When malls turn into art spaces

By John Anthony S. Estolloso

Personally, truly yours tends to shy away from art exhibits at malls and shopping areas. Perhaps it stems from a purist sentiment of gratuitous reverence to art that insists on demarcating the temple of beauty from the temple of merchandise. However, last Monday’s opening of SM City Iloilo’s ‘Art for Everyone’ challenged this personal prejudice and offered some epiphanies about how the artworld situates itself in the contemporary.

Zooming out of this narrow and corseted view, one realizes that the artworld cannot – and must not – confine itself to the formalities of the art museum or the gallery. If the core of Art is individual and collective expression, then it must permeate the spaces where individualities congregate. Art, too, must adjust to the shift of tastes and the grounds where these flourish. As such, the agency to view and experience it is broadened and amplified, quite aptly mirroring the exhibit’s title: art is for everyone indeed.

These were the thoughts running through my mind during July 13’s opening. Participated by artists and practitioners of varied genres and métiers from all over Panay, Guimaras, and Negros, the exhibit offered an eclectic selection of the region’s contemporary art scene: here are the many local art groups, solo artistes, and curators coming together, all in one floor of a shopping center. Mingling with them are shoppers, sellers, and the spectators who just happened to be there, all partaking in the visual smorgasbord offered by sundry creators.

In that sense, the mall becomes an intersection where art and commerce meet. The artists’ ‘intervention’, if we may use the term, democratizes how people perceive and approach aesthetics: one needs not enter ‘holy ground’ to look at art. By spilling into spaces uncustomary to its praxis, art is given room to evolve and acquire new meanings in new territories. Consequently, these relocations further build up the artworld and in turn, cultivate the market for art while avoiding its reduction as mere commodity.

This democratization of art lies in the interactions between place and persona. The public nature of a mall invites even the most casual passerby to pause and peruse what are displayed. In the informal encounters between artist and audience, the understanding of the creative process becomes a shared discourse where artistic interpretation meets commentary or criticism. Eventually, this attempts to diminish or to dispel biases usually affiliated with the arts: that it is difficult to make sense of, that it leans mostly towards the avantgarde, that it is purely decorative in nature, that it is elitist. Hence, this repositioning opens more access to art appreciation.

With this, our construct of art releases itself from the institutional and reaches over to the communal. While museums and galleries themselves are public institutions in the sense that they cater to general audiences, they nonetheless frame art in a proscribed aesthetic space: one enters a gallery to view art primarily, the same way one attends a play in a theater or listens to music performed in a concert hall. That a shopping area offers the same experience in viewing traditional and digital art blurs these boundaries, thus loosening restrictions conventionally associated with institutional venues, those which might have deterred the general public from dabbling with and appreciating art in the first place.

In turn, this juxtaposition-cum-intervention invites a flourishing of the art market. The venue offers buyers and prospective collectors a ready conglomeration of artworks to evaluate and purchase from. As a lighter aside, if we are to search for a deterrent to the starving artist trope, then this relocation of art would happily serve that purpose. Far from mere commodification, here is Art sold without belittling and diminishing the aesthetic value attached to these works or the recognition of the human effort and creativity poured into their making.

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At the onset of that afternoon’s exhibit opening, several local artists delivered a ritualized performance, as if to hallow the collection of art on display and endow these works with an aesthetic numinousness. To the clacking of sticks, the tinkling of gongs and finger cymbals, and the sounding of a conch, the artists perambulated around the main exhibit area, a seemingly outré procession amid the hubbub of SM City’s trade and traffic. That was art insisting on its existence and presence in the middle of this temple of merchandise – and there we were, ready to soak it all in.

(The writer is a humanities teacher in one of the private schools in the city.)