Geronimo Cristobal

Category: Reviews

  • Notable Lectures on Zoom

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    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…

  • The Metamorphosis of Narcissus as a Great Artist

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    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…

  • The Manila Syndrome

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    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…

  • Visual echoes

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    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…

  • From the Secret Files of American History

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    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?…

  • Protected: Deciphering the Indus Script

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    There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

  • Protected: Land of the Morning: The Philippines and Its People (Asian Civilizations Museum, 2009)

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    There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

  • Outline of Philippine Mythology (F. Landa Jocano, 1969)

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    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…

  • Cebuano Sorcery: Malign Magic in the Philippines (Richard Q. Lieban, 1967)

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    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…

  • Azimat (Rolf Bayer, 1958)

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    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…

  • Meaning over spectacle: Gerhard Richter retrospective online

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    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…

  • Sulat galing sa Praga (Angga Dwimas Sasongko, 2016)

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    Nasa kalagitnaan ng magastos na diborsyo si Larasati (Julie Estelle) at kailangan niyang makipag-ayos sa naghihingalo niyang ina, si Sulastri (Widyawati). Bagama’t hindi naging maganda ang kanilang relasyon mag-ina, ipinamana nito sa kanya ang lahat ng kanyang ari-arian sa kondisyon na ideliber niya ang kahon ng mga sulat kay Jaya (Tio Pakusadewo), isang matandang janitor…

  • Admiring hell from a distance

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    William Blake’s drawings for Dante’s “Divina Commedia” as a dialogue with the written word In 1824, The comeback wave of the Dante craze had just reached the shores of England and the artist John Linnell asked the perpetually penniless William Blake to make a series of illustrations based on the Divine Comedy. William Blake had…

  • Protected: A heap of broken images

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    There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

  • Portrait of a lady on fire (Celine Sciamma, 2019)

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    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…

  • Crash Landing on You (Lee Jeong-hyo, 2020)

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    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…

  • Villem Flusser on Artistic Freedom

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    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,…

  • Democracy’s Doppelganger 

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      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…

  • Outlaws (Javier Cercas, 2014)

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    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…

  • The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism (Vilém Flusser, 2013)

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    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…

  • A Tale of Two Modernisms

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    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”,…

  • Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015)

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    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…

  • Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

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    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…

  • Documents of Dissent

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     „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…

  • Tales for winter nights

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    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…

  • The show everyone loves to hate

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    Short review of the Whitney Biennale The Whitney Biennale is a show everyone loves to hate. A general discontent directed towards important exhibitions hangs over any appreciation of individual works. As in, what else can art do to change the world? In a show where most visitors spend less than a minute on average to…

  • Short descriptions of two New York exhibitions

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    1. Marta Minujín, The Neon Tunnel, from La Menesunda Reloaded, 1965. New Museum 2019. 95 words. The vista to the tunnel is covered by tinted Plexiglas with the lower part cut out to the shape of a human figure. Only one person at a time can enter the tunnel measuring two spans. Decked with a fragile tangle…

  • Romero Barragan: Beyond Representation

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    Traces of the everyday On the surface of the series Destinations, a red line on the black-and-white copy of a city map runs through several streets on the bottom right. Which city is it? Is this the documentation of a mental walk or was the path actually taken? If yes, in a rush or during a leisurely…

  • A New Prince Must Rise

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    Review of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s ‘Assembly’ It’s all a question of assembly: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri know how really productive work can break the common good. Yes, they did it again: after “Empire”, “Multitude” and “Common Wealth”, now comes “Assembly”, the latest delivery in the series of subversive feel-good books from H…

  • Elena Ferrante’s Naples Tetralogy

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    From the chaos of history (n) and of life, literature extracts its own world – a formed, an ordered world? And what does this world have to do with that life? An old question that has always been answered, weighted and interpreted again and again. In Elena Ferrante’s “saga” about the narrator Elena Greco, who…