I am trying out a new paradigm - and with it new ways of making works - that has been coalescing in the background of my thoughts ever since I started these extended residencies in Europe and now in North America.
This is a paradigm of queries rather than theses. Because now I find myself full of questions, mostly probing verity of stated and assumed facts. And ironically, these are statements that I may have made, but also have clung closely for about two decades.
It started in Paris, where confronted with the images of the Old World I found myself beaming, "Oh so this is what this really looks like". I was, in fact, describing my encounters with all the artworks and structures that Ive only seen in my art history books. Talk about living in a "precession of the simulacra", as most of us find ourselves in Third World and web communities. The goal, or the dream you might, of say of those whose lives were peppered by images and reproductions, is to find passage to see the "original". (A journey often construed as pilgrimage, as I have described it in my last exhibition Curator of Pilgrimage and Paid Vacations, at the Drawing Room last month) So while the "original" work or object is not within our tactile or visceral reality, we live with its emanations and iterations, so to speak. I have written about this on the Mona Lisa experience, where when finally face-to-face with Da Vinci's work I was deeply, er, let down: it was dim, it was small, and it was hard to look at without being elbowed by other spectators. I guess I could say the same with Bartholdi's Lady Liberty, the icon of New York if not the US. But unlike the La Gioconda, I have not the privilege of going to her up close: I am reserving that on my final days. Meanwhile I simply watch her at the same distance every day from the ferry to and from Governor's Island.
Ad so I am all in askance: what observable phenomena can be considered to make this assumption, true? In short, how do I know I am not being duped, or I am not deluding myself? It all goes with: who told you that? what are the sources? And even: Can I just continue with the ruse, as I am anyway having a good time?
---
For close to two decades I have been taught (and unfortunately even taught it elsewhere) with the following theses:
You are a Filipino first before being an artist.
As a Filipino you inherit the task of defining yourself from the gambit of neocolonialism and the colonial constructs of 300 years of Hispanic domination. Likewise you are put to the task of resisting the neocolonial powers that are in ascendancy.
As a Filipino artist it is your task to edify local culture, identity and history: in other words, dig deep and find that core.
There is, sometime in the past, a great civilization of pre-Hispanic Filipinos that was destroyed and assumed by the Spanish colonial masters and churchmen.
Only then, in touching base with these, that you can create authentically. Those idiots who make art for art's sake are just potheads, addicted to neocolonial hash.
Believe it or not, I held on to these theses like a credo. It did not help that I worked as a consultant for a government agency, National Commission for Culture and the Arts.
Then I began to ask:
Why does cultural identity have to be "pure"?
Why look for something archaic, even utopian, and prefer this OVER the present?
Why does cultural research, identity politics take precedence over art practice? Who said so?
Why reject colonial heritage? Aren't these part of one's culture? AND
Why can't I provoke, propose, pioneer cultural introductions and insertions...as a creator?
And finally...seriously...can't I have fun?
---
I used to think that cultural identity is a matter of assertion. You claim identity, you post it to a community.
But culture, being an artefact of communal life of dynamic shared language, idioms, norms, values and habits, has a tendency to become rigid, once it has been demarcated. Like a stray hen that you try to pin down in a certain territory, you place a fence or a coop around it. Thus, here culture becomes a construct, a mental object, a thesis supported or supplemented by objects - in other words, a marketable idea.
And it pains me to find out, in hindsight, that I bought into the whole cultural paradigm when it was in fact more a hindrance to me as an artist. Its like patronizing a really bad barbershop, and you won't know the service is totally messed up not until you try the other shops elsewhere. I didn't know. I didn't have sufficient information. I didn't have sufficient comparative experiences.
---
Patrick Flores has a phrase that I really love: "Preaching to the choir". Its like "converting the faithful" or "selling to the distributor". An ironic redundancy...so thus, have I been really working with irrelevant themes and practice...or am I just preaching to the choir? Time to turn around and face the congregation? Or the people outside the church?
This is a paradigm of queries rather than theses. Because now I find myself full of questions, mostly probing verity of stated and assumed facts. And ironically, these are statements that I may have made, but also have clung closely for about two decades.
It started in Paris, where confronted with the images of the Old World I found myself beaming, "Oh so this is what this really looks like". I was, in fact, describing my encounters with all the artworks and structures that Ive only seen in my art history books. Talk about living in a "precession of the simulacra", as most of us find ourselves in Third World and web communities. The goal, or the dream you might, of say of those whose lives were peppered by images and reproductions, is to find passage to see the "original". (A journey often construed as pilgrimage, as I have described it in my last exhibition Curator of Pilgrimage and Paid Vacations, at the Drawing Room last month) So while the "original" work or object is not within our tactile or visceral reality, we live with its emanations and iterations, so to speak. I have written about this on the Mona Lisa experience, where when finally face-to-face with Da Vinci's work I was deeply, er, let down: it was dim, it was small, and it was hard to look at without being elbowed by other spectators. I guess I could say the same with Bartholdi's Lady Liberty, the icon of New York if not the US. But unlike the La Gioconda, I have not the privilege of going to her up close: I am reserving that on my final days. Meanwhile I simply watch her at the same distance every day from the ferry to and from Governor's Island.
Ad so I am all in askance: what observable phenomena can be considered to make this assumption, true? In short, how do I know I am not being duped, or I am not deluding myself? It all goes with: who told you that? what are the sources? And even: Can I just continue with the ruse, as I am anyway having a good time?
---
For close to two decades I have been taught (and unfortunately even taught it elsewhere) with the following theses:
You are a Filipino first before being an artist.
As a Filipino you inherit the task of defining yourself from the gambit of neocolonialism and the colonial constructs of 300 years of Hispanic domination. Likewise you are put to the task of resisting the neocolonial powers that are in ascendancy.
As a Filipino artist it is your task to edify local culture, identity and history: in other words, dig deep and find that core.
There is, sometime in the past, a great civilization of pre-Hispanic Filipinos that was destroyed and assumed by the Spanish colonial masters and churchmen.
Only then, in touching base with these, that you can create authentically. Those idiots who make art for art's sake are just potheads, addicted to neocolonial hash.
Believe it or not, I held on to these theses like a credo. It did not help that I worked as a consultant for a government agency, National Commission for Culture and the Arts.
Then I began to ask:
Why does cultural identity have to be "pure"?
Why look for something archaic, even utopian, and prefer this OVER the present?
Why does cultural research, identity politics take precedence over art practice? Who said so?
Why reject colonial heritage? Aren't these part of one's culture? AND
Why can't I provoke, propose, pioneer cultural introductions and insertions...as a creator?
And finally...seriously...can't I have fun?
---
I used to think that cultural identity is a matter of assertion. You claim identity, you post it to a community.
But culture, being an artefact of communal life of dynamic shared language, idioms, norms, values and habits, has a tendency to become rigid, once it has been demarcated. Like a stray hen that you try to pin down in a certain territory, you place a fence or a coop around it. Thus, here culture becomes a construct, a mental object, a thesis supported or supplemented by objects - in other words, a marketable idea.
And it pains me to find out, in hindsight, that I bought into the whole cultural paradigm when it was in fact more a hindrance to me as an artist. Its like patronizing a really bad barbershop, and you won't know the service is totally messed up not until you try the other shops elsewhere. I didn't know. I didn't have sufficient information. I didn't have sufficient comparative experiences.
---
Patrick Flores has a phrase that I really love: "Preaching to the choir". Its like "converting the faithful" or "selling to the distributor". An ironic redundancy...so thus, have I been really working with irrelevant themes and practice...or am I just preaching to the choir? Time to turn around and face the congregation? Or the people outside the church?
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