Year: 2019
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Cain at Abel (Lino Brocka, 1982)
Sometimes the third world film-maker finds himself before an illiterate public, swamped by American, Egyptian or Indian serials, and karate films, and he has to go through all this, it is this material that he has to work on, to extract from it the elements of a people who are still missing (Lino Brocka). (Gilles…
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The Cave (Jose Saramago, 2000)
“Man never sees things themselves, but always only their shadows”, Plato once philosophized in his allegory of the cave. And before Saramago’s hero turns his back on the shadow on the wall of the cave and finds the exit from the cave, he must fear, doubt and hope for a long time – and the…
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Perjalanan ke Berlin
Pekan terakhir ini saya mendapat hak istimewa bepergian ke Berlin, ibu kota Jerman. Anda dapat membayangkan bahwa pergi ke kota Eropa mana pun menarik, tetapi bagi seorang geek sejarah seperti saya ini adalah kota yang saya nantikan lebih dari yang lain. Berlin adalah naik kereta cepat dua jam dari Hamburg yang mencakup 179 mil. Sebagai…
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Throw Away Day
A new documentary on the life and work of abstract expressionism’s invisible man, Clyfford Still and the quest to reclaim one of his paintings in an auction at the Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Sale A few minutes after four and the day slipped into darkness, signalling stagehands at the Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale to finalize…
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The Great Cosmic Detour
On the writings of Kidlat Tahimik When Kidlat Tahimik was named as one of the recipients of the Prince Claus Awards in 2018, I felt two contradictory reactions when I was asked to write a short biographical note about him for the Nikkei Asian Review. On one hand, for a filmmaker who has produced mostly…
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Havelock in the Boondocks
Many accounts of Homer’s life circulated in classical antiquity, the most prevalent being that he was a blind bard from Ionia, in present-day Turkey. His biography, written by Pseudo-Herodotus is now considered legend, the story of a blind man trapped in eternal darkness, being led to a gathering of people to recite his epics.[1] Perhaps it was a…
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Stylistic Negligence
Entry for Critical Dictionary after Georges Bataille Sty·lis·tic /stīˈlistik/ adjective. of or concerning style, especially literary style. “the stylistic conventions of magazine stories.” Origin mid 19th century: from stylist, suggested by German stilistisch. Neg·li·gence /ˈneɡləjəns/ noun: negligence; failure to take proper care in doing something. Origin Middle English: via Old French from Latin negligentia, from…
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A Tale of Two Modernisms
Modernism was first conceived by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867–1916) who first published the term modernismo in his essay in the Chilean Revista de arte y cultural. He discussed how author Ricardo Contreas was using “absolute modernism in expression through his synthetic style”. This might as well describe most of the works in “Sur Moderno”,…
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Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015)
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel begins The Sympathizer with a riddle “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man with two faces”. What is he? Might we ask. The line was spoken by a double agent working for the North Vietnamese Communists as well as for the United States during and shortly after the…
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Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)
Ari Aster’s debut feature Hereditary was celebrated as if one had reinvented slice bread. I was skeptical but he was someone who had something interesting to say. He was able to articulate that interesting thing in Midsommar. The horror genre was being reinvented; a good thing but its not slice bread. The promotion materials made…
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Documents of Dissent
„Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden”“Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for dissenters.” ― Rosa Luxemburg The artistic practice of Minerva Cuevas invests on the motif of dissent against the powers that be. She has collected material on public resistance in Mexico City for over a decade. From the recordings of marches, gatherings, and…
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Defacement painting as memorial
The Guggenheim exhibition has achieved for Basquiat’s Defacement (1983) a level of relevance achieved by few paintings: a memorial to violence with potency to comment on our current social crisis. Picasso’s Guernica and Goya’s Third of May 1808 belong to a rare class of paintings that have the ability to draw emotions even from people…
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Tales for winter nights
Reading some of Olga Tokarczuk greatest hits Polish author Olga Tokarczuk once compared her books to music videos. This analogy applies both to her collection of short stories and novels: They are self-contained, and the narratives are dense and short, so there is not even a moment of digression. The narratives vividly construct imaginative vignettes of ordinary…
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The way we hear
The following article is a response to the curatorial notes by Jay Ticar for Whether you hear it or not exhibit at Altromondo Chino Roces which ran from October – November 2019 One of the earliest things that came up with my discussions with Jay Ticar, the artist-curator of this exhibition, was the statement that…
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Walter Benjamin’s Breadmaking
On the versatile interests of Walter Benjamin and making a living out of writing While revisiting some passages in Radio Benjamin published by Verso in 2014, I realized that I never once examined Walter Benjamin’s variegated interests. Specifically, how and why do his works exhibit a wide breadth of interests that borders on a diffuseness…
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The show everyone loves to hate
Short review of the Whitney Biennale The Whitney Biennale is a show everyone loves to hate. A general discontent directed towards important exhibitions hangs over any appreciation of individual works. As in, what else can art do to change the world? In a show where most visitors spend less than a minute on average to…
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Lucas Arruda at David Zwirner
Lucas Arruda grapples with what its means to paint through tradition in his first solo exhibition in New York, ‘Deserto-Modelo’ Lucas Arruda, 36, mentioned in an interview with a Sao Paolo newspaper that his paintings are inspired by myths and tales. This maybe understood in the context of a pedestrian comparison to Mark Rothko or…
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North Atlantic White
A color walk piece inspired by William Burroughs. Originally written for Emmanuel Iduma’s class on narrative criticism. One similarity that struck me with Burroughs and a Filipino painter named Juan Luna is that they both killed their wives. In Luna it was the heat of passion and jealousy but for Burroughs it was the blur…
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Short descriptions of two New York exhibitions
1. Marta Minujín, The Neon Tunnel, from La Menesunda Reloaded, 1965. New Museum 2019. 95 words. The vista to the tunnel is covered by tinted Plexiglas with the lower part cut out to the shape of a human figure. Only one person at a time can enter the tunnel measuring two spans. Decked with a fragile tangle…
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Synthesis of styles in Willem de Kooning
De Kooning was the last to die from the legendary post-war generation, now known under the heading of Action Painters or Abstract Expressionists. He spawned together with this generation, an internationally recognizable American art. Because of this achievement, I am surprised to recall that De Kooning is actually European in origin. Willem de Kooning was…
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Haibun (9/11/2019)
Poets whose work open in silence; musicians who call silence the most perfect sound; painters whose images find their end in pure black or pure white – the white noise of nothingness accompanies my path. The attempt to banish expression has become downright suicidal. Was it da Vinci who first said he wanted to capture…
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On Criticism
Whether criticism functions as a creative activity or a technical component of artistic creation, it always refers to an object that needs to be evaluated. Criticism is always a concrete response or a mediation that leads us to what is possible in a work of art. I’d like to point out first a, perhaps, a…
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Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)
Sans Soleil is an amazing visual experience, as simple as it is complex, a large canvas where tracks seem to be launched in all directions: reflections, multiple bridges between themes, places and times. Everything, though, seems to turn in a concentric circle around a central message. It is a beautiful, fascinating enigma that quickly puts…
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Gabriel García Márquez: Journalistic works 1948-1952.
“Journalism is my vocation,” Gabriel Garcia Márquez has explained in countless interviews. In the great literary works of the Nobel Prize winner of 1982 one often feels the tightrope walk between hard-researched facts and the slightly exotic poetry of Latin America, which results in the so-called “magical realism”. How extensive the journalistic oeuvre of today’s…
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Georg Baselitz
All of them came to the event of the season, Georg Baselitz’ exhibition at the Haus der Kunst – the politicians, the chic people, the renowned critics and the simple art enthusiasts. Large-format paintings from important phases of his fifty-year work now fill the representative ground floor rooms, with the so-called “Black Paintings” and the…
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Jazz and Painting
Romare Bearden (1912–1988), Empress of the Blues, 1974, acrylic and pencil on paper and printed paper, 36 x 48 inches, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase in part through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment The relationship between music and art has been a very intimate one since the Romantic period. The early…
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Andreas Gursky
Museum Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf23 September 2012 – 13 January 2013 While photography paved the way for the emancipation of painting from its traditional image function about 100 years ago, photography in the digital media age seems to be able to emancipate itself from merely reproducing what it has seen by way of reportage. Andreas Gursky is…
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Constantin Brancusi exhibition at the Pompidou
Constantin Brancusi, born in Romania in 1876, in a village in the foothills of the Carpathians, had left his homeland in 1904 and had come to Paris via Budapest, Vienna, Munich and Zurich. He was a gifted sculptor, even before he arrived in the artists’ colony on Montparnasse. Auguste Rodin became aware of him and…
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The dialectic of creative renewal
Under the motto: “Burning Down The House”, the 10th Gwangju Biennale manages the balancing act between memory and the future Men and women in white dresses and black blindfolds are crossing a public square. They carry dark-veiled boxes with the bones of their relatives. Silently they deposit the mortal remains in two rusty steel containers…
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The disappearance of the future from pop culture
About Mark Fisher’s essay collection “Ghosts of my Life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures “This is nowhere, and it’s forever.” The sentence quoted by British cultural journalist and theorist Mark Fisher on the first pages of his essay collection Ghosts of my Life from a BBC science fiction series describes the perspective of…
Geronimo Cristobal 