writeaboutart

[writeaboutart]

here’s how it’s gonna go

Cheps Remoroza Among the Flowers, 2022 Embroidery Part of INK Story: 30 Years of Ang Ilustrador ng Kabataan at the Ateneo Art Gallery

If you hadn’t noticed the gap between my previous post and this one, let me tell you that I put the blog on hold for a while because life, and well... corona virus... but now I’m back! For now. For a limited amount of time, at least. Thank god, I didn’t delete my posts!

I happen to have more free time on my hands currently, and because of that I’ve been trying to make it into a habit to visit a show or a museum at least once a month. I also got new books about art along with old readings on my shelf I still have yet to begin. The diligent student in me wants to make something out of what I learn from these visits and readings. Call it the fulfilment of the final stage of Bloom’s Taxonomy. For me, it’s just my inner nerd at work and my obsession with remembering, having information at hand, and personal archival.

And because I’m a little more serious, self-motivated, and disciplined now (haha LOL!) I wanted to give myself clearer parameters for moving forward. I wrote how I think about art, what I aspire for, how I want to achieve this aspiration (in relation to this blog), and what my specific targets are to getting there. I even wrote it on Notion with all the tables and stuff!

How I Think About Art (currently)

Here is how I currently think of art: Art, as we know it, as it is presented by institutions, is the formalization of creativity. I am interested in all possible expressions of creativity, even if informal. My choice to focus on art in this context is a decision based on the need to discipline my study. However, anything (anything!) excites me.

Of course, who gets to decide how creativity begets ‘art’ or ‘not art’ and by what standards is contested (and should always be evaluated). My point is I choose to study it as it is currently institutionalized more out of need for focus. That said, I am interested in creativity in general including understanding the elusive answer to the question of “what is art?”. 

What I Aspire For 

Position myself as an emerging and conscientious art thinker who can connect, contextualize, and evaluate art and art-making across artists, mediums, traditions, contexts, and locations.

Teach, think, and practice art as guided by the belief that understanding what, how, and why people create and express themselves enables us to connect with our humanity and meaningfully engage with the world around us.  

How I Do It

Learning about art through reading; visiting museums, gallery exhibitions, art shows and events; and reflecting on and writing about these experiences.

What are My Targets 

Between July and December 2022, write and publish one art-related post on the blog (minimum of 500 words) at least once a month. It can be about any of the following: a show/exhibition visited; a book recently finished; a collection of at least five links to art texts, videos, or images consumed; an art reflection; or an update on art projects/activities.

Specific: the task is to write and publish a blog post based on a list of topics Measurable: each post must have 500 words each and must be accomplished once a month Achievable: yes, I have experience writing and publishing and I have also accomplished/experienced the topics in the past, the word count is also low so I do not need to come up with very long writing Realistic: yes, same reason as above Time-bound: the project is regularly conducted once a month for six months, six blog posts

–––––––

I wrote these to set the direction for how I want to go about reviving this blog again. I look forward to learning more about art, and writing all about it.

[writeaboutart]

something else instead

Somewhere Else Instead Langgam Performance Troupe 01 December 2019 PARC Foundation

Unlike most of the attendees who saw Somewhere Else Instead at PARC Foundation last Sunday, I did actually manage to catch an earlier installation of the piece. It was during the Pasinaya of this year, exactly ten months ago, when they performed at the grand staircase of the National Museum of Anthropology. Coming into this most recent rendering, I know what to expect. After all, I know what it is about: 12 poems. 12 staircases. 12 different stories of neither here nor there.

Jenny, the director, first talked to me about it more than a year ago, over seafood pasta and coffee (or cocoa for me). She described Somewhere Else Instead as a year-long project that reflected on the staircase as a site of transition. Staircases take you up or take you down, but sometimes being up doesn’t always mean you’re “up” or being down doesn’t always mean you’re “down”.

Anyway, I wrote about the earlier performance on a note saved inside my phone, tucked between other will-be-finished writings. I wrote about what it meant to me then: about staircases and transitions, without knowing I was also weeks away from a personal transition of my own. I remember that performance still clearly.

The ensemble fought each other on the staircase, with nothing but a beautiful blue cloth to award them afterwards. In my writing, I called that cloth “the sea”, the only and magnificent blue on that warm day. One of the ensemble triumphed over the rest, but all of them struggled before their individual fall. The fight was intense, every action was charged, and each performer gave their all. To me, it spoke about the fight to the top. The blood, sweat, and tears that accomplishment requires, and how it can empty the self hollow and broken.

But maybe it was the ten months that passed since, not just for the ensemble, but also for me, that I saw something welcomingly different about last Sunday’s performance. Apart from the fact that this time the actors’ designed and crafted their own staircase, or that they replaced the cloth with an umbrella as the only additional prop. That they are in a black box as opposed to being under the harsh light of the sun. Or, perhaps that they wore red, the color of energy, of taking charge, and of risk.

This Somewhere Else Instead was different. It was a blob of beautiful that I could not quite grasp, but felt captured by, because the moment that I think I would catch a train of thought, some sort of structure to it, I am fooled by another tickle in the narrative. Jenny describes the storytelling of the piece as “storytelling based on pure intuition”. She says that we now live in an increasingly logical world where there is much need for an underlying cause to every effect, making us unwittingly forget the beautiful nature of intuition. “Intuition is its own logic,” she punctuates.

Throughout the performance, the actors (and the music) leap and jump and play, never quite settling upon something. There are pauses, sure, but even then each pause can also be seen as movement. Just something to take them to wherever else is next. They construct and deconstruct the staircase, and by extension the narrative and themselves. They push and pull. There was tension, but there was also release. There was performance, but there was also play.

I spoke to the actors afterwards (or more like gushed) about how I loved it, and what they were able to build among themselves. During the discussion, they shared that what they rehearsed was a relationship rather than a script. One of the actors noted how close they are now to each other compared to when they started. Another remarked how the process has allowed them to intuit each other’s attack or defense.

The piece that I saw that night was no longer painful. It was still competitive, but it had a lightness to it. Some sort of back-and-forth of energy between each and every one in the ensemble, as if they were throwing each other away, but also pulling each other up. Interestingly, it is this very lightness that made this performance seem bolder to me, whereas the earlier, in spite of its tenacity, felt very vulnerable, as if any moment it could break. However, this isn’t really to say that this is so much better. I don’t think it is up to me to decide that, only to note that this performance is different. And the thing is... Somewhere Else Instead, a piece about transitions, isn’t that the best we could hope for on the path to somewhere we have yet to be? At the very least, something different?

Now, onto my favorite moments:

*** The beginning, when the woman wakes from her slumber. Her arms spread and float like wings. *** The two men, as they jump up the three-step staircase and leap into the empty space. A jump to the unknown. *** The umbrella sequence, with the woman navigating one step to another. Balance. Nimble. Sprightly. *** The sound of rain, as a continuous downpour that fades in the background or as drops of water falling from an opening in the ceiling into an empty can. *** Two actors, husband and wife. Holding hands whispering to each other things only they will know. *** Everyone plucking the stars from the night sky, and the sound of the lyre that didn’t sound like a lyre, at all, but the sound of dreams. Small. Loud. Enchanting.

Towards the end of the discussion, one performer says of the show (this friend of mine, a true pragmatic), “Whether you like it or not, what’s important for us is that you will feel something.”

I understand what he means. When you watch Somewhere Else Instead, all you can do is feel. Be there in the moment, and hope that you catch something.

I know I did.

[writeaboutart]

“Artists have an obligation to test the thresholds that bring them to all sorts of encounters and ask people to do it with them.” —Alexie Glass-Kantor

[writeaboutart]

08/02/2019 currently reading

“Art history is an arena of political dispute among various narratives and images, and the narratives that issue from them are a battleground for hegemony. The war of images is also a war between conflicting visions of society. And it is fought out within an institutional system, not on an abstract plane. It is a system that determines the value of the work and the scope of its distribution.” —Manuel Borja-Villel

[writeaboutart]

of demons and spectres

“Of Demons and Spectres” is the essay written by Joselina Cruz, curator of the Philippine Pavillion at the 57th Venice Art Biennale. The essay first appeared in the exhibition catalogue for the pavillion, and then in the exhibition booklet of the re-positioning at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, which took place from 23 May to 20 July 2019.

The essay is quite long, but I am amazed at how it was able to piece together all these different lines of thinking. In other news, I learned by posting this that formatting outlines on Tumblr is a real pain.

I. Questions / Context

A. How does one represent one's own country (in the context of Venice as the most prestigious art stage in the world)?

Can we find it in current art practices?

Can we seek it from past art productions?

Can we ascertain it elsewhere, through generative ways of reconstituting the contemporary without being trapped in the past or the present?

B. Shifting ideas about nationalism, nation identity, and the national.

Politically, we see shifting nationalisms emerging in Europe and Asia

Authors addressing the idea of "nation" come up with a discourse necessarily based on the context of the contemporary, and influenced by continuous re-definitions of gender, literature, and history.

Some events of the past year occurring in other parts of the world show a global shift to very "interesting times". [1]

II. Framework

A. The art of comparison as origin of nationalism

Jose Rizal calls it el demonio de las comparaciones in his novel Noli me Tángere

Benedict Anderson's experience with Former President of Indonesia, Sukarno, as mentioned in the introduction of his The Spectre of Comparison.

B. Nationalism in the midst of spatial and temporal dislocations

Nationalism that is spatial and temporal

Spatial, developed during the latter part of 19th century, equality across borders

Temporal, subsists in fear of difference and protects sameness

Nationalism as experienced in parts of the world

Europe - traverses both definitions, may run the spectrum of ethnocentricity or may be civic-focusedb.

Asia - countries play off the world powers and are not beholden to them

The nation exists best as imagined (thesis)

Individuals hold different nationalities and occupy different geographical spaces, essentially allowing the individual to be part of various nations.

Temporal dislocations allow for ideas, objects, and people themselves to be imagined beyond the present.

C. Contemporaneity

Rizal and gardens as triggers

Gardens triggered Crisostomo Ibarra's el demonio de las comparaciones.

Gardens are bound to the colonial act of forcing nature to follow shape under the hand of the gardener/colonizer.

Gardens to which Rizal, through Ibarra, compares Jardin Botanico to is a generalized garden Europe, a failed utopia.

Rizal in the garden observes two states of existence, without losing sight of his position - living in the present and capable of seeing both colony and colonizer.

Rizal's el demonio de las comparaciones is part of contemporaneity that re-maps history and art production outside of national and disciplinary frameworks.

Contemporary and the Contemporaneity

The usual definition of contemporary is an unsettled present, constantly bound by time.

There are several difficulties with this definition of contemporary.

The contemporary finds itself in a constant state of becoming, always being made, and as such, the present becomes the past before it can even get to the future.

"Contemporary art" has no critically meaningful referent, and often the term is diluted without its existential, social, and political meanings.

The exhibition depends upon the coming together of different but equally present "temporalities" such that all temporalities are present, but one must also be aware of their distance from it; one must be critical.

"The contemporary is understood as a dialectical method... with a more radical understanding of temporality." [2]

'Dialectical contemporaneity' does not designate a particular style, rather an approach [3] making it possible for the exhibit to be mined as a politicized project.

D. Point of Engagement

Access by the point-of-view of Anderson to produce a sightline that accesses past and future (Rizal) and future and present (Maestro and Ocampo). 

Access through its triple temporalities - as a 21st century exhibition linking with 19th century via an experience during the 1960s, the twentieth century.

III. Artworks Overview

A. Lani Maestro and Manuel Ocampo exemplify belonging to two states.

Maestro's belonging is of Canadian and Filipino, while Ocampo's belonging is of FIlipino and American.

The two artists' practice are intertwined with their own thinking of origin and status.

Their individual practice are also responsive to their shifting topographies, calibrating reflectively as they move across places.

B. With the two artists' works, the point of engagement is the body, the means by which either negotiate areas of their critical positions.

In Noli Me Tángere, the politics of Rizal was embodied by Crisostomo Ibarra, echoing the work of Merleau-Ponty when the body enters a space.

For Maestro and Ocampo, the site of engagement is the body itself

Maestro's work references the body in terms of its presence, whether absent or distant.

Ocampo's work references bodies that are ruinous and ruined, rendering them in utter disregard of their natural contours or functions.

IV. Lani Maestro's in The Spectre of Comparison

A. Engagement with the Body

The works feature the body as a metaphor, a political site, and a social construct.

The works present how the body occupies and is occupies, and how it produces a presence in its absence.

The works echo previous works in this qualification.

ladders that reach out to windows inside a box

book of images of waves picturing a moving ocean

sound piece with a murmured phrased.

silent post cards containing a line or two

The works incite a return to the individual.

B. No Pain Like This Body (2010/2017)

Influences

The novel of the same name by Harold Sonny Ladoo

The conditions of poverty, homelessness, prostitution, and drug abuse prevalent in Downtown Eastside Vancouver

Characteristics

The work has the same height as a regular person, thus situating the body to the work, its text and color.

The work employs a text reversal to derive the capacity and incapacity of the body to handle discomfort.

Appearance in Previous Exhibitions

The work was first exhibited in a gallery with shop windows opening to the street.

The work glowed bright enough so that people were drawn to and were able to experience the work even after gallery closing time.

C. these Hands (2017)

Influences

The poem Flowers of Glass by Jose Beduyab.

The "cradle of jewelry-making" in France [4]

Reading

The work resonates to the body part valuable to artists.

The work speaks in anticipation of the wounding of the body

The work speaks about fear of violence that comes with the severance of limbs.

D. meronmeron (2017-2019)

Title

The word meron comes from mayroon.

The analogy may: existence, roon: place; thus mayroon: existence in a space.

The word meronmeron doubles itself: meron is to have, thus meronmeron to have being.

Reading

The art work awaits the audience to fill the latent obligation of its title. [5]

The benches fulfill the work's commitment once they are occupied.

V. Manuel Ocampo's in The Spectre of Comparison

A. The body as unabashedly present B. The disappointment with the real

Manuel recalled the experience seeing the paintings of Juan Valdez de Leal in Seville in 1997.

Manuel is a painter first and everything else is a poor second, and as such his paintings resist definitions.

C. The iconography of Manuel

Catholic elements (which have received attention)

Swastikas

Bodies cut up revealing spilling organs

Excrement

Abstract art with a native version

Magritte shown as a rat

Ad Reinhardt cartoons

VI. Synthesis

A. The artists do not simply resist authority, as they also engage and critique the discourse of their practices.

Maestro rethinks her oppositional relationship with "East" and "West".

Ocampo ponders on his "contamination" of culture.

B. The site of the spectre is not firmly situated.

The loci where the local and global meet are not essential to the practices of Maestro and Ocampo.

The same applies for artists and curators moving across nations and spaces.

The registers of experiencing the spectre (in the exhibition) are varied.

Rizal's sad melancholy

Anderson's moment of understanding

Maestro's re-thinking of "East" and "West"

Ocampo's contamination of cultures

The consciousness of the colonial émigré was crystallized by Rizal as he continuously flipped between the contexts of home and the colonizing other.

The same privilege exists for us who live in the 21st century, although not similarly as luxury, as there remains the call to determine whether we will remain as tourists or engage beyond mere surfaces.

VII. Conclusion

A. Venice as “the exhibition” ought to be contested, unless participation is a national desire to “officially” be part of the contemporary and global art discourse (which have its own responsibilities and consequences.

B. The artists in “The Spectre of Comparison” produce a global discourse, interrupted by discursive and complex imaginings that allow for the consciousness of worlds to be constructed across geographies, temporalities, and he haunting of soectres.

––––––––––––

Footnotes:

[1] Notably, Pres. Rodrigo Duterte's approval of the burial of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, and his bloody war on drugs; the election of Donald Trump as US President, Brexit, and continued nuclear missile testing of North Korea.

[2] Claire Bishop, Radical Museology.

[3] Ibid.

[4] In conversation with Lani Maestro.

[5] Ibid. Lani said an artwork is not complete unless one engages with it.

[writeaboutart]

the center will not hold

‘the center will not hold’ was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design from March 7 to May 5, 2019. The featured artists were Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, Shilpa Gupta, Kim Heecheon, Manny Montelibano and Tintin Wulia. What follows are my notes outlined from the exhibition catalog and information from the curator, Joselina Cruz.

A. The title of the exhibition is taken from W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” published in 1919.

The poem was describing an event that seemed anarchic, dystopic.

Yeats was also Irish. The poem was written after World War I, and before the Irish War of Independence.

The poem captures a sense of societal disintegration and confusion that is very similar to our contemporary times.

Many other writers and artists have referenced it, such as Chinua Achebe who wrote “Things Fall Apart” and Joan Didion who authored the non-fiction collection, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”.

B. The exhibition is a response to what is going on in the world when the zeitgeist is leaning towards very right ideologies (e.g. Brexit, Trump, Duterte).

C. The exhibition speaks about contemporary centers/notions of power (used to be the panopticon) and the struggle for spaces to critique and comment on the issues of present times.

Failing democracy

Failure of politics to implement change

Rapid urban development

Rapid advancement of technology

Changing borders

A complex and nuanced present

D. The artworks provide a space / encourage commentary and critique on these realities.

E. People assume that these conditions are occuring in the world, but do not necessarily think about these as they happen.

F. “Personal is political” - everything we decide is a political (whether we intend to or not) because it affects everyone. We are part of a larger scope.

[writeaboutart]

essays by a white man

‪Isn’t weird for your sense of nationalism to be triggered by reading a text written by a white man? I guess that’s kind of the point, though.

Currently reading some essays from “The Spectre of Comparison” by Benedict Anderson.‬

Update 06/19/2019: I write about my thoughts on the essays here.

[writeaboutart]

things i must remember when invigilating

There are different levels of engaging with the work. Know the artwork on its own, in relation to the exhibition, and in relation to the practice of the artist.

When saying your opinion, something that the artist did not say, be clear and say “it is my opinion”.

If you’ve really thought about the work and you’ve read stuff about it, be confident and say your opinion. As long as you’re clear between what’s your opinion and the intention of the artist. 

Invite your audience to think about the piece and ask for their thoughts and reactions.

Part of the initial brief I received from Yeyey and Chris.

[writeaboutart]

this body, this blog

me

+

Lani Maestro No Pain Like This Body, 2010/2017 Installation with ruby red neon (reproduction) 140 x 61 cm each

on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila, May 2019.

Today is Day 1 of MCAD’s “The Spectre of Comparison” after last night’s opening. Posting this photo seemed fitting, and so does starting this blog.

Photo by James Olaivar