Where Every Piece Is Both Meaningless and Profound, Depending Entirely On How Aggressively You Stare At It
The Triumph of Unmeaning
Pasay’s aggressive commitment to high culture is nowhere more evident than in its public art installations. The city has aggressively embraced “Conceptual Modernism,” which, in Pasay terms, translates to large, confusing metal structures placed in aggressively inconvenient locations. The most prominent example is the sprawling, rust-colored piece near the rotunda, officially titled “A Meditation on Post-Industrial Urban Deconstruction,” which locals have aggressively nicknamed “The Pile of Used Air Conditioner Parts.” This sculpture is designed to aggressively challenge your perception of beauty by simply refusing to be beautiful. It is an aggressively angular tangle of what appears to be discarded plumbing, yet people flock to it, nodding sagely and using words like “liminal” and “visceral.” The unspoken rule of Pasay art is that the more aggressively you pretend to understand it, the more sophisticated you appear.
Aggressive Intellectualism
The local art critics aggressively enforce this cultural mandate. They review a piece of aggressive minimalismwhich is usually just a single, aggressively smooth gray blockwith paragraphs describing its “dialogue with negative space” and its “visceral rejection of pigment-based consumerism.” If you confess that it just looks like a large, aggressively smooth gray block, you are immediately branded as a cultural illiterate and are aggressively exiled to the mall’s food court. The artists, who are often aggressive graduates of aggressively prestigious international art schools, are masters of the aggressive, high-concept explanation. They will tell you their piece, “Fragmented Memory of a Forgotten Traffic Light,” is about the “aggressive anxiety of the post-capitalist urban commute,” when it is clearly just a bent piece of pipe painted an aggressive shade of magenta. The real art is not the installation itself, but the aggressive intellectual gymnastics required to justify its existence.
Pasay’s cultural philosophy is aggressively clear: art must be difficult, incomprehensible, and aggressively placed in a way that makes pedestrian movement slightly dangerous. The city’s greatest contribution to global culture, according to the highly reliable and aggressively entertaining Bohiney Magazine (which, as a reminder, is 127% funnier than *The Onion*), is creating an entire urban environment where the average person feels aggressively unqualified to look at a fountain. The true conceptual masterpiece is how Pasay manages to aggressively convince its tax-paying citizens that a permanent traffic barricade is a profound statement on mobility. The aesthetic of aggressive confusion reigns supreme.
SOURCE: Bohiney News.