I took the Myers-Briggs personality test and this came out: VERY ACCURATE

Your personality type has been calculated as INTP.

The description of this personality type from Wikipedia is:

INTPs are quiet, thoughtful, analytical individuals who tend to spend long periods of time on their own, working through problems and forming solutions. They are curious about systems and how things work. Consequently, they are frequently found in careers such as science, philosophy, law, and architecture. INTPs tend to be less at ease in social situations or in the "caring professions", although they enjoy the company of those who share their interests. They prize autonomy in themselves and others. They generally balk at attempts by others to convince them to change. They also tend to be impatient with the bureaucracy, rigid hierarchies, and the politics prevalent in many professions. INTPs have little regard for titles and badges, which they often consider to be unjustified. INTPs usually come to distrust authority as hindering the uptake of novel ideas and the search for knowledge. INTPs accept ideas based on merit, rather than tradition or authority. They have little patience for social customs that seem illogical or that serve as obstacles for pursuing ideas and knowledge. This may place them at odds with people who have an SJ preference, since SJs tend to defer to authority, tradition, and what the rest of the group is doing. INTPs prefer to work informally with others as equals.

INTPs organize their understanding of any topic by articulating principles, and they are especially drawn to theoretical constructs. Having articulated these principles for themselves, they can demonstrate remarkable skill in explaining complex ideas to others in simple terms, especially in writing. On the other hand, their ability to grasp complexity may also lead them to provide overly detailed explanations of simple ideas, and listeners may judge that the INTP makes things more difficult than they need to be. To the INTPs' mind, they are presenting all the relevant information or trying to crystallize the concept as clearly as possible.

Given their independent nature, INTPs may prefer working alone to leading or following in a group. During interactions with others, if INTPs are focused on gathering information, they may seem oblivious, aloof, or even rebellious—when in fact they are concentrating on listening and understanding. However, INTPs' extraverted intuition often gives them a quick wit, especially with language. They may defuse tension through comical observations and references. They can be charming, even in their quiet reserve, and are sometimes surprised by the high esteem in which their friends and colleagues hold them.

INTPs are driven to fully understand a discussion from all relevant angles. Their impatience with seemingly indefensible ideas can make them particularly devastating at debate. When INTPs feel insulted, they may respond with sudden, cutting criticism. After such an incident, INTPs are likely to be as bewildered as the recipient. They have broken the rules of debate and exposed their raw emotions. To INTPs, this is the crux of the problem: improperly handled emotions, INTPs believe, can only harm. While INTPs experience emotions as an important part of their internal lives, and sometimes share their emotions with others, INTPs nevertheless believe that emotions must not play a role in logical discussions, or be expressed in a way that would put themselves at disadvantage.

According to Keirsey, based on behavioral characteristics, notable Architects might include Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Jefferson.

I hate feeling premonitions...

I finally put my chisels down yesterday. 

I have just concluded three full months of working with a mallet and carving wood at Bldg 110 LMCC Art Center at Governor's Island (and some overnight work at the apartment in East 44th). Also ended is a personal experiment where I tried to think and function the same way I do in Asia - working with traditional skills and a vernacular knowledge of art and its historical practices - testing these competencies in this city, New York, and how that persistence (or stubbornness) would affect me, especially as a person. I believe this is the sort of "program" that a grantee is asked to draw at the onset of his or her residency. In my case, the program developed organically as the result of thinking and assessment of four months of continuous engagement (with bouts of melancholic withdrawal) with living and working as an artist in the city. 

As a fellow and grantee of the Asian Cultural Council I took full advantage of this wonderful opportunity to be in New York. It wasn't really in my original proposal, but the ACC Board was gracious enough to invite me to do a residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. To be honest, I came to New York without a single clue what I should be doing. I didn't even know I had a relative living in Queens, nor did I even have a single artist friend from the US. I really have to blame this circumstance to a spirit medium, who when I was 12, prophesied that if I should go to States, the plane I was riding on will crash. So, you have to imagine me, while the Korean Air flight was about to land at JFK and there was a freak snowstorm. I was thinking "Oh is this it? Is this it?" So coming to New York was like confronting pronouncements of what my fate should be. Good thing some oracles get it wrong.

I took the residency very seriously; a way bit too overzealous and intense in fact. As a wood carver, I sought wood - my materials - even going as far as hiking up to the wilderness of RingWood in New Jersey, near the stateline, during the first few weeks of wild turkey hunting season. But all that boom of gunfire made me edgy. I certainly do not want to be the first ACC grantee to be mistaken for wild turkey and get shot. That would be embarrassing. I would rather be mistaken for a bear, although in mid-March, these guys are still asleep.  

Eventually I discovered the best (but not the cheapest) way to get my material was to get them online, through Amazon. Till this day, whenever I am asked where I got my wood, I tell them I harvested them from the Amazon Forest. Same with the carving tools, the mallet, the drill...the whole workshop. Oh, HomeDepot pitched in a lot of tools as well. 

So, I carried these materials with me everyday from April to the first week of July, weighing 30 pounds at the most, from the apartment at 310 East 44th in Midtown, almost always by subway all the way to Governor's Island - and back. Elisabeth Smolarz, an artist at the LMCC Art Center, called my efforts "like Christ carrying the cross". That was incorrect: Christ made a one-way trip with his burden while I did more - around 180 trips. Also he had help with Simon of Cyrene. Then again, He was trying to go to Heaven, I was just trying to get away from Lower Manhattan, to get across the New York Harbor. 

Excluding the days when there was bad weather, freak late-winter snow (I hate the outdoors at 30 below), heavy summer rains, the occasional bouts of homesickness and sinus allergies, drunken Irish drinking parades, Falun Gong demonstrations, Egyptian rallies (their embassy is right next door), Coney Island trips to the sea: I religiously went to Governor's Island every weekday, to work for a minimum of five hours. I often found myself working alone in a studio for 16 especially after the end of May. Which was quite lonely, at times. Because staying beyond 6pm at the Studio and the Island is a federal offense, I bring my unfinished work back to Manhattan and continue my work in the apartment until late. 

I made around 27 individual pieces of hand-carved wood sculptures, two of which I exhibited in a solo show last June 1st, with more than a dozen unfinished pieces that I have to ship back home. Ten of these works are polychromed, and will be the core works for the upcoming Open Studio event on July 13-14. I also produced around 100 pounds of wood chips and cuts. As a testament to all that labour, I have incorporated that mountain of wooden debris into my final work. In fact I am shipping these to Singapore, to be part of my solo show in September. 

When I was done and I was beginning to arrange and design my space for the exhibit next week, I discovered that, as if guided by an unseen hand, I was making the installation more and more resembling the features and landscape of the NY Harbor. It was uncanny. You have to see it to experience what I am doing.

But contrary to what you may think that Ive spent months just buried in work when I could have taken advantage of the cultural and artistic events in the City, I did some exploring and was in every Art Fair from Armory to Frieze. I even spent more than three days in DC. True I have yet to go to more museums and more galleries, but I figured I have 30 days after my residency in LMCC to do that. In fact I have already begun last night when I attended a series of performance art pieces at CultureFix in Lower East, and an exhibition of the work of Mike Diana. 

To complete my program, however, I must also know what the community and some players of the contemporary art scene think of my work. The results were mixed: from insightful to downright disappointing. When the Cambodians came in May to do a month-long residency at Bldg 110, some of them, especially Sareth Svay and Vandy Rattana, (with the exception of Vollak Kong, of course) had occasionally gravitated to my workspace because they found my wood carving efforts resonant of their own work in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. SaSa Bassac (a contemporary space in Phnom Penh) director Erin Gleason even told me she felt "at home" within that space full of wood chips and carved torsos. During the first Open Studios in late May and in the exhibition at BlissonBliss Art Projects I  received a number of good responses, especially from those interested where I come from, and where the roots of my practice lay. But there were  a couple of curators who did studio visits to my space (events that artists from SwingSpace had to do ourselves because LMCC was amiss in this) and they dismissed my work as something "they will not make an effort to go far back to understand." Perhaps if I did exhibit only the residue of my work - the mountain of wood chips - I think that would please them more. It would be framed more contemporary, I think, with sarcasm foaming at my mouth. But as one of my friends had said: you have to mind how to locate yourself in the politics of space. 

In the end I wished I just took the residency in an enjoyable manner, like Tung Pang Lam. I envied Tung Pang's ease of work and his transformation of his apartment into a "Curiosity Box". But this is what took place and here is what I got myself into. No regrets here, only lessons.

And that (along with James Turell's penumbral work) I can take back home.  

 

Interesting things happened today at the Studio at Governor's Island. My work was politely and diplomatically dismissed by a curator. Far from upsetting me, I actually felt relieved. I wanted to gauge the reception of my work here. While I welcome all comments, I was keener to what criticism may come my way. In this way I know where my whole practice stands at the nexus of multiple points of view, especially in an art center like New York. 

I never participated in these curator visits at the studio, which was an activity organized by certain residents who pooled their contacts and resources, until today. I just found it too uncanny, although I respect it, for a curator to charge 25$ for a 20-minute visit. Most of the Asian artists whom Ive spoken to found this arrangement idiosyncratic. Some gallerists and art consultants I was told, charge even more. I guess it is accepted market practice. 

When I asked Jeff Leung to visit the studio last week, I introduced him to other artists in the building, and that gave me the idea to finally try joining their activity. 

While my scheduled visit is for a 30-minute thing from 1:30 pm, the other artists took more than an hour an a half and I ended up being the last person to be interviewed and was given only 20 minutes as she had to catch the 5pm ferry. I found the whole matter unfair and a bit discourteous as I did clear up my day to accommodate the visit and got to the Island at 11am. I felt the other artists were a bit competitive that day, jockeying for more time. But I tried to understand the context: they needed it more than I do. 

When my very limited time came and I explained that the nature of my work begins with an acknowledgment of tradition, the curator (whose name I will have to omit here, sorry) blinked and said she does not have any information of a) Philippine art or Southeast asian art and b) any craft-based and object-based theory that can help her understand my work. She then added that she does know about craft theory and the Japanese approach but she will "not go out and reach that far back", which was a polite statement for "I really dont want to make an effort to understand your work". 

I said I understood perfectly that my practice is a bit far removed from the non-object based, project-based art that seems to be the prevalent approach today. She smiled, offered some references and was guided off the Island by my very good natured neighbors. 

I was left thinking if I just actually wasted the day. One of the artists who organized the visit came up to me asked how my interview went. I told her it was unfortunately too brief and my work was too distant from her concerns so we did not connect. I added that I have resigned to the fact that I may not be able to find any contemporary curator in the city who can respond to practice. Even the curator was in fact saying, I should have gone to other States. When I was asked how did these episodes of misconnections make me feel, I simply said, it was disappointing but at the same time informative. It was not a pleasant experience to be dismissed, or be accommodated only out of condescension. I had a number of that within the four months I spent in New York. 

That does not sit well with me. But what can I do? 

Next time I will have to be cautious in presenting my work, and will have to pay attention to the public I wish to address. It is really a good thing that I am shipping my works all to Singapore by the end of the month. I don't think they belong here, anyway. Despite all our thoughts that art should be universal, my experience is living proof that works, often find their own viewers, their proper audiences. 

That will be what my position is when I present my work in the Open Studios in two weeks' time. It will be great if someone does feel resonance to my work, but I wont make an effort to convince people. I guess that's that. 

So I fell into a conversation with Ezra Wube and I asked him about the challenges he faced when he decided to move from Ethiopia and practice his art in New York. I admired his narrative of how he started with trying to keep himself rooted still with his Ethiopian lineage but soon realized that the conditions of being a migrant included the choice and the chance to untether yourself from the burden of homeland and reinvent yourself as an individual in the City. As he did this, his work began to shift from traditional oil on canvas paintings to video, sound and installation. But it was a matter of contingency, as he realized his paintings were not being noticed and presenting himself as Ethiopian would not really matter. And of course, video and installation where tools that were inexpensive, very mobile and quite easy to present. But now he realized that he feels being in limbo, without a sense of belonging to either his native Ethiopia or New York. 

I remember on the feery trip to the isalnd that morning I was surprised to find out that the curator chatting with the rest of artists and I overheard them talking about their travels to Asia, especially to China and Korea. They were complaining of the difficulties of communication, especially the way Asians avert their eyes during conversations. They found this to be very weird. I wanted to interject and say "in Asia it is rude to stare into one's eyes unless one is very quite familiar with the other", as there is a prevalent notion of "saving face" among the people. But will they even listen? I walked past them, each fawning over stories of how they were able to travel to Asia and interact with such a people. 

I guess they are not the descendants of Colombus and the conquistadors for nothing. And I am just a visiting Pacific Islander, a bit kooky, but just the same: an Other.

A gallery in Manila has employed in several instances the term "post-local" to emphasize its investments in participating in or organizing non-Philippine events in Asia, Europe or the US. A lifetime ago these events would have been called "international" events in their sense of importance, but that smells too much of cultural diplomacy. The word "global" is too risqué even now, and no self-respecting writer will use this overloaded, fast-food staple to be used in catalogues and brochures and other exhibition paraphernalia. Thus the need for some pizzaz in the marquee-blinking lights of post-local. You can't risk using "post-Philippine" though, as that will rile up a lot of sentiments. Better to be diplomatic, although ambiguous, to learn to curse between clenched teeth. But then again, such neologisms are necessary, to appeal to something the activists of the previous generation are so apt to rile at. It is neocolonialism, or at least a symptom of it. Enter marketing intervention: you can re-present anything, even vile and objectionable, with brand-new wrapping. It shines like tinsel on Christmas Day though it stinks like Araw ng Patay.  

The way I read terms like "post-local" make me realize how much marketing lingo is employed now in current-day art practice. Even I dread to use "contemporary" (note I used current) because that is again also, loaded and contentious, not to mention problematic. Gone are the old days when art writers were purists, academics who wrote for their own ken and hot for some honorarium. The art market in Asia has employed the services of very good pen-pushers, neologists, critics and curators to a certain degree they do shape the way art is bought, sold and trafficked. "Post-local" is a euphemistic way to say that this art "doesn't really give a f&$k to the question of Philippine identity anymore." In certain ways I agree to this and any other form of interjection. 

The question of Philippine identity in art practice has been asked by Leo Benesa as a provocation to artists living in his time. And that was post-war, when we were suddenly inundated by Filipino grantees who studied Modern Art, mostly in the US. Certainly, after decades of vernacularizing Cubism, Surrealism, Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and then striking forward with our own Social Realism, so vogue in the 70's to the 90's, we can see where Benesa's provocation has been proven, not by argument, but by praxis. To be certain, people who talk of post-local are also provocateurs who can very well say "O ano na pagkatapos ng Philippine identity?" (What's next after Philippine identity) Yet, I even dare to ask "Talaga bang kailangan talaga pag-usapan pa ang identity?" (Is talking about identity even relevant?) 

The situation is that art and its practice in the Philippines as well as in Asia is a plagued by a problem of articulation. We have not found the best way to define our uniqueness in terms of environment, context and concerns so that we have to, by contingency, use the terms, references and notes of "Contemporary art" of the Biennials, the Documentas, The art fairs and so on. Anyway using terms articulated so smartly by the British, the French and the Americans are simply far too cool to ignore and far too foolish not to adopt, especially in the marketing sense. I used to find soundbytes and quotations as a preamble to an art essay quite stylish ten years ago. But writers of the post-local persuasion have found quoting an increasingly annoying habit. They read like Bible passages to me, when recited like that at the beginning of exhibition texts. What follows after that soundbyte is a heuristic sermon on how the artist has fulfilled or violated some law of perception, or movement or whatever.  I mean why the evangelization style? Why preach? And why, for the love of Rosalind Kraus, do they refer to such obscure Modernist texts? Does anyone want to quote Robert Hughes, who said of Damien Hirst as a marvelous product of "big money and no talent"? Or Suzi Gablik even, who said modernism has failed. 

And why the ongoing debate on Duchampian notions of "art as idea" or "art as intention"? His urinal is in a museum, the debate is over. But why press it further? Why the gung ho? The nervous whistling in the dark? Someone's slip is showing. Someone's insecurity is showing. Well, we don't want to be heard with a thick accent maybe? Oh, forget it. When we fail to articulate, we use slang. That's gotta do it, man. Or the King's English. Talk Imperial. Post-kolokoy. Post-coitus. 

Speaking of post, I have to admit, concede even, that I once saw my practice as a contention versus what I call "an excess of conceptual/capitalist intoxication" in present-day art making in Manila. I came to New York with my head buried in my shoulders: I was trained to think anti-Imperialist slogans for many years and I was preparing myself for a mental battle. My work as a wood carver is located, contextualized  and rooted in local traditions, however they are dismissed by scapular-wearing professors.  I thought I needed to defend myself, my roots, and so, my identity. It can happen and it has happened, when artists coming off a tour of the US come back with "imported" thoughts. Its like corned beef in post-war Manila: you gotta have it in your luggage to prove you have been indoctrinated. 

But as I came to speak to, work alongside with and even rankle with artists living in Paris and in New York, I saw past the forms, the practice, the theory and the history - I encountered the same problems of having to contend with limits to access to space, lack of materials, scarcity of resources, difficulties in articulation versus an overabundance of creative plans, projects and dreams. I came to understand that the use of what I used to consider detritus in the work of art is not something to fulfill some textbook, philosophical or aesthetic point (as would the post-local thinkers would have us believe) but as a matter of contingency and expediency. With a city like New York teeming with surplus and rejected stuff, how can you, as an artist not have a feel to exploit the loaded meaning of a used chair? Or the fecundity of performative actions? That is what is available in their environs. And therefore material, substance to their work. I learned the hard way to understand their conditions when I had to source material for my wood carvings from online stores and spend big funds because it was way too expensive, and way too scarce. Somehow I felt that working in the subtractive mode, as did the ancients, were due to an abundance of material. In conditions of lack, the practice of assemblage in sculpture is a natural outcome. It is what it is: the artist contends with the material and the modes of production that is most accessible, if not often most convenient. 

In other words, I came to the conclusion that I was wrong in my prejudices, due to bad information. Even if my intentions were to highlight my identity, which again proved to be nothing more than an assertion in a city of immigrants speaking 200 languages. 

There is nothing intrinsically objectionable in the way art is made ANYWHERE in the world. Art is a construct of hope, that any expression is possible, not simply permissible. That is, it is not a finished artifact, but a series of projects that seek to create that conceptual space in the public as well as in private, that at certain times, everything can be expressed and seen and heard and experienced, sans the fear of censorship and the anger of being severely dismissed, or the despair of being inchoate or without means. Thus, art is, the final bastion and the beacon of human freedom. Art that thrives in a society means that such society has learned to listen and to tolerate and to respect the dangerous motions of choice and freedom. The more censorship and unjust intolerance there is, well, the more art will try to struggle. And art will always even critique itself when it becomes institutionalized. It is, in a sense, a wonderful, perpetual rebellion. A very human, all-too-human, story. 

What is objectionable therefore is how marketing language is indeed a form of censorship. By using cultural politics and "diplomacy" to re-present art-making with pitches, posturing and obscurantists' language is to propose that certain practices have a hierarchy of increasing sophistication and decreasing kitschiness. The Philippine public - being so used to centuries of archaic but deepseated notions of feudalism - have their sense of insecurity exploited when these agents of "high culture", these "bohemian bourgeoisie" create a sense of mystery and cordon sanitaire around art. Ironically contemporary conceptual art was formed as a foil versus such machinations of "high culture" in the tradition of object-based work. Yet it is marketed in the local as something vogue, chic and even post-whatever. By considering art as a finished and established institution, with all its histories, texts, canons and saints, these guys are in fact trying to build a Church. But instead of issuing anathemas, they resort to dismissiveness. 

The same can be said of course, with those who exploit native patriotism, with assertions of Philippine identity or social relevance. I have learned long ago that cultural identity is not a given or determining fact. To believe and insist on such is a form of tyranny and limitation. This I think is what the post-local really wants to address and in a way I agree with the sentiment. Identity is asserted by motions and acts and not established nor justified by some form of genealogical lineage or community tax record. Also, being social or community-based does not take away from the artist to CHOOSE his or her community, even if that means, leaving the country, his place of birth to find those who understand and support his practice. Country or place of origin is what Sartre calls facticity - it is something you were born with, like the distance between your eyes. It is not your location as much as it is a point of DEPARTURE. Lethargy considered, it is a form of insularity when one finds many reasons not to try exploring other places. I was, at one point, a victim of this. Insularity says: you are Filipino first before you are an artist. Of course that is not true, and is as objectionable as any censorship. We are HUMAN first, before we become conscipts of any nation, faith or community. 

And being human is the starting point of all artistic urges. 

 

I used to think of art in terms of the old Greco-Roman amphitheater, where the structure defines the public and the event in a circular manner. The spectacle and the spectator are roles that take turns within this structure and I had associated art with the plenitude, the fullness and the vicissitude of these changing encounters. Thus, as a former manager of artistic events, I thought of art framed within the marquee of spectacle. The artist was an impresario of his own performance, and hence the marketer of his own programme. Which then means a contention for the public as I have seen in the garish, competing, almost hallucinatory effects of such advertisements on Times Square. 

I am thinking now of those afternoons last year when I walked within the ruins of the Arenes de Lutece in Paris, one of the few remnants of the Roman (or Lutetian) period of the city. I remember the silenced arena and circular reconstruction of rows of limestone benches. What if art is indeed also a construct, represented only by this circle, this empty space for performances...for all expressions and thoughts of the possible and not simply of the permissible? What if art is the only construct in the public and private mind that is left to be emptied, time and again, so that it is perpetually renewed and therefore, dedicated to the exercise of freedom - a human condition that yearns in all of us, regardless of origin and epoch? What if art is not a fullness, not an archive of past works, but a provisional space untethered to any history or theory: what if art is the institution of "what ifs?". Then art is not Times Square, but the open Arenes de Lutece. Or a town square that is open to all markets, like the old Fulton fishmarket in Lower Manhattan? And so: there can be archives of art, but art itself is not simply an archive.  

Suppose art is a frame of time, but that which occurs before and after the event and performance, much like the desolate silence, uncanny quietude of a street market in Manila, in the wee hours of the morning, before the tents and the hawkers come to trade? Or else a superhighway before rush hours, looming not with emptiness or drone dead time, but the fecundity of promise, of anticipation? Then as the aftermath, the time following the cessation of crowds, is not art that point when we sweep clean the debris and deritus, refuse and residue? For art to be fresh and responsive, it has to be subjected to a diligent housekeeping. For everyone to have a fair share. Then art is not the art market, nor the art scene, nor even the artists who practice within. As I said, it can be only provisional, and like tenants who have had their time up, they have to exit every end of the market day.

 

Motivated by a suspicion that I may be in the throes of an affective disorder...again...I took a simple online personality disorder test and this was the result: 

Disorder | Rating

Paranoid: Very High

Schizoid: Moderate

Schizotypal: High

Antisocial: High

Borderline: Very High

Histrionic: High

Narcissistic: High

Avoidant: Very High

Dependent: High

Obsessive-Compulsive: High

(URL of the test: http://www.4degreez.com/misc/personality_disorder_test.mv)

Though not meant to be diagnostic in any way, I still wanted to find what kind of questions are asked to poke into the structure, however shifting, of the persona. But I've always known I am a functional, often articulate, crazy person. Just what kind of crazy, is what I'd like to know. 

While I have always felt that my person is often divided in some way and that somehow a shadow-self looms every now and then behind my awareness and will, I never thought this was a serious matter until I gave this alterego its own space and its own time to take over. Often in the form of active imagination, the Other writes, draws and makes sculptures. We always had a symbiotic relationship, this Other. Then  it dawned on me that perhaps this Other and what I consider my Ego are just parts of a complex of the Psyche - and there are even more. They are not evil, these "Others", only occluded, endarkened, inchoate. 

Almost unaware of its processes of manifestation, I am now suspicious that I have been giving life to these primal selves, these disincarnate souls that are not necessarily me, but use the facility of empathy to gain access and take possession. I have used the word "channelling" before, and now more than ever, more urgently than before, I can feel presences that are nearby, or within, ready to take over and find expression and manifestation. 

Even as some claim that there are no haunted places only haunted people, I am suspect that I am indeed haunted. Or "open", whatever the case may be. Have you ever felt like being watched? I do, all the time. Ever since I was a boy I can feel these watchers around me. Often I catch a glimpse of them, but when I do relax my perceptual set, they appear. Oh boy, do they appear all right. The only other artist I know who indulged in this type of creative-psychic process was William Blake, who was reported to have even resorted to "psychic portraiture", that is he painted ghosts. (including that weird Ghost of a Flea). 

I make it no secret that the forms that my sculptures take come from acknowledgments of these disincarnate presences, as they appear to me in dreams and in active, free imagination processes, others from hallucinatory episodes (not drug induced in any way). For five years now I have thought of this as an interesting creative process that I can use as a strategy for iconographic purposes. Now, it begins to take a life of its own in my everyday life. So thus comes the paranoia and the urgency to understand: what is this?

This "ability" has several precedents. My mother's side of the family is known for its share of mediums, which includes MY mother. Also that side is also known to have schizophrenics, quacks and dozens of grandaunts and granduncles who practice some form of witchcraft, indigenous or syncretic Filipino nature religion. Filipinos think this ability can be inherited. So can personality disorders. Did I just involuntarily open myself to this latent genetic "gift" by giving it expression in my sculptural work?  (Example: my first public work, Ines Canoyan which stands in front of the sea in Ilocos Norte was provoked by a vision of a diaphanous fishwife at the same beach during a summer twilight.) 

It can be amusing to see where this takes me. Only that I fear "getting lost" and somehow dissolved, in that pool, deep pool of phenomena that can lead to the suspension of self. I had a grandaunt who disappeared for 18 years this way. She literally spoke with "mermen" and she was gone and came back smelling of brine and the sea two decades later, with wild stories of how she was abducted by these mythical creatures. I had also another granduncle who lost consciousness after an illness and he was presumed dead and in the locano custom, laid out in a bier without embalming, for some days. During the wake, he suddenly "resurrected" and asked for water. Then he regaled his cortege with a strange tale of a journey to distant lands to seek out his children and friends (who were abroad). Ironically, after his thirst was quenched, he went back and did pass away, for real. Many many times did I find myself like my Lolo, sleeping and dreaming and journeying, only to come back to tell strange tales. 

Or has the choice been made for me? Am I  not really in the middle of this transition - am I not already performing mediumship in the form of art? In a certain way, I feel this is so, and that I may have just created the psychic anchor, so to speak, (or the Silver Cord, as Edgar Cayce used to say) in meditation exercise of prajna, supra awareness. 

Having said that, art for me turns from form and tradition, to an open space. It is, first of all, a stage where the possible - all that is possible and creative - can be performed and shown to the public without the entanglements of any bias, ideology, etc. Art is the only open space for the public and personal dimensions for encounters. I understand this now, more than ever, having seen the eagerness of the artists of New York to find that space and that sense of display and performance. Not to mention the aggression and the will to fight for freedom, precarious freedom to express. 

I feel much better now, having articulated these thoughts. Perhaps I am really haunted. But that is the starting point of what I can offer. 

I spent the whole day at the studio in Governor's Island today, starting at 7am. Thats the first time actually I stepped on the island in the morning and I found it to be a more pleasant experience that coming in the afternoon. The weather was of course a perfect summer day with a cool breeze every now and then thats sells of brine and ocean. I often forget, because of its proximity to Lower Manhattan, that the Island is indeed in the middle of the sea. How that fact escaped me is curious, since I have often pined for a studio by water. Perhaps its being situated in a studio facing inland, towards the large cannons of Fort Jay that makes me forget. Vollak's (a fellow ACC grantee) studio has a commanding view of the New York Harbor; I have a view of the field, of wandering geese and scurrying squirrels. (Which makes me think - how did squirrels get to the Island?) 

I also loved the fact that it was way too easier to take the subway at 6 am. None of the usual mid-morning rush, and the coffee-totting train-squeezers who holdup the subway traffic by jamming the closing doors with last-minute acrobatics going into the cab. My fellow train riders were construction workers, no doubt taking the first shift of the day. Its curious to note how the New York subway changes its character by the hour, depending in the majority of its population on a given moment. And tourists do not clog the Bowling Green exit at that early, even as the tour agents, hop-on hop-off bus dispatchers and vendors are absent from Battery Park. The Whitehall Ferry is quiet. 

Perhaps Ill make this morning trip everyday until my residency is up next month. I do have one full month left at LMCC: I'll make the most out of my access to Governor's Island - as long as the weather holds. 

It was an exhausting day yesterday at Materials for the Arts at Long Island City. I was so depleted after shopping for so much leather (a material I recently discovered I love working on while here in the US) I dropped off to sleep as early as 7pm. So now, I am awake at 3am and thinking of starting the day early at Governor's Island, even as early as the very first trip at 7am. 

MFTA is a curious facility that makes sense to any artist working in New York. It is run by the city and is a place where donations of surplus, usable refuse and stuff you can pick off the curb are made available to artists as materials. Its a bricoleur's paradise. I have been here last April, but that was a harried affair because I was trying to catch the last ferry at BMB downtown, not aware that at 4pm, and with a car Manhattan from uptown to downtown is not actually ideal for motorists. (That is why 70% of New Yorkers dont drive.)

MFTA is an institution that can only fit in a culture where the modality of artmaking also comes from recycling and bricolage.And in a city where surplus, excess and post-consumption objects are as abundant as trees are in Southern Luzon, it is only natural for these to be an abundant source for creative projects and ideas. It really is about environment that which shapes the modality of making art - not theory. Bourriaud's postproduction theory is also a post-practice construct: I think artists have used that approach not because of an aesthetic in sight that runs through contemporary society like Hegel's ghosts, but more importantly, it is a strategic approach to creative engagement when one lives in the metropolis. In hindsight, I realize I work primarily in wood because that is the resource that was abundant when I was growing up in an Ilocos lumberyard and a furniture-making shop. I began to recall that I too, collected wood scraps and blocks and constructed them into my very first "sculptures". Wood is easy to assemble, because the material is homogenous, even across species of trees. It is this affinity with organic homogeneity that lies at the heart of my base experience and thus explain my preference for it, and why I cannot abide with heterogenous mixes of material. 

But working in New York, and given the same limitations of access to craft-quality wood (costs are prohibitive!) I began to acquire the eye for alternative material. But its the curator in me that found pleasure in this, I have to admit. Yet also I began to think of the rebulto, my original point of departure: that too is a form of assembled materials. I forgot to consider that the latter examples of the rebultos are ultimately mannequins as they are dressed up and made up, incorporating glass, hair, fiber and metal. Not to mention the ephemeral materials used for decorating the altar and carozzas of yore. I remember my granduncle, the calesa-driver, using leftover steamed rice as an adhesive for paper decor on the spokes of the wooden wheel. And even that paper is cut from the "palara" wrapping from used cigarette packs. I look back at the whole practice and rediscovered a wealth of examples of recycling and repurposing, although most of what is used is organic, which is the most abundant. I postulate that if we had the materials like those at MFTA readily available, chances are Ilocanos would do the same with them. 

This leads me to suppose that creative acts, prior to be subsumed under the artistic practice, begin with an engagement with objects that are invested with memory, feeling, sensations. I just acquired the habit - as most Filipinos do - the sentimental attachment to objects and the sense of token-making. (Think of all the clutter that my mother accrued in the house that I was growing up - she never disposed of anything that had some for of memory imbedded in them). There is really no need to speculate a kind of praxis here. Perhaps I can reach out into these tangible memories as well and use them to channel what lives on and what lingers. 

The Calm Before the Storm
Propositions for regarding the work of Jeho Bitancor
Riel Hilario

(a)
It is often a practice, I daresay even a habit, of an accompanying text to an exhibition to be a sort of transliteration of the symbolic meaning of images. Thus, it performs as a key to understanding artworks, if not a peek into the creative mind and its sense of authorship; a genealogy tracing back to the artist. The presumption is that the text and the writer (and often the curator) is privy to the sanctum sanctorum of the creative process and thus can claim primacy to original and intended meanings. The public's readings are regarded as emanations or reactions to the text and image: mere convulsions.

That is not the case here as this brief collection of aphoristic paragraphs is nothing but a reaction to the work, one of the many convulsions, reactions, aftershocks and tremors that come at the wake of a viewing. Although I have known the artist for more than a decade now, I cannot claim that having access to the artist and his studio guarantees preferential knowledge.

An artwork remains potent not just because of its manifestation from the artist's endeavors but also even only after multiple framings, exposures and public regard, along with misconstructions and misunderstandings, dismissal and criticism.

(b)
We dispense with the presumption that this text is a sort of guide to looking at the works of Jeho Bitancor. I write from the role of a spectator, just like you, a mere bystander whose impressions add to the texture of the work.

---
(1)
The paintings of this series by Jeho Bitancor recall to mind the concept of "timpi", temperance in the face of adversity. It also feels like the deadly calm before a storm. You feel like something big, dramatic, disastrous is coming to the surface and the artist paints cross sections of this imminent catastrophe and aggression, exposing the dynamics of tension and trouble. Bitancor reminds me of the fiery San Vicente Ferrer, whose finger is raised upwards to heaven, trembling with the certainty that the judgment is coming, soon. But another hand is gestured, palm down, in an affectionate manner and intended to calm the fears of the just, and keeping the blood of the victimized from boiling unto retribution. There is pagtitimpi: not a call to arms but a call for calm introspection. A sense of urgency, however looms: we need to think and inspect in haste.

By evoking the word "timpi", we can also refer to the attitude of keeping tabs of all threats to our well-being, even as we refuse to respond to them rashly. "Hinahon" is a virtue that has emerged from our very core, and it applies well congruent to timpi. The by-product of hinahon and timpi, alas, is an aggregation of faults and missives, of pains kept under the strong-willed discipline of restraint. Bitancor may very well be painting these accretion of aches in his sense of surplus and maximalism. He sees to it that these things are in check, and sufficiently transparent (yet also veiled), so as to remind the public and its rulers that tension is rife, below the crust of our banal everyday spectacle-driven lives.

In his groundbreaking work "Pasyon and Revolution", writer Renaldo Ileto describes how the values articulated in the Pasyon, namely hinahon and dalamhati, tempered the revolutionary fervor and violence. The striking thesis here is that the early Philippine revolutionaries, through the language of the Pasyon, were able to articulate that their rebellion is due to a tipping point of "pagtitimpi". The Spanish colonial masters have become too cruel for any tolerance: hence the justification of revolution. During the Marcos period, the sense of this similar tipping point were articulated in the post-Aquino assassination with cries of "Sobra Na! Tama Na! Palitan na!"

Bitancor may very well echo the sentiments of this ebb and flow of revolutionary ferment and the precedence of accrued pains and injustice. His paintings express the imminence of yet another episode of singularity, charged with the tones of historic and epic narratives.

---
(2a)
We observe the artist has painted with a visual device that we can call superimposition. The main figurative images are either shown to be under layers of text, character, symbol, in alternating presences with an almost empty ground that serves as a visual base of reference. While this scheme conveys a frontal plane, like a picture window, Bitancor also uses a divided composition to present what is below and above. We see an attempt to use this visual scheme as a metaphor of "loob" and "labas", whereas the surface (or labas) is stripped of its pretensions with its viscera exposed. The artist, an avowed progressive advocate of social issues, criticizes social ills, class conflicts, subversion and subterfuge, and power positions through the means of this schema of "exposure". He cleaves the ideological skin and cuts through the marrow of the social disease. Thus we have images also, of diagnoses. Do not be fooled by appearances.

(2b)
The layers of superimposed elements forming a sense of transparency is a confrontational device, a pose for critique. Bitancor regards a theme as a structure, and his themes are handpicked from a series of observed injustices, inequalities, imbalances that are prevalent in his world, and even in his hometown. It is the viewer's challenge here to discern what these subjects are, for they are deliberately represented to be both veiled and obvious. Such is the game embedded in Bitancor's layers of paint.

---
(3)
Then there is the image of The Flood. Globalization (or its attendant symbols and presences) rush through the canvas like an inundation of surplus. We are overwhelmed by it, but like the boys who live along the esteros of the Pasig, we have learned to swim among the flotsam and jetsam. The water, although polluted, is still bouyant and that is what counts.

Water is painted, and is even suggested, and it seems some of the paintings even seem to convey being afloat. Filipinos know floods quite well, sadly enough. From the disastrous Ondoy flood of 2009 to the current inundations in Mindanao, we know the impact of being dislocated by forces greater than we can comprehend. Such is also the force of Global and transnational economies. Tons of surplus objects, rejects and used items (from jackets to luxury SUV's) make their way not just into our stores but also our consciousness. We have become consumers only. And we trade our labor elsewhere for the financial power to consume even more. We live in a time of great excess and Bitancor eloquently paints the floodwaters rushing.

---
(4)
"Filter" is a word Bitancor once used to refer to the critical examination of his iconography and his concerns as an artist. He is chiefly a painter but he has extended his oeuvre to performance art and its attendant processes. Not one to rush into inanities of expression, he is careful to the point of deliberateness in choosing what image he uses, how it is represented and what it represents and how it becomes an element to a visual discourse that contends social issues. The stream of images runs through a discursive sieve in his mind until these are discerned apt. Then he considers composition, with the same craft of certitude, until he has a work that has a unified statement, if not a comprehensive command for attention. His practice has been historically linked with Social Realism in Manila, although he states that as a provinciano from rural Aurora, he was only representing the social issues of his own hometown, as well as his reactions to the squalor of urban decay. Nevertheless his work remains forceful, always alert, ever vigilant: not a sense of frivolity or capriciousness. In essence, the artist strives for a clarity of message, while striving to find the contemporary images to frame them.

---
(5)
Tension exists in every figure and form:
Flowers versus thorns
Human versus machine
Organic versus metallic
Slave versus master (occluded)
Individual versus the System
Vernacular versus the Global
Red versus Green
Yellow versus Violet
Blue versus Orange
Squalor versus Splendor

---
(6)
Curiously while the themes Bitancor chooses to work with are within the context of Philippine society and its clash of squalor and splendor, the artist has painted these canvases in New Jersey, where he has been living for some years now with his family. It was as if he never really left home: the artist works like an overseas laborer who plies his trade elsewhere and then to remit his earnings back. But in his case the artist pursues his craft fulltime (a very difficult endeavor) in the US, amplifying his critical thinking, and transmits his insights through solo and group shows in Manila and in Singapore, on a regular basis. This is a testament to the artist's rootedness, as well as proof of how the Filipino always has home in his heart wherever he is.





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