Diagrams that (un)map a landscape

Buen Calubayan maps the landscape through radical reflexivity in UP Vargas Museum solo show.

By Chesca Santiago
January 19, 2024

It took me four visits before I finally dared write about Buen Calubayan’s recent solo exhibition at the UP Vargas Museum. Yet still they do not suffice to completely decode the artist’s schemes. There’s a certain elusiveness to Calubayan’s project: pursuing several threads of his lifelong inquiry on the landscape, he presents the act of inquiry itself as material. As such, the landscape painter does not apprehend the landscape through his famed arsenal of the painted canvas, but through diagrams, annotations, and notes that lay bare a perceptual process that navigates his subject at the level of the fundamental.

Instructions on Viewing the Landscape (2015) commences the exhibition with an outline of the linear perspective technique.

As its title suggests, Forms without vanishing points: Diagrams for sensing and becoming is primarily constituted by diagrams—a mix of the artist’s original formulations and some gleaned from archival references—which Calubayan elected to wrap around the Museum’s glass walls. The exhibition is neatly divided into four sections that map out the landscape on various perceptual levels. The first section commences with Instructions on Viewing the Landscape (2015), which faces outwards from the Museum’s facade to greet visitors as they ascend the steps towards the entrance. Instructions sketches out the linear perspective, a technique very much fundamental for a landscape painter such as Calubayan. It is accompanied by his handwritten annotations on resources, such as manuscripts and books, about other dominant perspectives on landscape research. In this way, the section is a prelude to the radical inquiries that follow in the rest of the show.

Lifespan (2022) is accompanied by Calubayan’s personal notes.

Because the tint of the Museum’s glass walls are most visible when viewed from outside, their transparency is not so much apparent when looking at exterior-facing diagrams such as Instructions. But moving towards the interior-facing diagrams, such as Lifespan (2022), it becomes more evident that the exhibition is also activating its site as medium, albeit at times at the expense of readability (perhaps black decals against UP Diliman’s foliage is not the most legible, but I understand that this is an attempt to reinforce transparency). Lifespan traces the lifecycle of an artwork—from conceptualization to storage and through the manifold routes (e.g. the studio, labor, gallery, salon, museum, neglect) this sequence can pursue. Viewing the diagram from inside, one looks outward and sees the Museum’s surroundings as the backdrop. The Museum is cast as a vitrine, positioning the art system as a landscape that is framed by, and simultaneously frames, our experience of the world.

In Fields (2022), Calubayan visually annotates works from the Museum’s permanent collection.

This is also evinced by Fields (2022), Calubayan’s experimentation on the condition reports of works from the Museum’s permanent collection. In place of conventional text-based formats of assessment, here we see the artist annotating the works themselves in an act of proffering a different way of reading the artwork. His own way of apprehending the landscape is thus extended for scrutiny. Laid out on an adjacent table are the artist’s own personal sketches and notes: tracing perspective lines on trees, jotting down phrases for future probing. By turning his process into an exhibition object, he renders it visible for inspection.

The diagram Steiner-Waldorf Approach to Child Development / The Twelve Senses (2018/23) forms the core of the third section.

Moving forward, the Museum’s West Wing Gallery proceeds to the exhibition’s third section. Here the inquiry turns to the corporeal—to the sensorial and bodily ways through which we perceive and consequently construct the landscape. The diagram Steiner-Waldorf Approach to Child Development / The Twelve Senses (2018/23) foregrounds the influences of the Steiner-Waldorf approach to Calubayan’s ensuing perspective of the body as an active agent in world-making. As a wall text in this section intimates, we can visualize only as far as the eye can see. The human is thus situated in conversation with the dominant modes of landscape perception laid out in the first section. I recall a specific annotation by Calubayan about the landscape being a way of seeing: a seeing informed by the worldviews we hold, be they gendered, elitist, and so on. At this point, the permeability of the exhibition’s sections becomes most apparent.

A harvest scene from Lubao, Pampanga questions how the landscape is experienced by farmers.

The exhibition’s final section turns to the land—how the landscape is actually lived and experienced by the beings who inhabit it. In the video room plays a harvest scene from Pampanga taken in 2022, where an expanse of farmland is shown with the occasional farmers and tractors who come and go to work on the land. After all the abstractions of the preceding sections, Calubayan through this video brings us back to the ground to question how the landscape is actually apprehended (this time by farmers), sans diagrams and other abstractions. The video work is juxtaposed against documents from the Museum’s archives, such as with a Bureau of Lands Annual Report from 1923 and 1927 that surfaces how farmers have been suffering losses since the 1920s. The landscape has been a site of plight for farmers for over a century.

Located at the back of the Museum, Banahaw diagrams gathers images and texts from fabric prints and signages in the Mount Banahaw Complex.

Yet the height of Calubayan’s critique comes when the artist problematizes the very method of his inquiry. The entirety of the Museum’s rear glass walls are wrapped with diagrams that map out indigenous ways of grappling with the landscape. Banahaw diagrams takes images and words from signages and fabric prints found within the Mount Banahaw Complex. The text is akin to adaptations of the Biblical Ten Commandments, this time giving directives on how visitors should behave within the Complex (e.g. “Ang kapaligiran ay ingatan, para sa atin at sa bayan.”). Beside it is a digitally modified detail of a chart tracing the genealogy of a family from Kiangan, Ifugao—a snapshot of a land whose bounds are established by ancestry in place of square meters. How much can the flattened, two-dimensional surfaces of these diagrams capture a landscape so imbued with struggle, sanctity, and history?

A genealogical chart from Kaingin, Ifugao questions the utility of diagrams against indigenous worldviews.

Altogether, the reflexivity that Calubayan exercised on the diagram is also an attempt to reflect more broadly on the institutions and infrastructures that shape, and are shaped, by our experiences of the landscape. Although diagrams are the main method of his inquiry, the critique extends to every other attempt at the representation of nature and experience. It is a welcome invitation for all artists to pause and ponder their process amid an industry that bestows value only to the product. 

And in probing the system, Calubayan also implicates himself in the critique precisely by laying bare his own artistic and perceptual processes. Towards the end, Calubayan destabilized the utility of the diagram and left us to evaluate the very material and method of his exhibition. By mapping out the landscape, the artist ended up unmapping it—cutting up the lines and surfaces that so resolutely but fails to sufficiently capture it. It is reminiscent of anthropologist Tim Ingold’s appraisal of the map, a recognition that to plot a life onto a map or a diagram is to petrify it: “It is rather that the world of our experience is a world suspended in movement, that is continually coming into being as we—through our own movement—contribute to its formation. In the cartographic world, by contrast, all is still and silent. There is neither sunlight nor moonlight; there are no variations of light or shade, no clouds, no shadows or reflections.” Radically reflexive, it is a show that is not afraid to contradict itself, even if it means turning its back against its own propositions.