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.
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.
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