Closing the Cultural Gaps
#141: Here & Now (April events), Marian Pastor Roces, Art, "Rediscovering Philippine Artifacts," Martha Atienza, Floria Tosca, Paul Pfeiffer, Al Jarreau, Glass Beams, and The Ventures.
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HERE & NOW
April always tends to be a busy and stressful time for me. The nonprofit I work for holds a big, public event at the end of the month with other events leading up to it. This requires writing a lot of promo. On April 12, I will be at the Buddhist Temple of Salinas, introducing Theo Gonzalves, who will give a presentation on his new book, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American History, Art, and Culture in 101 Objects, which I copy edited. Also, I’ll be writing the nonprofit’s newsletter, and working with archivists to create an archival website, as well as a small exhibition in our office/gallery space. When May begins, it’ll be time to write up a grant report. Also—this is tax month!
Locally, the sunny periods between rain storms (we just had one) get longer. All over town, art events, poetry readings, and lectures are scheduled. Just today, I visited the Monterey Museum of Art’s big annual block party. Just down the street from me, Old Capitol Books is holding their annual Monterey Poetry Festival on April 12 and 13; I won’t be reading, but will have some art on display there.
So, I don’t have much time to think about, much less create, art or work on my own writing. But some of the things I’ve written in previous issues about the indigenous cultures in my parents’ homelands are still bouncing around in my head—especially in relation to art.
I should be going for more walks or reading books during my breaks from writing and editing, but since I work a lot on a computer, I find myself too often browsing social media and watching videos. Sometimes, I encounter some really interesting stuff.
For example, I’ve been checking out writing and lectures by art critic, scholar, and curator Marian Pastor Roces, thanks to a mention by Leny Strobel in social media. Roces headed a collaborative project to create a global inventory of Philippine art, artifacts, and documents in museums existing outside the Philippines (now called Mapping Philippine Material Culture).
I watched a couple of Pastor Roces’ lengthy talks on video, where she made me aware of the magnitude of the number of artifacts that have been looted from the Philippines by representatives of colonial powers. She notes: “The materials from the Philippines are held in natural history museums. Jorge Luis Borges always comes to mind whenever I revisit the Inventory. . . which means that it will take a few more generations to disentangle the . . . universe of material [cultural] expression from nasty webs of slots, partitions, screens, and segregations. Apartheid exists in museum storages.” [Drawings and paintings by Philippine master artists] “are [grouped] together with feathered arrows and poisoned darts.”1 Something like 90% of the archipelago’s cultural/artistic wealth is held in foreign countries (see “Rediscovering Philippine Artifacts” in the Rabbit Hole, below), creating what Pastor Roces calls the “lacuna“ or gap in cultural knowledge and context among Filipinos.
Since I’ve been working on a very small scale lately, of course I’m also interested in what she has to say about Philippine artistry “at the level of the minuscule,” in her online lecture, “Mindanao Textiles: A Technical Entry to Aesthetics.” She speaks of “a heritage of smallness,” noting that you need a magnifying glass to see how the gold was woven, or to see the intricacy of other pre-colonial items. Even when you look at Philippine-made “[Spanish] colonial jewelry, it’s the same smallness, the same intensity of workmanship,” whether it applies to the crafting of weapons or to the lace-making arts of the colonial period.
ART
Two asemics. The first is an older one from 2018. To some degree, all asemics I make relate to a gap or sense of loss around language. The second asemic was done in 2021; the writing in this piece is a kind of caption—unknown language, describing an unknown or unmappable “landscape.“
RABBIT HOLE
Rediscovering Philippine Artifacts in Foreign Museums (by Neni Sta. Romana Cruz), Philippine Inquirer: “A global inventory of Philippine cultural items shows that 90 percent are in large museums overseas, and a mere 5 percent have been on public display.”
Installation artist Martha Atienza talks about her installation, “Protectors”:
The baroque paintings of Australian artist Floria Tosca examine the intersections between science, description, power, and nature in “My Anthropocentric Wunderkammer.”
I had a very brief but interesting discussion with a group of artists, recently, about issues of scale in art. Thanks to author/artist Eileen Tabios for pointing me to the work of Paul Pfeiffer who plays with ideas of both scale and time, often resulting in a sense of the uncanny. See Pfeiffer’s fascinating interview with Jan Tumlir about his MoCA exhibition:
SOUNDINGS
Vocalist and songwriter Al Jarreau scatting (among other things) Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five”2 in 1976 from a rare German TV broadcast (tomgadd channel)3:
Glass Beams, from their EP “Mahal.” This music sounds to me like a cross between Suburbs of Goa and (Surf City Boomer that I am) the Ventures’ surf guitar. And OK I’ll say it: some interesting fashion choices were made here…
Couldn’t help myself. The Ventures, performing “Pipeline,”4 live in Japan, 1965:
I did not get this one out by midnight.
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From her lecture on contemporary indigeneity: “A Measure of the Violence of Loss,” for the Para Site International Conference, April 6, 2020. Surprising to me was that she connected the great losses of these artifacts to colonial collections—and the resulting void, or “lacuna” of cultural self-knowledge—to a social and political state that would produce “our sociopathic, murderous president” (President Duterte).
The jazz standard, “Take Five,” was composed by Paul Desmond, and recorded in 1959 by the Dave Brubeck Quartet.
Thanks to the “Mysterious M.” for pointing me to the Al Jarreau video!
"Pipeline” was originally written by Brian Carman and recorded by the Chantays in 1963. The Ventures’ version is a cover of the song, and it’s the version I heard when I was a teen living in “Surf City” (Santa Cruz, CA).