Category: Essay
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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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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.
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Protected: Nicanor Parra’s Antipoems for Idiots
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Protected: Sociedad and Academia: Intellectual and Social Currents in the Establishment of the Academia de Dibujo y Pintura in 1821
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Catherine Deneuve as an ageing film diva
The Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-Eda won the Cannes Palme d’or in 2018 with his film “Shoplifters” about a family of thieves. The following year, the master of family drama made his first film outside of Japan: “La Vérité” with Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Ethan Hawke. I was immediately impressed by the first appearance of…
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Brief notes on Teddy Roosevelt’s statue being removed from the steps of the Museum of Natural History
In the New York Times today: the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt, the former president of the United States who declared the end of the Philippine-American War in 1902, will be removed from the steps of the Museum of Natural History. The Museum maintains that it is removing the statue not because of Theodore Roosevelt’s…
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Protected: Philippine Traditional Craft in Contemporary Art
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Protected: Origins of critical writing in the Philippines
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Dog cage quarantine
An officer of the neighborhood night-watch with five young men locked inside a dog cage after breaking community quarantine rules in Laguna province, the Philippines on March 20, 2020 (Eric Panisan Ambrocio via Facebook/Human Rights Watch) When my sister told me not to make plans to come home to the Philippines over the…
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Mythological tricksters in Indonesia and the Philippines
There, tricksters tend to come in a paunchy and less nimble guise, as either apes or tortoises. In one such tale, an ape is said to have befriended a heron, and they engaged in the common practice, at least among the humans who told these tales, of delousing one another. The heron went first and…
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Protected: Land of the Morning: The Philippines and Its People (Asian Civilizations Museum, 2009)
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Outline of Philippine Mythology (F. Landa Jocano, 1969)
This compilation, curated by the esteemed Filipino scholar Dr. F. Landa Jocano, presents a selection of Philippine myths and magical tales, categorized broadly and connected with minimal editorial input. Sourced from both published works and Dr. Jocano’s field research, particularly in Panay’s remote areas, the collection, while not exhaustive, impressively showcases the diversity of Philippine…
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Cebuano Sorcery: Malign Magic in the Philippines (Richard Q. Lieban, 1967)
Book Review of Cebuano Sorcery: Malign Magic in the Philippines The practice of witchcraft in the Philippines has long fascinated observers, with early Spanish explorers documenting its prevalence among locals who employed sorcerers to inflict illness on adversaries through magic. By the 1960s, anthropologist Carl Lieban noted that such practices were still deeply rooted…
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Protected: After the Storm (Hirokazu Kore-Eda, 2016)
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Rage against the image
On the night of February 25, 1986, the Filipino people took to the streets to celebrate the downfall of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Around ten thousand protesters held a vigil to retake Malacanang, the presidential palace originally built by the Spaniards for the Governor-General of the former colony. The plaza which was once open…
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Protected: Gasgas ng alikabok
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Pantasya ng bayan
From the 1950s to the late 1990s, the use of the word “pantasya” has acquired a number of meanings. I suppose our grandfathers and grandmothers used the word in its oldest sense, of fantasy or phantasy, which they probably labeled improbable literature. In other words, out of this world. I’ve always been fascinated by the…
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The decollage we live in
It’s hard to explain, even to myself, why an artwork from more than fifty years ago can speak to our time without resorting to clichéd notions of the timelessness and universality of artistic language. I try to think of concrete experiences that can constitute a right mindset to write about Jacques Villegle, a Parisian artist…
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Kung ako’y mahal mo (Gregorio Fernandez, 1960)
Kung Ako’y Mahal Mo (If You Love Me) is a charming romance melodrama with an incredulous narrative plot. I know all melodramas require some stretching of your suspension of disbelief but this one takes the prize. Ramon (Nestor de Villa) is a car mechanic who hears a cry for help from Lydia (Charito Solis). Ramon…
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Azimat (Rolf Bayer, 1958)
I discovered a wonderful website that archives film locations in Singapore called www.sgfilmlocations.com. Browsing through the copious material, I found a rarely-seen 1958 movie called Azimat or Seal of Solomon, written and directed by Rolf Bayer, who did the screenplay for iconic postwar Filipino film, Anak Dalita. The movie stars Pancho Magalona and Tita Duran…
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Meaning over spectacle: Gerhard Richter retrospective online
The abrupt closing of Gerhard Richter’s retrospective at the Met Breuer, among other art world events in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has refocused the energies of its curators to use online platforms. While it serves its purpose well of extending the reach and lifespan of art exhibitions, the Met Museum’s website is not…
Geronimo Cristobal 