Toys, Robert Fuentes larger version

Artist Michael Arcega's Many-liners | Claire Light

“I don’t do it (change context) consciously. We’re all producers of visual culture, be it like this Mission School aesthetic or politically-based work from (Asian American arts org) KSW, they all have their overlaps. They’re all happening at the same place, same time. They’re all interesting. I don’t know . . . it so happens I like people, I think. You can talk about painting, sculpture and drawing and they’re all different things and they all have slightly different languages. You can go from talking about one to the other with the same core knowledge. You can apply it socially by going through these different sub-scenes or sub-cliques. It’s all the same.”

Mike’s refusal to describe where he stands categorically must, at some level, be deliberate, since he occupies a permanently transitional position. Note, I don’t say “transnational.” He is transnational, insofar as that word has value, but the role he assigns himself in the work is puckish: arbitrating between an exotic kingdom and a mundane world through childish pranks. It’s a bridge position typically brought under the umbrella of “hybridity.”

“I see my background in that. Based on the Manila galleon trade, Filipinos typically are mixed already. Like prehistoric migrations of people, and then the trade that happened after that, and then the Spaniards coming in, and then expanding that trade, and then the U.S. coming in and further expanding that. Manila is such a geographically strategic location for hybridity that I wholly embrace that.

“People ask me where are you from . . . it’s like, the Philippines, and even the breakdown of what kind of blood I have that we Americans like to . . . it’s like 50% this, 25% this—I don’t know what I am. And I think it’s good. The way of the bigger gene pool is better . . . I wouldn’t want to be placed in one group, because it alienates or isolates it from other groups.

“The job of visual arts, if there is a job . . . I need to talk about these issues that are important to me because I’ve seen a country collapse in itself because of the loss of a middle class. I’m pretty much . . . I’m American officially, but I wouldn’t want to see that happen again. It’s kind of this patriotic thing that, actually I don’t want this country to go to shit. I care about it. I see it happening slowly but on a massive, massive scale. I feel like I have an obligation to talk about issues that are fucked up.

“But at the same time I don’t feel like art as a whole has that responsibility. I feel like I do, and I think certain artists have that obligation.”

But then, he has categorized himself, in the art world, at least. A Southern Exposure Gallery exhibition in 2003, which Mike helped organize, described the artists in the “Conceptual Craft” group as those that use “labor-intensive practices that are deliberate, elaborately constructed, even verging on the obsessive, and utilize traditional materials such as wood, fabric, glass, and ceramics. However, unlike traditional craftspeople, these artists use their highly-refined skills to produce work that is rooted in conceptual art, moving beyond the craft process to a more sophisticated set of ideas. In essence, their craft exists in service of content.”

Mike describes it more simply as “where the object, the form, is on par with the concept, or the concept is on par with the form.”

Perhaps contrasting conceptual artists with craftsmen is meaningful, but I find it interesting to contrast them with traditional visual artists, who were concerned with content, if not concept. They were also craft-oriented in painting and sculpture, moving through a progressive process, a long series of actions. Contemporary western art has collapsed the steps of process so that you have one, two or three steps which you just repeat over and over. There’s an obsessiveness about a particular moment in the process, rather than a wandering through the process.

“Post-Duchamp art, after the ready-made kind of destroyed that process . . . it allows us artists the freedom to do anything, which is something that confused me for a long time. Tell me where I start. And then mining what it is and sometimes falling back into the traditional process. As a craft, I’m doing that same process that traditional artists did. I need to know how to wood work (In Gaud We Trust). I need to be able to translate an image or multiple images and make it look like what I want it to look like, a compilation of European and American churches. And then know how to source material, find the material, make a maquette, and then know how to manipulate a similar object, like pvc sheets. That progression is similar. At the same time I’m coming from another angle conceptually, so it’s called In Gaud We Trust. That short statement in my mind is focusing on gluttony that we as a country have. In looking at materials I look at this pvc and say, ‘This represents oil and religion in one.’ But combining the two is what makes it interesting, because it’s past and present. I’m taking advantage of both traditional and contemporary processes of making work. I have a traditional background. Like I know how to render things. That helps me get concepts across to more people. I don’t want my work to be so esoteric that I’m isolating the masses. I would like to speak to the unconverted. I would like to have a broader voice.”

Works mentioned:
El Conquistadork
SPAM/MAPS
Tanks A Lot
Gun piece
Noosepaper
Noah’s Ark
Map of Manila galleon route
In Gaud We Trust

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