Author: admin
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Protected: The Woman who left (Lav Diaz, 2018)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Portrait of a lady on fire (Celine Sciamma, 2019)
Marianne must cross the rough seas when she is summoned by a countess (Valeria Golino) who would like to have a portrait of her daughter, Heloise. The portrait will be sent to Heloise’s fiancé, an Italian aristocrat, as a confirmation of their arranged marriage. Hoping to save their crumbling estate or move back to an…
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Crash Landing on You (Lee Jeong-hyo, 2020)
Over the spring break I was able to catch up with trends on social media and watched smash-hit K-drama Crash Landing on You (CLOY), a Netflix series directed by Lee Jeong-hyo, starring Hyun Bin, Son Ye-jin, Kim Jung-hyun, and Seo Ji-hye. The hilarious plot begins with Seri, a South Korean chaebol heiress and influencer (think…
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Villem Flusser on Artistic Freedom
With his statements in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Vilém Flusser opened a new understanding of photography, and gave the term a new meaning. While he describes the photograph as a “flyer-like image distributed by the apparatus,” the Photographer for Flusser was a critic; a gadfly: “a person who attempts to place within the image,…
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Democracy’s Doppelganger
Abraham Lincoln once confessed to friends of seeing his double on the night of his first election. He was resting on his couch when he happened to turn in the direction of a mirror and saw two faces. Next to him, was his pale and ghostly doppelganger looking at him. He sprung up from…
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The Revolution of Everyday Life
Jacques Villeglé became known in the mid-1950s in Paris when he took street posters as material, tore them from the walls or peeled them off, and exposed them in art galleries as artifacts of urban life. He was an original member of the Nouveau Réalisme movement. While the group fused only in 1961, in a…
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Outlaws (Javier Cercas, 2014)
The fifty-eight-year-old Javier Cercas made his latest breakthrough outside of Spain with his novel “Anatomy of a Moment”, which the most important Spanish daily newspaper “El Pais” named Book of the Year in 2009. The well-known Argentinian author Albert Manguel had praised this novel, which revolves around the failed military coup in 1981. It received…
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Poems in the shape of paintings
With a history of cultural iconoclasm, the Arab region has become a fertile ground for abstract art. Yet Arab artists remain marginal in the global conversation of modern abstraction. An ambitious project initiated by the Barjeel Art Foundation seeks to issue a long overdue corrective. Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s, slated to…
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Protected: Ruang Rupa: Between critical and marketable art
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Protected: A rainy day in New York (Woody Allen, 2019)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Ang tunay na world domination
Optimistiko si Slavoj Zizek sa future ng Tsina sa kanyang artikulong “My dream of Wuhan” na lumabas sa Welt. Ako rin. Bukod pa sa mga sinabi niya sa artikulo, umaasa ako na magsisikap pa lalo ang Tsina na makuha ang loob ng komunidad ng mga bansa sa responsableng ehersisyo ng cultural capital at iba pang…
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A romance in the provinces (Kornel Filipowicz, 2017)
I just read A romance of provinces (1960), by the Polish poet, novelist and screenwriter Kornel Filipowicz (1913-1990), who was for more than twenty years, and until his death, life partner (each one, in his house) by the poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012), Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. The affinity of worlds and tones is…
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122 Rue du temple, 1968
122 Rue du temple, 1968 Jacques Villeglé torn-and-pasted printed paper on canvas 62 5/8 x 82 3/4″ (159.2 x 210.3 cm) Museum of Modern Art The words of French crime novelist Leo Malet comes to mind every time I encounter a work by Jacques Villegle: “The collage of the future will be done without scissors,…
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The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism (Vilém Flusser, 2013)
Vilém Flusser, a philosopher and communication theorist born in Prague in 1920, spent most of his life in exile. In 1940 he reached London on the run from the Nazis, from there he went to São Paulo after only a short time to settle in France in the early 1970s. He never saw his native city of…
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Seeing is Believing
Through Greek, Judeo-Christian, and the Post-literate societies The common interpretation of the cultural aphorism “seeing is believing” is that “you need to see something before you can accept that it really exists or occurs.” Throughout its modern usage, it is usually uttered as a rebuke to assumptions made without visual evidence. In the Oxford Dictionary…
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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…
Geronimo Cristobal 