(Nardo the Shit Guy) / 2013 / Artist: Louie Cordero / Digitally printed excerpts from the comic series, site-specific installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila’s exhibition The Philippine Contemporary: To Scale the Past and the Possible, 2013-19

The enshrinement on a museum wall in 2013 of Cordero’s underground comic, first released in 2003 under the moniker Abang Guard Productions, underscores the enfolding of pop sensibilities into categories of art in exclusivist exhibitionary sites. Not so subtly subtitled Umutot Ka Hanggang Gusto Mo, Nardong Tae (Fart as Much as You Want, Nardo the Shit Guy) consists of the travails of Bornek, a fan boy of Nardong Putik (Nardo in Mud), the real-life amulet-bearing folk villain from Cavite who ran circles around the law from 1948 until he was finally killed in a dramatic car chase in 1971. Putik gained a reputation for stealing from the rich to apportion his stash to his fellow poor. He was also known to escape armed clashes with nary a scratch alongside a seemingly supernatural ability to extract himself from prison. As a spoof of Nardong Putik, Nardong Tae is a classic neighborhood bullies-get-their-just-desserts tale overlaid with pseudoscience and risqué street humor. Bornek is transformed into a taong tae (walking poop) after he gets beaten up and entombed under a giant turd comet descended from outer space. Already fatherless to begin with, the incident further turns the odds against Bornek who traumatically attempts to finish school amidst the scorn and verbal abuse cast on him by both teachers and fellow students offended by the stink and funk he brings upon school premises. Bornek eventually leaves for Manila to turn himself into an “agent of the republic” by studying criminology at a university in Recto. He, however, turns to the dark side as one of his teachers attempts to kill him the day before graduation. He unleashes his noxious gases and fecal matter, which wipes out the school and a whole generation of law officers.

On one level, Nardong Tae invokes the abject to potentially thwart the sanitizing tendencies of bourgeois tastemakers in the art world who would be the first likely visitors of the canon-making exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. Cordero’s uncanny merging of urban folk–punk horror visuals and grime-suggestive graphics replete with expletives and taunts to polite society force a coming to terms with another world where the unspeakable gets brusquely spoken and where fiction and real life mesh.

This happens as the antihero Nardong Putik’s vaunted antics spill over to the public reception of Ramon Revilla, or in the comic’s case, where Bornek gets his comeuppance as his fart and shit annihilate the people and institutions that alienate him. More than a decade since Nardong Tae propelled Cordero’s credentials to cult celebrity proportions, the eventually exalted status of the comic and its later three-dimensional manifestations as sculpture demonstrate how the abrasive nature of art born of a poetics of the dire, base, low camp, and oddball gaudy still gets ultimately mitigated in the grasp of niche consumerism just as many earlier counterculture motifs became enfolded into artistic streams ravenous for the new.