Category: essay

  • Pasay City art scene, still a growing seed

    Ana Teixeira Pinto’s piece about the implications of the socio-politico-economic matters to the art scene in Lisbon fed into my continued ponderings about the art scene in my own city, Pasay. While we have the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the longest-running Philippine commercial gallery on our map, I believe Pasay’s art sphere has…

  • Rick Rocamora’s Dark Memories: Burying texts under photos, and vice versa

    For a photography exhibition, the ones shot by Rick Rocamora for Dark Memories: Incarceration, Disappearance, and Death During Martial Law are actually not the main vehicle for the stories, but words. Dark Memories is part of the two-part show at Ateneo Art Gallery to continue to remember the country’s dark past that happened 50 years…

  • AI Art in Fredrik Jameson’s Postmodern World

    An art competition at a US state fair stirred the entire art world last September. The winning entry, ‘Théâtre D’opéra Spatial’, a work by Jason Allen created through Midjourney, sparked conversations online (mostly on the side of disapproval and/or alarm) about the usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create art. In a rather simplistic and…

  • Guillermo’s Wind of Change

    It was 1981 when art critic Alice Guillermo published Endaya’s Wind of Change at the Observer magazine, a weekly supplement of The Times Journal. At that time, she was already an established art critic; from bagging the Art Association of the Philippines’ Art Criticism Award in 1976, to having her byline in multiple publications. It…

  • Some ethical dilemmas in curating

    “Juan Luna was convicted of murdering his wife and mother-in-law.Should his works be removed from public view?” In preparation for the discussion, I skimmed the required readings to assess which ones can help me approach the prompt. I read Karen Ocampo Flores’s “Etiquette for Curators” and found it practical and instructive especially for someone who…

  • The Wild Walls of WIPZ and RESTOK

    The perimeter of the university wall along Katipunan Avenue from the gate on Shuster Street to the one on Magsaysay Avenue – all 430 meters of it – is the Freedom Wall. This long stretch of wall has been a canvas by often anonymous makers for their graffiti and street art sprayed in vibrant colors…

  • Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo’s “Marina (Seascape)”

    Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo’s “Marina (Seascape)”

    Not much has been written about “Marina (Seascape),” so I wonder where the 36-year-old Félix Resurrección Hidalgo was when he painted it in 1891. Was he painting en plein air like the impressionists in Europe? Or was he cooped up in his studio, mainly using his memories and imagination of watching the sea? I would…

  • A Love Letter to Bo Burnham: Inside

    In the spirit of the meta-commentaries in Bo Burnham: Inside, it would be acceptable to break the fourth wall and say that this is coincidentally the fourth draft (even if the second one already passed the 700-word mark) of my attempt to understand why I love Burnham’s recent Netflix special. I finally came to realization…

  • Spiral Jetty and Nature: Exploration with the Greens and The 1975

    Spiral Jetty and Nature: Exploration with the Greens and The 1975

    Spiral Jetty is one of the important markers in the history of Land art (or Earth art, as it is also called). It was constructed by Robert Smithson in 1970 using rocks mostly from extinct volcanoes which he transported to an area in Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah. The artist unfortunately died three years…

  • Ricarte Puruganan – Pushing and riding the waves of Philippine art

    I love seascapes – from The Great Wave off Kanagawa, to Seascape near Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, to Stormy Seascape. Such affinity drew me to Toilers of the Sea by Ricarte Puruganan as I randomly flipped through my copy of 100 Years of Philippine Painting. The overall Impressionistic quality of the painting and incorporation of Filipino fishermen…