kultura

in defense of (art) criticism!

via thepoc.net’s Metakritiko section.

I don’t know Angelo Suarez, Gelo, personally, but I appreciate his (virtual) presence in the way that I tend to love every other person who has the gall/temerity/balls man/woman/gay to speak his mind even when it’s unpopular. The thing is, there was nothing unpopular about Gelo’s review of Pablo Gallery’s Chabet, Tan, Ilarde exhibit.In fact, knowing the kind of consciousness Gelo brings to art, this was a pretty good review – good, being, he liked the exhibit – like, being, he didn’t dismiss the exhibit – didn’t dismiss, being, he actually wrote about it.

Which in these shores is something we should be thankful for, right? Here, where the conversations on art – any art – are praised when they are praise releases, where the critical bent is, i.e., the good review that speaks of the bad in art, is always deemed unproductive and useless. The goal kasi is to sell art.

This goal is what Gelo hits at with http://thepoc.net/metakritiko/metakritiko-features/4794-conceptualism-fellatio-a-the-admission-of-the-futility-of-resistance-as-a-form-of-resistance.html Conceptualism,fellatio, and the admission of futility of resistance as a form of resistance. On that level, the question for the spectator should become: do I agree with Gelo? My answer, as a spectator, is no. I agree with Antares, from whom the more intelligent comments on the Gelo’s article came (and who should really be writing art reviews, please please?). In light of capital, resistance isn’t necessarily futile, and to insiston futility is to place one’s critique very clearly on the side of capital and its contingent oppressions. Parang, ay walang nang resistance, so ‘wag na lang?

But what has become more obvious in the aftermath of Gelo’s article is that this isn’t even the question that’s being asked, and there is a refusal to even begin a discussion on the crucial things about contemporary Philippine art that Gelo raises.

the rest here!

kultura

Boob slips in the age of technology, Or the victimization of Anne

If there’s anything that Anne Curtis’ swimsuit malfunction highlights about us all, it’s that we are ill-equipped to handle the advance of technology. And I mean, all of us, those who hold cameras in our hands, and those who love being in pictures. In this sense, Anne Curtis is a victim of both the one who shoots, and she who has enjoyed being shot, and even makes a living out of it.

Because in fact, the victimization of Anne could’ve began with the fact that the show’s production allowed people to watch the show with cameras and camera-phones in hand – the more famous shot of Anne has her dancing on stage, right breast exposed, a gazillion hands with camera-phones aimed at her from the audience below. A less famous shot is one that’s taken from the other side of the stage, in a higher position, maybe a tree?,  and has Anne being carried by Sam Milby, in the same dance number.

The fact is, we have allowed cameras like these in public exhibitions such as this, because it’s free pre-publicity: in the age of Twitter and Facebook, everything is a status update and photo upload away. Propriety, obviously in this case, be damned. (more…)

komentaryo

Anong problema sa walang harapan?

Full of themselves, is what ABS-CBN seems to be, after the presidential and vice-presidential candidates cancelled on their tandem debates for Harapan 2010. In truth, if I were these candidates, I would’ve backed out too, in favor of a miting de avance or campaign sortie in a far-flung province or city. The point is simple: who watches TV, a debate of all things, and who will go out and listen to the music, watch the fireworks, see artistas on a stage?

What this points to, quite simplistically, are markets, is access, is social divisiveness.And the middle class illusion that everyone has equal access to technology.

After all, ABS-CBN’s disappointments is borne mostly of its celebration of its use of new technology that has people actively responding to the debates they have been able to mount so far.

But where I work, teachers who lost their television sets to Ondoy have yet to buy new ones – it is in fact, far down in their list of appliances to buy. Where I work, we also don’t have easy access to the internet. Where I work, a debate is the last thing that will spell the different between voting for Noynoy and voting for Gibo and voting for Villar. Where I work, what spells a difference in presence and promises.

And this is my basis for thinking that ABS-CBN is all hot air here – it cannot, will not, should not speak as if this is the loss of the greater public. There is nothing extraordinary about the debates they have come up with. It does generate interest, yes, and we do watch and make candidates’ mistakes and fab answers our status updates. But that doesn’t mean it does a lot. In fact it fails horribly at asking the right questions, or even talking at length about the more important issue that might actually solve poverty.

Instead, half the time, it’s all punchlines and laughter and sensational statements, the status quos that we live with. Harapan 2010 will not go in depth about globalization or imperialism, America’s presence or foreign ownership of land, agrarian reform or workers’ rights, because that would point a finger at the industry that it is part of, the company it is created within, ABS-CBN as cultural empire, the Lopezes as oligarchy.

If anything, Harapan 2010, while informative, yes, and interesting and fun for the social classes ready to laugh at and praise our candidates, is also about television ratings, and the social and corporate responsibility of a media organization such as ABS-CBN. That in itself is replete with meanings, and cannot be dismissed as simply about being in the service of the Filipino. Utang na loob.

kultura

Reconsidering Identity in the Aquilizan retrospective

a version of this was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Arts and Books Section, March 15 2010.

I almost balked at the sight of the U.P. Vargas Museum from afar. I was there for the retrospective exhibit of Alfredo Juan and Isabel Aquilizan, but was unprepared for the fanfare of a book launch and a grand re-opening. Once inside the museum though, I realized I would’ve regretted not seeing this retrospective in the context of precisely this moment: when the University of the Philippines administration (with no less than the President and Chancellor present) celebrates the presence of, and a book on, a politician’s contributions to the University. In the midst of the heat (closed windows, bright lights, no air conditioning), and talks of how much the politician donated for the museum’s renovation, the Aquilizans’ works seemed to be in the most perfect space, my spectatorship in the most perfect moment.

Here, in the midst of a celebration obviously spent on, within state education that has come to disenfranchised poor students, the Aquilizans’ retrospective exhibit Stock became more powerful. The opening night of the whole museum, its anti-thesis; the exhibit, a response to the party itself.

Identity and the State U

Because while the Aquilizans’ installations talk about the usual migrant concerns of keeping memory and wanting to remember, finding identity and redefining it, these works also question precisely the materialism(s) of the world, our own found need to accumulate and consume in order to find our identities, and how we limit people to identities they might not want.

This dynamic between the material and the human, the things we hold in our hands and the identities we create, is what makes this exhibit more interesting in the context of the museum. The U.P. Vargas Museum is the University’s pride, and that night it was up for show: look at us, here is the art we have, we are the best there is, we are fine.

But as the Aquilizans’ works prove, we are farthest from being fine. There is nothing stable about the identities we keep, because it can only be forced into constantly changing, redefined by our loyalties and betrayals, and what it is we disregard. It’s everything and violent, everything and sad. (more…)

kultura

Meat h(a)unts you in Bacolor exhibit

It’s disconcerting for sure, even strange. But is it funny?

Felix Bacolor’s Meet Your Meat (Gallery 1, West Gallery, West Avenue) had the latter as goal, and yet it isn’t so much a sense of humor that this exhibit requires. Maybe a sense of irony? Maybe just a snicker – the physiological act, not the candy bar.

Because in fact, eating will be the last thing on your mind once you see Meet Your Meat. From outside the tiny gallery, the amount of meat across the space is startling; within the gallery, it is everything and disconcerting.

On the main wall are three huge images of stark white trays with individual slabs of raw meat: a drumstick here, some steaks there. The paleness of the chicken beside the bloody redness of the beef brought on an involuntary crinkling of the nose: images of raw meat, I realize, can only evoke memories of wet markets, with its ironic stench of freshness.

Smaller versions of these digitally modified images of raw meat make up the Warhol-inspired bigger work in front of the gallery. While this is a little less disconcerting because it isn’t extraordinarily larger than life, the discomfort does lie in the fact of its smallness, i.e., it almost seems like something that we would still possibly eat, although we’d fear growing a finger given what looks to be the size of a genetically modified animal.

But what does evoke an amount of fear in this exhibit is the stainless steel meat grinder that seems to be centerpiece. From outside the gallery, the grinder atop a wooden table looks like it’s spewing out raw meat in its various shades of red to pale pink. It doesn’t just require a crinkled nose, it begets a certain amount of disgust. Inside the gallery, the disgust turns into astonishment: what a good pair of hands can do with clay and some color.

On opposite walls of the gallery are two smaller works. One is an installation of a stainless steel meat tray made in China, which evokes the coldness of raw, unencumbered, meat. The other is what looks like a puzzle from our childhoods: cartoon-like images of a pig, cat and cow are cut up into 16 squares scrambled across a square frame. The goal should be to rearrange the pieces and complete the puzzle. In Bacolor’s installation, the manner in which the animals are cut up are telling of the meat parts we end up eating: the chicken’s legs and wings and breast, the pig’s snout and belly, the cow’s ribs and loin. The interest is necessarily sustained by a work such as this, given one’s gut reaction to “solve” a puzzle, yes?

At the same time, an exhibit such as this can really only be puzzling. On the one hand, there is the surprise and astonishment that sustains interest; on the other, there is the gut reaction of disgust that makes it too easy to walk out of, or not even walk into, the gallery.

One’s reaction to the real images of raw meat vis a vis the cartoon painting seems like a difficult test you can’t pass. Or, given that there’s no delicious cooked food in sight, i.e., no food as we know it, this could also be a cruel joke: we are being reprimanded as meat-eaters, being judged for what you do to those poor cartoon animals, being told of what it is you really are eating before it becomes your food.

In this sense, the gut reaction of disgust, the imagined smell, is a critique not so much of the exhibit, as it is of the meat-eater-self. That self that doesn’t care much for the meat one eats, has taken it at (cooked) face value all this time, without thinking of wherefore it comes and why. To say that this is a critique of capitalism is a stretch, but so is to say that it’s funny. Maybe in the end, all it becomes is the strangest of mirrors. The kind that reminds us as well that we are nothing but meat, just not the kind that’s made for eating. Though maybe the worst kind of animal.