Another day of sharing my work at the Studio, this time among other artists of Swing Space: Karl Erikson, Kimberly Ruth, Jamie Diamond, Elisabeth Smolarz and Ezra Wube. Two days ago it was the curators Amara Antilla and Lyn Hsieh from the Guggenheim who went to the Island to talk and see my works in progress. There is a kind of fulfillment in these artist talks: a sense of being able to gauge one's work through the responses of others, especially peers. These two studio visits brought a lot of positive things: first by making the presentation I am able to articulate my practice and second by noting reactions I was able to find resonances in creative endeavors - although we do not belong to the same genre or field, or even aesthetics. It was one thing to show (off) the final works at an exhibition, but also another thing to be able to show the process and be given input on other artists' strategies and projects.
I spoke with Ezra as we both made our way to the ferry docks. He is Ethiopian and had settled in the US since college. He is a painter, a process-based painter who is quite curious about documenting and preserving transience by gestural memory. In a way his work becomes a palimpsest, painted, erased, painted over and his efforts are documented on video and he hopes to have these videos projected on the finished canvases, as echoes of the process. I was quite intrigued about his stories of Ethiopia, its original form of Christianity centered on Axum, and how the art scene there has just picked up abstraction, and how this "belated" sense of modernism has some awkward dynamics in the way art is made and presented there. The last bit about modernism struck home: as a writer on art history I am aware of such moments in Philippine Modern Art, when the Filipino early pioneers pussyfooted with "distortion" at first but quickly found their own unique visual language, whose points of departures and references were usually one or two modern master, but mostly, Picasso.
Long Island-born artist Jamie Diamond's presentation of her work the Reborn subculture was also intriguing. Her studio is the first one that I pass by when I enter Building 110 and her shelves full of life-like newborn dolls and photographs of such made me wonder what was going on. Reborn was featured (quite badly) in a BBC program called "My Fake Baby" and it is an exclusive group of women who make, adorn, and exchange these life-like dolls of vinyl and silicon among a community. Some of the members of this group have experienced a loss of a child and it would be reasonable for them to adopt this practice as a coping mechanism. Yet some are also fertile females who do not have children of their own, and some, like Jamie, are artists interested in making them. Jamie had to find her way into the community for some time and now she is working with some of them, as there are those also wary of her presence.
What I like about her project is that it reminds me of Simon Flores' portrait of the dead child, a genre known in the 19th century as recuerdos de patay. Her work and her very autobiographical approach and sense of communal involvement is very contemporary, also even a bit resonant of the relational aesthetic that I have been suspicious of. I think of my work and I see, in the context of contemporary practice and construct, do I see possibilities of presentation, project planning and framing. I am using the theoretical framework that was indeed so 80's. Its not the practice nor the work that seems deficient and insecure: it is merely finding a way of communicating my intentions to the artistic community that is, by now, quite global.
When it was my time to present my work I did so first by explaining where the Philippines is and where Ilocos is and how these are not just factors of my creative practice, but in a sense, a ground from which I emerged as an artist. In preparing this presentation late into the night and early morning, I found out how much my training as an art history student in fact informs how I choose my subjects, my techniques and formulate projects. Inasmuch as I want to say I am no longer a curator or an art historian because I am now an artist is in reality, a false declaration. Because my interest in the rebulto is not merely artistic, it is also and most importantly a practice of connoisseurship: I cannot but help use research as part of my methodology. What I do reject and criticize is not historian but the speculative critic and theorist. I still maintain that art is not about applications of theory: it is not some praxis. Theory emerges as a manner of making sense the production of the work. What I criticize about curators is their stance of directing or stage-handling art history with the notorious concept of "intervention". They are the proverbial cart that wishes to be in front of the horse. The again I have to think of curator as a role and not a position (something I picked up in 2006 in the Multifaceted Curator Workshop in Jakarta).
I am actually happy to realize this as it somehow eases an internal tension of identity. Somehow posing as a "simple woodcarver" is a very, very bad way of articulating my practice and is bad faith.
So we begin with what are true statements.
My interest in the rebulto is an outcome of connoisseurship training and resonance. I love old stuff, I love history and I love traces of history. This was perhaps formed because of Ilocos, of Vigan: I was never a city boy. I am always drawn to historical objects and historical narratives. I am always curious how history, the past, or the recollected and vestigial past reminds us of our own lifeworld trajectory. I am interested in the cause-effect relationships, of then and now, the continuum therefore of narratives that bridge personal and even generational lifetimes. I love the genealogy of the graven object.
In military science there is a folly called "fighting the last war", where the general adopts strategies that were successful in a previous war but catastrophic in applications to a present conflict. If I had not gone on these artist residencies, and have not decided to engage my work in the Asian region, I would have been still "fighting the last war" in a Cold War scenario of neocolonial and post-industrial ideologies. The game is different now in the sense that a conceptual ground of practice is laid out globally and artists, working from their own cultural, personal, relational and historical backgrounds can move in to play and there is discourse here.
If an artist wants to the work to connect, then he has to ultimately engage artistic communities with some sense of participation. In a way that is what contemporary art practice is: a sense of connectivity, of empathy and even, of advocacy. In a previous entry I discussed the importance of location, or knowing where your ground is. Location is referentiality, something that you can identify as your origin or home base. Now I also understand the sense of community (having something in common) and connection, in a way of engagement. Like Jamie's Reborn subculture or Ezra's diasporic Ethiopia, every artist identifies the community he or she is wholeheartedly involved in. Because in that way art is not just a matter of wanton self-expression, but a genuine motion, a human gesture, of sharing.
I spoke with Ezra as we both made our way to the ferry docks. He is Ethiopian and had settled in the US since college. He is a painter, a process-based painter who is quite curious about documenting and preserving transience by gestural memory. In a way his work becomes a palimpsest, painted, erased, painted over and his efforts are documented on video and he hopes to have these videos projected on the finished canvases, as echoes of the process. I was quite intrigued about his stories of Ethiopia, its original form of Christianity centered on Axum, and how the art scene there has just picked up abstraction, and how this "belated" sense of modernism has some awkward dynamics in the way art is made and presented there. The last bit about modernism struck home: as a writer on art history I am aware of such moments in Philippine Modern Art, when the Filipino early pioneers pussyfooted with "distortion" at first but quickly found their own unique visual language, whose points of departures and references were usually one or two modern master, but mostly, Picasso.
Long Island-born artist Jamie Diamond's presentation of her work the Reborn subculture was also intriguing. Her studio is the first one that I pass by when I enter Building 110 and her shelves full of life-like newborn dolls and photographs of such made me wonder what was going on. Reborn was featured (quite badly) in a BBC program called "My Fake Baby" and it is an exclusive group of women who make, adorn, and exchange these life-like dolls of vinyl and silicon among a community. Some of the members of this group have experienced a loss of a child and it would be reasonable for them to adopt this practice as a coping mechanism. Yet some are also fertile females who do not have children of their own, and some, like Jamie, are artists interested in making them. Jamie had to find her way into the community for some time and now she is working with some of them, as there are those also wary of her presence.
What I like about her project is that it reminds me of Simon Flores' portrait of the dead child, a genre known in the 19th century as recuerdos de patay. Her work and her very autobiographical approach and sense of communal involvement is very contemporary, also even a bit resonant of the relational aesthetic that I have been suspicious of. I think of my work and I see, in the context of contemporary practice and construct, do I see possibilities of presentation, project planning and framing. I am using the theoretical framework that was indeed so 80's. Its not the practice nor the work that seems deficient and insecure: it is merely finding a way of communicating my intentions to the artistic community that is, by now, quite global.
When it was my time to present my work I did so first by explaining where the Philippines is and where Ilocos is and how these are not just factors of my creative practice, but in a sense, a ground from which I emerged as an artist. In preparing this presentation late into the night and early morning, I found out how much my training as an art history student in fact informs how I choose my subjects, my techniques and formulate projects. Inasmuch as I want to say I am no longer a curator or an art historian because I am now an artist is in reality, a false declaration. Because my interest in the rebulto is not merely artistic, it is also and most importantly a practice of connoisseurship: I cannot but help use research as part of my methodology. What I do reject and criticize is not historian but the speculative critic and theorist. I still maintain that art is not about applications of theory: it is not some praxis. Theory emerges as a manner of making sense the production of the work. What I criticize about curators is their stance of directing or stage-handling art history with the notorious concept of "intervention". They are the proverbial cart that wishes to be in front of the horse. The again I have to think of curator as a role and not a position (something I picked up in 2006 in the Multifaceted Curator Workshop in Jakarta).
I am actually happy to realize this as it somehow eases an internal tension of identity. Somehow posing as a "simple woodcarver" is a very, very bad way of articulating my practice and is bad faith.
So we begin with what are true statements.
My interest in the rebulto is an outcome of connoisseurship training and resonance. I love old stuff, I love history and I love traces of history. This was perhaps formed because of Ilocos, of Vigan: I was never a city boy. I am always drawn to historical objects and historical narratives. I am always curious how history, the past, or the recollected and vestigial past reminds us of our own lifeworld trajectory. I am interested in the cause-effect relationships, of then and now, the continuum therefore of narratives that bridge personal and even generational lifetimes. I love the genealogy of the graven object.
In military science there is a folly called "fighting the last war", where the general adopts strategies that were successful in a previous war but catastrophic in applications to a present conflict. If I had not gone on these artist residencies, and have not decided to engage my work in the Asian region, I would have been still "fighting the last war" in a Cold War scenario of neocolonial and post-industrial ideologies. The game is different now in the sense that a conceptual ground of practice is laid out globally and artists, working from their own cultural, personal, relational and historical backgrounds can move in to play and there is discourse here.
If an artist wants to the work to connect, then he has to ultimately engage artistic communities with some sense of participation. In a way that is what contemporary art practice is: a sense of connectivity, of empathy and even, of advocacy. In a previous entry I discussed the importance of location, or knowing where your ground is. Location is referentiality, something that you can identify as your origin or home base. Now I also understand the sense of community (having something in common) and connection, in a way of engagement. Like Jamie's Reborn subculture or Ezra's diasporic Ethiopia, every artist identifies the community he or she is wholeheartedly involved in. Because in that way art is not just a matter of wanton self-expression, but a genuine motion, a human gesture, of sharing.
Works in progress at the studio.
Carving tools at the studio...well some of them. I still work on the floor, Asian style.
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