Year: 2020
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Sudden Death (Alvaro Enrigue, 2016)
A duel between Caravaggio and Quevedo, or how a tennis match connects worlds. Since when did people actually play tennis? And since when have tennis shoes been around, today the most socially acceptable and most widespread footwear worldwide? And how did you make the balls? The Mexican author Álvaro Enrigue, born 1969 in Guadalajara, México,…
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David Medalla (1938-2020)
Peripatetic Filipino artist David Medalla, a pioneer of kinetic sculpture and participatory art performance, died in Manila on Monday, December 28. He was 82. He developed an early reputation as a poet and wünderkind during the immediate post-war period, and was recommended by American poet Mark van Doren to study Literature at Columbia University in…
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Protected: Origins of the US-Educated Filipino as Modernist Gadfly (1903-1946)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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The Outsider Speaking for the Other
A serial reading of Andre Breton, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster, might give the impression of a direct intellectual lineage. That’s not what I’m going to do here. I’d like to think of this as a commentary from the sidelines; of what would have been possible had these thinkers sat…
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Three Painters from Bandung
Tondi Hasibuan Overly rigid attempts at comparisons to Picasso do not do justice to Tondi Hasibuan’s incredibly multifaceted work. The stylistic caesuras are too abrupt. Forms reminiscent of Picasso’s late period pieces are given a new lease on life with reinventions from the fund of the artists imagination. A Fine Arts Professor, Tondi Hasibuan’s ambivalent…
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Protected: A Thread out of the Labyrinth
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The Furnace of Kings
Carlos IV monument in Plaza Mayor, Intramuros c. 1898. Photo: John Tewell Collection. The statue of Carlos IV is one of few colonial era monuments that stand today in the old city of Manila called Intramuros. The original purpose of its commission, who made it, and the story of its construction have been largely forgotten,…
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The Myth of a Degree Zero Moment
Degree Zero at MoMA provides counterpoints to the understanding of drawing’s role in post-war art. Gathering 75 works, made between 1948 and 1966, from Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock, Alfredo Volpi, and many others, as well as recent acquisitions by artists such as Uche Okeke, the exhibition freshly examines the commonly perceived…
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The Tormented Square
Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1913. Kazimir Malevich was clear in his intentions to discover the “zero point” of painting; that is, painting that does not represent life outside its surface. He wanted to completely abandon depicting reality and instead invent a new world of shapes and forms. In his 1927 book The Non-Objective World, he…
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The Waves
I first saw The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katasushika Hokusai (1760–1849) ten years ago during his first retrospective in Europe at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau. I had to line up early on closing day to see an exhibition that was always packed. I saw the print again this year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in…
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Notable Lectures on Zoom
Indonesia’s Genocide: New Perspectives 55 Years On hosted by New York Southeast Asia Network, Oct 7, 2020, 8 PM EST I treat the study of the effects of Cold War strategies and policies of the United States on Southeast Asia as an extension of my research interest which focuses on the cultural legacies of American…
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The Metamorphosis of Narcissus as a Great Artist
on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s profile of Anselm Kiefer I first saw Anselm Kiefer’s artwork as an art student in Berlin nine years ago. It was the same fighter plane made from sheets of lead described by Karl Ove Knaussgard in his New York Times article published last February 2020. Exhibited inside the Hamburger Bahnhof, the…
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Social Documents
A question of authenticity links the cases presented by Nicole Fleetwood, Leigh Raiford, and Sally Stein. They all compare and contrast photographers against their subject or with other photographers to emphasize the power of documentary interventions and mishaps in shaping perception for a particular milieu. Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” has been argued to be authentic…
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Hooded Trauma
On the offensive figures of Philip Guston The decision by four major museums to delay the retrospective of painter Philip Guston has generated renewed interest in his controversial life. Perhaps because he is still often ranked with American abstract expressionist painters that many were flustered when museum directors deemed his images unfit for public consumption,…
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Pushing against the roof of the world: ruangrupa’s prospects for documenta fifteen
My latest article about ruangrupa on Third Text:http://thirdtext.org/cristobal-ruangrupa “A concern in many texts of Indonesian mythology is the need to raise the sky. This appears in myths from elsewhere, too, but the forms they take are not as extreme as in Indonesian stories, in which heaven and Earth are so closely jammed together that even…
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The Manila Syndrome
Filipino labor importation and US Cold War Diplomacy A month after New York went into COVID-19 lockdown, one of my boyhood friends, a Filipino nurse now working in the US, sent me a special report by Aljazeera which reveals the staggering high attrition rate of Filipino nurses in the frontlines of the battle. “Keep me…
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Notes on not publishing a book from a really extremist ultra-leftist
Guy Debord’s Biography in 45 Notes Think of how your book would look if you published a book. If it looks anything like any other book, do not publish that book. If by some reason you think of a book that has never been done before then caution yourself from thinking about what that book…
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Visual echoes
How many ways has photography changed our view of nature and how has our overwhelming dependence on photography impacted our ability to experience nature and our efforts to preserve it? Robin Kelsey offers a trenchant critique: we relish the view of nature more than nature itself; photographs have “obscured the process by which land becomes…
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A decent photo of Montauk Point
Over the summer break, I visited Montauk Point on the easternmost end of Long Island and I was intrigued by the information written on a tourist pamphlet that lighthouses were the very first public works project undertaken by the United States. The lighthouse along with the one at Camp Henry, as pointed out in “Conjuring…
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Art writing needs to be activist
I find myself writing more frequently about photographs and writing about photographic exhibitions and the archive. Thinking about the photograph’s historical, theoretical, architectural, and urban contexts and attendant social issues became more insightful and rewarding in light of extended isolation from any art world experience. Time away from galleries and museums was good but I’m…
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Heaven in a wildflower
Miguel Abreu Gallery’s first post-COVID quarantine exhibition pits painting versus photography. Brooklyn-based photographer Eileen Quinlan captures the nightmare of being marooned in isolation while Cheyney Thompson’s stenciled paintings complement the same sensibility by approximating the waves imprinted on driftwood. Quinlan’s snapshot of a wilderness glade, entitled Curtain Call, contemplates death and regeneration with an austere…
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Blindness and reflection
I recall Aristotle’s De Anima in Geoffrey Batchen’s article about his thrift store locket. A commercial photographic material, the locket was once deemed lacking in “intellectual and aesthetic qualities beyond sentimental kitsch,” thus making it unfit for purposes of official history (33). The invisibility of such low-cultural objects to institutional analysis nonetheless paved the way…
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Listening to Images
Campt, Tina, Listening to images. (Durham : Duke University Press, 2017) I found Tina Campt’s use of the term “vernacular photography” thematically apt. Though she never mentions it, the etymology of “vernacular” is linked to slavery. From the OED: “vernacular”, early 17th century: from Latin vernaculus ‘domestic, native’ (from verna ‘home-born slave’) + -ar.* Used in…
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From the Secret Files of American History
A response to Black Reconstruction in America (1935) by W.E.B Du Bois There are significant parallels between the events following the American Civil War and our current political situation. Does this mean that history is repeating itself in some momentous way or is it just a case of the same old shit happening all along?…
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Feeling Photography/Penetraing Pictures
Elspeth H. Brown and Thuy Phy, Feeling Photography. Durham : Duke University Press, 2014 In his letters, Franz Kafka projected his uncertainties on the photograph of his fiancé and wrote how her “little photograph produces as much pleasure as pain.” Kafka continues: “It does not fade away, it does not disintegrate like a living thing;…
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Reading American Photographs (Alan Trachtenberg, 1989)
ALAN TRACHTENBERG. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill and Wang. 1989. Pp. xxi, 326 Trachtenberg’s book begins with a good reminder that the concept of indexical images existed well before the invention of the first publicly available photograph in the mid-19th century. The fascination for projected images…
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Hospital ministry under coronavirus lockdown
My father, Gerry, is a veteran missionary for a small local Christian congregation in the Philippines that has held Sunday service at a hospital for the last fourteen years. Assisted by my mother Beth, he has done missionary work in various workplaces since the 1980s. His current post in the Palliative Care Unit, an office…
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Protected: Deciphering the Indus Script
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Geronimo Cristobal 