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Personnes

monumenta1

monumenta2monumenta3We trekked to the Grand Palais one Sunday to see Christian Boltanski’s Personnes, the third installation in the Monumenta series. Boltanski had scheduled his exhibit to be shown during the coldest time of the year, and then the heating was off as well, so you can imagine how pissed off I was, after standing in line outside for 30 minutes to get tickets.

But once inside, everything comes together, and even the freezing temperature makes sense. Used coats are arranged to form neat squares on the floor, rusty poles at the corners and a light tube in between; sixty-nine squares of cloth that make you wonder about the people who wore them. At the very end is a mountain of clothes and a crane hovering over it. The crane grabs a handful of clothes with its claws, makes a slow ascent, and then releases the clothes into the air so they flutter back down into the pile, over and over.

What completes the atmosphere is the sound. A rhythmic beat, but not steady. Sixty nine recorded heartbeats echoing throughout the vast space of the Grand Palais. It’s quiet enough to be disturbing. It feels like being surrounded by hundreds of ghosts.

Shivering in my coat, I think of how appropriate the title of the exhibition is. Personnes. In French it means nobody. And also, somebody.

Currently listening to:
Grizzly Bear
Veckatimest

2010 03 12 Life in France Comments (2)

How do you afford your rock-and-roll lifestyle?

Ladies and gentlemen, I am attempting the impossible. I am cooking a very important dish called ‘Bouef Bourguignon’!

It is a dish cooked in red wine for 3 hours. Usually, you use half a bottle of wine for this recipe. I will now go finish the rest of the bottle.

I had a very nice weekend, and I will tell you all about it in a second, because first I feel the need to share with you a masterpiece of mine, created over 4 years ago.

Four years ago, back when I was working at GetAsia, I was already using the most sophisticated platforms ever to create mind-boggling, state-of-the-art animation shorts. In fact, Marcus (my then-Art Director) and I were known as what you would call geniuses. Oh, we used to work day and night at the office to create only the MOST BEAUTIFUL works of art in the history of man. Although Marcus and I stopped at the height of our career. For reasons of humility.

I actually posted this a long time ago in the archives, but my image server conked out on me, unaware, obviously, of the masterpieces I had uploaded on their puny FTP hosting. But thank God you are lucky, for I have a copy of the most stunning animation you will ever see in your whole life.

And that, folks, is all you need to know about my art.

***

Nice Weekend, Tagalog, and all things nice

I was supposed to tell you about my weekend, wasn’t I?

I got an SMS Saturday night from a sculptor from the Philippines (he sculpted that metal circular fountain in Greenbelt, though I’ve never seen it personally). Apparently he and another friend Ivan (photographer) were in Aix and were wondering if we could meet up for drinks.

It’s not so often that I get SMSs like this, in fact it was only the second time, so Julien and I went downtown where we met up with these two fantastic artists.

Dinner at our place was a hoot: talking about Philippines politics, traveling, films. I wanted to take them to the cinema to watch Jim Jarmurch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, but of course it wasn’t playing anymore.

(PS. I watched Kill Bill 2 last night. Quentin, I love you)

The next day we took them around the South : the Luberon, the castle of Les Baux, Lacoste. Mostly, we roadtripped and talked. On the way to Les Baux, we saw a field full of sheep and we stopped to take pictures. The weather was perfect, as it had been for the past week. Summer is almost here. I remember Reggie commenting that it was the first time he ever perspired in France.

If ever anyone comes to the south of France, please send me an email, I’ll show you around, we’ll have so much fun, and we’ll speak in Tagalog all day!

People in my Nose

(time for conversations)

Me : Jul, I have a pimple in my nose and it’s not so funny.

Jul : Well, dinner’s almost ready… why don’t you invite them for dinner, you’ll be sure that they’ll come out.

Me : Mmmmm. (remains quiet and pensive)

Then:

Me : Errr… why would they come out for dinner again?

Jul : What?

Me : I said, why would pimples come out for dinner? I don’t get it.

Jul : Oh, pimple! Sorry, I thought you said ‘people’. I thought you had people in your nose.

Me: That’s okay.

Rubiks Cube

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been trying to find a Rubiks Cube for a year now and it’s only here that I’ve managed to buy one. It’s not even the nice model: it’s a cheap plastic one where the rows keep on sticking to each other. But at least there are still Rubiks cubes for sale.

The other evening I was reading a book with my feet up on the futon, and I was very comfortable and didn’t want so much to be bothered, but Julien came up to me “exclaiming ecstatically” that he had found a solution to the Rubiks Cube!

He forced me to put down my book to witness the pattern he had cracked. I was a bit bummed out to be bothered from my reading of course, but I’ll admit I was a bit curious, too. A pattern to solve all the sides of a Rubiks Cube was intriguing.

He started twisting and turning the thing, methodically, in one direction first, then on the other. Top, then bottom. He did it for a long time. Years passed. The sun went up and down and up again and down. It rained, leaves fell, it snowed, the sun shone again. I say all this to make you believe that it did feel like a very long time. And that it actually was. I started counting the turns he made.

After the 127th twist, he looked at me proudly, practically rubbing the Rubiks Cube on my nose. “See?” he said, “See? It worked!”

I told him I didn’t see anything. The cube looked exactly as it did when he started.

“Exactly! That’s it! You see, if you turn the cube 127 times in that direction, you find yourself back where you started! Isn’t it amazing?”

“So you let me stop reading my book to watch you turn the Rubiks Cube 127 times just to see that nothing would change in the end?”

“Well, yes… In fact, I showed you a pattern.”

….

I leave you to imagine exactly what I told him about what I thought of his ‘pattern’.

Mahmud

Oi, by the way, my robot Mahmud has made friends with a box of sugar. Here he is posing with his best friend.

Ok, I have to go check on the dish I’m cooking. Muy caliente!

2004 05 19 Other Half
Stuff that happens to me Comments (0)

At the Window | A la Fenetre

“I have not always had this certainty, this pessimism which reassures the best among us. There was a time when my friends laughed at me. I was not the master of my words. A certain indifference. I have not always known well what I wanted to say, but most often it was because i had nothing to say. The necessity of speaking and the desire not to be heard. My life hanging only by a thread.

There was time when I seemed to understand nothing. My chains floated on the water.

All my desires are born of my dreams. And i have proven my love with words. To what fantastic creatures have I entrusted myself, in what dolorous and ravishing world has my imagination enclosed me? I am sure of having been loved in the most mysterious of domains, my own. The language of my love does not belong to human language, my human body does not youch the flesh of my love. My amorous imagination has always been constant and high enough so that that nothing could attempt to convince me of error.”

-Paul Eluard

I amthinking of Paul Eluard. The nonsense of Dadaism, the strength of Surrealism, Art and my relations to it, and what it means go on without a label.

2001 11 30 Books Comments (0)

Funny idiot

DADAIST OF THE DAY (Rather, most overlooked dadaist)

Otto Freundlich, 1878-1943
Otto was first a student of art history under Wolfflin, then a figurative, then an abstract sculptor; he studied in Berlin, Munich, Florence, and Paris, where he was associated with the Cubists around 1909. From 1914 to 1924 he lived in Cologne and retained close ties wtih Berlin. A member of the Novembergruppe, he was only peripherally involved iwth the Dads, though he sympathized with their socialist and pacifist goals. Hannah Hoch recalls him as “much too serious and earnest to participate in any of our youthfully scandalous manifestations… Freundlich belonged already to a more established community of nonconformist writers and artists, all regular contributors to Franz Pfemfert’s Die Aktion.” He returned to Paris in 1939, fled to the Pyrenees, and in 1943 was deported to Poland, where he died in a concentration camp.

LET’S BE THANKFUL
Man Ray for the rayograph (cameraless photography) and aerograph (spray-gun technique) and for this quote: “Who made Dada? Nobody and everybody. I made dada when I was a baby and I was roundly spanked by my mother. Now, everyone claims to be the author of Dada. For the past thirty years.”

Francis Picabia for the film Entr’acte, (with music by Eric Satie, and filmed by Rene Clair) and for “object portraits”, and for this sentence: “The principle of the word BEAUTY is merely an automatic and visual convention.”

Hans Richter for making Dreams that Money Can Buy , a dada-Surrealist 1944 film… and of course, for the book Dada Art and Anti-Art, and of course, for writing “Coincidences of sound or form were the occasion of wide leaps that revealed connections between the most apparently unconnected ideas.”

Kurt Schwitters who I really don’t like but I feel I have to put him here for Merz, his own apolitical branch of Dada, which is pretty cool for a Dadaist to not join any of the Cologne or Berlin groups… the bastard. But I like his collages with satirical intent (everyone knows him for his collages, well…) ans for Anne Blume, his nonsensical parody of conventional love poems… and for this poem:

The forest is silent in grief.
She must patiently suffer
Her dear betrothed,
The summer, to depart.
In gried and anguish still
She holds him in her arms.
You, my love, wept when I departed
could I now but rest on your heart!

Yours Truly,
Kala, who knows nothing, nothing, nothing.

PS. I’m going to create pink-and-blue retro graphics that will blow your minds away. I’ll be so good you’ll say I am Queen of Pink and Blue. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

2001 08 28 Comments (0)

The story is that Boom found the pigeon

Version 1.0 | Hands.
My grandmother passed away when I was eleven. I don’t remember much about her, except that during her dying days, she spent it at home so my father could take care of her. I remember her hair, very long and white, strands that almost looked as if they would crack under the comb she’d use to brush it. And I could stare for hours at her hands. Not kidding. They were a mystery to me. Wrinkled, soft skin, the flesh under her forearms loose. “It’s like someone sculpted you”. I was sitting on her bed, legs crossed, pretending to be an Indian. She smiled at me.

Version 1.1 | The sculptor and me.
I’ve always been disappointed because I’ve never been able to draw hands. I myself have non-dramatic hands with short fingers, unlike my sister’s long fingers. Boy’s hands, people would say. Maybe it’s because I’m not a sculptor. Or maybe the sculptor just wasn’t too fond of me, I suppose. Oh well.

Version 1.2 | Basquiat’s Hands.
I wonder if Basquiat had nice hands? But then I wouldn’t care. Any hand that can create art as wonderfully as he did is bound to be beautiful anyway. Strange things always happens when emotions are involved.

Version 1.3 | Returns.
After the funeral everyone came over. They were all in black but everyone had stopped crying. I sat myself on the couch. Then, I saw my Grandmother. Standing just across the room from us, next to the salad dish. My brother, who was sitting beside me, was looking at her too. Then, she was gone. Did you see? I whispered to my brother, who was 7 then. He said no, but his eyes were opened wide.

Version 1.4 | Ambush chosen the follow star powder keg.
Watched beautiful short films by Ang Lee, Wong Kar Wai, John Frankenheimer, Guy Ritchie and Alejandro González Iñárritu. Just six minutes of classical music and car chases. Ang Lee’s, at least. (I just overheard someone here say: “The story is that Boom found the pigeon.” I’ve been waiting all day to hear something like that. My day is complete. At last.

2001 08 01 Musings Comments (0)

Even in this anechoic chamber…

If you want to simplify, then simplify, goddamit. Hehehe.

A very blue day today. I’m sure we all have our days. I don’t necessarily mean I’m sad. I’m just feeling kind of blue. So naturally, I thought of :

  • rivers, lakes and bodies of water
  • my favorite jacket (which is still lost)
  • the Microsoft Windows logo
  • thoughtfully chewed-on Staedtler pencils
  • the sky and heavenly bodies
  • Julien
  • Minimalism
  • Yves Klein
  • the voice of Louis Armstrong singing What A Wonderful World as fireworks boomed over Australia’s harbour when the millenium struck.

Julien and I gave colours to music. Jeff Buckley’s was the colour of wine. Rich, thick, languid. Damn. I forgot the others… we had green voices and blue ones and pink ones and even sepia ones, the colour of old photographs. Which was Bob Marley’s? Which was Elliott Smith’s? Which was Edith Piaf’s, Radiohead, Ben Harper’s? The only problem is that you change your colours too, so when you listen to certain music you’re unconsciously trying to drag your shade into theirs. That’s not too bad, too. It’s a nice clash of colours. I would like to paint with music, one day. I’ll rent a ballroom, play all kinds of music all at the same time, and just dance like crazy to all the colours.

Yep, that’s not too bad. Today, though, I’ll stick to being blue.

Two wonderful pictures I’ve found, and they’ve got interesting stories behind them, too. Ameli Tancica and his heart-melting tribute to Yves Klein, and James Turrell’s Catso. I especially love the latter… As Turrell says that there is never no light— even in an anechoic chamber that takes away all the sound, you realise that there is never really silence because you hear yourself. Take that, all ye who “gnash their teeth and tear their hair in the dark”!!!

Similarly a line not straight corner to corner. I agree with Sol de Witt this way. In a jumble of everything I’ve been reading since this morning (Pablo Neruda, cummings, Skiles, and the FANTASTIC Neil Gaiman) I sum up my day of chopseuy literary readings with this sentence : No straight lines, only light.

By the way, to everyone who’s asked me, no, I don’t have plans yet of adding a guestbook here. Maybe soon. If ever there will be one, it will be with the single aim to hear your ideas and not just your hello’s, although hellos are friendly and well-meaning and Goddamit, I love hello’s. But I sincerely want to hear what you really think. Thoughts and ramblings, if you must. We’re all very interesting people, didn’t our mothers convince us of that? :-)

And may I just tell you how irritating it is to read books over the computer? Computer books. Damn. I swear it. I’ve got a headache the size of China.

Kooky ending, don’t you think? :-) Hehehe. I’m getting the Last Sentence Syndrome. *leaving singing doo-bee-doo-bee-doooo*

2001 07 20 Comments (0)