Category: Essay
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Bulletproof Equations
Preliminary Investigation Into The Possible Origins of Agimat Burmese Yantra Jacket, vegetable ink on cotton, date unknown, Collection: Herbert Johnson Museum. Photo: Author In his memoirs, Benedict Anderson (1936-2015) recalls a story from Soemarsaid Moertono (1922-1987), his Indonesian fellow student in the mid-1960s who showed him drafts of his MA thesis on aspects of traditional…
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Bophana (dir. Rithy Panh, 1996)
Filmmaker Rithy Panh’s passionate story of the Cambodian national tragedy is told through a documentary centered on the enduring love of two of its victims. Panh, who was interned in a Khmer Rouge labor camp before finding refuge in France, returned to a Cambodia traumatized by a massacre that saw the obliteration of a good…
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The Lover (dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1992)
The Lover (dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1992) is not the typical epic historical romance in the same way as Gone With the Wind might be but it plays on the same elements. While the plot of this well-worn genre revolves around the loss of innocence—which is often an allegory for the colonial experience—and of having…
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Children of Srikandi (2012)
George McT Kahin wrote in his Introduction to Benedict Anderson’s Mythology and the Tolerance of the Javanese (1965) that “anyone interested in contemporary Indonesia, its organization and social and political articulation… comes to realize that in order to achieve any real depth of understanding for these phenomena, it is first necessary to appreciate the enduring…
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Marriage (Mas Ruscitadewi, 1995)
Eave hanging (ider-ider) with scenes from the Baratayuda (Great Battle) from the Mahabharata, Ink and pigments on handwoven cotton cloth 18th-early 19th century, 39 3/8 × 276 3/4 inches (100 × 703 cm). Donated originally by Claire Holt and Ben Anderson and transferred from the Echols Collection at Cornell University’s Kroch Library. Photo: Collection of…
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Mystery Object
This brass cylinder is made distinctive by the incisions of figures that resemble reliefs from temples or medieval goblets. Roughly a meter high, the object is shaped like a lighthouse, with a conical head that detaches from the neck. The shape of a lotus bud is inscribed at the tip of this head which can…
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Archive Style (Robin Kelsey, 2007)
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, born Ireland, 1840–1882), Black Cañon, From Camp 8, Looking Above, 1871, Albumen silver print from glass negative, 20 x 28.1 cm (7 7/8 x 11 1/16 in. ) Photo: Public Domain/ Metropolitan Museum of New York Survey photographer Timothy H. O’Sullivan, is known for depicting the atrocities of the American Civil…
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The Age of Barbarians
The Age of Enlightenment is commonly thought to precede the rapid development of history as an academic discipline. An awareness of history and the perceived continuity of peoples and nations caused a rapid evolution in the field of applied arts and architecture. This can be observed in the revival of historical styles in painting as…
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The Sentimental Masks of Marcos and Robredo
Abstract How is charisma generated and transformed in the 2022 Philippine Presidential elections? This paper weighs in on the critical discussion of propaganda and political branding, using melodrama and political emotion as lenses to examine the rivalry between Leni Robredo and Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. These two candidates enacted charismatic leadership within online spaces and reworked…
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May Tenga Ang Lupa
Rodel TapayaDrawing Room GalleryJune-July 2022 May tenga ang lupa, may pakpak ang balita (The land has ears, the news has wings) is an aphorism that reminds us not only that contemporary realities have ancient roots but also that nonhuman actors matter in telling the story. In Rodel Tapaya’s own words, it is these stories that…
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Pensionado Modernists: US-educated Filipino Artists and the Struggle for Independence
Abstract The history of American modern art has largely excluded the US empire in its narrative and overlooked the massive direct investments in art education by the US government and private institutions during the 20th century. This essay revisits archival sources on two generations of Filipino pensionados, who were educated during the American colonization of…
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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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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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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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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…
Geronimo Cristobal 