoral shapes forming the sides of a Gothic arch. In the space between the arch and Angel of Death one passes a formidable gauntlet of shining bronze armalite bullets, three on each side and magnified to the height of a man six feet tall. These symbols of violent, bloody death, which are also phallic symbols, seem to encroach on one aggressively from both sides, so that the very whiteness of Angel of Death, with his final spear that would render the coup de grace, would only provide a cold yet strangely beautiful relief in the psychological sense.</At>
<Complementary>to Angel of Death is A Tender Moment: The Detonation of the Bomb, which, as the title suggests, is a dual sculpture. The male and female figures on one side of the plinth are clearly inspired by the erotic sculptures of the Konarak temple in India: an erect couple with their limbs interlaced in the act of love. Like the mithunas, they gaze intently into each other's eyes as the man supports the woman's back with his hands. The couple stands on a base consisting of a compact pile of small skulls as from a holocaust to signify martial victory over their enemies, the difference in scale lending an illusion of grandeur to the figures. The figurative treatment is classical in its fluid plasticity of form and in the fine articulation of the limbs and fingers, a smoothness enhanced by plaster of Paris and the synthetic marble.</Complementary>
<How>will love and creation, war and destruction be resolved in Arellano's sculpture? The artist says that growing up in the "make love not war" generation, she thought that love and war were opposites. But she later discovered that link between the two: Both are explosive in nature-the detonation of the atom bomb and the explosion of sexual ecstasy. Likewise, both involve death and destruction, though on different levels: The holocaust of the atom bomb and the petit mort of sex which marks the momentary dissolution of the self. She also acknowledges the influence on her work of Alain Resnais's 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour, which opens to a sequence showing a couple, a French woman and a Japanese man, making love against a long and elegiac montage on images of the Hiroshima holocaust. At one point she says to him, "You are good for me. You destroy me." Arellano writes that each kind of death, whether it be the petit mort, the displacement of the personality associated with the ingestion of hallucinogenic mushrooms, or the detonation of the atom bomb, "carries with it a blinding light and the purification of the mind of the body through a spiritual or physical experience."</How>
<In>1995, Arellano did a portrait series, Three Buddha Mothers: Vesta, Dea, Lola, accompanied by the floor piece Eshu in which the traditional Buddhist iconology of the male Buddha becomes gendered as female in the three stages of life. The pregnant Vesta gestures to her fertile breasts with mudra of generosity. Dea, the artist's fantasy self-portrait, possesses multiple breasts and wings, like a large moth molting out of her cocoon. But here, an unexpected element appears in the cobra that rears up like a phallus from between her legs, making her half male, half female. Lola, the wrinkled crone, sits in the familiar Asian position of one leg poised on a bench and an arm lightly resting on her raised knee which is also the "mudra to teaching turned inwards."</In>
<A>leitmotif that courses through Arellano's works is that of destruction by fire. In her 1988 show Fire and Death: A Labyrinth of Ritual Art she made a circular cast of the living room wall of her ancestral home, which had been razed to the ground. The intensity of the devastation by fire can be seen in the irregular patches left by fire in the cement wall, which she shaped into a circle to depict the void or enlightenment. She also had an exhibition of dead trees and tree stumps in different venues such as the Greenbelt Park in Ayala Center in Makati in 1998 and the Government Service Insurance System Museum in 1989. These consisted of tree stumps which she painted as though they were oozing blood, of entire tree trunks blackened by fire which she partially 'gilded' with bronze lights, and of dead trees with their roots upended like mythical baobabs and supported by ropes tied to the ground. A blackberry tree with two hollows for breasts whispered to her, "Clad me in poison!" and she covered it with an armor of lead sheets.</A>
<The>central thematics of creation and destruction bring us to the heart of the Sivaitic world view in the context of Hindu-Buddhist traditional philosophy and culture. One central concept is that of the annulling of contradictions, of going beyond good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly. It is implied that nature, here embodied in Siva, inexorably passes through the universal cycles of creation and destruction of which human beings are of no consequence whatsoever. But such a mythical system strikingly contrasts with world views which valorize human agency and the accountability of human beings for their actions and their effects. In the personal, local, and global dimensions, humans live within a system of power relations marked by the tensions of conflicting interests. With respect to this, however, it is possible to say that the Hindu-Buddhist mythical system with syncretic components provides an aesthetic framework for Arellano's art and shapes it into an integral and coherent whole within its rarefied climate, while its philosophical premises show themselves as fragile in the light of realpolitik. But Arellano, as she herself says, is engaged in a search in progress where questions must arise along the way. "I ask myself whether I shall see God when I die, and, if so, whether this would be more than a glimpse of Siva's third eye. For me, this is still an open question."</The>