Class Struggle

Alienation, Alma Mater,

and Artbooks as Art in

Angelo Suarez’s Batch ’97 Haiku

On the night Angelo Suarez’s planned-to-be-latest book s&wich – five years’ worth of cut/ups and drawings that simply failed to cohere either by accident or by design – culminated with its PR-heavy deletion, Batch ’97 Haiku – a project arguably in the making for thirteen years but only really assembled in the span of a few weeks – enjoyed a quiet launch among other books on an unassuming table in Cubao. B97H, in brief, is a collection of haikus assembled by way of Suarez’s gradeschool batchmates’ yearbook profiles, specifically their answers to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Each haiku consists of three lines, the first being the batchmate’s name, the second being what s/he wanted to be when s/he grows up, the third being what s/he turned out to be. For further clarity, some excerpts –

NAME: Kay

AMBITION: To be a successful person

PROFESSION: Volunteer nurse/Healthcare specialist

NAME: Pamela

AMBITION: To become an architect or engineer

PROFESSION: College student/Retail store employee

– and so on. Despite its more literary thrust, B97H enjoys the company of books like Ian Burn’s Xerox Book art piece – a book made up of pages that are successive photocopies of each other – and Fiona Banner’s various book constructs – a stone etched with its own legitimate ISBN, an ISBN tattooed on her back as a tramp stamp – basically, conceptual art books that query notions of books as objects. This is Suarez’s second book under this conceit, the first being s&wich, the next either Circuit – a book made up of blurbs written about the book itself – or Joint – a book that has only one word written in it – but with B97H, notions of books as objects are not only queried figuratively but also literally: of all of Suarez’s books so far, B97H reminds the readers the most that a book is a construct – a product – of labour: the most instantly recognisable thing about this book is that it was reproduced mechanically via mimeography, on newsprint, which gives the book a handmade look as it is actually handmade.

The recognition of this reality – books are products of labour – opens itself up to even more concerns readers don’t normally associate with books, namely that of the alienation of the worker from the products of his labour, the “worker” here now either the author – Suarez himself – or the ate or kuya who ran the paper through the mimeograph machine’s feeder and manually cut and stitched and bound all five hundred copies of the book. For the ate or kuya, the answer is clear: the money they got for the work they put into the book’s production is simply part of what they get from their paychecks for being employees of the establishment that owned the machines that printed the book; that is, regardless of the quantity of copies or the quantity (or even quality) of work they put into producing B97H, they will always get the same amount (pending things like tips and bonuses for exceeding their quota, etc etc), however far away that amount is from minimum wage; that is, they don’t get anything from B97H by way of royalties or namechecks in the acknowledgement page regardless if they helped make it into a book, regardless if they prettied it up or not.

For Suarez, though, the artist who laboured on the book on the intellectual level, the answer is murkier, as in art, the weighing of quality of artiness with regards to its proportionate quantity in monetary terms has always been determined by indeterminate factors – popularity, tradition – thus are always shifty at best, ultimately funnelling down to just one question, really: just how much are you willing to pay for art? This is a fundamental question as this is how the concerns of the alienation of the worker as artist to the fruits of his labour is addressed, how everything is addressed in our age of the free online market: through purchase. So, just how much are you willing to pay for art? And this being a conceptual art piece, its territory is more in ideas and less in material things, so what you’re really paying for in B97H – a fifty-six nearly-4”x4” mimeographed-newsprint-page book with each page having at most four lines each – is not the poetry – not the actual book, even – but its concept, and Suarez is saying the concept is worth P200, all takings to him (with maybe P50 going to the store, granted).

So, are you willing to pay P200 for an art concept? Is it too cheap or too expensive? The general consensus so far is that it is too expensive, in context with the quality of production of the container of the concept – the book looks cheap, so it should be sold cheap – but that argument focuses more on the material aspects of a product that is immaterial. So again, how does one price a concept? By day, Suarez is an ad kid, a copy writer, transacting (and thriving) in a cutthroat industry where concepts are bought and sold in insanely large amounts of money, so one can see how Suarez justified it to himself. But in advertising, the returns of the buying and selling of concepts are concrete, material, in cold hard cash, but in art, the returns from the buying and selling of concepts are less concrete and material and more in their memetic proliferation, in their enriching art’s history and production. With B97H, Suarez is making an effort to have his art function more like his work, and he wants his concept’s worth not only in its influence and viability but in pesos, too. Suarez believes the concept is worth P200 of your money, and his defense seems to be that B97H – a book questioning books – does not only contain art but is art in and of itself in all its rustic glory (maybe even because of its rustic glory) – so when you buy the book, you’re not just buying a book, you’re not just buying a concept: you are buying art.

And it is art – it’s a book of haikus – and yes, even in and of itself – it’s a book of a concept, it’s a book of a concept of haikus, it’s a book of a concept of haikus conscious of itself being a book of haikus, and it’s a book of haikus that are not actually haikus but actually are haikus!!! – most definitely, only it is art that seeks merely to legitimise and celebrate itself. This is hardly news nor even hardly new, even for Suarez, ie, Dissonant Umbrellas, but how it sets about doing this – asking questions about our notion of poetry, poetic form, books (specifically art/artist/art manifesto books) as form by deciding to run the book in the cheapest means possible and sell it at an insanely bloated price compared to its material quality, the reader is forced to think – seemingly for her/himself – just why s/he had to buy it for that price, it’s all just three or four lines per page, and they’re all crummily misaligned and shoddily printed! What is it about this book that warrants its very expensive price? But what’s really being asked is Is poetry defined merely by its formal concerns?; and Is an artbook defined by its curatorial framing scheme and its ability to fit itself into the continuum?; and most importantly, Does quality in art equal quality in price equal quality in form? – by way of how it was actually physically reproduced is what makes it a slightly different – and more important – book from Dissonant Umbrellas.

Only B97H does not make any real efforts to answer these questions, merely elaborating on them, complementing the ongoing discussion, and that, in and of itself, is merely okay; that is, it jumpstarts the discussion among people who haven’t been thinking about these things in any relevant way. One may see this as fence-sitting, may see this as a wrong move – I know I would rather B97H made stronger louder and clearer pronouncements about its concerns rather than wink them towards the readers who are already in the know – but asking questions even if only for the sake of asking them has value even if it only means continuing the interrogation.

Its only clear and maybe-irreconcilable misstep – for me, at least – is when it starts conflating poetic craft with physical labour and champions ultimately art for art’s sake: “The writer’s labor of writing, especially w/in the framework of poetry, is comprised of the attempt itself to divorce writing from labor; that is, the poet’s work is to strip poetry of work; that is, the poet can neither be considered poet nor labourer when decontextualized from a history of poetry that detaches itself from the history of class struggle,” a statement prefacedly labelled as an “impasse.”

The statement itself is formally a haiku, or at least argues itself in the form of a haiku, only the jump required of the reader between lines two and three is to me too big by virtue of the third line being too confusing: it is not very clear what it is trying to say – it is an elliptical statement that spirals down itself, confusion compounded even more so by its use of three successive negatives – and it is also not very clear as to whom it is saying these things. It seems to be saying that poets cannot/should not claim themselves to be poets or even more pointedly, to be labourers, if their poetry is not generated from the position of doing it purely for itself. If this is what it means to say, well then yes, poetry is indeed work, meaning, you work on it, only, you work on it to be better with it, meaning, you just don’t do it for money alone if at all as labourers in fact do, meaning, the poet just doesn’t do it for himself, meaning, the poet just doesn’t write poetry for its own sake, meaning, the artist-labourer analogy is a false one, a misleading one, maybe even a tasteless one. If this is what it means to say, well, then this statement remains to be both very confusing and very confused, and spits on the faces of all the uncredited labourers who actually assembled this book, this art object.

There are people who refuse to acknowledge the argument of/for committed art, “selfless” art, of art for society – only, they may not believe in it but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’d see it as an impasse: clearly, even if one is a staunch denier of the mingling of art and society – thus a staunch defender of art for art’s sake – that person cannot ignore the origin and presence of dadaism, the Situationists, Bataille’s DOCUMENTS, or to be closer to home, Gay Lit, Gat, Bien Lumbera, Joaquin’s ransoming of Lacaba, etc etc, all occasions of art – politically charged or not – stemming from societal concerns, ie, concerns other than art, ie, not merely for/from art for art’s sake.

But maybe the artist-labourer analogy is actually fairly accurate, at least between the covers of B97H, with its elaboration on the haiku. The book proposes a reductionist approach, a coldly formulaic understanding of writing poetry – which the haiku as a form is perfect for, being more often than not made up of strictly three lines, each line having its own function: line one is concrete imagery, line two is abstract imagery, and line three is the convergence of the two previous lines, with dramatic tension occurring between lines two and three – and the book does have a point, only it effectively transforms the artist in his writing desk making art into the labourer in the factory floor assembling products that are identical and mass-produced. And this dehumanisation is reflected on the products – the haikus – themselves, where the subjects – Suarez’s batchmates – are all rendered anonymous, all defined by and reduced to their jobs, to their functions in society, nothing more.

There is a meanness inherent in the assembling of the haikus. The blankness of obvious emotions creates a void that is filled by a suspicion that somebody is insulting somebody else somewhere. The terse lines don’t give much in terms of intent, in terms of what it wants you to feel about it, and that is almost always taken by the reader to be a sinister thing: if it isn’t blatantly saying you should like it or hate it, readers tend to hate it by default. So upon finishing the book, if and when the initial dust of bewilderment settles and clears, I predict most of the feelings for this book will be somewhere between anger and estrangement, primarily fuelled by its P200 price being in direct opposite proportion of its material quality, secondarily by its debasingly frigid and logical take on the haiku, tertiarily by the fact that all the haikus are irrelevant to anyone and everyone who is not part of the graduating gradeschool UST Batch 1997. And when any of those feelings settle even more on top of the preceding bewilderment, a majority of readers will either simply hate it or simply have no feelings for it, a situation that again leads to another question about poetry and art: basically, Do we have to like it – does it have to be likable or say likeable things – for it to be considered as good art? Or maybe it’s only really relevant to Suarez’s batchmates, and maybe for those people, the book’s value as art is only as good as an itch in the neck. So maybe it’s not worth the P200.

B97H is a very sad very mean very funny book. In between all the artiness (or lack thereof), the book effectively tightropes the line to and fro comedy and tragedy rather wobbyingly, unsurely, throughout the book’s reading (and subsequent rereadings, which I recommend everyone ought to do), as some haikus read sadder than usual one day and somehow funnier the next. The difference between the comedy and tragedy is not that big, and this book is yet another testament to that fact.

But it is certainly more sad than it is funny and/or mean: the haikus function as odes, as meditations on loss, as they chronicle unrealised dreams, thwarted potential, adult reality’s cold hard slap in the face of youthful idealism, and all this off-page drama, true to the haiku, is what keeps this book from suffering Dissonant Umbrellas’s, or even s&wich’s, fate – underneath all the insular art stuff, there is heart, even when seemingly mean-spirited or cold.

In short, what the book really is about is waking up one day and realising you’re not a kid anymore; that is, it’s about waking up one day and realising your life didn’t pan out the way you wanted it to when you were twelve years old; that is, it’s really about you failing yourself. Our reactions to these occasions are in constant flux, determined by indeterminate things like already having had your breakfast or how your mother raised you before you left for college or if you woke up this morning beside someone you love, determined by all of our various ways of consoling ourselves. On top of everything already stated, B97H is, in the final analysis, a P200-kiss-sabay-hug to your one and only you.

Angelo Suarez's Batch '97 Haiku is available in Sputnik, Cubao, where it is now priced at P100. Somehow somewhere, someone won the struggle.