Tea Party #17 ~ Features ~ ConPUNtational
Toys, Robert Fuentes larger version
Artist Michael Arcega's Many-liners | Claire Light
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Mike Arcega goes and makes a miniature Spanish galleon outfitted with square-rigged sails, which actually propel the thing. It’s big enough for him to sit in, and he sailed it around Tomales Bay a year or two ago. There’s video footage. It’s all about the Spaniards colonizing Manila and—wait for it—it’s made almost entirely of manila folders! He calls the ship El Conquistadork.
Then there’s the one where he made a series of maps out of Spam. Right, the canned meat product. He sliced Spam into thin pieces, baked them in an oven until they were dry, and then cut out the shapes of geographical features. There’s a map of the Philippines by island, of the U.S. by state. He even made a map of the world! By country! They’re called SPAM/MAPS.
I guess, since he’s an artist, you could try to analyze this stuff seriously. But that’s not how Mike himself talks about it. (He’d probably make a pun out of the word “anal-yze.”) Instead, he lets the images accumulate—an oversized wooden “.45” pistol with a mechanism inside that actually shoots wooden bullets!—and the gee-whizickry somehow doesn’t get tiring—hangman’s nooses made from newspaper!—but like layering the perfect Dagwood sandwich—a miniature Noah’s ark with paired strips of animal jerky hanging from the rafters!—at some point you have food deep enough for thought.
And here’s where you might get into trouble. Mike’s work is deceptively simpleminded, based on puns—and silly, hyuk-puns at that. He draws you step-by-step down, one liner at a time. But the puns are riddles, as are the materials, the forms, the institutions they represent and skewer, the obscure rituals woven delicately in, the small details carved or painted or glued on in patterns. Riddles whose solutions are . . . one-liners again, doubling back on themselves.
His humor isn’t irony. “I’m not that cool. They’re kind of one-liners but not really. They’re use-this-word-in-a-sentence jokes. Like,
Q: Use tenacious in a sentence.
A: (in a Filipino accent) When I play tennis I wear my ten-a-ciooous.”
He has a bunch of ‘em, both jokes from his childhood and jokes he’s made up himself. You have to understand “how much that influences my work, the breakdown of jokes. You have the delivery: blah blah blah. You have the pause where you think about it and try to figure out . . . it’s kind of a riddle. You have the question—the knock-knock version—and then you have the punch line.
“I’d like to have the delivery of my work be similar, in that you walk up to it and it’s like, ‘What is it?’ and then you have this dialogue with it, and then hopefully you get a little bit further. And then every word is a punchline, so maybe you’re rewarded by . . . you like how it looks, or you look at the card and then you get a pun and that brings you somewhere else. Jokes are kind of essential as a folk tool.” » next page »