2. how is it that this is NOT the We Are Not Aimless exhibit? nope, none of those paintings are part of it, not that gallery set-up, nothing. how does this even make sense?
3. i was at your gallery for close to an hour, even used the comfort room while there, and three of your gallery people saw me. NONE of them told me i was looking at the wrong exhibit, or the right exhibit with the wrong title, or the right title with the wrong works. in the galleries more respectful of guests, basic but non-obvious information is offered. none was offered me here. i took that to mean things were obvious.
4. had the gallery people told me i was looking at a stockroom exhibit, I would’ve promptly walked out o there: what a waste of time to look at works on gallery walls that have no point for being other than being unsold.
5. had your people said go on to the second floor, that’s where the REAL exhibit is, i would’ve stayed; had they said it was outside in the heat, i would’ve walked through it still. i spend too much time looking at art, taking curatorship and works seriously. i do so for no other reason than to value what’s here: people spent time money energy / blood sweat tears for any exhibit to be set-up. i respect that by spending time with the work.
6. i’ve reviewed you before eh? been through your gallery often enough, even the guard by the gates of Whitespace knows me. i’ve been doing the art beat for the past two years. never NEVER has this happened to me. nor has it happened that no one would point out to the girl taking 10 million pictures that this exhibit ain’t what she thinks. goodness gracious what a waste of time.
and so i promise that i will stop wasting time at your gallery. i shall boycott you all this year. maybe that doesn’t matter to you. but then again, that only means you don’t know what matters.
***
I’d like to apologize to the curator of the real We Are Not Aimless exhibit. That review wasn’t written out of stupidity; if you read it at all, it was an example of how seriously I take art / curatorship / exhibits. I take responsibility for it, and I’m sorry for whatever stress it caused you.
I’d also like to apologize to GMANewsOnline which put up the story and had to receive the flack first. Lesson learned. It won’t ever happen again.
The rewriting of fairy and folk tales into more politically correct versions is an old task, one that’s been done by the best fictionists (think Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber 1979) and poets (think Anne Sexton’s Transformations 1971), one that’s been analyzed by every kind of feminist there is. We all generally agree: tales are archetypal stories that limit what we can be. Stereotyping is the basic accusation against these stories we’ve grown up on; current cultural theory tells us this doesn’t just happen for femaleness but also for maleness, gayness, every other sexuality in between.
The more dominant and overwrought critique of course happens for women’s images in fairytales; it’s one that has is proven by those of us who at some point thought it true that we are damsels to be saved from distress by a man; it is one that has as proof generations of female children who believe that there wasn’t, isn’t much she can do without a man. It might be said: what a stretch. I say: have you lived my life?
It’s in this context that I enjoy every Disney Princess Movie there is, long before that label even began to be used. This doesn’t include Snow White, Cinderella and Aurora’s (Sleeping Beauty) first incarnations as traditional princesses; it doesn’t include Ariel’s first incarnation as the Little Mermaid who barely goes through suffering in the way she does in the original Brothers Grimm story. Maybe these stories were Disney’s learning curve.
Because by the time we were treated to Belle in Beauty and the Beast we were also shown someone who was reading, who knew of the world and her freedomsbecause she read books. She stands up to the beast, responds to him kindly but firmly, is unafraid. Jasmine in Aladdin was barely a step forward, with a title that speaks of the male lead instead of the female one, and with the princess’s conventional rebellion against royal duties easily and simply presented to be about getting out of the castle, and going on a carpet ride, too. By the time Pocahontas and Mulan showed in theaters, Disney seemedto have found its niche in creating new and different images of being female, of dreaming, of freedom for its audience — kids and adults alike.
This is my context for the movie Tangled, a retelling of Rapunzel, a reassessment of the fairy tale that names all its silences and puts it up for examination. Right here is the complexity in this reconfiguration of the story of Rapunzel: nothing is easy here, everything is complicated, and almost overpowers the simplicity of family and dreaming which might seem to be its easy stereotypical point, but isn’t all that’s here.
Because there is freedom from want like we don’t know it: Rapunzel lived in that tower and filled her days with every possible activity within its walls. Here it becomes crucial that Rapunzel as a teenager was doing the more conventional chores of cleaning house and baking alongside new(er) images of female hobbies: reading up on the sciences and the world, playing the guitar, painting across her tower’s interiors from the walls to the ceiling, mural upon mural. In the latter, Rapunzel is allowed an amount of self-reflexivity, a skill that’s always difficult.
She draws herself looking upon the world. For someone who hasn’t been seen by the world, she knew what she must look like to it. She knows of the world and rationalizes the fact that she’s kept safe from it: Rapunzel was thankfully not stupid, nor was she naive in the conventional sense. Her naivete isn’t borne of innocence; it’s one that’s premised on possibility.
So when Flynn Rider finds his way up the tower, bad guy as he is, Rapunzel didn’t see him as savior, as he was about possibility: she was going to use him to find her way beyond the tower. When Flynn becomes a real guy distinct from those wanted posters with his face on it, Rapunzel didn’t simply think they were falling in love, as she thought this would prove the world wrong about him. Because her naivete is such, Rapunzel isn’t like most princesses we’ve seen in Disney retellings: she wasn’t stupidly in love, didn‘t require that we suspend belief in the process of watching her character unfold.
Instead we are enamored by her lack of self-consciousness, we are drawn to her emotional turmoil. This she had plenty of, a new and funny aspect of the retold Rapunzel, and so real given the fact that she’s been locked up in a tower for 18 years. Her psychosis bordering on the crazy, her ability at a combination of joy and guilt, ecstatic celebration of the outside world and the sinking feeling that it might end in pain and suffering, all seems real and probable for Rapunzel. None of it is stuff for fairytales.
rapunzel
When she finally gets angry at the mother she always new, evil as she is, it is all real, too. And when her hair meets it’s logical end, we were set up to think that it didn’t matter after all, the hair isn’t all that Rapunzel was about.
She was also about being barefoot, a wonderful image for these times of shoe craziness among females, starting them on the obsession younger than ever before, even in their version(s) of heels! (Good gracious.) Rapunzel wasn’t just barefoot, she had none of the princess-y qualities we see in animation, in the female protagonists on TV and romantic comedy movies, in romance novels and chick lit.
Here is her value in the midst of popular productions of femininity and womanhood: Tangled de-centers Rapunzel as a girl who simply dreams. Instead she is created to become the girl with short hair, the one with average looks, the one who does art and plays the guitar, walks barefoot, enjoys the simplest of things, and in the process actually lives. The point is that this girl lives, and her life isn’t a fairytale at all.
these were up elsewhere that i love because they are untouched, unexpurgated, and i’m left to fawn or freak out and everything in between. art can only be about how it makes you feel eh?
i remember growing up and being told that i must have a mole somewhere on either foot, because i couldn’t stay put. gala, lakwatsera, may nunal sa paa.
Now this obviously cuts across networks, so that is its limitation as well: I can’t quite watch two soap operas at the same time, though I will try all the time. There is no list that isn’t biased, and this one for Pinoy TV and showbiz in 2010 is also a measure of my own personal taste for that which is different, and new, and sometimes a bit inane.
John Lloyd Cruz in a genre all his own. Because he can apparently sell everything from biogesic to fruit juice to crackers, tuna to pancit canton, and just might have singlehandedly brought back Greenwich Pizza in our lives. Of course he has a whole barkada in those commercials, but really now, that’s every other barkada we have. What works in the end is that John Lloyd is so willing and able to make a fool of himself, and to create this image of being the every guy in a co-ed barkada. And even when we hear him admit to girlfriends, and we hear rumors of vaginal locks in his life, in the end all that remains really is John Lloyd as the every boy, like a Juan dela Cruz without the indio or the konyo, and just a whole lot of middle class charm.
An Aljur seems to be in order. Aljur Abrenica opened the Cosmopolitan Bachelor Bash for 2010, with the confidence that we still rarely see in our men after Richard Gomez decided he could just row his way in an ad and wear briefs in a fashion show. Sam Milby just lost so much luster compared to Aljur, also because the former just seemed so darn uncomfortable the whole time he was on stage; it also didn’t help Sam that the new and improved Christian Bautista came before him, who undoubtedly new to strut his new, uh, assets. Aljur meanwhile, had us asking for more, and we wanted to see him on that stage again. After seeing what seemed like hundreds of topless men, that can only be a measure of Aljur’s presence. He’s playing Machete in a GMA soap for 2011; you know what channel I’ll be on for that timeslot.
The Currency of the Kantoboys. If you don’t know who they are, then you are missing something. Composed of Luis Manzano, Vhong Navarro, Billy Crawford (without the Joe), and John Lloyd, and an ASAP XV original, the Kanto Boys go against the grain of on the one hand the now defunct Hunks, and on the other just the standard metrosexual. There are no perfect pretty boys here, instead there is imperfection, one that’s borne of silliness, and these four boys’ willingness to make fools of themselves, with poker faces throughout any performance. It’s an anti-macho creation that just works. That they remain cute — if not become cuter — is well, just their luck. (more…)
