Art Smart: The Creator of the Tiny Men in Grey Suits

With their tailored grey suits, lonely and utilitarian auras, I immediately thought of the Pixies from The Fairly Odd Parents when I saw Isaac Cordal's installations. Just by looking at them, I find myself being submerged into a pool of sadness and bleakness. I wouldn't voluntarily want to feel this way but I guess that's what makes his works stand out. They really make you feel something. Even if it isn't the usual gooey stuff you feel when you look at something really inspiring, it's cool nonetheless. 

I've been prepping this for quite some time and I never had the chance to post it til now since I always felt like it wasn't the right time. What made me think now's the time? We read this story for our Filipino class and its called 'Ang Kwento ni Mabuti' by Genoveva E. Matute. Roughly translating, it means The Story of Good because 'mabuti' means good in our language. The story is told from her student's perspective seeing that Mabuti is an elementary school teacher. It is said that Mabuti is just a plain old teacher but the student's perception of her changes after she comforts him/her in the library while he/she cried his/her heart out over a very trivial problem. She then slips up and says that sometimes she wants to do the same; cry and feel sorry. 

After that encounter, his/her becomes intrigued by her. The student suddenly had the urge to find out just what made her want to cry. Mabuti carried on teaching Filipino literature but the student whose eyes are now open, noticed that in everything that she taught, she made sure that her student's got to see the beauty in everything. Then one day, while telling the class about her daughter's dreams of becoming a doctor someday, another pupil of hers offhandedly commented about Mabuti's daughter's father. This made the teacher's face drain of its color and that's when the narrator noticed something was amiss..

And our homework that was assigned to us over the weekend is to find out what exactly is up with the absent father of Mabuti's daughter using the remaining cryptic paragraphs given to us. I shared this with you guys because the dominant message in the whole story was that to achieve great happiness, you have to go through great sorrow as well to really appreciate it. I thought of Isaac Cordal's installations and I'm thinking they're the 'sorrow' branch of art. I don't know. I think if you wholly want to appreciate art, you ought to get down and look at some melancholic and raw pieces first to really give you variety and some sense of what you're engulfing yourself with.