All I really needed was to start working.
And everything fell into place. The anxiety that has been plaguing me since day 1 here in New York - the uncertainty of what I can and cannot do, the insecurity of my works' irrelevance to contemporary art discourses, my lack of confidence in handling my time and resources during my residency - all of that seemed de trop, unnecessary once my hands felt the solidity of wood and the certainty of the blade cutting off shapes. How can I explain these things? How can I use as justification the comfort I feel when the wood releases its smell at the first cut of the chisel? Because often this is what I truly look forward to: to inhale the wood, the primary material, and the rest just follows. What plagues me now is the worry that I might not find enough wood here in this concrete jungle to work on. But that is something I must find a way to cope with. Perhaps I can still make something with the material that is available and inexpensive.
---
I have also been doing a lot of reading and research on hyperspace; non-Eucliedean geometry and Riemann metric tensors. I have no math in my system, therefore anything to do with complex equations describing phenomena is a source of awe for me. My main reference is the wonderful Michio Kaku of CUNY, an expert on string theory, a popularizer of theoretical physics. Kaku's introduction to the idea of the fourth dimension and the hypercube made me sit up and pay attention. I read his work on the subway to and from LMCC on Governor's Island. Among his claims were that the idea of the fourth dimension was quite revolutionary it provided the spur of a new way of thinking about the world in the 1890's and 1900's because it provided a physical realm for paranormal phenomena to take up residence and even influenced modern art through Cubism and Surrealism.

My immediate reaction to the idea of hyperspace is profound respect for the universe. And my deepest emotion is that of sadness, because back home, our sense of cosmology, dominated as it is by Catholicism, is still the tripartite division of earth, heaven and hell, the last two being located in the realm of myth and dogma. In other words, worlds that can be seen and those that cannot and the eternal primacy given to the unseen as the powers that be over the seen. I now understood the idea behind Philip Pullman's trilogy that starts with the Golden Compass. The fourth dimension, and the other dimensions that follow it in a succession of worlds, can be understood as the key to understanding transcendent phenomena. It is a liberating concept, and I bewail the fact that while it was already understood in the 1900's, Philippine cosmology is still structured in feudal, medieval and possibly prehistoric terms. There is nothing mystical about the geometry of the cosmos- it simply is.

Now I find myself a new challenge. How can I possibly express the idea of hyperspace through my rebultos, now that I have in my ken a paradigm to do away with these worlds-behind-the-scenes? How can I use the modality of the figure to illustrate this insight that I have now? Suddenly, I feel that I have been thrown into a new vista. Suddenly I do not have to resort to religious codes to explain what Taoism had intuited thousands of years ago.
---

In hyperspace all my interests seem to unite: cosmology, the paranormal, multiverses, theoretical physics, phenomenology and the mind. What if consciousness itself is a trans-corporal phenomena? Then it could only mean that consciousness exists in different states of vibrations, and therefore of existence? How do we know that galaxies are NOT conscious, or sentient in their own way? Or is sentience a variation of feedback mechanisms inherent in the laws of physics?

A new vision. Totally rocking my world.

My ears are still ringing from the 70-minute Oktophonie performance at the Park Avenue Armory. And as if I have not enough, I am listening to John Cage's Thirteen Harmonies via YouTube. There is some resonance here that I cannot put a finger on. It is as if I can intuit what Cage was trying to say with sound, and what Oktophonie meant with its environment of speakers, tracks and atonal droning. With regards to the performance, I took the advice of a review and listened to the music with my eyes closed. But this was before I considered the "stage" designed by Rirkrit Tiravanija. With composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's references to a lunar surface as the most suitable image to accompany his music, Tiravanija's take with the circular platform, custom-seats that make you stretch your legs on the floor with a back to rest your head to gaze upwards, and the white cape everyone had to wear - was quite clever. It made the circumference of spectators the spectacle, perennially illuminated as we all were with strategically positioned stage lights. While I understood that the smattering of dim-lit lights in the ceiling of the Drill Hall was meant to suggest stars or other celestial objects, and the octagonal frame of spot lights as a sort of moon, I cannot help but consider as well the effect of the architectural trusses that hold up the ceiling as an eerie skeleton of the lunar module and the space station, especially when the lights pass and garish shadows define their lines, bright spiders against the consuming dark.

I tried not to read anything about Oktophonie prior to the performance: now of all instances I am circumspect of all texts framing creative works. But I did encounter the sheet music and a brief video from YouTube and I was piqued with the concept of "sound bombs" that can only be appreciated during a live performance. I actually anticipated these "sound bombs" and I was quite pleased with the experience.

Listening with eyes half-shut (open enough to sense the color of light changing in the performance area) I felt the tension of war, induced by the fields of minor harmonies and the low ominous drone that circled, waned and waxed, like a reconnaissance plane or a bomber making its run over a field about to be blown up. (Later I read that Stockhausen did in fact references bomber planes of WW2!) At first I tried to contain the music in my consciousness - I was scanning textbook descriptions of modern music, etc etc.- but the bombs of sound woke me up to frequent starts. I found Nietzsche's aphorism to be true in this case: music is the most immediate of all the forms of art. I was trying so hard to decode, or encode or to find symbols for the aural environment I was in, quite uncomfortable with the assault on my senses. Then it happened- my consciousness let go and I found myself within the field, reacting not to the "melody" but to the vibrations that took hold of my body. That music is a construct of vibrations is a concept so palpable at that moment, I found all my education in music history as bland as paper: nothing of that mattered here. (Who the hell even thought of writing about art and music this way?)

Oktophonie brought me visions. Spontaneous filaments of dark matter shone radiant against nebulae: I see warring forces as the struggle of stars against one another. Streaks and jets of flame reach out with pointed fingers to the unseen cosmos. And I remember my childhood discovery of the constellations and of the planets. I was seven, and the idea of outer space dislodged God as the object of awe in my head. Religious narratives were far too insular for these space operas. And I never felt the same way again about the night sky. I remember the feeling of trying to express this awe, this childhood wonder, in my sculptures for Astral Projection (2011) and I wonder now if that feeling still lies inexhaustible as I contemplate on what pieces to make for my current residency.

Oktophonie was now nothing but a background of droning sounds: I feel buoyed in the air like in an aircraft. I began to ask: didn't I choose the artistic track over a potential scientific track when I was twelve? The thoughts of space flood my mind and spacecraft flying by the vast vacuum. I remember wanting to meet Michio Kaku the theoretical physicist who teaches at CUNY. Then I resolve back into the present: a sound bomb woke me up from my train of thought. But the music has began to relax, having found its points of unravelling. The teenager on my right jerked her feet and landed on my shin. I saw she was asleep, or have fallen asleep.

An insight: I cannot frame the thoughts of others, no matter how hard I try to construct or research them. The best and only acceptable manner in dealing with others' stories is attention and regard and conscious cognizance. Thus I see a chink in relational aesthetics: the accruing of stories is no different from the curation of rumor. The intervention of the creative project into community serves not the common good, but only the desires of the artist to confer authorship to "someone else" yet stays at the forefront as a steward and as a byline. The events are staged, rigged, to the full effect of making "life" appear when in fact it is the construct of the artist that frames the whole shebang. Its like trying to play chess under a shroud, manipulating the pieces while pretending to be a ghost. So again, the true creative narrative is the one which the artist utters without the mannerism of a subterfuge. A provocateur or a a raconteur is not a creator but a director. But like a Filipino politician, he finds a way to draw the force of the masses to himself. Authorship cannot be denied, but it can be, at all times, hidden occluded. This is the occlusion that I was so wary of and the image from Tiravanija"s octagonal light contraption made me see that.

The music is fading as the light onstage grows brighter. The performer at the center is now visible and the audience raise up their smartphones for a snapshot. I do as well. When the performance concluded I arose like I have just taken a nice nap or did some meditation: it was refreshing. It was validating.

World Trade Center
I had to see Ground Zero on a weekend: so I went to see it this Saturday morning. I figured thats the best time to do so, wary as I am of having to jostle with the crowds of traders and businessmen in the Financial District downtown. No, I did not go to the Memorial. For some reason I do not have the will to do so. Besides, that was the one crowded today. So I took the 4 train Express to Fulton St and walked towards 9/11 site, passing by Trinity Church and afterwards strolled down Battery Park.

On that fateful day of the attacks, I was in the studio of the Silangan Gardens, mindlessly painting, wallowing in melancholy. I decided to paint an angel, an angry one, with wings of steel and hurling airplanes down a city. I had just had my birthday and I was so angry, so poor so hopeless. Then I turn on the radio and heard the terrible news of the planes crashing on the WTC towers and I looked at my painting with fear. The painting turned up to be on display of the new wing of the Pinto Art Museum. It was untitled then, and it is still is.

And so that is the reason why I had to see Ground Zero And when I did, I could feel the hairs of my neck stand up and even though it was a bright and cheerful spring morning, my thoughts saw nothing but a creeping sense of coldness. For some reason I felt some sort of shockwave passing through my body, and I could see the image of the plane smashing on the south tower again and again.

I took a photo of the new tower that is to completed this year. It looks defiant enough, but I cannot shake off the feeling of dread.
---

i went to two museums this week, The American Folk Art Museum and the Museum of the American Indian, primarily due to the resonance I feel towards craft and art made by non-academically trained people. I owe this empathy I guess to the fact that I am working from my pre-academic knowledge of wood carving and wood work, both of which were very much part of my family's history, as my grandfather used to be a furniture-maker in Ilocos. It was one of my mother's cousins who taught me the basics of rebulto carving and I did the rest of my learning by observation, and later, aided by the conceptual framework of connoisseurship, I was able to classify designs and styles of wood objects made in my mothers hometown of San Vicente. (Ilocos seems to be the point of origin of all my creative impulses, and I keep coming back to this land where I was born for more ideas, as it seems).

The works that I went out to see in these two museums would profoundly change the way I see folk and native art. What is also important to note here is that there has never been any extensive cultural exchange between folk American and Native American with Filipinos, except for (mis)representations in pop culture and cinema of the cowboy vs indian variety of the 70's. The same goes with the African and perhaps Eastern European cultures. So coming to New York I wanted to encounter these through museum objects and even contemporary artworks. Where I expected to find strangeness, I actually found some form of connection: some type of resonance that is triggered by the schema of figurative representation and even symbolism in textiles and basketry.

It would seem that these connections, although framed by an anthropological understanding (comparisons etc), would be sufficient answers for me to work on. If I were working in the 1990's, perhaps. But this time it is different: contemporary art is shaped differently and I found my world rocked by expressions of concept-based art and relational aesthetics - which abound here by the way. And they concretely are presented to me by my own former teacher, Alfredo Aquilizan, who is also in New York now prior to a three month residency in California. Yesterday over lunch at Capizzi in Hell's Kitchen, we went over his approach to art making and how this has evolved from object-based to process-based projects. His work deals with relationships of people, with people and the idea of using art as a provocation, a common project whose products are NOT the work, but the totality of the process of conversing, exchange and interaction on very concrete terms. This open approach should have attracted me, made me excited, as these creative modalities affirm my values of authentic exchange and positive response to the world...and yet something makes me turn away and desire the solitude of the studio and the soothing comfort of working with wood.

Indeed relational aesthetics can be considered the new environment where contemporary practice of folk art, outsider art and indigenous art can find their own footing in the transactions and discourses of art today. The paradigm of the solitary artist, engaged in his craft, can look so "old" now. But is the need for being contemporary the same as the need for relevance? Cannot the artist himself create the frames of reference for his work and not rely on the machinations of curators, exhibition programmers and museum directors? Or is this merely a hope? Or does anyone give a damn about this anymore?

Let me summarize my dilemma:

My premise in my work with rebultos is that I am attempting to infuse new relevance to the folk art form by framing it in the environments of contemporary spaces and art paradigms. Yet suddenly I am cofronted by a challenge to return the form that I have been trying to extend and enrich with my own personal meanings to the same community from where I learned the craft. I do not think I am ready for such an engagement...perhaps one day, when I am older and more confident of what the hell I am doing.

Because what I am quite unnerved here in New York is the doubt that haunted me since I started this journey into wood. Am I outdated? Am I still relevant...or is my work means something? Or damn all these doubts and go on with what I am really interested in, because no one, not even the most persuasive theory can tell me what I should be doing?

Also, is my defiance my own? Or is this something I have to unlearn as well?

What makes me work even more suddenly irrelevant? The mere fact that my material- wood- is not readily available in this metropolis. New York is fast becoming a battleground for me. A battleground of my mind.
-----

So did I learn something from the Museums? Yes, and it has something to do with the idea of being an outsider. I will elaborate on that in a separate non-whining essay.

Second Avenue

A few bags hanging from both elbows, dangling like obscene fruits
I walk up the slope towards downtown, hands in my pockets, ears in my heart.
I desire to sit down for a while, but the benches are too cold, too damp.
Trudge along, walk past, go on.
The gleam of the East River a block away: an endless horizon far south and north.
Going somewhere? I hope so: these roads do not cease easily.

Lexington Express

These steel boxes: they shriek on iron wheels
breakneck stops on iron sleds they go:
Thump, thump, thump
Relentless like an old odd couple in a hurried and harried tryst
(They only have minutes before they rush back to their desks)

These cars, these seats, these desks, these bars
Are but transient vessels to even transient desires.
They really belong in the bowels of the earth because
The sun above is too bright for them.
The clouds are too quiet for their insistence.

One car opens and closes her doors, a swift parting
Then she leaves with an electronic voice, without passion
And in her wake, are wisps of newspapers flying in ragged ways
A thousand leftover cigarettes lie naked and cold
In even colder, darker pools of spit and rain, below.
Steel and rock and water, below.

---
Fifth and Forty-second

Gothic crowns on brownstone boxes: that is Manhattan seen from the streets.
Peeking in between: the water towers, exhausts, ventilation ducts, pigeons and street lights
Gleams, the polished hubcab head, the Chrysler - a gaudy shimmering insult to the sky.
Her sister, the Empire State, stands blocks away, framed by a cloud that hopes to
Look like an oversized gorilla begging for a fight with a biplane and some drastic and epic fall.
Why, with all these behemoths and giants, of steel, brick and glass - Why do I see nothing at all?

Nobody waits for the lights to change, they charge into the fray
Hands extending against the bullish buses and careening cabs, an uneven street fight!
Suddenly snow falls and snow dies, settling on the pavement and swept
Into dirty mounds, long sierras of sleeping, tarry ice: like a homeless person wrapped in futility.
Waiting for the day to disappear. There is indignity in being moved out so better
Dissolve than be evicted.

These are battlefields for fighting, dreaming, cursing, chilling, crooning for money.
No pilgrims here, only visitors with cameras pointing up to the sky.
Look up, look up, New York: you can't help it.
The asphalt is ugly, the crossings even uglier: ignore, forget, stay away from gazing at the earth.
There is nothing there: there is no heartbeat there. Only warmth, smelling curiously, of rubber.

I was in Queens for a whole afternoon yesterday, at the Bliss in Bliss art space on 46th and 43rd Ave. it is owned and run by a Filipino resident in NY, Ged Merino, a kumpare of Freddie Aquilizan. I was glad I went there as I have many insights at the opening, and met people I never knew I could connect to.

It was my first visit to Queens and since the 7 train wasn't running on weekends, I had to improvise and took the R train to Queensboro plaza where I took Vernon-bound shuttle and got momentarily lost in the middle of Long Island. I retraced my path by board same shuttle back to the plaza and took the 7 train that was running to Flushing and got off 46th Bliss St. Then thanks to the map and navigator app on my phone I was able to find the address, which was smack in the middle of a residential block.

I was first taken aback by the sight of the Queensboro bridge: its ugly to say the least and the area looks something like a place where thugs and the homeless could congregate. But as I learned later, looks can be quite deceiving: all that TV misrepresentation had to be purged before I could take a single step into anything. Fortunately Ive learned the art of being socially small in the Metro in Paris. I took no notice of people and they took no notice of me. If lost, look bored and upset.

Bliss on Bliss was something you can expect from an artist-run initiative. It is small, being the basement of the apartment building, yet it is charmingly rugged, authentic in its mishmash of drapes, knickknacks, studios and artworks. There was not much heating but the sheer number of human beings shuffling within this bowel of an art space provided its own warmth. Plus the alcohol and it was indeed really cozy. It was also refreshing to hear long conversations in Filipino...the vernacular does that to everyone stranded or lost or in exile. What is interesting here is that I do not know anyone in the crowd. Jeho Bitancor wasn't yet there but since I was tired I decided to sit through the five-piece repertoire of a jazz guitar-and-sax duo for close to an hour.

That musical performance was really good, and entertaining in most parts. Ive been a fan of jazz since the 90's but lost track when I began listening to grunge and then pop. I liked the thought of passing a wicker basket towards the end of the program as alternative to a ticket. You can give any amount you want that approximates your enjoyment and your willingness to support the artists. Later Ive learned how the flocking of artists from all over makes the scene competitive and difficult. It is not rare to find real starving artists in here, and this makes Andy Warhol's statement, "Think rich, look poor" a definitive slogan in this scene. Often when an artist makes it and achieves a breakthrough, there is a superstardom complex that robs the authenticity when the struggle is often won. I mean Basquiat suffered from that when his work was removed from the streets and into the galleries. I wonder if there is such thung asa middle field in the art scene of NY. Today Im off to see the big time galleries in Chelsea and MoMa. I want to witness what makes the art capital here tick from the top.

The show over, I felt intruding. I was already out of the door and ready to cross the street to Queens Boulevard when I bumped into June Yap, the curator-in-residence of the Guggenheim and formerly of the Singapore Art Museum. June and I met in Bandung and Jakarta in 2006 and as I reminded her of that she said, yes I remember your face. She was on her way to Rite Aid, a drugstore, to buy beer with Manny, a former UPCFA student who was a year behind me in college. Prior to this I chatted with Ernest Concepcion, whose work was part of the show and he introduced me to Ged. He told me Freddie was arriving in the evening. I asked him about sourcing local lumber for sculpture and he said he will ask around, and looked genuinely thinking of where he could point me to. I already said goodbye when I had to take it back when Jeho, Mideo, Kleng and Art Zamora were almost at the gate and invited me back into the basement gallery.

I was able to get information from Jeho, who is practicing his art fulltime in Jersey, of how the scene works and he was so anxious to know where he is located in the whole mess of the local Philippine art scene, the Singapore-centered regional art scene inasmuch as I was curious of his entanglements with the NY scene as well. I mounted Jeho's exhibit when I was still a curator and wrote about him in an exhibition brochure. He seems like a guy who knew what he was doing, got displaced and is now confused where his community lies. His involvement with Bliss and with Ged is a natural outcome as this space seems to be the only one that threshes the Filipino experience in New York. But it is really typical of all artists like Jeho (and also myself) reared in Bobi Valenzuela's paradigm of knowing one's context and community in artistic practice, although these concepts were not fully articulated years ago. Art in this realm of thought and living is all about sharing, provoking and engaging. Art is a form of existential reinforcement, one that makes the individual experience and narrative to be woven into the fabric of common vernacular history. In other words, art moves and is assimilated into the nebulous tsimis-world. In fact I think to be spoken of and about, is a secret normative desire of every Filipino. Fir good or bad. For fame or infamy.

While Jeho and I were discussing his work in the courtyard, June chimed in with her menthol cigarettes and her stories of battles with Guggenheim in organizing the show No Country. It was an insightful conversation as June intimated that her desire in organizing the event was a transactional device for Guggenheim to acquire South and Southeast Asian art. Good for Poklong and for Peewee to have their works bought by this cultural behemoth. But her intentions - not uttered in the board rooms - is not to promote Asian art but to inform the Americans that there is an independent, self-sufficient, and dynamic community of artists in Asia and that we are well. It was a curatorial subversion that left me laughing and amused. It would be something I would do, if I were a curator...and come to think of it...this is precisely my perspective when I came here. It was funny to understand what was intuitively clear and legible as an Asian artist is something of an exotic specimen still for the American culturati. I mean, this was the concept that we were critiquing in Bandung...the idea of consuming ethnicity as a late-capitalist folly, a post-colonial imperialist fantasy if you will. And the fact that there are multiple, non-public, vernacular coded ideas in the show living underneath the facade is SO Asian. I mean that is the indirectness that Ive intuited in Paris that characterizes cultural contacts in Asia...where the public face is constructed to be an exoskeletal structure to fit into the matrices of family, state, school, etc. The inner, deeper life is something opened up as a point of privileged relationship, and marks the sense of community. In Asia, it is really a transaction between what is made public and what can be discerned as private that marks everyday experience. At the front, at the facade of it all is Confucian-inspired or should I say generated sense of PROPRIETY. This is the normative force that permeates even to the very core of artistic engagement. To be public with one's private life is scandalous and rude. And if you dont know it yet, being rude is worse than being publicly bad.

That is why I found it so refreshing to know that June wanted a larger show and not the pipsqueak of a space grudgingly given by the Guggenheim to her efforts. And that her selection had to be trimmed by the stakeholders of the event, and that she has a personal knowledge of the artists themselves....no constructed professional distance here. (She even considered my work as well, which is quite generous)

I had to do a French exit and leave the event unnoticed (a craft perfected by Bobi). As I walked into the chilly, late winter evening in Queens and into Manhattan, I begin to understand why this residency had to take place. It is often good to see one's position from a distance or as Kahlil Gibran once said that the mountain is seen clearer from the plain. With this distance, I can see where I am coming from, and ironically again, I feel more Asian in America as I felt more Filipino in Europe. This is what the contemporary world is all about.

Now it is only a matter of crafting engagements and constructing encounters.
---

I was in Queens for a whole afternoon yesterday, at the Bliss in Bliss art space on 46th and 43rd Ave. it is owned and run by a Filipino resident in NY, Ged Merino, a kumpare of Freddie Aquilizan. I was glad I went there as I have many insights at the opening, and met people I never knew I could connect to.

It was my first visit to Queens and since the 7 train wasn't running on weekends, I had to improvise and took the R train to Queensboro plaza where I took Vernon-bound shuttle and got momentarily lost in the middle of Long Island. I retraced my path by board same shuttle back to the plaza and took the 7 train that was running to Flushing and got off 46th Bliss St. Then thanks to the map and navigator app on my phone I was able to find the address, which was smack in the middle of a residential block.

I was first taken aback by the sight of the Queensboro bridge: its ugly to say the least and the area looks something like a place where thugs and the homeless could congregate. But as I learned later, looks can be quite deceiving: all that TV misrepresentation had to be purged before I could take a single step into anything. Fortunately Ive learned the art of being socially small in the Metro in Paris. I took no notice of people and they took no notice of me. If lost, look bored and upset.

Bliss on Bliss was something you can expect from an artist-run initiative. It is small, being the basement of the apartment building, yet it is charmingly rugged, authentic in its mishmash of drapes, knickknacks, studios and artworks. There was not much heating but the sheer number of human beings shuffling within this bowel of an art space provided its own warmth. Plus the alcohol and it was indeed really cozy. It was also refreshing to hear long conversations in Filipino...the vernacular does that to everyone stranded or lost or in exile. What is interesting here is that I do not know anyone in the crowd. Jeho Bitancor wasn't yet there but since I was tired I decided to sit through the five-piece repertoire of a jazz guitar-and-sax duo for close to an hour.

That musical performance was really good, and entertaining in most parts. Ive been a fan of jazz since the 90's but lost track when I began listening to grunge and then pop. I liked the thought of passing a wicker basket towards the end of the program as alternative to a ticket. You can give any amount you want that approximates your enjoyment and your willingness to support the artists. Later Ive learned how the flocking of artists from all over makes the scene competitive and difficult. It is not rare to find real starving artists in here, and this makes Andy Warhol's statement, "Think rich, look poor" a definitive slogan in this scene. Often when an artist makes it and achieves a breakthrough, there is a superstardom complex that robs the authenticity when the struggle is often won. I mean Basquiat suffered from that when his work was removed from the streets and into the galleries. I wonder if there is such thung asa middle field in the art scene of NY. Today Im off to see the big time galleries in Chelsea and MoMa. I want to witness what makes the art capital here tick from the top.

The show over, I felt intruding. I was already out of the door and ready to cross the street to Queens Boulevard when I bumped into June Yap, the curator-in-residence of the Guggenheim and formerly of the Singapore Art Museum. June and I met in Bandung and Jakarta in 2006 and as I reminded her of that she said, yes I remember your face. She was on her way to Rite Aid, a drugstore, to buy beer with Manny, a former UPCFA student who was a year behind me in college. Prior to this I chatted with Ernest Concepcion, whose work was part of the show and he introduced me to Ged. He told me Freddie was arriving in the evening. I asked him about sourcing local lumber for sculpture and he said he will ask around, and looked genuinely thinking of where he could point me to. I already said goodbye when I had to take it back when Jeho, Mideo, Kleng and Art Zamora were almost at the gate and invited me back into the basement gallery.

I was able to get information from Jeho, who is practicing his art fulltime in Jersey, of how the scene works and he was so anxious to know where he is located in the whole mess of the local Philippine art scene, the Singapore-centered regional art scene inasmuch as I was curious of his entanglements with the NY scene as well. I mounted Jeho's exhibit when I was still a curator and wrote about him in an exhibition brochure. He seems like a guy who knew what he was doing, got displaced and is now confused where his community lies. His involvement with Bliss and with Ged is a natural outcome as this space seems to be the only one that threshes the Filipino experience in New York. But it is really typical of all artists like Jeho (and also myself) reared in Bobi Valenzuela's paradigm of knowing one's context and community in artistic practice, although these concepts were not fully articulated years ago. Art in this realm of thought and living is all about sharing, provoking and engaging. Art is a form of existential reinforcement, one that makes the individual experience and narrative to be woven into the fabric of common vernacular history. In other words, art moves and is assimilated into the nebulous tsimis-world. In fact I think to be spoken of and about, is a secret normative desire of every Filipino. Fir good or bad. For fame or infamy.

While Jeho and I were discussing his work in the courtyard, June chimed in with her menthol cigarettes and her stories of battles with Guggenheim in organizing the show No Country. It was an insightful conversation as June intimated that her desire in organizing the event was a transactional device for Guggenheim to acquire South and Southeast Asian art. Good for Poklong and for Peewee to have their works bought by this cultural behemoth. But her intentions - not uttered in the board rooms - is not to promote Asian art but to inform the Americans that there is an independent, self-sufficient, and dynamic community of artists in Asia and that we are well. It was a curatorial subversion that left me laughing and amused. It would be something I would do, if I were a curator...and come to think of it...this is precisely my perspective when I came here. It was funny to understand what was intuitively clear and legible as an Asian artist is something of an exotic specimen still for the American culturati. I mean, this was the concept that we were critiquing in Bandung...the idea of consuming ethnicity as a late-capitalist folly, a post-colonial imperialist fantasy if you will. And the fact that there are multiple, non-public, vernacular coded ideas in the show living underneath the facade is SO Asian. I mean that is the indirectness that Ive intuited in Paris that characterizes cultural contacts in Asia...where the public face is constructed to be an exoskeletal structure to fit into the matrices of family, state, school, etc. The inner, deeper life is something opened up as a point of privileged relationship, and marks the sense of community. In Asia, it is really a transaction between what is made public and what can be discerned as private that marks everyday experience. At the front, at the facade of it all is Confucian-inspired or should I say generated sense of PROPRIETY. This is the normative force that permeates even to the very core of artistic engagement. To be public with one's private life is scandalous and rude. And if you dont know it yet, being rude is worse than being publicly bad.

That is why I found it so refreshing to know that June wanted a larger show and not the pipsqueak of a space grudgingly given by the Guggenheim to her efforts. And that her selection had to be trimmed by the stakeholders of the event, and that she has a personal knowledge of the artists themselves....no constructed professional distance here. (She even considered my work as well, which is quite generous)

I had to do a French exit and leave the event unnoticed (a craft perfected by Bobi). As I walked into the chilly, late winter evening in Queens and into Manhattan, I begin to understand why this residency had to take place. It is often good to see one's position from a distance or as Kahlil Gibran once said that the mountain is seen clearer from the plain. With this distance, I can see where I am coming from, and ironically again, I feel more Asian in America as I felt more Filipino in Europe. This is what the contemporary world is all about.

Now it is only a matter of crafting engagements and constructing encounters.
---

I had a meeting with Sandra Liu, who is programs officer for the Asian Cultural Council in New York, to discuss what program would I want to do while here. My case is a but different from all the other grantees and fellows: I don't have a program coming in to New York as I did not write a proposal for it. Not that I didn't want to, but I felt at that time in 2011 that I need to explore Asia more than elsewhere. When news of the award came in last March, a full year ago, I accepted it and signed the contract, but admittedly with certain apprehension. Perhaps this sense of disbelief is due to this strange event in my childhood when my mother asked a spiritual medium who was possessed by the persona of a Sto. Nino if I (Ronald) will be able to go to the States and the spirit said no. I nursed this sense of uttered destiny for many years, forgot about it and suddenly resurfaced during that time when the news was given. You know these stories of how the oracles would utter complete non-referential answers to a straight question, like when asked if a general would win and the reply was a great victory is at hand, which turned out to be the fate of his opponent - stuff like that. I felt that happened to me in this respect. Because I came here not as my mother's son but as Riel, which is a construct I had forged to use as a persona interface to my artistic and curatorial projects. Making sense of that, is what I have just did. Haha.

So, the question remained, what to do in New York? Honestly at that moment I felt compelled to say, hey I am like Heiddegger's das man who feels thrown into existence without a clue. Yet that sort of sense of being stranded or lost or thrown is really one of my favorite challenges. I could have said: well, lets see what I can make of New York in five months, because ultimately it will be MY five months and no one else's. It will be probably a phenomenological experiment, this me, this consciousness as it encounters this city, THE city.

But I kept rambling about my desire to work and my plans of making a body of work, something concrete and tangible and not just some memory-factory that most travelers and resident-artists like to do. I saw in Sandra's face that my almost inflexible desire to do wood carving as somewhat a problem...and compounded with that my rants against Conceptual art and my biases against art that is grounded on speculation and nostalgia, as opposed to concrete experience and tangible things. (Hope I didnt sound too agressive) but having done that, I was able to externalize this whole bunch of complexes that I thought I never had: prejudice. There is a complex of ideas about New York and American art that seem to be operational in my lifeworld that Ive never seen before, like a lion that has swallowed me. Being tired, a bit bordering on hypoglycemia maybe, made me vulnerable and I thought I looked like someone who was lashing out at Europeans and Americans like they were dragons and demons. And you know what, I now realize that I have been demonizing Western culture and power all my life...and this disturbed me. Let me explain.

Like the spiritual medium in my childhood, I had some teachers when I was in my teens who inculcated in me the TRUTH that as a Filipino I am construed as a post-colonial subject. My utter goal was to emancipate myself with neocolonial trappings using a variety of conceptual frameworks, primary of which is the nationalist ideology and the belief that somehow the Filipino is a race apart from any other (as opposed to a simple national identity). I have got used to thinking of resistance and subversion as far as Western culture is concerned and my keenness to dig out these supposed native or indigenous values and traditions were the tasks of my formative years as an art student, and later as a curator and writer. In other words, I have grown accustomed to think of Western art as a dragon that I must slay or a tempter that I must resist. Then later Ive associated Western art and its modalities with conceptual art, who was being championed in Manila by this artist-teacher who learned it here in New York. To avoid this New York-trained conceptual artist to becoming my teacher in the university, I had to shift to art history to avoid being "proselytized", so to speak. Thus I became a vocal critic of "fantasy conceptual art" which ironically has the upper hand in the Philippine art scene today with a dominant number of such works being sold in the market.

So stupid, I know, and I realize it was a big mass of ideological manifestations of xenophobia and prejudice.

Fortunately I am not a lost cause and an out-and-out bigot. And I have to thank the existentialists (Nietzsche, Heiddeger, Sartre) for making me see that there is la condition humaine, or the human condition that underlies all human existence and conscious life. I also have to thank Joseph Campbell most of all, because it was his theory of the monomyth that opened my eyes to consider, explore and even indulge in religious and mythological practices and worlds from Buddhism, Islam, etc etc. When I was in Paris I also came to reconcile with Roman Catholicism, which scarred me in my childhood with all its emphasis on guilt and the need for atonement. Sartre and Campbell, as well as Nikos Kazantzakis, diluted the thick soup of prejudice against Western culture, because all three looked past beyond their national confines and saw what was universal.

I would have to apologize one of these days for letting the dragon out of the bag while at the ACC office. But I could swear that once I got out of the door, and came back to my apartment to sleep, I woke up and found that demon outside of me and that I found myself thinking how insufferably ignorant and vulgar I was.

Note to self: UNLEARN and LEARN TO SEE.

Damn all my prejudiced teachers and damn these nationalist ideologies that have had their hold on me for these years. I am going to see New York and its environs, and the US in general, with an openness and a curiosity untainted by prejudice.

So what is my program in New York? I have none yet. But to me these coming weeks will be something like a date: its a getting-to-know you phase. And I figure not knowing isn't a bad place to start from.

It has not been yet a week since I arrived here in NY and yet the pace of this city has already asserted its rhythm, even eventually overturning my jetlag rudely. This is the city that never sleeps, the accounts manager of Wells Fargo told me on my first day, insomnia and jetlag are not handicaps. With its subway clanking and rolling nonstop in its subterranean veins, New York does not stop to be conscious. It is wide awake, and also aware of the multiplicity of desires, passions, sadness, memories and madness that fuels businesses, relationships, traffic and consumption. I now understand that the spirit behind Lady Liberty, whom I saw first yesterday while on the Staten Island ferry, is really this overarching awareness and this watchful welcome - a gaze to an on all visitors and migrants to this strip of land that has become in many ways the modern center of the world.

Indeed from Paris, the old capital of cultural empire, there is a markedly distinct difference. While I struggled in Paris to find my passage and pace, making myself so small often just to mingle and find my way - a matter of insecurity from not knowing how to speak French well enough. New York, being a nexus of all types of people from all over, I did not feel a stranger, and my command of English provides me with more than enough transactional skill (which was the only application that I can muster in marketplace French) to be discursive at times. While in Paris I was often passive, a mere observer, NY often goads me to think actively, to respond positively and to criticize freely. In Europe the old buildings makes you stand back and be awed. Here, with all its structural blandness compensated with sheer size and number, the edifice of New York makes you feel agitated. In a good way I guess. This city provokes.

Yet, why do I feel this sense of perpetual exhaustion among the residents that I have met so far? Is this because of overexposure to stimuli? I was at Staten Island yesterday and there is a completely different contrast with the suburban communities of the island to that of nearby Brooklyn, Harlem and of course, Manhattan. Yet even in this community, the people look tired but determined. Not less often do I see persons looking like those indulgent Roman emperors whose gaze are glassy from lack of pause in their motions? The Dalai Lama once said that if we define our sense of happiness as a train of pleasurable events and experiences we are bound, not to feel full but to feel exhausted. Is this the air that hangs over New York? Or am I just not used to being pummeled by stimuli and actively responding to it?

New Yorkers seem to play by a game whose rule is simple: find territory and amass (resource, gigs, artifacts, relations) For what? That is the question I am most willing to find out.