MANUEL OCAMPO
Artist Statement

I see my current work as having no explanation (or one hasn’t emerged yet). I say that more than lacking an explanation, I mainly see it as not needing one. The work exists without one. The whole theoretical routine of making meaning to one's work is similar to searching for a genie in a bottle, but what happens instead is tantamount to exorcising the ghosts squatting in the prison logic of intestinal mishaps. It makes me wince, better yet, try covering your nose from ghosts poops. Such a theory about why one has to lock themselves in a room and constantly jabs a mute opposition with wet and coagulated pigmented pastes hasn’t emerged (I’m improvising it, almost), yet the paintings are appearing for all that, discoveries go on being made, and I see no need for a reason. Maybe I take it as something that the creation of a painting, like the appearance of a child, has its own inherent meaning. A painting grows out of a tradition, historical but also personal. It grows out of something; it’s the consequence of a host of factors. It’d be enough to stand in front of it and read it. I believe that the meaning is created along with the painting. I can perform my own reading and recreate a precise meaning...but I can’t be bothered to. I don’t see it as being necessary. I take it as something that these creatures are here due to a reason and for a reason. One could debate this instinctual, naturalist or creationist theory at length...but we will fall into a somnambulistic state of miserable oblivion. Painting, after all is a Zombie medium.

Usually, the art that I make is a by-product of whatever's left in the refrigerator after a night of courageous gluttony, alcoholic dependency, with in and out bouts into the toilet. Sometimes I never quite make it there and I just stare at whatever's dribbling off my mouth and posterior lyrically dripping all-over the Suprematist tiled floor. White on White? Not anymore, brown is the new white. This event is a cross-field between mutually opposed activities and factors: on the one side, a steady and stubborn stream of nutty images, on the other through a clumping of content that can immediately be constipated as the amalgamation of praxis (painting/shitting) and theory (how to put food in the tummy), between representation (how to sit comfortably on the toilet) and reflection (what to read in the toilet: Art Bor'um or Flush Art). The structuring of different shapes and forms juxtaposed and opposed in such a way that what emerges is a new being - hopefully somewhat artistic - within which I can unfold and formulate for myself and do all-over again. My son once described this bodily by-product representation: "Hey, that looks like Enrique! (an artist friend)." What is paradoxical about this "artistic" body, however, is its dependency upon other spatial formations, both in its formulation and its reading.

My method consists primarily in presenting the cross-breeding of these factors as a fundamental dialectic condition. They oscillate between pole and bipolar. From Mouth to Anus. However, these things are conjoined, even mutually interdependent, in what might be called a production of artistic proportions. Sounds like shit in a can to me!

Art and poop - the highest product of distraught bourgeois self-consciousness. The groggy golliwogs' denomination: shit is the asymptotic demurrage for the history of consciousness game. The portrayal of shit is the portrayal of the mediated excess of the costive social consolidated within the intestinal factories of the media machine adiabatically coagulating into an elongated intensification of the phylumic body alienation that allows a fixated, fastback flow of attention on information rather than direct experience. In other words: the shit of information is the simulacrum, the religio-politico fiber bran data husk evacuating the phenomenon of corpulence. Shit on the pedestal appears as carnal message cum ghost emanation analogous to fart as shit simulacra, let out with a somatic ecstasy: a diarrhea beyond corruption. Shit is the dowager who primps the primogenitor freakazoid tallying the penury of the sensual in perennial virtuality down to cynical perdition.

One can see then that painting in my work asserts a marked conceptual utilization. This holds very true for Painting as well as diarrhea, which interbreeds references of a textual (content) and visual (tactile/haptisch) nature with the personal and autonomous. Here, the expressive plays a not insignificant role. Partly through its traditional position as a sign for subjectivity, where the farty brushstroke expresses the “inner “ and the “soulful”. Look at Pollock who seems to be the epitome of the expressive, subjective artist. Pollock "drips" his paintings and how this ultimately subjective form actually leads to a disappearance of the subjective. Boy, what a relief!

This obnoxious albeit ostentatious self-indulgence can be likened to the Freeing of Aesthetic Pleasure. This sits next to Kant’s idea of aesthetic pleasure: freeing it up from all moral justification, but also free from the “sensuous” satisfaction of needs. Yes, just let it all out. Art doesn't need justification, and "Artists shouldn't be Stooges to their Ideas." Aesthetic pleasure is based on enjoyment from that which does not let itself be recognized or identified. Such pleasure arises not in direct confrontation with an object, in our rationally or sensuously testing its qualities, but in our reflective recourse or return to the process of experiencing the object. In other words, it is The Return of the Thing as The Thing Itself. As in that thing which you try to flush down but keeps coming back and exclaiming, "I Shall Return!" Well, isn't that Painting?

Manuel Ocampo, Manilla, 2006