Three Kings and Sound Bags Revisiting Three Kings and Sound Bags (1979) as Philippine 'Experimental Art' of the 1970s

On 6 January 1979, the Manila-based artists Judy Freya Sibayan, Raymundo Albano and Huge Bartolome jointly staged two performances titled Three Kings and Sound Bags in the End Room of the Main Gallery of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. These were loosely choreographed around two scripts written by Albano, the former in Filipino and the latter in English. Three Kings took its title from the Catholic commemoration of the Feast of Epiphany, the arrival of the three Magi (the three wise men who through legend were eventually referred to as the 'three kings') in Bethlehem to visit the infant Jesus after his birth. The theatre actor Peng Olaguera¹ was invited to read the script while the three artists remained seated amidst the audience with standing microphones. Three Kings was, according to Sibayan, "a ludic parody of the biblical mythology of the three kings".² Sound Bags followed immediately after the reading was complete. Olaguera also read this script. But this time, Albano assigned pages of the script to himself and the other two artists. The first page was labelled Huge, the second, Judy, and the third page, Ray, with the succeeding pages labelled with their names in the said order. After Olaguera had read page one, he paused as a cue for Bartolome to take out an object from a paper bag to make sounds with, which was amplified by the microphone. After the second page was read by the actor, Sibayan did the same, and the artists continued to take turns in an act of 'gifting' the audience with sounds by strumming a comb or crumpling pieces of paper.

At first glance, the use of simple gestures, social and conversational settings, everyday materials and found objects in these works resonate with post-World War II art movements such as Conceptualism, Performance Art, Fluxus and 'happenings'.³ However, as retrospectively noted by Sibayan in her essay 'Performance', the placement of these works within the visual arts (rather than experimental theatre) rendered them largely unnoticed at the time of their making.⁴ To understand the significance of Three Kings and Sound Bags in a Philippine and Southeast Asian context, it is important to situate them, firstly, within the collaboration of Albano, Bartolome and Sibayan under the collective name 'Karioka' in the period between 1977–79. Secondly, to appreciate Karioka's legacy, it is necessary to explore these works within the discourse around 'experimental art' in the Philippines during Martial Law from the late 1960s until the mid-1980s.

Karioka (1977–79)

Three Kings and Sound Bags are part of a series of performances staged by Karioka which include Three Pieces (1977), Thanksgiving Day Reflections (1978) and On Eating (1978), among others. In all these works, Albano, Bartolome and Sibayan staged everyday actions, readings and photo-documented events as forms of parodic critique of the art world. These collaborations grew out of an initial series of earlier 'classroom performances' by Sibayan and Bartolome during their time as undergraduate students at the University of the Philippines between 1973 and 1976. They studied under Roberto Chabet, the first director of the CCP Art Museum whose teaching style embodied a decisive shift in Philippine art away from figurative painting and sculpture (a long-standing tradition in Philippine art academies dating back to nineteenth-century Spanish colonial times), towards abstraction, conceptual art and installation. Exposing his students to literature and documentation of contemporary art in Western Europe and North America in particular, Chabet's teaching of fine art encouraged experimentation with media.⁵ As noted by Sibayan:

We didn't perceive ourselves as belonging to specific 'species' (painter, printmaker, sculptor, photographer, etc.). We did what was demanded by the investigation [of art]–whatever formalized a concept, be it the manipulation of space, light, architecture, human bodies or human behaviour … art made with the aim of studying and researching art further. We engaged in performance art, for instance, in order to investigate the inevitable 'loss of species' in art or the blurring of borders that separated art forms. With these experiments, we tried to extend the idea that to make art was to perform a task. We tried to affirm that what was essential in art-making was not the object created but the process of creating art and the good this process did to ourselves.⁶

A number of artists training under Chabet or running in his professional and friendship circles consequently adopted a style of making art modelled on playful exchanges.⁷ The early collaboration between Sibayan and Bartolome encapsulated this spirit of experimentation within and beyond the classroom. The two artists staged a number of performative and impromptu actions on the campus of the University of the Philippines Diliman and beyond that questioned the status of art and who could ascribe it this label.⁸ These often took place in public settings, while remaining deliberately enigmatic to coincidental viewers. Instead, they developed tongue-in-cheek play on language through the use of puns, riddled with interpersonal references, in-jokes and anecdotes.

Their subsequent works produced under Karioka, together with Albano, continued in this playful and parodic spirit. Albano's work as a hybrid "artist-curator",⁹ in the words of Patrick Flores, deployed collage-making, installation, as well as performative and critical writing as the main mode of questioning what constituted contemporary art in a Southeast Asian context. Under the rubric of Karioka, Albano's interest in the influence of Southeast Asian languages and cultural practices on contemporary art forms came into conversation with Bartolome and Sibayan's earlier parodical performances, as well as Sibayan's early exploration of what contexts render an object or action the status of 'art'.

In 1976, Albano chose Bartolome and Sibayan for the 1976 CCP Thirteen Artists Award, a prestigious grant given to 13 emerging artists whose work was then presented at a biannual exhibition at the CCP.¹⁰ This award was not intended for the artists' existing body of work, but as a form of official 'recognition' for their potential to contribute to Philippine contemporary art.¹¹ Both artists had already exhibited at the CCP Art Museum prior to the endowment, with Sibayan in particular having held her first one-person exhibition in 1975 at the CCP Art Museum Main Gallery, a space exclusively for major exhibitions. This opportunity for Sibayan—then a student in her junior year—was made possible by Albano, who accepted Sibayan's proposal to curate a site-specific work to 'exhibit' the gallery as the context that valorizes any thing installed in it as 'art'. This work proved seminal in Sibayan's future work of Institutional Critique.

In addition to their individual works for the Thirteen Artists exhibition, Bartolome and Sibayan collaborated on two other works: Inch a Second, an audience-participatory sound and performance art, and Three Pieces, a 15-minute performance at the End Room in January 1977. Albano offered his writing "How to Make Your Dream into a Performance" as the script for Three Pieces to be read by Sibayan during the performance. Thus began the three artists' collaboration and friendship, who later called themselves Karioka.

'Experimental Art' under Martial Law

In addition to a playful experimentation with media and public enactments, Karioka's works also addressed the role of art spaces and institutions in determining the status of art. This grew partially out of the artists' theoretical engagement with Marcel Duchamp's notion that art is constituted by its context rather than its 'objecthood' (a discourse particularly central to Sibayan's early projects and later developed as an artistic self-positioning in relation to Institutional Critique).¹² On a more practical level, however, Three Kings and Sound Bags spoke to the growing influence of state-backed exhibition spaces such as the aforementioned Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). Completed in 1969 by the authoritarian government of Ferdinand Marcos, the CCP was intended as a platform for commissioning new works and granting prestigious awards to contemporary artists, as well as exhibiting art as a symbol of Philippine national progress on an international level.

By the time of Three Kings and Sound Bags' making, both Albano and Sibayan had held institutional roles in the CCP. Albano inherited the position of director of the CCP Art Museum following Chabet's departure from the position in 1970, whereas Sibayan first served as curatorial assistant and staff writer for Marks (1976–77) and contributing writer for Philippine Art Supplement (1981). Both art journals were established by Albano and published by the CCP Art Museum. Sibayan was also involved as an exhibiting artist (1974–81), before taking on the role as director (1987–89). The performance of Three Kings and Sound Bags at the CCP in 1979 reflected a dynamic interplay: on the one hand, the performance existed by virtue of the fact that the CCP could bestow such enactments the status of 'art'. On the other hand, the absurdity of the artists' actions (the rustling of paper into a microphone or the strumming of a comb) parodied the seriousness and sanctity of such art spaces.

Speaking of the presence of nuanced messages of political critique in the works of Chabet, Ringo Bunoan has noted that "veiled critiques"¹³ were widely present throughout conceptually-inclined 'experimental art' under Martial Law in the 1970s and 1980s. During this period, the term 'experimental' held a specific significance. It was used by a number of artists as an alternative to the Eurocentric notion of the 'avant-garde'. As noted by Chabet in an interview with the art critic Cid Reyes: "What is considered 'avant-garde' in the Philippines may not be 'avant-garde' in another country. Let's just call it 'experimental' art."¹⁴ By this, Chabet referred to a range of practices from installation, conceptual and performance art, and in particular works which fell outside the remit of the art market, such as interactive and participatory art, as well as multimedia art.¹⁵ Beyond this formal meaning, however, 'experimental' also alluded to the ways in which select artists, including the Karioka trio, sought to navigate the boundaries of 'new' art practices emerging in particular from Philippine educational institutions, all the meanwhile developing strategies to talk around the cultural politics of the Marcos regime (1965–86).

'Experimental art' such as Three Kings and Sound Bags navigated the parameters of state-sanctioned forms of contemporary art and more personal desires to express political and institutional critique. It did so by embedding 'veiled critiques' within live acts, as well as developing art writing, criticism and self-publishing as a mode of archiving and furthering the discourse around 'experimental art'. With this intention in mind, the scripts of Three Kings and Sound Bags were published in the journal Philippine Art Supplement, accompanied by Sibayan's aforementioned essay "Performance" and a selection of images from Karioka's other performances On Eating and Thanksgiving Day Reflections (both in 1978).

Retrospectively reflecting upon Three Kings and Sound Bags 43 years after their staging, Sibayan has recently remarked:

The paintings being exhibited at the end space of the Main Gallery at the time of the 1978 Thirteen Artists exhibition became the backdrop of Three Kings and Sound Bags which occupied the whole space, thereby negating the area for proper viewing of these paintings. The event was a conflation of species or the loss of species—painting, performance art, theater and art theory. A situation of ironic inversions, we had a theater actor not acting but merely reading scripts that were not enacted by the performers who were not actors but were visual artists; a staging of a performance in a space that was not a stage but an art gallery which was called the End Room, occasionally a space for intimate theater; and finally, the reading/performance of a discourse on art no matter how ludicrously parodic of art theory, rendering the art gallery a discursive site.¹⁶

Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez has used the term "artist-as-critic"¹⁷ to describe the close-knit connection between writing and artistic practice of this period. A prominent example of this may be found in journals of the time such as Philippine Art Supplement. This was established and edited by Albano (alongside the aforementioned art magazine Marks), with the aim of engaging with international discourses, all the meanwhile furthering local epistemologies and concerns around 'experimental art' in the Philippines. Albano published his own writings through these channels, using them as platforms to theorise about the fluid relationship between art, institutionalisation and experimentation. Nevertheless, his role as the CCP director until his untimely passing in 1985 rendered a number of his writings always anchored to official institutional positions. In contrast, Sibayan's departure from the CCP allowed her to develop an extensive autobiographical writing practice in which she has retrospectively situated her individual and collaborative performance works within a history of Institutional Critique in the Philippines.¹⁸ Through such channels of publication, the archival and discursive survival of the scripts of Three Kings and Sound Bags survive to this day. They give glimpses into the multifaceted and dynamic struggle to produce 'experimental art' at the nexus of internationalism, dictatorship and a budding discourse around contemporary art in 1970s' Philippines.