Manila Bulletin
by Jasmine T. Cruz
Artist Lindslee pooh-poohs both the profound and commercial value of art
Ooooooh paintings. How deep! Not! Paintings have held dominance for centuries in the art world. Collectors all over the world spend inordinate amounts of money to buy them from galleries or fight over them at fierce auctions. Despite the ongoing hullabaloo on paintings, visual artist Lindsey “Lindslee” Lee scoffs at this traditional art form and against the pressures on artists to create more commercial artworks. This was revealed to great effect at his recently concluded exhibit Cliché Untitled at Cubao’s Artery Art Space.
Lindslee’s critique was delivered in a humorous manner. There was a piece entitled Message is Deep, and it was deep, literally. Made of a canvas with a large mound of paint (that was hardened with resin), the artwork had the word “deep” carved into the mound as though showing that it had a heap of paint on the canvas and that was the only reason it was deep. “If the canvas has paint, is it art?” said Lindslee. “Not all paintings are art.”
There was also a piece made of two canvases and sandwiched between them was oil paint, and, yup, it was called Starving Artist. If only artists could eat their creations, then maybe they wouldn’t need to sell their souls to the art market, but reality bites.
For Lindslee, some artworks are just garbage, but they really look pretty in an impressive frame. So that’s what he did. For his piece Dirty Tactics, he presented a black garbage bag in a gold-colored ornate frame. Does it look expensive now? Has the garbage bag magically turned into art? Also worthy of note about this piece was that Lindslee purposely chose a biodegradable garbage bag, and he said that there was paint behind it. He teased, after a few years, the garbage bag would decompose, and maybe there would be a real work of art behind it.
So how did Lindslee get into creating art that critiques art? With a Bachelor of Fine Arts Major in Painting from the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, Lindslee also studied at The Art Students League of New York. Since 2000, Lindslee has exhibited in Manila galleries such as Galleria Duemila, Hiraya Gallery, West Gallery, The Drawing Room, Blanc Gallery, and the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and international galleries such as Taksu Gallery (Singapore), Hohmura Gallery (Japan), and Art Center Ongoing (Japan).
In the beginning of his career, Lindslee made abstract paintings, but after a while, he got tired of making them, but collectors kept asking him to do more. This experience is encapsulated in his piece Artist and Painters, a wall filled with sculptures of hands, each hand holding painting rollers dripping in paint of various colors. Lindslee shared that while he was studying art in the US, his day job was painting houses. Back then, he’d use those painting rollers to cover the walls with paint, but even after that, even when he was finally a professional artist, he still felt like a house painter—someone just filling up a surface, completing a task. This is what led him to break away from abstract painting, which culmi- nated in his 2013 exhibit “It’s All in the Mind” at Galleria Duemila in Pasay City. Typhoon Ondoy also helped. That storm destroyed his abstract paintings, and so he had to literally pick up the pieces and start over. He began cutting up the ruined paintings into strips and pasting them back together, or rolling them up and presenting them as is, or keeping the painting’s backing frame exposed through the tears on the canvas, and the like.
He continued to develop this idea when he went on a residency in Japan in December 2014. At the end of that residency, he created several artworks, one of which is Pain Thing, a piece he recreated for his current show at Artery. With cysts of paint protruding from the canvas, that sickly sight is sustained by plastic lifelines connecting the painting to IV bottles that are filled with paint. The bottles are marked with words like “collector”, “spectator,” “financier,” etc. This work, according to Lindslee, illustrates how the powerful people in the art world keep an artist alive, but then again, an artist on lifesupport is not truly alive.