Year: 2021
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Gleaning from the Archives of the Pensionado Story
From 1903 to 1943, over 14,000 Filipino scholars were sent to the United States to study under a U.S. colonial scholarship called the Pensionado Program. The story of the program was documented in 1943 by Kenneth Munden, Assistant Archivist in the Division of Interior Department Archives, at the behest of the office of the Secretary…
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Christian Kruik Van Adrichem’s Theatrum Terrae Sanctae: A 16th Century Mnemonic Pilgrimage to Jerusalem
Abstract The essay examines an original map of Jerusalem drawn in 1584 by Christian Kruik van Adrichem (1533-1585), a Dutch theologian and humanist. The fold-out map, which was intended to be a historical and devotional guide based on accounts of travelers, portrayed an imagined Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, including the City of David…
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Rodel Tapaya Info
Profile for http://www.rodeltapayaart.com Rodel Tapaya Filipino, Born 1980 Rodel Tapaya’s alternative forms of understanding time and place refuse to see indigenous epistemologies and storytelling traditions as anachronisms. While folklore is often disparaged as a vestige of superstitious thought, Tapaya suggests them as a mode of resistance to the primacy of modern subjectivity and modernist form.“My…
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La Collectioneusse (Eric Rohmer, 1969)
While Eric Rohmer’s cinema is appreciated for its study of human mores, his approach to art is still little known. However, there is a Matisse in a room in Pauline à la Plage (1983), Mondrian’s Neo-plastic architecture in Nuits de la plein lune (1984), or even a Picasso in Rendezvous in Paris (1995). ). The…
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These fragments I have shored against my ruins on BROADCAST
Teodulo Protomartir is recognized as a vanguard of Philippine photography, even though little biographical research has been conducted on his life. Since submitting this article to the editors, new information has come to light through the generous input of those who knew him and followed his work. I hope to include these insights in a…
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On Artist Interviews
Originally titled “Remaining in conversation,” this is a short introduction to the interview section of Holding Everything Dear (SVA, 2021). The artist interview in Western art has its roots in the dialogue tradition exemplified by Francisco de Hollanda’s Da pintura antigua (1548) and Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogo della Pittura (1557), both of which are important sources…
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The Case of Daniel Folkmar
This is a digest of Campomanes, Oscar V. “Images of Filipino Racialization in the Anthropological Laboratories of the American Empire: The Case of Daniel Folkmar.” PMLA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1692-699. Accessed November 3, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25501971 American Studies scholar Oscar Campomanes brought my attention to the work in physical anthropology of Daniel Folkmar (1861–1932). Like…
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From the Archive: Dean C. Worcester Photographic Collection
The counter-gaze in the Real Photo Postcard (RPPC) of an “Igorote group” “Igorote Group”, Photo: Dean Worcester Collection- No names provided Among the recently digitized photographs from the Dean C. Worcester Photographic Collection is an RPPC of a group of six young Igorots. Nothing much is written about the Igorots on the front or verso of…
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Holding Everything Dear (2021)
Wrote a short section introduction to Holding Everything Dear (2021), a compilation of selected writings from Degree Critical edited by Jessica Holmes, Lune Ames, and Cigdem Asatekin. Foreword by David Levi Strauss and afterword by Nancy Princenthal. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dgVMcIXx29uHVCT3DV6Z5vLEH-8l4d_T/view
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Perpetual Motion on Broadcast
My recent piece on tragedy and displacement in the work of Katsushika Hokusai, Constancio Bernardo, and Josef Albers on Broadcast by Pioneer Works. https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/perpetual-motion-geronimo-cristobal
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The Ignorant Schulmeister and his Armchair Revolution
This essay is a preliminary examination of the artistic pedagogy of Josef Albers mainly using his encounter with Constancio Bernardo, his student at Yale School of Art in the 1950s, as a case study. After being mentored by Albers, Bernardo made the earliest examples of modern abstract painting in Southeast Asia. Drawing from Jacques Ranciere’s…
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Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Davis
Covering subjects outside the mainstream of early twentieth century swing and jazz music, the blues point to more than one kind of voice involved in the act of telling. Angela Davis suggests a multiplicity and fluidity prohibited by the homogenizing structuring of narration and community in mainstream music.[1] Through her transcription and analysis of the…
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Manifest Domesticity
Amy Kaplan posits that the domestic space exists as a malleable third realm between the nation and the foreign.[1] Among the variables that shape the “domestic” are the modes of domestication, rhetorics of family, and femininity. Amy Kaplan uses the concept to examine literary discourses that “use images of women and domesticity to obscure or…
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“Jennifer’s Butt” by Frances Negrón-Muntaner
Frances Negrón-Muntaner talks about the way both Selena’s and Jennifer Lopez’s rear ends are viewed by fellow audiences under circumstances that feared the racialized body before popular culture decided that a massive gluteus was cinematically desirable.[1] Latin-American teenagers perceived the uncanny doubling of Selena and Jennifer Lopez as tethered to their somatic features; a unique…
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The trouble with digitizing archives
There are several methods to organize documents. One of them asks what a document means; whether it is true, authentic or forged; whether it can be understood as a trace of an event that can be used for its reconstruction. Another method does not seek to interpret the document, but to arrange, organize, and add…
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Professor Salamanca and the prospect of American Studies in the Philippines
One of the articles I unearthed while researching for my literature review last semester was Professor Bonifacio Salamanca’s article on the attempt to institute a Department of American Studies at the University of the Philippines. Salamanca received his Ph.D. in American Studies in the early 1950s from Yale University where he was a scholar of…
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Keywords: Visual and Archive
In her book “Artful Science,” Barbara Maria Stafford, Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, examines entertainment and educational materials to see how the visual component changed in the “long eighteenth century,” which she defines as the era of the Baroque to the Romantic period. In relation to the current state of the…
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Bauhaus in the Boondocks: Ideas for an Epilogue
Or stuff that won’t make the cut in my MFA Research Project at the School of Visual Arts in NYC I intend to follow some leads from Jacques Rancière’s Politics and Aesthetics (Verso, 2003) and his more specifically art critical Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (Verso, 2013) in writing about the pedagogical…
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Protected: Emotions adrift and slaughtered
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Resistant Spectatorship
Manthia Diawara’s critique of black characters in D.W. Griffin’s Birth of a Nation and Eddie Murphy’s cop movies serves as a template for further examination on the racist depictions in mass media of the African-American male. In considering some Hollywood productions, Diawara makes a case for the problematic ‘identification’ between the black (male) spectator and…
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Protected: The Autonomy of Art and the 20th century Bend Towards Abstraction
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Burke’s Sublime and the Beautiful
Edmund Burke’s contrast of the beautiful and the sublime had some political consequences. In the short article below, I make an argument for the particular political importance of the aesthetic quality called “beauty,” despite its devaluation in art criticism in the last several decades. The idea that the sublime moves us more profoundly than the…
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Protected: Biombo del Gobernador / Governor’s Screen Divider
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Indonesian Palaeography, A History of writing in Indonesia from the beginnings to 1500 AD
In ’60s and ’70s, several orientalists, mostly from Germanic countries, have undertaken, led by the senior leadership of Professor B. Spuler under the auspices of editors at Brill, the vast project of writing a “manual”. The result is the publication of Handbuch der Orienialislik, which in several issues has taken stock of Western knowledge about…
Geronimo Cristobal 