I haven't posted here in donkey's years, although I have a couple of posts long overdue. I had an exchange between me an Christine Wong Yap ready to post and then lost it when the wireless at the cafe I was at shut off. It was about an hour's worth of work to clean up and I haven't had the heart to do it again.
But also, the Galleon Trade topic area has sputtered to a temporary halt for me. It's not that the artists have stopped making art, but that the cohesiveness of the group of artists has fray a little bit in my mind (only in my mind!). We're all back to our normal lives, it's been a year since we went to Manila, and the integrity of the topic has dissipated for me.
Also, I started blogging about art for KQED in January and that has absorbed a lot of my art blogging impulse.
I think when the Bay Area portion of Galleon Trade happens, there will be a flurry of posts. But it will be temporary. I think this blog will only survive, if it does, as an intermittent stream.
But also, I have a new, paid, blog called EnterBrainment, which is my usual meandering take, but this time on pop trash. It's a featured blog on a new, innovative blogging site called PNN or Personal News Network. The innovation sounds simple: the software is designed to allow bloggers to lay out their blogs like newspapers. But the result is a very different set of possibilities for blogging: more Huffington Post than Daily Kos.
Anyway, please check out the new blog and keep an eye out for my post with Christine. It's coming, I swear.
Yikes! I wrote this then didn't post it! Argh! I'm posting it now!
hen I responded to Woff's email asking for help installing her new show, I thought I'd be grouting holes and leveling lines. Instead, Woff got all Mark Kostabi on it and had us do the painting grunt work to her evolving design. She freehanded outlines of hillocks, trees, and--in my case--bamboo, and we colored in the lines with flat housepaint. We were like a 40-person paintbrush.
It was particularly interesting because she hadn't planned it all out beforehand. We got the paintbrush-eye-view of the artist's process. (Perhaps less interesting, although horrifying, to discover that I have absolutely no painting hand left... if i ever had one in the first place. Okay, whatever.)
The piece takes up the back room of what is currently Southern Exposure Gallery, and both is and isn't an attempt to create an immersive environment suggestive of the PIs' lush tropicalishness, the terrorist-inspired security paranoia that exists in different measures both in the US and the Philippines, and the monolithic commercialism that deforms the minds and landscapes of both.
Wrapping a single landscape around three walls, arranging the perspective so that foreground trees disappear into the ceiling-line, and even popping the foregrounded foliage out of the wall slightly by forming it out of painted, jigsawed pieces of pressboard, all seem attempts to create an illusion. But only for a second. The images are all painted solid and flat, outlined in black, comics-style. Even the metal detectors, the size and shape of the real thing, are deliberately simplified.
And the forms she has standing in for institutional structures--the row of lockers at a high school, the rows of balconies at Manila's Megamall--aren't even filled in or outlined, but rather left as undefined blocks of grey paint.
It's hard to find a place to stand here, literally and figuratively. The landscape is tropical but the room is empty. There's an organic line running through everything, and symbols of plenty, but the whole has more of Woff's minimalist stamp on it. It's a spare desire for profusion.
Even knowing the sources of a lot of these images, the piece is hard for me to read.
As I hinted before in talking about Stephanie's show, this piece is about minimalism and profusion ... and those are hard things to put together. Where do you fall down? You want a minimalist profusion, or a profuse minimalist, show to fall down on one side or the other, but Woff manages a sort of balance between the two which feels unacceptable.
It's pretty challenging, trying to get with the lushness and then getting stopped by the grey monoliths ... or trying to get with the empty space and then coming up against tropical flowers. You can't rest in one thing or the other. Strange.
Seriously, I'm still not sure what to think, but I definitely find something new here, and something that demands more thought and engagement than the typical installation. For one thing, the irony is missing. There's a humor here, but it's a hard humor to characterize. Is it making fun of itself or of third world economics or of first world stereotypes? Or is it just joking along on its own, regardless of who might be in on the joke?
The megamall namecheck is pretty opaque, as are the high school lockers. What to make of this?
o real post today, just sticking my head in to explain why I haven't posted about Woff's show yet. (Running through February 23 at Southern Exposure Gallery in San Francisco, so get out there!)
I am currently--as in, right now, I just took a break from it to write this post--revising an article on Woff to appear in the next issue of Hyphen magazine. Not the Hybrid Issue that was just released this weekend, but the next one, due out in a few months, which is "spaces" themed, whatever that means.
As I was telling Herself, trying to write an article and a substantial blog post, both different, about the same subject, is like trying to give birth to fraternal twins at the same time, or trying to get a fat guy and a wide girl through the same doorway. Basically, we're gonna have to rethink that strategy.
Also, I just went all official 'n' shit as a blogger at the KQED arts and culture site. (For those of you scratching heads, KQED is the San Francisco NPR affiliate, one of those public radio hubs that originates a lot of programming, and a major contract employer of local artists and writers. So I'm very happy about that.
So this week I think I'll finally manage to get those puppies through the aperture, both. Well, we'll see. Stay tuned.
Video stolen wholesale from www.stephaniesyjuco.com. Double-click to play.
hildhood is a distant country for everyone, a place of proverbial and metaphorical nostalgia. Most of us learn in adolescence that something is not right about ourselves, and we drive those things we found it so easy to be underground.
Artists especially have to spend their apprenticeship fighting their way back to childhood insights and personality quirks merely to find an authentic voice---to ground themselves in who they actually are and to dissipate the clouds of who they are taught to be. This is why autobiography is so essential and ubiquitous among learning artists. This is not news.
So when a child starts out to be someone--starts to learn a language, a way of dressing and thinking and behaving, a way of making noise in the world--and then has to change all of those things to continue growing up in a new culture ... well, it causes a quiet cataclysm. Idiom becomes stunted, often, and the child becomes a person permanently chasing after the right language to use to say, "I am."
I spent the year most children spend collecting complete sentences speaking my own language, an idiosyncratic mixture of English and Cantonese that drew vocabulary, grammar, and tones from each in an unusual pattern. When I left off and emerged speaking English, the Cantonese faded away. Well into adulthood, whenever I heard someone speaking Cantonese in public, a ghost self emerged, a sort of presence behind my left shoulder, that understood what was being said, and was connected to me, but could only communicate to me a sense of fading rightness in the sounds of the language.
It's like a parallel universe. When your childhood in one culture is broken off, the person that child would have become in that culture is broken off. But that no-longer-possible-person remains with you as an echo of yourself you can either choose to ignore, or attempt to build a sound-box around, to see if they have something interesting to say. If you choose--as I have--to chase after that echo, you'll never be satisfied, or triumphant, in boxing that voice. You're chasing a nostalgia for an alternate universe, depicting a world that your audience will never be able to see, and perhaps never realizes is there to be seen.
And then, of course, as adults we see the exotiphilia, or fetish for tribalism, or lust for otherness, that strangers will ground in the cultures we left behind. We don't fit into these visions, but even in the most egregious expressions we see small corners of the alternate universe. And we're angry and sad and speechless that someone else could appropriate the little nests of our echoes to say something that annihilates them.
This is how I'm reading Stephanie Syjuco'sBody Double pieces. She composed them before we went to Manila, but I first saw one of these on someone's laptop in The Living Room while we were there, and all our talk, and thinking, about distance and culture of origin wove itself into my reading. I got to see a display of three of these pieces at the opening of Mills Art Museum's show We Interrupt Your Program tonight.
Each piece in the video triptych shows excerpts from a Hollywood Vietnam war movie filmed in the Philippines. Stephanie muted the sound and put black boxes over the images that turned the Philippine landscape into Vietnam. What's left is small glimpse of jungle or hills or skies or rainfall--the sorts of small moments and images brought back, Proust-like, when we smell rain or foliage, or eat something we haven't eaten since we were children.
The monolithic blank forms interrupting the landscape are nothing so
simple as Western brute technology or political iron-fisting, or even
colonization. At the risk of interpreting one-for-one: the hard, black boxes are maybe memory loss, or maybe just the places that never got filled in. Or the big, ugly swaths of the here-and-now we have to cover up to let the echoes gain some volume. Stephanie said tonight, looking at her own work up on the wall, that it was an exercise in minimalism. I think it an attempt to contain lushness in minimalism, something resounding loudly in Woff's new piece (yes, I will blog about it).
'm Not Interested in Abstract Sculpture (sooo not!) so I wasn't going to see the Louise Nevelson show at the De Young (nodding in appreciation? NO!)
But then I interviewed Woff for a Hyphen magazine article (stay tuned) and she mentioned, among other, more idiosyncratic influences, Louise Nevelson as a role model in her "pomp" and confidence. So when I was there last weekend to see Mike's show, I took in the Nevelson as well, on coincidentally its last day.
Wow.
That was a great show, especially the first four rooms: one of those lovely, simple moments when the curators and the preparators and everybody gets their shit together and comes up with a complete experience that IS an experience ... but also shows off each individual piece to its best advantage.
Case in point: the entrance contained two pieces--a self portrait, and one of her "cathedral" walls of boxes. Each was set apart from the other, displayed in contrasting and theatrical styles. The cathedral piece stood against a wall and was placed so that the viewer had to stand right up before it without gaining distance; the self-portrait in front of a sheer screen and lighted dramatically from above, so that you could walk around the dividing wall and see the shadow of the piece from behind.
The second and third galleries were full of these black-painted-wood "cathedral" pieces, all stacks of open-faced boxes filled with found pieces of wood: lathe-turned table legs and the scraps of circular cut-outs, wedges, blocks, discarded moldings, etc. The genius of these two galleries was that each piece was set against a dark grey wall and lighted by two or three blue-gelled frenells. Far from obscuring the black-on-black piece, this color scheme turned out to be the best way to pick out the movement and blockage of shadow Nevelson built in. The modulation of shadow and surface that Nevelson plays with is so complete and sophisticated, that you don't need a high-contrast lighting scheme to make it come out. On the contrary, you need mood lighting. This was proven out by two later galleries which lighted black pieces in white to no great effect.
When I stood before the first cathedral piece in the entrance, I felt as if I was standing before a bank of speakers. I could almost hear music, the synesthesia of the experience was so strong. I had to concentrate hard, like when looking for the figure inside a 3-D dot graphic, but I could almost hear music throughout the exhibition.
Then I emerged from the faux-gloom into a room full of light, and white-wooden pieces of the "Dawn" series. After being dazzled for a moment, I noticed that, although strongly lighted, the pieces didn't create a high contrast between lighted surface and shadow. The white paint and varied forms of the sculptures' components reflected light in various directions around the pieces, modulating the play of light and shadow in remarkably complex and subtle ways.
The subsequent galleries, while impressive, weren't overwhelming. They were more a hodgepodge of miscellaneous great work, such as an entire room constructed on her scrap-box plan, plexiglas pieces, and paper reliefs. The first galleries, though were like the first two movements of a symphony, that tracked the sounds of night and daybreak.
Pompous? Probably, but what symphony isn't? Fabulous is more like it.
t the top of the broad flight of stairs glows a row of stained glass windows, like what you'd find in the arcade of a monastery. The windows are each composed of a bright primary color, a tribal image inscribed on it in white light. From a distance these have a similar effect to the Chagall windows in Chicago, part commissioned artwork, part upscale design element, part museum dramatics.
But up close they read more like a lightbox poster ad for a traveling ethnographic exhibition. "Savage Artifacts Here! Now With Twice the Post-structuralist Selfconsciousness!"
The gallery they gave Mike Arcega to continue this thought is more a throughway. A landing, two hallways, and two doors give onto--or are accessed through--this space. Glass-covered vitrines sit in the center, each filled with the promised savage artifacts, and to the left--on the wall and in the corner--larger objects not suitable for display cases sit in theatrical isolation: a large, wooden ceremonial implement, and a rough-looking map, possibly of some sort of aboriginal provenance.
From the doorway, that is.
Up close, the ceremonial implement resolves into a giant spork, the map (of Oceania, natch) turns out to be made of spam, and one vitrine houses a selection of cheap tourist souvenir wooden spoon-and-fork sets (some bought in Quiapo in August). The "legit" artifacts, a solemn row of tribal war and ceremonial clubs from the Peoples of Oceania, are solemnly echoed in another vitrine by a series of Arcegaesque wooden "war clubs" (the photo thereof jacked from famsf.org/deyoung/exhibitions/) topped by wooden miniature aircraft carriers and the like, and "dance clubs" topped by miniature nightspots flashing lights.
The gallery is filleted by two windows giving onto the interior entrance hallway; these, also covered with "stained glass" transparencies, emit almost no light, and make of themselves the interior backlit didactics of button-pushy educational museums.
Sadly, in the center of this organized breakdown you'll find a real didactic explaining Mike, the work, and His Point. (Don't worry, I won't tell you What It Means. I'm too bored by the prospect of Educating People.) I suppose it was necessary, or at least inevitable. But I would have rather been given the opportunity to walk swiftly past ... or to stop, look, and say WTF? (especially to the fork-and-spoon sets on loan courtesy of Lordy Rodriguez.)
Far from placing him at a disadvantage, giving Mike a foyer for his installation Homing Pidgin was a perfect choice. The hallway to the right leads past a wallpaper of "Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique" to another gallery sporting hybrid American art-ifacts from Indigenous artists incorporating European elements and from European artists about indigenous subjects.
That entrance in turn leads to the museum's permanent collection of American art, organized by era and topic.The gallery on the opposite side of the staircase shouts out some
dramatic--and actual--indigenous artifacts from somewhere or
other--aren't they all the same?
The doorway opposite leads to a dim gallery displaying oriental carpets made by the Turkmen. And the hallway to the left leads into the middle distance, a place too far for the casual museum-goer to go.
As near as I can tell, from various websites, programs, wall didactics, and the half-remembered tales of Arcega himself at parties, Mike was invited to a residency at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. This residency was part of the "Collection Connections" project they started to "attract new and diverse audiences to the Museums." The De Young opened up its collections to Mike to browse, and Mike ended up putting together an installation/exhibition in a gallery provided for the purpose, created out of old and new work by the artist himself, and work from the Museum's collection. Plus, his friends' tourist souvenirs.
Very cool, the De Young. Props.
In all of this it's hard not to see the things I'm tracking in this blog--Manila, Quiapo, and Green Papaya, and Megamall--in Homing Pidgin. Heretofore, Mike has trafficked solely in eurocentric images and styles, with Filipino content. I've talked about Mike and hybridity before, but the hybridity has existed more in the artist's identity and subject matter than in the meat and bones of the work.
But here Mike is (re?) appropriating "savage" "indigenous" "tribal" images, making them not lyrical frills or mark-making on a more recognizable piece, but rather confrontational in their size and manner. The "stained glass" images are grainy, ultra-reproduced, slick-vinyl photos of pieces that have been discussed to death. The authentic war clubs seem rather tame and powerless in comparison. And all of these exist in the presence of too much self-consciousness about colonization ... and in the absence of an aesthetic that could be definitively attributed to a Filipino American 1.5 Generation X American-trained conceptual artist (re?) claiming a public identity.
I'm not sure what all that means, but for an artist like Mike, pre-identity totems seem a logical, bold statement. His lock on these images is what is hybrid: does he claim them as an artist of pastiche? As a clown/ethnographer? As a pseudo-curator? As a son of the islands? I don't think there's another artist who could keep all the possibilities in the air for so long; any other artist would have to mean something by it.
Maybe it's just from being in a museum (those windows!) but there's a size and attitude here. Basically, it seems to me that Mike has acquired the confidence to not make fun of the museum, but rather take advantage of it. His piece respects and dovetails with what the museum is trying to do, but is so much clearer on the whys and wherefores--and where-to-nows--of this kind of intersection, that he's able to hijack the discussion for the space of a short hallway.
have a great many excuses, reasons, circumstances, 'n' such to present for being essentially non-blogging on this blog in the past few months. But the main reason is simple: depression.
Not that I've been completely nonfunctional. It's been a mild depression, brought on by shortening days, a mild health-related problem, and, perhaps most importantly, the seeming near-total suspension of my creative faculties in 2007. Crappy year.
I see how this post could easily be read as being dismissive of the artists' work, although that was not my intention. Still less was it my intention to cause distress to the artists. Although it's always been clear to me in the abstract why "embedded reportage" leads to ethically compromising conflicts of interest, this is my first visceral experience with it. I'm simultaneously writing critically about artwork, and turning my critical eye on my friends. When the beast is busy eating your heart out, this kind of internal conflict can freeze you. And it did.
A few things have contributed to my release from freeze in the past week or so. The first was the turn of the year, which is powerfully symbolic, symbolically operative, and coincidentally happens a week or so after the winter solstice so that the symbolism and seasonal rhythm can work together to give you a full-on catharsis.The second was my doctor figuring out my mild health-related problem, but the less said about that the less boring.
The third was, strangely enough, that the Irish film Once got to the top of my netflix queue. No others of my friends felt the same way about this flick that I did, but when you're coming out of a depression and creative freeze, a movie about an artist who has come to the end of a long stretch of dark-night-of-the-souling and is jumped into the next level through the friendship of a fellow artist is just exactly what you need to see. The scenes where the two musicians play and sing together were ecstatically blissful for me, because their release felt like my release.
That's enough, clearly. But then the year turns and everyone gets energized in January again and Things Start Happening. In the past week I've stood before, and in one case, within, the artwork of distant geniuses, community sprites, and friends (sometimes all three at once), and it has been electrifying.
Last weekend the National Book Critics Circle was in San Francisco to acknowledge the existence of the provinces and announce the fina-list for their award. Thursday and Friday I went to three literary panels therefore. I might post about these over on my personal blog, but I won't here.
That same night (Friday) I went to Trader Woff's opening at Southern Exposure Gallery, a show I helped install, along with a number of other friends (in fact, helping get that show up was part of its process, and mine here).
Saturday I took one of my last chances to see Mike Arcega's installation at the De Young Museum, and also took in the Louise Nevelson show while I was there. Other De Younginess ensued.
Later that night I saw There Will Be Blood with Jaime, and trust me, there will be blog on how bad that flick was.
And Sunday afternoon, I took in the annual Day of the Kings concert of Coro Hispano with Robynn.
Yes, each of those is a future post, to which I will link here when they are complete. I called this post something about "artistic processes" because my blogging--my record-keeping of and spur to my critical practice--is string and parcel with my creative writing. My practice is integrated and revving up my critical function is the first step towards outright making shit up again. And vice very much versa, of course. So this is my declaration: as of January 15, 2008, Clairica is open for business.
ere's a brief clip from Robynn Takayama's RJ Lozada's newly released documentary, A Serving of Love, about the recently passed community leader Bill Sorro. My friend Robynn Takayama was intrinsic to the project as well. Check out the website for more clips and information about Bill.
It's a typical youtube homemade video of a song describing the conflict between Magellan and Lapu Lapu. It ends with Magellan asking for a doctor and telling his mama "don't you cry."
Now, wouldn't you want to die trying to bring Christianity to the Philippines ... or something ... and then being immortalized in a song like this? (Does anybody know who this singer is?)
NEXT!
Also, this history student made this video summary of the Galleon Trade for class. Love the music! Don't love the way history is taught: so that it leaches all the human idiosyncracy out of the stories and makes them a catalogue of dead numbers and dry anecdotes.
This and other unattributed photos were stolen from www.wofflehouse.com, Woff's website.
rader Woff is here to speak, speak about the Galleon Trade.
Jenifer Wofford, by name, den mother, artiste, fearless leader, unspeakable admiral, grantwriter, ruffled trade, and the one to blame for all of this.
Speak, Woff! Tell us: what is the Galleon Trade?
... if we can find some other art spaces along the west coast of Mexico ...
Indeed! And how did you come up with this project?
It was 1998 and I barely understood what an internet was.
And where do you see cultural convergences among the three landing points of the project: Philippines, Mexico, and the Bay Area?
You have an incredible love of drama in both situations ... I don't know, good dancing skills? ... A real affinity for pork and salt?
Then talk about hybridity: in general, and especially with regard to the Philippines as a place of both race-mixing and cultural hybridity.
The tricky thing about talking about the Philippines, certainly from somebody who's a halfie herself, is ... it can become very self-congratulatory to talk about the wonderful future of hybridity. It's really narcissistic, too. ... At the end of the day, for me it's less about some nationalistic Filipino thing, for me it is more about the bigger condition of hybridity or about drawing connections across difference. Doing that through Filipino arts and culture issues for me feels the most--"authentic" is such a tricky word but I'll go ahead and use it--feels like the most authentic way for me to do it. I could do it in some ways just as easily through Malaysia, since I grew up there, and in some ways I have a lot deeper connections with that place, but it's a little trickier to make that fly. There's a very small Malaysian American community here, there's less of a network to actually make these kinds of parallels happen. --Also, I'm not Malaysian.
Everyone's symbol of the Philippines, everyone's adjective. It's impossible to explain a jeepney--you have to see one. But once you've seen one, all you need to say is "jeepney" for the full force of its symbolism--its representativeness, its jumble and joy and color--to infect whatever word you're modifying.
The word itself contracts "Jeep" and "Jitney," the latter a form of share taxi found in the US and Canada in the early 20th Century.
It's also impossible not to fall in love with jeepneys. I did, my first hour in Manila--exhausted from a 16-hour flight and 13-hour jetlag, inside an air-conditioned taxi trying to muscle its way through morning rush hour to our accommodations--when the rising sun picked out the brightest things on an already colorful landscape, and all the things that people had tried to tell me about jeepneys before burst visually into my consciousness like ripe coconuts onto my hard, hard head.
The brightest things were moving targets full of people and I didn't manage to take a single picture that time, nor did I manage it for the rest of my trip in Manila, despite repeated attempts. My only halfway decent jeepney pictures are from the inside of oneZak took me on to get, in a roundabout way, to the Manalos' store.
It seems almost silly to point out the Filipino-representative nature of jeepneys; it's so overstated already. But do you notice something about all these youtube videos?
Yeah, they're all made by Ams of the non-Fil variety, or other flavors of white tourist. (Let's count me among them, since in the Philippines, I'm white. That's, after all, what counted to the Filipino strangers I encountered: the American, the money, and the white. Oh, and apparently I'm white because of the loves and enthusiasms the Philippines awakened in me. Jeepney! O, Jeepney!)
Filipinos I met didn't talk about jeepneys amongst themselves, and were almost reluctant to answer my questions. A cliché? A stereotype? Fil Ams were equally reticent, and undelighted. Used to it? The only Filipino youtube videos with the word "jeepney" in them were the excessively posted video of a band called "Sponge Cola," (?) who had an apparent hit with their song "Jeepney." There aren't any jeepneys in the video, but I have no idea if the song deals with jeepneys. (Well, there were also the inevitable personal videos made by Sponge Cola fans using photos of self and drawings of unicorns against the backdrop of the jeepney song.)
But Americans? A post-modern, transportative, artisan-fact like a jeepney is almost calculated to make GenX travelsters wet their shorts with cum-to-Jesus. Love. LOVE! How it bleeds American pop through its chrome skin! How it bedecks, deflowers, beflowers a supra-militarized past by dragging it into a dingy military relic! How it pollutes the air (you can hardly ride one for the fumes!)! The names of the jeepneys! They all have names! Love! How unselfconscious! Just like the na-ked-tives in National Geographic! We love that shit!
And the Catholicism of the jeepneys! They're so Catholic! With their virgin statues, and saintly names, and sometimes near-evangelical airbrushed Jesus. We love the Catholic in the foreign, since the US is so fundamentally post-Catholic, post-joy, post-passion, and post-tack. It makes the Philippines almost look like those weekends in TJ, or spring break in Cabo! Only better, because, without the frat boys (much)!
And, naturally, jeepneys can also be rolling carnivals of affect, being evidence both of poverty and pluck. Although an American would never decorate a moving vehicle thus without a guarantee of praise, attention, gallery space, and the possibility of grant monies, we can appreciate the sheer cultural wastage of decorating 200,000 + vehicles to be used purely for public transport, particularly if said vehicle is a microenterprise run by an undereducated family that barely speaks English.
Okay, I'm being a bitch. Truth be told, I'm annoyed that it turns out I'm a cliché of an American tourist, so in love with the Jeepney, the Jeepney, o!
But so be it! Let this rhythm of searched-for youtube videos be my love song to the Jeepney, the lovely Jeepney, the ironic Jeepney, the joyful Jeepney, the mortal Jeepney. May it live forever!
ne could be forgiven for thinking that I'm a bit of a pinoyphile, what with this whole Chinese-hapa-with-no-Filipino-connections-starts-a-blog-about-Filipino-stuff thing.
I'm not, as it happens, a pinoyfile (pinoypile?) but I do have a special connection with Fil Am history and culture--not because I sought it, but because the Bay Area Fil Am community runs like blood through Asian American history and organizing, in a way that no other individual ethnic community does. You can't ignore it, and you can draw from it.
My first job here in the Bay Area, the job that defined me to the community and defined my mission and vocation in life to myself, was at Kearny Street Workshop. KSW was so called because it had originated in the International Hotel, an SRO on Kearny Street that housed largely elderly Filipino American men who had been seasonal laborers earlier in the century.
The International Hotel fell victim to San Francisco's insane real estate politics in the 1960's. It was the last building standing of what had once been Manilatown, bordering on Chinatown, but had since been eaten up by the Financial District. The residents of the I-Hotel were one building away from being banished to Daly City, and they didn't go without a fight. The fight, as it turns out, took up the better part of a decade, and the eviction and Fall of the I-Hotel didn't happen until 1977 ... and among a city-wide upheaval that had the local sheriff imprisoned for three days for contempt of court for refusing to evict, etc.
The Hotel was razed but, because of in-fighting, the hole it left in the ground remained empty for 23 years. Then the I-Hotel was rebuilt, yes, and as an SRO for the elderly, with a Fil Am cultural center on its ground floor, in spite of the jockeying, and the partners backing out, and the neverneverland reality of San Francisco real estate politics, in great part because of Bill Sorro.
One of the leading lights of the Save the I-Hotel fight, Bill was a founding member of the I-Hotel Tenants Union, and remained a housing rights advocate and community leader for the rest of his life.
Bill Sorro died of prostate cancer on August 27, 2007. Readabouthimhere.
Bill Sorro was pretty much my first contact in the San Francisco Fil Am community. He was a genuinely kind and generous man. When I met him, he didn't know me at all, or know my abilities or quality. But because I was working for the Asian American community, that was all he needed to know. He gave me respect, never talked down to me, never demanded any sort of literal or metaphorical accounting for my time or passion. He remembered my name from the first and had a smile and palaver for me every time I saw him.
Now that I'm a bit older and am watching young twentysomethings flop into the community like underfed puppies, I realize what a rare thing such generosity and respect for the rookies is. Getting people into the work was his thing, not so much getting them to respect his work. And of course, as a result, he had the most respect of all.
Many of hispeers have been passing this clutch of years, many of them people I knew and liked and worked with. But, although I never really knew Bill all that well, I felt a pang at his death unlike the regret I've felt for the others. He was a truly bright and warm presence.
There will be a memorial celebration this Saturday, and an exhibition about his life runs through Oct 6. I'll post about the exhibit when I see it.
oday I paid a visit to Galleon Trade captain Jenifer Wofford's home studio. More will be posted soon about La Woff, but there was one strangely lovely story that came out today that needs to be on this blog.
Apparently, in the spring of 2000, a southern Philippine Islamic terrorist group staged a mass kidnapping from a beach resort on Sipadan. The hostages were held for ransom for months, while the kidnappers dragged them around the jungle ahead of the Philippine authorities and added to their number with further kidnappings.
But in July 2000, one of the newly added hostages, a German woman with a complex of medical conditions that made her captivity a matter of life and death--even if her captors had not been capable of beheading her--became a minor local cause celebré, being the cause of a defingerization.
A freelance script writer named Leah Cabullo, who was on Jolo island, where the hostages had been taken, along with a passel of journalists, decided one night to
cut off a piece of her left middle finger and use her blood to write a letter appealing to Islamic extremists to free an ailing German woman among 40 hostages held in a southern Philippine jungle.
... Cabullo, a Manila-based freelance writer in her 30s, refused to leave her rented room at a retreat house in downtown Jolo and spoke with other journalists covering the 80-day standoff through a window. Blood was scattered at the lobby outside her room.
"I cut my finger as a sign of deep sincerity," she said.
The letter appealed for the release of 56-year-old German housewife Renate Wallert, ... who suffers from hypertension, a chronic anxiety disorder and other ailments.
Rosa Banagudos, a caretaker at the retreat house, said Cabullo was rushed to the Sulu provincial hospital for treatment after the bizarre act. The detached portion of the left middle finger was placed in a bottle filled with alcohol.
"I was still sleeping when I heard her scream," Banagudos said. "I rushed to her room and saw her hand bloodied. I didn't see what she used to cut her finger."
According to a friend of Cabullo, the severed portion of the finger would be sent to Robot and Susukan with the appeal letter, written in blood on white linen paper. The offering would be delivered by a courier sometime on Tuesday.
Note: "Robot" was the nickname of the terrorist commander. Delicious, no?
There's not much else to be found about this story on the internet, in any language. I even checked the Filipino Google, but no dice. Not even any follow-ups, although you'd think that the press would fall all over themselves to find out if it worked.
And the funny thing is, according to Woff, it did work. All the stuff I found chez interwebs about the hostage crisis never mentioned Cabullo as a reason, but Renate Wallert was released less than two weeks after Cabullo's sacrifice. This article attributes that to payment of a ransom, but her husband and son remained with the kidnappers until a month later (for the husband), and nearly two months later (for the son). It's not clear how much ransom money played a part in the men's releases.
This article from Asia Week has only confusion to report about Renate Wallert's release:
The 85th day dawned with the release of the first Westerner, ailing German Renate Wallert. The Europeans say neither they nor Libya agreed at the time to pay a ransom for Wallert. In the Philippine and German press, it was reported that $1 million was paid. Sources allege Aventajado raised $1 million through local businessmen and sent Dragon to make the payment. They also allege Aventajado asked Germany for a refund, but that officials refused. Aventajado denies all of the above: "That is not true."
The article doesn't mention Cabullo.
Well can I believe that Cabullo got Renate released ... and well, too, can I understand Woff's fascination with the story--which prompted her to center her installation Kandingan around a drawing of the only photograph she could find of Leah Cabullo ... holding up her maimed hand.
There's something inside that wants an extreme act like this to be able to affect people. I'd just call someone like Cabullo crazy to the creepyth degree. But then, if you're dealing with Islamic fundamentalist kidnapping beheaders--who risk their lives and international relations for arbitrarily chosen ransom sums, and then waste statesmen's time bickering over how to divvy up the take--how do you prove your sincerity, really, truly?
None of this stuff--terrorism, kidnappings, beheadings--is really capable of shocking anyone anymore. It's too commonplace and understandable ... or else too commonplace and permanently beyond understanding. What's shocking is that a civilian figured out how to speak terrorese from the point of view of the powerless. It seems crazy, but it also seems like she was the only who got through--or cared to get through.
Between a crazywoman and a transported, orgasmic Saint Theresa-type, Cabullo wants to strike me as the latter. Catholic redemptions are not far from the imagination when thinking about weird Filipino phenomena, for obvious reasons. Something wants there to be the closest thing we have in real life to magical realism: some kind of inspired, gritty communication, some kind of understanding-beyond-understanding, to exist in fanatical jungles and distant motherlands.
How strange and beautiful and creepy such things are. I wonder what she's doing now. I hope she hasn't been declared mentally incompetent.
nce upon a time, before art was professionalized (insofar as people are willing to pay artists, that is to say) folks stayed at home a lot and made art themselves.
Every middle class home had a piano, every working class one a fiddle, or a jew's harp. Young ladies drew each other for sport. Young men drooped from the forks of tree branches shouting, "Beauty!" Jigs were danced, and danced well, on homemade wooden heels, family theatricals taught children the fine art of crying at will, a blank wall was excuse enough for interpretive dance, and if you were lovely enough, your hair golden enough--or raven, depending on which side of the world you jigged on--your hands small and finely tuned enough to turn faces on tiny grains of rice, why then fantastical creatures of green and blue--or with wings and teeth, or scales--would do your chores, freeing up your time to make art for the Pure Joy of it.
Then came the silver age of art, when the family was no longer a haven of show tune singalongs and refrigerator-magnet galleries. Then, the youth wandered out into the scary forest and, in amongst the wolves, false breadcrumb trails, and predatory lifestyle party organizers, might be drawn by the faint, but pure, glow of the community arts nonprofit. There, our hero/ine passed a comfortable night, or three, before being drawn back out into the realm of worldly temptation.
"Look!" the reptilian tempter would cry, "look at the sophistication of yon milieu! Look at the bumpkinness of the cottage in whose doorway you stand! Whose bread is made of finer flour? Whose advocacy is going to further your career? Come hither, and rule the kingdom for your fifteen minutes!" And away the dazzled youth would go, drawn inevitably, inexorably away from the last likeness of home and family.
After the Fall, callow youths never stop to wonder if the Artyrs who kept the hearth while they were testing the jungle tread are still there, are doing okay, have suffered from neglect or abandonment.
No, this is not the Manalos' sad story, but mine ... sort of ... well, not really. Kind of. Okay, yeah, a little bit. I'm projecting, is what I'm saying.
I'll be the first to say that I found Manila a little ... challenging. More on that later (hint: small pedicabs and intestinal disorders ... okay, maybe not so much more on that later). So, after making some phone calls and getting some directions, I stumbled one day late in my Manila visit into the cool haven of the Manalos' flower and gift shop, Blue Gayuma. I just thought I was going to get a nice visit with old friends, but it ended up being a debrief on the last eight years of my life.
You see, I met the Manalos in the last millenium, while I was program manager at Asian American arts org Kearny Street Workshop, and they were running Bindlestiff Studio, a black box theater in San Francisco's SOMA district, that Allan and Joyce Juan Manalo had transformed into the "premier" Fil Am performance venue in SF. As fellow arts organizers from the same community, we all knew and respected each other, but were too busy sacrificing ourselves on the altars of "vision" and "community-building" to have time for each other. I came to their events and chatted, they came to ours, and chatted, we shared resources now and again (mostly them letting us use their space).
Allan giving a tour of Bindlestiff in 2000, the "epicenter of Filipino performing arts," a black box theater located on San Francisco's South of Market Skid Row. This is a lovely picture of a brief turn-of-the millenium era in Fil Am arts. Funny glimpses of many the personalities that stocked (and still do, some of them) the Bay Area's Fil Am performance scene.
You'd see Allan performing here and there, either solo stand-up comedy, or with his sketch comedy group Tongue in a Mood. You didn't see Joyce so much ... unless you bought a ticket to see a show. She preferred to stay in the background, running Bindlestiff and theater group Teatro Ng Tanan with consistent self-effacement.
Come to think of it, they were both pretty self-effacing, out there doing their thing, certainly, but doing it out of love, and happy to use their own sweat to promote unknown artists -- to make the young and the marginalized into stars for a night or two. The problem with being self-effacing is that it's a rare person who will promote you when you efface yourself ... and if you happen to be the designated drivers, well you might just not get much notice at all.
Also, nonprofit Artyrs live a pretty marginal existence to begin with: no health insurance, constantly putting your own minimal salary back into bottles of two-buck Chuck to feed the small but hungry egos of the artists you're serving ... it's a silver age for those who pass through your warm cottage, but they're not the ones who have to roam the forest, rain or shine, gathering firewood.
On top of that, the real estate politics of San Francisco are insane. Bindlestiff lost its longtime space in the Plaza Hotel for a few years while the city redevelopment agency spruced the SRO up. But from the beginning of negotiations the city started backing out of promises made, and it looks like now Bindlestiff--no longer run by the Manalos--will have to meet unrealistic financial goals to be allowed to return to its home.
For a variety of reasons, about four years ago the Manalos--as usual, quietly--left the States and returned to Manila, where Joyce grew up but where Allan, born and raised in the States, had only visited. And there they are today.
It might seem like being cast out into the dark forest, but Joyce and Allan are no Hansel and Gretel. We spent hours one night gossiping and bitching about the Bay Area Asian American arts scene, and I caught them up on four years of meltdowns they had missed. But when I visited them at Blue Gayuma, and later their house just down the street, it was clear that they'd found their way straight back home--and straight back into that nonexistent golden age where families made art at home for their own pleasure.
Joyce is beading and making jewelry, which she sells at Blue Gayuma. She's also making pottery, which is displayed at the store. Her brother, a set designer, makes small wooden theater sets/altars. (I'll post some pictures of these as soon as I retrieve them from the external hard drive they disappeared into.)
But the most delicious surprise of the Manalo/Juan family was Joyce's mother, Levi Juan.
Each subsequent flag she played more with materials, adding hand-made worry-dolls to the suns, or little mirrors into a sort of plaid pattern, or encrusting the edges so thick with multicolored beads that you want to put the whole thing in your mouth.
On one flag, tiny yellow beads collect around the edges of the sun-shapes, making the piece look like the artist was working on it in the middle of a storm of pollen. On another one, a monsoon of brown bead-chains rains down the top of the flag upon an angel of fertility. She reminds me, in both technique and exuberance, of the extraordinary vitality of artist Aminah Robinson (whose work online photographs don't nearly do justice to, and has to be seen to be believed).
It would be easy enough to call this a Jeepney aesthetic ... and it would be largely true: a folk art, unironically declaring its affiliations, and drawing in colorful scraps of plastic materials and popular culture to redraw, over and over, a standard utilitarian form. But I'm still not sure what it means to call something jeepneyesque, jeepneyfied, jeepneyized. I don't know what exactly it means for the jeepneys, much less for unpretentious "folk" art.
It doesn't seem, this work, to be about meldings of pop culture and traditional culture, or turning the weapons of war into street art, or any of those clever things I and others say about jeepneys. It doesn't seem to be about much more than joy in materials, profusion, and a delight in color and texture.
Which is why this was my favorite art in Manila: the unexpected, the purely joyful, the unapologetically, unmodifiedly Filipino, the domestic, the folk, the personal-fulfillment, the unblaring, the unadvertised, unframed, and unpresented ... art.
(The details you see sprinkled throughout this post are details of the flags. Click here for a flickr photo set of all five flags she showed me, including views of the whole flags. The pictures suck, because I took them, please excuse.)
y excuse for so far not really posting very much about art on this art-centered blog has been that I want to start with posts about artists, including their sound files, and I'm having trouble transferring their sound files. And this is true.
I've also been silent because I've been processing everything. Also true.
However, those are not the only reasons I've found it difficult to talk about the existing work.
Before I went to Manila, I did stop to consider if the work the artists were bringing was going to be big enough. Most of the Galleon Trade artists work relatively small in any case, and had deliberately chosen cheaply transportable work--Christine Wong Yap even going so far as to make her work out of standard sized shipping boxes. I somehow had it in my head that expanding horizons meant BIG galleries.
That turned out not to be the case. The galleries were, if anything, smaller even than typical storefront community spaces in the real-estate-starved Yay Area.
Despite all of that, the work was still too small. By this, I don't mean that I hold it in any disdain, or that, after moving into an international context, I suddenly saw the poverty of the artists' point of view. It was rather that the work was made by artists who hadn't been on the Galleon Trade trip yet. The work wasn't triangulated to three points. It worked in its context, and out of its context it became ... well, not trivial, but almost beside the point. (Two possible exceptions are Megan Wilson and Mike Arcega because they made their work while in Manila, but I'll talk about that in other posts.)
Because the trip, the exhibitions, weren't about the artwork actually, at all. It was about the artists themselves, about their waxing, their ebb, about their arc through Manila. The artwork they brought was by way of credentials, yes. It was their gauntlet thrown down, a bit. It was their conversation piece, the thing that got the kids in the neighborhood talking to them.
But also, it was--or it will be--a growing mark on their doorposts, against which everything they make subsquent to Manila will show significant growth ... significant expanse.
But hey, no pressure, right?
A concentrated gaze is to an artist like sunshine to anything vegetable. (Well, the artist has to be ready. I've noticed that really green artists experiencing their first public success are far more likely to be stopped in their tracks by the attention--by the combination of fear and ego--than to flourish under it. But more seasoned, yet still emerging, artists who have cut their teeth, filed them, and had some fillings put in as well, know how to use the energy-concentrate that attention offers them.)
Just as plants in a greenhouse grow faster and out of season, I'm expecting a more radical growth in Galleon Trade artists within a short period of time. Because they have just been placed in a greenhouse.
Observe the picture at the top of the page, the one with the artists in a row, half-surrounded by an attentive local crowd. I went through our trip photos looking for one of these to symbolize the artists' experience in Manila, only to discover that it wasn't symbolic at all. It was literal. I have dozens of such photos, because the artists were in tons of such situations. Of the six evenings of Galleon Trade events, three were about attention to the artists' work and three were about attention to the artists. There was an opening, followed by a panel discussion, followed by another opening, followed by an "artists grill" Q & A, followed by another panel discussion, followed by another opening, followed by another Q & A.
A full week of nothing to do but talk about yourself as an artist.
But all artists have similar--if not so concentrated--experiences like this if they push on through. What made this special was that these were mostly "minority" or "ethnic" artists who, regardless of their success level in the mainstream, were always conscious, or made to feel conscious, of their otherness. Additionally, many are "1.5s," those who immigrated as children and are therefore neither fully immigrants, nor fully second generation American-born. They are transnational, but in a way peculiar to 1.5s: their connection to their birth culture being that of child, even though they are now adults.
All Some of the Fil Am Galleon Trade artists had only ever visited the Philippines with their families before--as children, or as adults still stuck in a child's role. This trip was their introduction to their, or their family's, country of origin, not only in an adult role, but in their chosen profession as artists.
Visiting Manila for this cultural event was profound enough for those of us with no other connections there. But visiting Manila with this pile-up of passages was earth-shaking for the Fil-Am artists of our group. I expect there to be a pause. Then I expect there to be new work: very different, very rich new work.
Left to Right--Top: friend of Mike Arcega's, Mike Yap (Christine's husband), Camille Wofford, Christine Wong Yap, Dad Wofford, Mom Wofford, Jaime Cortez, Johanna Poethig; Center: artist friend whose name slides out of my head, Rick Silog, Mike Arcega (with flowers and balloon), Woff (with flowers and balloon), Emily Sevier; Front: Kenneth Loh, Stephanie Syjuco, Chris Brown, moi.
've finally begun writing posts again, but longer ones, so, while you're waiting for those, here's some stuffs.
The photo above is from Jenifer Wofford's and Mike Arcega's combined birthday party, held at Johanna Poethig's house in Oakland. Both were born on August 19, but a year apart. It's rather appropriate that our first gathering stateside since the trip was to honor these two, since Woff is clearly the head and heart of Galleon Trade, and Mike arguably its hands, being the artist who actually created a galleon long before the project was thought of.
Much basketball was played, and phallic balloons twisted.
As if the world was conspiring to think of our exploits, two articles followed our return. The first, from the Philippine Daily Inquirer, is simply reportage about Galleon Trade. Click on the image to get a high-res photo where you can read the text.
Relevant quote:
The term "brain drain" connected to their migrating parents is no longer applicable to these Fil-Ams. "Galleon Trade" proposes instead the use of the word "integration." It's amazing that the project took off despite the lack of government funding from both ends.
"Integration" being of a different form than the melting pot type. Too bad the article didn't go into it. Also too bad that they find grassroots community fundraising "amazing."
The other article, in the The Art Newspaper, is about the Manila underground arts scene, not about Galleon Trade. It lists a number of artists, curators, and art spaces we got to meet and hang out with and in while we were there. Have a quick gander, because some of those names will come up again.
rink wine, in an effort to make yourself "sleepy" (i.e. drunk.)
It won't make you sleepy.
So posting will have to start again later this week, once I've gotten over my own idiocy and settled back into my dayjob. Yes, I'm back in the Bay Area.
In the meantime, please enjoy the send off filmmaker Romeo Candido gave us in the last days of our Philippine sojourn. If you're attentive, you can catch a flash of me sitting in chair at the beginning:
And here's a more formal version of the same song:
the galleon trade edition is embedded reportage from the front lines of the 2-3-year art campaign Galleon Trade in Philippines, California, and Mexico.
This blog will follow the artists on their wanderings throughout the life of the project. More than that, it will follow thoughts directly and indirectly inspired by the project and its implications: speculating, inspecting, researching, commenting, commentating, and jumping to conclusions. It will be more focused than usual, but it will be very atlas(t)y.
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