David Burrows
Art Monthly

On one wall of the Delfina Gallery, splattered and drawn in black and white oil paint over six canvases, Manuel Ocampo has deposited an array of body parts, religious symbols and paint blotches. Painted with a confident but heavy hand, the expressive veneer of Ocampo's paintings dissolves when his sardonic imagery and jokes hit home. Ocampo's titles sound like the outbursts of a neurotic salesman. In 'How does she expect me to get ahead when she keeps spending it', a Klan member on horseback gazes at a monument t modern art topped by a swastika while a dripping penis floats on the picture surface. In another painting, 'Phew, boy, what a sales meeting that was boss', a strutting military figure can be identified beneath splashes of paint. The exhibition also featured a collaborative sculpture, fabricated with Gaston Damag. Resembling an upright packing crate, the sculpture inscribed with the title Arena for a pseudo context, consisted of two large sheets of plywood punctured by the feet and head of two crude wooden figures each displaying impressive phalluses.
 
Ocampo's sacrilegious visions are sometimes read as discourses o multiculturalism and post-colonialism, which is not unreasonable as the Philippines born artist and ling time resident of Los Angeles populates his paintings with a myriad of colonial and colonised voices. Ocampo though, while devouring the heterogeneity of global and urban culture, saturates his work with a bitter scepticism. For Ocampo, the liberal agenda of multiculturalism has a sour after taste.
 
An alternative reading of Ocampo's work has been offered by Ken power in his extended catalogue essay for 'Wounds of a Tongue' held in Santa Monica. Power views Ocampo's work as a celebration of excess which exposes the emptiness of representations of good and evil circulating within consumer culture: a reading that presents Ocampo's work as convergent with Baudrilard's concept of simulation. In the past, art and simulation theory conjured up a cool cynicism rather than the caustic, excremental outpourings of Ocampo but powers has good reason for his supposition. Famously, Ocampo was trained by priests to create convincing, prematurely aged imitations of Spanish colonial folk painting for European buyers. This faking of original folk paintings, which as Ocampo points out were hardly authentic in the first place being copies of European paintings, greatly influenced Ocampo's earlier work. Another aspect of Ocampo's output is a leveling of all political and cultural values in which nothing is spared and everything is sacrificed.
 
While both the above readings, are credible, on the evidence of this Delfina show Ocampo's work seems to be about where he finds himself, both in terms of art world politics and global culture. In fact, what is interesting in Ocampo's exhibition is that global and local cultures cannot be separated from each other as they intersect through complex patterns of consumption and reception.
 
In Ocampo's mixed media installation that occupies most of the gallery, Why must I care for a girl who scratches wherever she itches 1 1û2 Centuries of Modern Art twelve step programme, three clocks labeled 'Head in fog', 'Brain on shelf' and 'Mind in gutter' displayed different times from around the world. A series of faxes from dealers and curators on the wall recorded banal and petty communications about business and the failure of Ocampo's New York gallery to show his work in the East. Above the floor of the gallery Ocampo suspended two paintings as hammocks; one of which alluded to politics, the other to decoration. Across the gallery floor Ocampo scattered unstretched, grubby canvases depicting an eclectic clash of subject matter including jokes about Jesus coming, rock music's infatuation with the occult and images of teeth. Other canvases indicated that Ocampo's bitterness had reached meltdown. In one floor painting Africans gut, stuff and then roast some Europeans. A satirical canvas consisting of green stripes, a devil with the head of Karl Marx and the text 'Dirty Buren, Buren dirty' gives Daniel Buren a dressing down. One obtuse monochrome bares the legend, The unseen power of the monochrome while another claims to be an impersonation. This is crude stuff and Ocampo's joke paintings and hammocks declare that transcendence is an illusion for the lucky few who can afford it.
 
Art practices that articulate such obvious, vulgar truths without proposing alternatives sit uneasily within the contemporary art world. Ocampo's revelations are uncomfortable not because they are well kept secrets but because everyone knows the score. This is why Ocampo's Delfina show has an air of shame and embarrassment. Press information stated that Ocampo 'lives and works anywhere' but he travels in style and with a carnivalesque enjoyment of the symbols of his alienation. Power's reading of Ocampo's work is not too far off the mark then, as the artists vociferous show brought to mind one of Baudrilard's lesser known edicts: 'Even signs must burn'.