I've just finished with the details of my very first complete sculpture here during my residency. It felt good that it came on the last few days of May, barely a week after the open studios at Governor's Island and a few days since my wife left for home. I have an exhibit opening on Saturday, June 1st, and I will be supplementing, no, replacing the main object of the show with this one that Ive just finished. Perhaps it was the combined emotions of anxiety to make a new work, of the sense of affirmation from responses to my work in the Studio, and of the feeling of being alone again after my wife left that I felt compelled to accomplish something. In my world that means making an artwork, a sculpture. It feels good to possess that sense of release and relief after all that struggle within and without. I mean, I have again a few scars - but its just another day at the office for a woodcarver like me.

It is hot in New York: the mercury says 90F. Still a little cooler than summer in Manila, but it was warm enough for me to go out walking in flipflops and shorts along 2nd Avenue. It felt strange as several weeks ago I was shivering from the same streets and now, with the warm sun easing my muscles, I feel quite at home. I am a child of the Sun, after all. I always long for the enchantment of summer.

The sculpture now sits on top of the writing desk at the foot of my bed. Ive placed a lamp on it for illumination and in the dark it looks like a sentinel. Ive used leather for the first time with this work, and like all my processes I discovered it by accident. Thus the work "flowed" effortlessly and constructed itself, guided by decisions and promptings of someone within or beside me. When I make works this way (with unseen guidance) I know my work is "right". How can I explain this? As an art history writer I can identify several artists and traditions that use this method. I am only beginning to understand this process, and it feels like something of either a haunting or a possession, or if Ilocanos have it, a communication between one's alteregos from other planes. Or other universes in hyperspace?

With regards to art and any cultural artifact, it is often not the form that is potentially problematic and suspect but the theoretical framework from which it is encoded at its infancy. Form flows seamlessly in the plenitude of things and objects and worlds. But framework is constantly riddled by the insularity of its codes, the limits of its theoretical horizons and conceptual range and ignorance. Consider that we live now, no longer in a mere "international" contemporary that is buttressed and buffered by transactions between discreet communities and nations, no not anymore.

We situate ourselves more or less, in a projected hyperspace of the "global", where connections and the means of connections are in place, and the metropolises being the nodes of these various nexus. We actually speak less now of geopolitical states in cultural dialogue (except the politicians and consulates); it is not just France, but Paris or Sete etc., not merely the US but in NYC, or LA, or San Francisco, nor just Thailand but Bangkok, not Korea but Seoul, nor just Indonesia but Jakarta, or not The Philippines instead we speak of Manila, or Cebu. The metropolis represents our point of departure to the global community that increasingly making its way through elsewhere. I predict that in the coming decades, once the metropolis has expanded its role from node to central gateway, those beyond the city shall become the next frontier. So that its no longer Tokyo, but also Ibaraki or Kanagawa; not just New York but also Brooklyn, or Manhattan; not just Bangkok, also Chiang Mai...more and more into non-urban sites, then finally into the realms of the sub-communities.
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These thoughts came to me while looking at the diverse sets of objects in the exhibit "Connecting Communities: The World in Brooklyn" at the Main hall of the Brooklyn Museum yesterday. By putting together different objects from different cultures and periods under the themes of person, community and things, this exhibit made me rethink the network of the global and contemporary as the result of exposure, or presentation as interface. Consider that communities in the 20th century industrial pre-linked world were discrete lives lived in pockets of diaspora, ghetto and migrant neighborhoods, set beside established communities of colonial or native population. In the time of the internet and social media, all of these pockets become linked by virtual cities by means of a flat interface and a search engine. The dominant social theme is one of home and comparison, at least for the beginning. Then as these communities influence the infrastructure of the cities (app-directed transits, courier by web etc, cyberlinked libraries) we shall learn to speak of sub-communes, or trans-national affiliations: a post-international world. I found the exhibit prescient of this projection of a future, by being a showcase of accumulated objects from across many lanes of nostalgia and history.
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Yet again, at the center of all these objects the concept of sculptural form is no longer urgent. Sculpture is but one of the many categories of objects, this one created under the auspices of Art. Sculpture intends to be of a higher construct, seemingly unconstrained by external forces of market and value, created for the pure sense of aesthetic judgment. But is it? These times call for a sense of reevaluation of claims.
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In effect, the one cultural artifact that seems to stand with curious interest is the "story". In a global world punctuated by shades of differences, origins, allegiances (soon to be blurred in distant future of homogeneity) what matters is the story behind author, creation, artifact, structure, community, nation. Cultural communication is simply the exchange of stories. For what purpose? For many purposes, above all things is to provide information and persuasion of tolerance.
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The exhibit, Connecting Communities, is a very good example of how stories however different can be grouped in many ways around a theme or place. Nicolas Bouriaud and Roger McDonald both thought of curatorial work as the DJaying of art, and that the exhibition can be seen as a Playlist or Album. This approach is a curator's way of dominating the traffic of art by discursive conglomerations and by subjugating the authorship of the artist. I think rather that the contemporary is best served, like in the case of the Brooklyn exhibit, as an anthology of stories, where curatorial direction is that of an editor, or more likely, an archivist.
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There will be a time when the art world will be served more by archivists that curators.
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Thus I conclude:

(1)The difference between object-based work and concept-driven production in art is the urgency of speed and delivery. It takes time and dedication to a stable concept that makes labor on making objects slower, than the sense of urgency that is needed to identify, collect and compact the idea into a form in a haste that mirrors the speed of conceptual manifestation.

(2) The object and the concept are BOTH iterations of storytelling. What is to be considered here is who do we think we are telling the stories to and how can it be repackaged for such audiences (translation, adaptation, even censorship).

(3) Contemporary is construed as a null-field where there lies the space for contending with projection (interpretations and digestions of past, like nostalgia) and trajectory (the direction towards the fulfillment of our visions, passions, appetites and debts).

(4) The global is hyperspace.

A yellow school bus served as a the shuttle from the Guggenheim Museum to the Frieze Art Fair on Randall's Island. As we made our way under the RFK Bridge and into the Randall Island Park I espied the large red inflatable rabbit sculpture of Paul Mc Carthy looming over the tent structure that held the Fair. I remembered what Freddie Aquilizan used to tell us: If you cant make it good, make it big. Quoted from Audrey Flack, who added if you cant make it big, make it red. This sculpture is both big and red.

Then suddenly we were hollered down by a group of men chanting "Shame on YOU!" as we made through the dirt road to the south entrance. The men - presumably artists with a cause - were waiting to pounce on the arriving guests with slogans and a funny inflatable rat sculpture with greedy eyes on their guard. All the guests in the bus peered back. The rat nodded with the wind. It was a fine Friday mid-morning, with 70 degrees on the mercury and sunny.

I wanted to make the most out of this visit and I planned to stay the whole afternoon if I had to. When I was doing the rounds of the Armory Show week I was reeling from jetlag, as I had barely a day upon landing. In contrast to the cloudy, grey and snowy late winter weather at the Armory, the near-summer heat of the day for Frieze was very, very welcome. Yet I keep telling myself: Oh God, another art fair! Ive been to many art fairs since last year, from Art Singapore, ArtHK12, FIAC and Slick in Paris, Art Fair Philippines, The Armory Show and now Frieze and pretty soon, Pulse and others. Everytime I go I think: this is a marketplace, and yet it is also a marketplace for ideas. What good was an artist if he could not capture the hearts and minds of people? Often the art fair is a shortcut to gallery hopping. Not quite the real thing, but it saves you some blisters.

There is something about this edition of Frieze that made me chuckle and smile, the same way I found myself entertained at FIAC last fall. I stumbled upon the oxygen of contemporary art practice: permissibility. Or what can art do when we are given no limits nor laws nor canons. Or our lack of awareness thereof. Or the dismissiveness of all fetters and meanings and traditions that accompany these assertiveness.

I also came to terms with the context of lifeworld in comparing Frieze New York to all the art fairs elsewhere: here in these white spaces, are objects that come from living in post-industrial cities. Elsewhere in the City are two art fairs of "indigenous and tribal art" (which I am curious to see), where art from "beyond the city and beyond modern civilization" have their own limelight. Michel Foucault once said that history which is prevalent is the narrative of the powerful. In our time the meaning of being contemporary is evidence of mastery of narratives coming from the metropolises. Contemporary art is not about the tales of bunions, unless of course, they are assimilated into the heart of the city and its politics. What made me snigger and giggle at the Fair was the dawning of an understanding. It was not about the dichotomy of "craft versus concept" or "tradition versus contemporary" or even "West versus East"; these are the concerns of Cold-War period art.

Its ALL about the traffic of novelty, this global force driving contemporary international art.

Take an banal object from New York and bring it to Ilocos and suddenly it becomes a relic of a sophisticated civilization. Take a common trifle from Ilocos and bring it to New York and in the right context it becomes an exotic object from a distant land. City and country mouse tales. But this is nothing new. In the early modern and late 19th century, in the age of expositions, this was the operative force in showcases and impresario spectacles. What made the difference? The level of seriousness levied upon the funding, politics, and presentation of the exhibits. C'mon, these things are finely tuned, and finely crafted to make it speak with the deep baritone seriousness of Habermasian discourse. So funny. And they have magazines and websites to support the works that are so flimsy without the support of a whole encyclopedia of written words. Hahaha.

What else is hilarious? The presumption that the tales of the city mouse is richer and better than the yarns of the country mouse. Foucauldian logic: the world and the community that has more power has more leverage to say what history is better said, and everything else are footnotes. But what I find fascinating is the way the country mouse is also driven to find its hole and home in the Big City and have his tale also told in the spaces, however within the liminal; or else this country mouse picks up a thing or two and goes back home with the learining of the city and in the law of traffic of novelty, becomes famous.