Category: Artists
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Keyword: Primitivism
For a fictional volume called Keywords for Southeast Asian Studies Abstract This article focuses on the historiography of Primitivism in Southeast Asian Studies, understood as the interest shown in non-Western cultures by the European avant-garde. Emerging with the development of anthropology, this movement instigated a protracted debate between ethnology and aesthetic studies. I present examples…
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Rodel Tapaya/ Three Paintings for Macao Biennale
Dogs have figured in Rodel Tapaya’s works since his first foray into visually translating the myths and legends of the Philippines. From Donsadat and the Magic Dog (2009) to Cane of Kabunian, numbered but cannot be counted (2011), man’s best friend is depicted as the vicar of divine representation and an intermediary between man and…
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Rodel Tapaya/ Can’t See the Forest for the Trees
Rodel Tapaya Can’t See the Forest for the TreesJack Bell Gallery (London, UK)May 2023 In this series of portraits filled with lush flora and fauna, Rodel Tapaya signals an intellectual turn to the ecocentric, spotlighting nature as the primary actor in the folklore that fuels his artistic imagination. The composition recalls a peculiar Southeast Asian artifact:…
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Machete of Paete and other Petrified Idols of Underdevelopment
Machete Poster and sculpture by Paloy Cagayat. Photo: Lakan Sining. The town of Paete, Laguna in the Philippines is an artisanal community famous for its living tradition of wood carving of religious santos. In 1580, the town came under the administration of Spanish friars Juan de Plasencia and Diego de Oropesa, who encountered a native…
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Protected: David Medala/ Parables of Friendship
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Protected: Andi Taku E Sana, Amung Taku Di Sana / All of us Present, This is our Gathering
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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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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David Medalla (1938-2020)
Peripatetic Filipino artist David Medalla, a pioneer of kinetic sculpture and participatory art performance, died in Manila on Monday, December 28. He was 82. He developed an early reputation as a poet and wünderkind during the immediate post-war period, and was recommended by American poet Mark van Doren to study Literature at Columbia University in…
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The Outsider Speaking for the Other
A serial reading of Andre Breton, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster, might give the impression of a direct intellectual lineage. That’s not what I’m going to do here. I’d like to think of this as a commentary from the sidelines; of what would have been possible had these thinkers sat…
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Protected: A Thread out of the Labyrinth
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The Tormented Square
Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1913. Kazimir Malevich was clear in his intentions to discover the “zero point” of painting; that is, painting that does not represent life outside its surface. He wanted to completely abandon depicting reality and instead invent a new world of shapes and forms. In his 1927 book The Non-Objective World, he…
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The Waves
I first saw The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katasushika Hokusai (1760–1849) ten years ago during his first retrospective in Europe at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau. I had to line up early on closing day to see an exhibition that was always packed. I saw the print again this year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in…
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The Metamorphosis of Narcissus as a Great Artist
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…
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Hooded Trauma
On the offensive figures of Philip Guston The decision by four major museums to delay the retrospective of painter Philip Guston has generated renewed interest in his controversial life. Perhaps because he is still often ranked with American abstract expressionist painters that many were flustered when museum directors deemed his images unfit for public consumption,…
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Pushing against the roof of the world: ruangrupa’s prospects for documenta fifteen
My latest article about ruangrupa on Third Text:http://thirdtext.org/cristobal-ruangrupa “A concern in many texts of Indonesian mythology is the need to raise the sky. This appears in myths from elsewhere, too, but the forms they take are not as extreme as in Indonesian stories, in which heaven and Earth are so closely jammed together that even…
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Heaven in a wildflower
Miguel Abreu Gallery’s first post-COVID quarantine exhibition pits painting versus photography. Brooklyn-based photographer Eileen Quinlan captures the nightmare of being marooned in isolation while Cheyney Thompson’s stenciled paintings complement the same sensibility by approximating the waves imprinted on driftwood. Quinlan’s snapshot of a wilderness glade, entitled Curtain Call, contemplates death and regeneration with an austere…
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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…
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Admiring hell from a distance
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…
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Protected: A heap of broken images
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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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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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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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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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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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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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The show everyone loves to hate
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…
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Lucas Arruda at David Zwirner
Lucas Arruda grapples with what its means to paint through tradition in his first solo exhibition in New York, ‘Deserto-Modelo’ Lucas Arruda, 36, mentioned in an interview with a Sao Paolo newspaper that his paintings are inspired by myths and tales. This maybe understood in the context of a pedestrian comparison to Mark Rothko or…
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North Atlantic White
A color walk piece inspired by William Burroughs. Originally written for Emmanuel Iduma’s class on narrative criticism. One similarity that struck me with Burroughs and a Filipino painter named Juan Luna is that they both killed their wives. In Luna it was the heat of passion and jealousy but for Burroughs it was the blur…