southeast asian literature project

deadline: 20 May 2008
Discipline(s): Comics/Animation/Gaming

Asian Youth Animation and Comic Contest is authorized by All China Youth Federation and hosted by ACYF International Project Cooperation Center, Cartoon Commission of China TV Artists Association and Guiyang government, Asian Youth Animation & Comics Contest (hereinafter referred to as “AYACC”) is aimed to be top annual award for Asian original animation and comic.

AYACC is dedicated to integrate Asian cultural resources, promote the influence of Asian animation and comic, create cultural image of Asia, provide a platform of information exchange, as well as to boost Asian animation industry development . It is the great event for Asian animation and comic.

The Theme of 2007 AYACC is “Cartoon Dream”, which involves TV series, short animation, comics, illustration, etc. The Grand Prize and more than 30 other awards has been set up for the Contest, such as Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Student Work and Best Visual Effects. The total amount of prize will be 100,000 RMB together with trophy. A grand Awarding Ceremony will be held on July 2007 in Guiyang, China. All prize winners will be invited to the ceremony, and participate series of programs including “Cartoon Industry Development Forum”, “Best Animation & Comics Show”, “Cartoon Night Party” and so on.

Up to now, AYACC has promoted its event among 20 Asian countries and region, such as Japan, Korea, India, Israel, Thailand, Malaysia, Turkey, Singapore, Philippine, Iran, Kuwait, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc. The Contest received great concern and actively answer. The Asian Embassies in China also expressed their willing to support the event by organizing domestic artists to participate in.

AYACC is going to integrate top-level resources of Asian cartoon industry, boost the influence of the Asian cartoon, create Asian cartoon image, as well as to provide a information exchange platform for Asia cartoon industry. AYACC aims to become the vane of Asian cartoon, the performing stage of young Asian artists, the grand ceremony of cartoon art in Asia.

About the Contest

1. Eligibility:
Anyone living in Asia and /or with roots in Asia under age of 40 is eligible for enter.
2. Genre:
TV series, short animation, computer-assisted or computer-generated, animation, comics, illustration
3. Prize:
* Total amount: 100,000 RMB
* Trophy and Certificate

TENDER FOR APPLICATIONS |
WEDNESDAYS i’m-n-love

OPEN PLATFORM RESIDENCY

APRIL 24: WOP RESIDENCY OPEN CALL LAUNCH BAR OPENS 7 PM,
OPEN DISCUSSION (ON THE RESIDENCY) 9PM GREEN PAPAYA ART PROJECTS

True love never dies. And unlike hot summer flings, this one is here to stay. After nearly eight months of relentless romance, unwavering faith, accidental chance encounters and careful planning, our love has finally come to bear fruit. Its time to step up. Swingers meet their match, cynics lost among throngs of intoxicated hope. Paperwork bureaucracy thrown out the door, paving the way for mad spontaneity. A bit of temper if only to extend our cheap honeymoon getaway. No need to pack your bags for this one. Yes, settling in can be nerve-wracking, even unforgiving. Take your chance, as usual the moment is now! The day has finally arrived. With much much anticipation we are launching the call for applications to WEDNESDAYS i’m-n-love OPEN PLATFORM RESIDENCY.
WEDNESDAYS i’m-n-love OPEN PLATFORM RESIDENCY (WOP) is an experimental and creative laboratory for new artistic explorations in contemporary visual arts, performance, and new media. Open to artists, curators and researchers who wish to present their current tendencies for a once-a week critical exchange via screenings, readings, conversations, performance and temporal exhibitions. WOP Residency provides 6 local young artists/curators the possibility of research residency at Green Papaya Art Projects for 2 months (or 8 Wednesdays) each with some production allowance.

Six artists/curators will be selected from an open call to organize and co-curate eight succeeding WOP programs. Aside from co-curating, the resident will also assist in documenting and archiving the events. While in residency, the participants shall also be encouraged to produce their own works (literary, writing, video, performance, painting and plastic art) referenced on the creative environment and experience brought about by the Wednesdays happenings. The works may be multidisciplinary and collaborative. All creative outputs of the six participants will be presented in a culminating exhibition and publication after one year of WOP Residency completion as part of Green Papaya’s calendar for 2009.

Launched in September 2007 as Wednesdays I’m-n-love Open Platform, this weekly happening opens up the space to discuss aesthetic, ideological and pedagogic strategies involved in any artistic process. Now running on its eight month, WOP has evolved into a weekly gathering much anticipated with unexpected creative twists and turns. Generating a platform for interventionist tactics, cross disciplinary interaction and collaboration in varying artistic stages – from script readings, improvisation jams, lectures, live talk shows to ping-pong nights. Originally conceived as loose, informal and anarchic gatherings, WOP Residency arose from the exigencies of a structured sustainable artistic program empowering the local art community in the face of temporary artist-run initiatives. Bringing in much needed environment to discuss strategies that will bridge the gap of managing independent initiatives whilst promoting creative and artistic agendas.

Aims and Objectives • WOP Residency aims to put-in-place the necessary mechanisms to develop a curatorial approach and strategy emerging from the sensibilities and context of new artistic explorations of young emerging multi/cross-media artists. It is creative laboratory with a diverse interest in anthropological, social, political, and technological contexts, and probe how these areas of diverse interests impact on contemporary art practice. • It provides artist/curator a unique environment for artistic engagement between him/her and those artists involved in the weekly WOP programs. Such environment is seen as a fertile ground for the resident artist/curator to create his/her work witin the context of that engagement. • WOP Residency seeks to ensure a year-long uninterrupted programming with 6 resident artists/curators taking charge of curatorial and program implementation for 12 months, with each one covering 8 weeks of residency. Putting in place a curatorial and managemment support mechanism involving members of its community thereby putting into practice the principle of comunity ownership and responsibility over the idea of an independent, alternative and “open platform.”

Ask and you shall receive. Artists, curators, researchers, talkers, thinkers, auto-didacts, art students and enthusiasts alike can submit your motivation letter, one-page proposal/artist statement expressing the desired residency period from June 2008 to May 2009 and curriculum vitae on or before May 15, 2008 to

greenpapayaartprojects@gmail.com

or send it via post to:

GREEN PAPAYA ART PROJECTS
124A Maginhawa Street, Teachers Village East
Diliman, Quezon City

http://papayapost.blogspot.com/

Call for Papers:

STATES OF INDEPENDENCE
the 5th Annual Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference (ASEACC)

WHEN: November 27 – 29, 2008
WHERE: Manila, The Philippines

Please send an abstract (max. 500 words) of your proposed paper to one these members of the program committee of the conference:

Dr. Rolando B. Tolentino: magpaubaya@yahoo.com
Dr. Sophia Harvey: sophfeline@earthlink.net
Dr. Gaik Cheng Khoo: gaik.khoo@gmail.com
Dr. Tilman Baumgärtel: mail@tilmanbaumgaertel.net

DEADLINE: May 21, 2008

THEME: STATES OF INDEPENDENCE
The first decade of the 2000s has seen a stunning upsurge of independent cinema in a number of Southeast Asian countries. This development has been one of the motivations of the Annual Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference (ASEACC), and this year we want to focus completely on the issue of identity. We invite contributions that address the somewhat contentious notion of “independent cinema” from different theoretical and methodological angles. The concept of “independent cinema” means something very different in the emerging countries of Southeast Asia than in the US or Western Europe, and we want to tease out some of the particular qualities of independent cinema in the region.

We want to ask what “independence” means in countries, where the commercial film industry is slowly bleeding to death, but where the distribution is often dominated by commercial chains that are rather disinclined to show independent films. We are interested in papers about the situation of independent distribution channels, be it “microcinemas” in galleries, socio-cultural centers or people’s living rooms, or on the Internet. We are looking for contributions that address the specific aesthetics of independent films from the region. In particular, we encourage papers that study the work of individual independent filmmakers or analyse specific indie films. Finally, we will focus on the situation in this year’s host country, the Philippines. As is our tradition, filmmakers will participate in open forums and screen their works.

NEW MEDIA
Another focus of this year’s conference will be the role of technology and “new media” in the creation of an alternative “mediascape” in the region. We invite papers that examine the influence of digital technology on the film language that Southeast Asian film makers are developing.

SOUTH EAST ASIA AND EUROPE
We are also encouraging contributions that engage with historic aspects of dependence and independence, such as the colonial legacies of some European countries in Southeast Asia or more contemporary inter-dependencies between Europe and Southeast Asia (for example, the policies of European film festivals, funding bodies or production companies such as the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Hubert Bals Fund, Fortissimo, etc).

OTHER TOPICS
- Alternative funding/distribution channels and bodies
- Issues of identity and representation in independent film
- Interdisciplinary approaches in alternative media production
- Independent film and the mainstream
- Festivals and grant-giving bodies
- The Local and the Global
- Independent film in the Philippines

ASEACC is currently attempting to get funding for travel subsidies and accommodations but cannot offer any as yet. Prospective participants are strongly encouraged to secure their own travel funding. We are also trying to get discounted hotel and dorm rooms for conference participants.

The conference will be accompanied by screenings of select independent films from Southeast Asia from November 25 to 26 and on November 30, 2008.

For more information on the conference, visit our websites:
http://www.asianfilmarchive.org/aseacc/
http://seaconference.wordpress.com/

An announcement from the Cha editors:

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal is the first Hong Kong-based online literary quarterly dedicated to publishing quality English poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, reviews, photography & art from and about Asia.

The second issue of has now Cha: An Asian Literary Journal been released. It features works by 23 writers/artists: Robert Abel, John Biggs, David Braden, Michelle Cahill, Sam Ferrer, Richard Freadman, Suzanne Hermanoczki, Clara Hsu, Luisa A. Igloria, Agnes Lam, Mary Lee, Janny Leung, Mark Malby, Debra Moffitt, Chris Mooney-Singh, Ashok Niyogi, Alistair Noon, Alvin Pang, Kay Sexton, Mark Stringer, Todd Swift, Mag Tan and Eddie Tay.

The second issue is available on our website www.asiancha.com. For further details, please see the attached flyer or contact the editors at editors@asiancha.com.

Yours sincerely
Tammy Ho & Jeff Zroback
The Editors

An announcement from Jane Camens of Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership:

Dear friends interested in writing from Asia and the Pacific,

Following a discussion that began at the first Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership board meeting in Bali, I am delighted to share with you a new initiative that the Partnership has helped initiate in India. We sincerely hope you will support this initiative in any way you can, help us to publicise it, and participate.

I have pasted below and attached the announcement, and would be grateful if you can send this out as a media release if you have the resources to do so, or promote the event among possible participants and sponsors in any other way you can.

I take this opportunity to wish you a wonderful 2008, and successful Year of the Rat.

Jane Camens

Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership

‘WRITING THE FUTURE’

The First Ever Asia-Pacific Festival of Writing

An internationally-supported event for emerging and established writers, scholars of contemporary literature from Asia and the Pacific, publishers, agents and all interested in new writing from the region.

 

New Delhi and Shimla,

India

October 2008

The Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership and Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, are pleased to collaborate in organising Indian and international support to hold the first ever Asia-Pacific Festival of Writing in New Delhi and the hill-station town of in Shimla.

In anticipation of both Indian and international funding, the Festival, called ‘Writing the Future’ will include creative writing workshops for emerging writers from the region, translation workshops, as well as a major academic conference on new writing from Asia and the Pacific and public events featuring emerging and established writers and people in the publishing industry.

The Festival was planned at a two-day meeting at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in mid January, attended by representatives from India’s Ministry of External Affairs, the Ministry of Culture, the India Foundation for the Arts, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, the Sanskriti Foundation, the Indian Institute for Advanced Studies, the Sahitya Akademi or National Academy of Letters and other universities in India (including Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jamia Millia Islamia). Others participating included the executive director of Britain’s New Writing Partnership, academics from other universities such as Dhaka University and Lisbon University. Indian literary agents, publishers, writers, performers, translators of standing also attended the meeting.

 

International sponsorship for the event will be co-ordinated through the Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership (APWP), which seeks to raise the profile of contemporary literature from the region. The Partnership is an international collaboration of scholars, literary organisations, and writers from the region, and is presently housed within a research centre, the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University, Australia.

The APWP will promote the Festival internationally and take registration from international participants through its website (www.apwriters.com).

“To quote Victor Hugo: ‘Advancing armies cannot stop an idea whose time has come’,” said co-coordinator of the Festival, Professor Rukmini Bhaya Nair, a poet and Head of ITT’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences.

“We plan this as an on-going event that we hope will provide valuable opportunities for new writers in the region for years to come,” she said.

 

Professor Nair suggested the theme ‘Writing the Future’.

“The conference will enable a forensics of literary studies in the region through the lens of creative writing,” she said. “The Festival as a whole will provide a forum for extensive cross-talks between academia and creative writers.”

 

Executive Director of the Writing Partnership, Jane Camens, said the Festival would be the key focus for the APWP in 2008. Ms. Camens started Hong Kong’s international literary festival which was the first festival in the region to feature writing from and about Asia. She project managed the first events for Britian’s New Writing Partnership while completing her MA at the famous writing program at the University of East Anglia.

“Emerging writers in England gain tremendous benefit and advantage from workshops with peers and established writers, but there are few equivalent opportunities in Asia,” she said. “ ‘Writing the Future’ is an attempt to introduce to Asia a mini equivalent to the UK’s Arvon Foundation writing programs or annual Bread Loaf Writers Conferences in the USA, and other opportunities open to new writers elsewhere.”

Both Professor Nair and Ms Camens stressed the importance of the conference of scholars that will be a central focus at the festival, in addition to the workshops and public events. Academic institutional support is the backbone of the initiative. The conference will examine contemporary writing from the region, the value of writing programs, the state of national literary studies, and notions of writing in relation to regional identity, globalization, cosmopolitanism, post-colonialism, and other associated issues.

 

The IIT will host the academic conference ‘Writing the Future’ together with other institutions and universities in Delhi. IIT will also actively seek to involve other universities from the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere.

The Indian Literary journal Biblio will publish a special issue in conjunction with the conference, and may also publish a future issue including selected papers from the conference and new writing from the workshops. In addition, IIT, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University will approach other peer-reviewed international journals to publish academic papers from the conference.

A draft of the Festival Program follows:

Shimla Fiction Writing Workshops (6-17 October)

Fiction writing workshops will be held over two weeks at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (formerly the Vice Regal Lodge in the picturesque former summer retreat of the British Raj in Shimla.). The intake of participants will be selective and limited to a total of 25 emerging writers, 15 of whom may come from outside India.

New Delhi Poetry Workshop (21-25 October)

Poetry workshops will be held at the Sanskriti Foundation which runs other residency programmes in collaboration with UNESCO, Asia-Link, Association Française d’Action Artistique and the Fulbright Fellowships, helping to foster understanding between different cultures through the sharing of ideas and life experiences. Participation will be open to 15 Indian poets and 10 from abroad, as well as local Indian and five international teachers.

New Delhi/Mysore/Guwahati Translation Workshops (13-16 October)

Workshops will be run by the Sahitya Akademi (the Indian National Academy of Letters) in collaboration with the Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi and IIT, Delhi. The workshops will focus on translating writing from Indian languages into English.

The Festival seeks collaboration with international centres of literary translation for this initiative. Approximately 30 participants are expected.

 

New Delhi Script Writing Workshops (To be confirmed)

 

New Delhi ‘Writing the Future’: Conference on Contemporary Writing from Asia and the Pacific (21-23 October).

The conference will address some of the following questions. Can writing programs, taught by practitioners, invigorate national Literary Studies courses? What benefits might there be between creating a dialogue between the humanities, creative arts and other disciplines? The conference will call for papers that examine contemporary writing from the region, the value of writing programs, the contrasts and synergies between traditional oral forms of literature and new forms of writing influenced by multi-media, the state of national literary studies, as well as studies that seek to explore writing and identity, nationalist constructs, globalization and diaspora, cosmopolitanism, post-colonialism and other issues raised by contemporary writing from the region.

‘Writing the Future’ Literary Festival Public Events (21-25 Oct)

Public events will be held in New Delhi in the evenings. These will include readings by emerging and established writers; panel discussions with publishers, literary agents, and writers; book launches; and cultural performance by Indian poets, theatre-people and singers.

School and College events (21-25 Oct)

Local and international established writers who conduct workshops and participate in the public events will visit schools and colleges in New Delhi to read from their work and talk about their writing process. Engaging with youth is a very important and intrinsic part of the conceptualisation of this festival.

Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership Board Meeting (23 October)

The international Board of scholars and writers will meet directly after the conference.

 

For more information, contact:

Prof. Rukmini Bhaya Nair, at the IIT, New Delhi (India) at Tel: +91 11 26591371

or email rbnair@hss.iitd.ernet.in

Or

Jane Camens at the APWP (Australia) at Tel: +61 2 66804906

or email jane.camens@apwriters.com

A sexy new series of six-word-story-anthologies. Authors pro bono, but artists well-compensated.

Some samples from the first installment:

No hurt feelings: say I-love-you back.

Didn’t you read? NO HUMANS ALLOWED

Send entries and queries to editor:
Adam David <juncruznaligas@gmail.com>

Related links:
Random Fandom
Adam David’s Flickr site
A sample from this link, from Adam’s “Instructions for the Inclined” series:

The Singapore Writers Centre is currently working on a database of editors who can render their services.  Editors who wish to be included in this database can download the application form, fill it up and send it to swc_info@bookcouncil.sg. Visit this page for more info.

The Asian Children’s Writers & Illustrators Conference 2008 will be held on the 5th and 6th June 2008 at the National Library, 100 Victoria Street. Visit their website and click on the poster image below for more details:

Related links:
National Book Development Council of Singapore

Writer and conceptual artist Yason Banal’s ongoing curatorial project:

Young Star @ Philippine Star
Utopia in Progress
SLEEPWALKING
By Yason Banal Friday
December 7, 2007

Since SLEEPWALKING came out in STAR two years ago, it has been interested in exploring the potential of “the printed page” as an imaginative space for art and ideas. There had been e-mails, phone conversations, dream sequences, suicide notes, conceptual works and critical theories, punctured with sex, politics and culture. Beginning this month, I will occasionally be converting this newspaper column into a curatorial space, inviting creatives, thinkers and curators to make unique works or organize special projects specifically for publication — the works will not exist anywhere else in the same form as they will have here. Spread sporadically over 12 issues in the course of one year, UTOPIA:SLEEPWALKING will serve as a platform for exciting and experimental “young stars” from various disciplines and countries to create “projects for the printed page,” thus communicating such “propositions” to a broader public. It is imperative for an exchange to happen, not just of ideas and images, but of communities and contexts; these gestures, this space, can only hope to be insightful and transformative for both creator and audience.

First to be featured in UTOPIA:SLEEPWALKING was the world premiere of John Torres’s “film for the printed page,” Flash Elemental, which appeared with the above quoted text on December 7, 2007. A version of Flash Elemental appears on the project’s blog. More of these online versions will be uploaded every month.

[Above image is a "still" from Flash Elemental.]

Call for submissions:

Do you enjoy the city more than the countryside? Do you prefer trashy neon signs, crowded thoroughfares and junk markets to mountain vistas, glistening lakes and pastoral landscapes? Do you hate animals? Well, if you do, you’re in luck, because Ricepaper would like to hear from you! We invite all writers of Asian and mixed descent to participate in our spring 2008 issue about urban life, big city nights and big city problems. Previously unpublished poetry, comic strips and short fiction are most welcome, and should preferably get to us by Feb. 1, 2008.

Send your submissions to the editor, Herman Cheng:
hermancheng604@hotmail.com

or

Ricepaper Magazine
PO Box 74174 Hillcrest RPO
Vancouver, BC
V5V 5C8

Payment:
$50 per page of poetry and illustration published
$100 per short story

* Ricepaper is a 13-year-old arts and lit quarterly that focuses on East Asian and Southeast Asian culture. Ricepaper accepts unsolicited submissions of up to eight previously unpublished poems, on any subject, in any form. Poetry and illustrated submissions should not exceed eight pages in total, while short fiction should not exceed 6,000 words. Fiction writers must be of either Asian or mixed descent. Please include a short biographical note with your submission.

Amir Muhammad’s latest book, New Malaysian Essays 1, is now available for pre-orders.

You can pre-order New Malaysian Essays 1 for RM30 each, which is RM6 less than the bookstore price. The price includes shipping anywhere within Malaysia. If you are outside Malaysia, kindly make friends with a Malaysian resident who can then post it to you.

You can send the money to my Maybank account: 014105120512. Once you have done so, send me an email at matahari.books@gmail.com to let me know your address. If you’d like an autograph, let me know to whom it should be addressed

Closing date is Thursday, Feb 14. The books will be posted on Feb 15.

Book info:

Synopsis:
New Malaysian Essays 1 is the first of a planned annual series concentrating on local non-fiction writing. From polemic to ode to memoir, this series invites Malaysian readers – and writers – to notice, analyse and interpret the living, throbbing, squelching vitality around them. Multi-disciplinary, multi-tasking and best appreciated on multi-vitamins, this first collection takes us from Brian Yap’s election-era critique to Amir Muhammad’s alternative lexicon by way of Burhan Baki’s elegant deconstructions, Aminuddin Mahmud’s seminar on branding and Saharil Hasnin Sanin’s knockabout ruminations on language before rounding off with Sonia Randhawa’s stirring call for national (and therefore personal) self-realisation.

Writers: Brian Yap, Aminuddin Mahmud, Burhan Baki, Saharil Hasrin Sanin, Amir Muhammad & Sonia Randhawa
Length: 256 pages.
Size: 21cm (height) and 17.9cm (width)
Language: English (80%) and Malay (20%).
Published by Matahari Books
Design & Layout by Bright Lights at Midnight
Printed by ?
Retail price: RM36
ISBN: 987-983-43596-1-4
National Library Catalogue-in-Publication
Launch date: 16 February 2008 (8pm; Central Market Annexe, top floor)

This book won’t be available in most Malaysian bookstores and the print run has been reduced to 1,000. The original distributor backed out due to “the Datuk’s orders” because of ‘the vulgar words’ and being ‘politically sensitive’. Excerpts and more info are on Amir’s blog.

(A review by Angelo V. Suarez for the Philippine Daily Inquirer of Bea Camacho’s recent text-based work.)

In the recently concluded exhibition Conversion Factors at Mag:Net Katipunan, one expects a machine-like accuracy to Bea Camacho’s latest works—an almost mathematical attention to logic and calculability rather than the emotional excesses of artifice and design much of contemporary art continues to recover from. But by refusing to bracket out the latter in her involvement of family matters, the artist graciously fails to meet this expectation, and by doing so paradoxically exceeds expectation by her equal refusal to present merely the former.

A third space is paved thus—or ‘cleared’ perhaps is a better word, given the extensive whiteness of the show—where both extremes arrive at a negotiation. And this negotiation is achieved through thoughtful employment of language, where words are no mere titles to individual works but serve as a framing device for each—such that in spite of their apparently peripheral existence, in the near-complete bareness of the exhibition, the texts begin to take the foreground.

Disappearance and despair

Or background, as it were, in a performance where on one of the gallery’s white walls the artist writes or documents, as its title matter-of-factly indicates, the objects in her room. Filled with text, the entire wall is then covered up with more paint, and all that’s left for viewers to see is the white, massive trace of erasure—a literal whitewash. A poignant sense of loss accompanies the glaring absence, made blinding in certain angles by the light that strikes it from the ceiling.

But what is more striking is that this feeling of loss, deftly manufactured by Camacho (and it is true that feelings can be manufactured, given the proper cultural tools), operates in two dimensions. With knowledge of the performance, one is made to think that the act of erasure attempts to communicate an emptiness felt by the performer—a notion that complements the show’s overarching motif of distance and alienation, attested to by the other works present. However, one is likelier to have no knowledge of the performance at all; walking blindly into the gallery on any given day, s/he is at a loss upon contact with the seemingly bare wall, empty if not for the lonesome titular label.

Seeing nothing, the viewer may ask: Has the work been stolen? And the question may appear in multiple allusive variations: Has it turned invisible, will it be telepathically conveyed, is it made of inert gas, is the work a secret, is it a readymade composed solely of found paint and wall, is it the emperor’s new artwork, is it another of those cerebrally chic conceptualist tricks? Each question is as silly as it is valid. For in an age where an empty page by poet Jose Garcia Villa mingles with an equally empty score by musician John Cage—and both have been buried beneath a tombstone labeled dubiously as that of the international ‘vanguardist canon’ (pardon the contradiction)—one begs for a point other than the Zen-like dictum “a canvas is never empty” formulated by Robert Rauschenberg.

And a plethora of points can certainly be read both into and from Conversion Factors, with its multiplicity of suggestions juxtaposed against bareness. While Rauschenberg’s saying rings true in his “Erased De Kooning Drawing” of 1953 where the renegade artist manually erases, frames, then displays a drawing by the Dutch abstract expressionist, in Camacho’s work it doesn’t. Or rather, it is rephrased, if not completely refunctioned, as such: it is the artwork instead that empties the canvas—in appearance at least, or more appropriately, disappearance.

For in the face of this effacement, the titles quite literally come into the picture, hinting at hidden social structures—at invisible form beneath invisible form—like a signifier that reveals rather than hides its arbitrary relationship with its signified, or a photograph that willingly declares its subject to be false, in betrayal of the realist cause. If one insists merely on the material presences (i.e. the exhibited objects) inside the gallery, then s/he will have to be content with the notion of “empty” canvases rather than emptied ones, missing out on the processes subsumed in exhibition.

Absence makes the art grow fonder

This subsumption is rendered most keenly in Camacho’s “Portrait Series,” framed white sheets on which nothing is visible upon first encounter, save for reflected light and its counterpoint with shadow, with occasional dust. Each titled with a personal name presumably of a loved one, the seven portraits line the wall like blindfolded captives waiting to be shot—but in fact these subjects already have been, photographically so: executed mercilessly upon the finger’s release of the trigger at camerapoint.

But also like cattle for cheap, raunchy burgers—or Rauschenbergers, let’s say—they arrive ‘double-dead’ like decaying meat as final products for public consumption, with the subjects dying further by slowly turning invisible: the photographic portraits are photocopied, then the photocopies are photocopied, over and over, till not one trace of the images remains. The artist’s exhibited books attest to this: beginning with the initial photocopy of an original image, the subsequent pages unfold a tale of a person’s face diminishing, gradually and distortedly—conceptual memory retaining the ghost of someone’s identity, contrapuntal to visual memory struggling for recognition.

Because Rauschenberg’s erasure was committed by hand just as de Kooning’s drawing was made by hand, his work, rather than removing someone else’s signature or autographic gesture, superimposes instead his own signature upon another. Consequently, rather than doing away with the sense of individualism and authenticity the abstract impressionists were preoccupied with, Rauschenberg duplicates it instead with paradoxical sweep, with sweeps of the eraser. In Camacho’s portraits, however, the act has been committed mechanically instead of manually—impersonally—and the use of photocopying technology achieves a disturbing play on the so-called work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Observe: while in Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1936 essay, the theorist proposes that the unique quality or “aura” traditionally accorded an artwork which renders it culturally sacred diminishes with every reproduction, Camacho seems to argue otherwise: In the fashion of most conceptualisms, it is the work that literally diminishes or dematerializes instead. But by virtue of the tender titles and the frames, the artist adds to this by implying that the aura is retained somehow in spite of this disappearance, that it remains intact—if not made more alive—by its relegation to the abstract realm of concept and memory. Presence, not absence, makes art grow into fodder.

This calls to mind another text-based work by Rauschenberg wherein he sends a typical telegram, empty if not for the heading, that declares simply, “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.” Though their difference lies in the fact that Camacho’s portraits are end-points of reproduction while Rauschenberg’s telegram is a starting point begging for reproduction, both take root in mechanical soil—the former in photography and the latter in type. The mixed-metaphor/oxymoron “mechanical soil” is intentional: these two works simultaneously celebrate their art’s paradox of personality and impersonality, for in the cold calculability of their processes lies the social reality of the artist as primary producer, whose personal affairs whether advertently or inadvertently inform—or shall we say fertilize?—his/her artistic produce.

To yearn is to yarn

The same paradox is explored further in two more works, and the preoccupation with process is maintained while coming surprisingly in the warm form of crochet. In “The Distance Between Me and My Brother,” yearning turns to yarn as time and travel become exactly what the entire show is about—conversion factors. Converting the spatial concept of distance into a temporal and emotional one, both viewer and artist ask: How long does it take to journey from one space to a distant other? The answer lies in how long it takes to produce this work—personal in its allusion to family and actual use of hands, recalling the stereotype of an old woman knitting a soft keepsake for her grandchild as she waits for the latter to come home from school.

But not only does the mathematical notion of conversion confer on this work a sense of impersonality. So too do the grids of woven yarn produced in the process, invoking a kind of repetitive order that structures emotion, layer upon layer. This latticework also exists in “Ten-Minute Phone Call,” a crocheted work where time is converted back to material space and where the financial cost of a ten-minute phone call, presumably long-distance, is equivalent to the value of yarn used in its production.

Collectively, it is easy to dismiss Conversion Factors from a visual standpoint as just another recourse of emotional excess on its course to white catharsis, all in the name of art as an expression of emptiness. And a purely textual standpoint will prove just as dismissive, with the individual titles bordering on melodrama juxtaposed against the coolly detached show-title for a trite attempt at irony. But Camacho chooses to tread that narrow path between the pictorial and the literary instead, between the tangible and the conceptual, where materiality and textuality converge in the poetics of intermedia.

Given the somber quality and quiet equipoise of the artist’s oeuvre, one would think Conversion Factors to be an elegiac tribute to a dead beloved. But instead, it is art in its traditionally medium-specific renderings that is eulogized here, whose carcass lies still and still lies displayed in museums that are valuable the way mausoleums are.

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For more information on Bea Camacho and Conversion Factors, visit www.magnet.com.ph.

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(A review by Angelo V. Suarez for the Philippine Daily Inquirer of recent text-based works by Costantino Zicarelli and Buen Calubayan.)

When conceptualist frontman Joseph Kosuth proposed art to be an analytic proposition—away from the prized pedestal of sight and toward the backroom of the mind—he was met with skepticism. After all, this entailed the dematerialization of the artwork, becoming pure concept incapable of being sold by commercial galleries. While decades have passed since this radical reformulation, and discourses regarding the nature of artistic activity continue to be produced (have in fact become artworks in themselves), the same skepticism cannot be avoided upon contact with the work of Costantino Zicarelli and Buen Calubayan.

Which may well be indeed one of the most salient points of Zicarelli’s recently concluded exhibit I’m with Stupid / I’m Not with Stupid and Calubayan’s upcoming Idiot Show for Idiots. In a welcome respite from painting and teaching—and possibly in a gesture expressing disillusionment with both practices—each comes up with a separate affair that equally straddles both their previous practice of demonstrating visual dexterity (on canvas) and performative finesse (in the classroom where pedagogy is also a kind of performance, and elsewhere). With their material work taking the backseat in this artistic ride, language takes the wheel as these two set on a collision course with conceptual practice, rabidly running over pedestrian aesthetics in their way.

Home is where the art is

But skeptical in what manner? you might ask. Where Kosuth’s analytical conceptualism stops at a tautological questioning of what constitutes art objects as such, Zicarelli intervenes to reveal his skepticism of what constitutes reality per se, playfully reveling in the fallacy of visual and linguistic reference by locating his work in a broader social context. Playing up the role of context in approaching a work of art by refusing to house his project in a gallery, he resorts to turning his own literal house instead into both a gallery and the very project itself in simultaneity.

For an entire week on October, the Zicarelli household was open to the viewing public, each welcome within certain hours to look at everything inside, from sleeping quarters to appliances and the most commonplace of objects—so absurdly commonplace, in fact, that they become the spatial equivalent of experimental poet Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, where words for household terms like Duchamp’s readymades are unshackled from their referential/functional context and brought into a poetry/art environment in a hyper-Formalist (whether intentionally or unintentionally is irrelevant) gesture of defamiliarization.

However, Zicarelli complicates the Duchampian conceit exactly by not taking his goods to a gallery for display. He simply labels each object with a title and declares their variable dimensions, consequently alluding with ease to the more-than-familiar art contexts viewers are deeply acquainted with. This, in turn, cleverly evokes not so much art’s reliance on social institutions but the arbitrariness of this reliance.

In turning the Zicarelli household into an art environment, I’m with Stupid / I’m Not with Stupid demystifies what is usually perceived as the neutral or passive role of the gallery or museum and points with acerbic humor (in the manner of ‘I’m with Stupid’ t-shirts) at the covert processes institutions manipulatively play a part in—if not outrightly instigate—in shaping aesthetic dogma and the standards with which ‘authorities’ measure a work’s quality of and art-ness.

It is by way of such subtlety that this Fil-Italian artist becomes graceful in his work, in spite of its political overtones. And to heighten this grace and subdue his politics—isn’t politics after all more potent when discreet?—he juxtaposes against it a sly refunctioning of ‘I’m with Stupid’ in classy-kitschy counterpoint. It’s a two-way extension Zicarelli commits herein: he first partners the affirmative statement with its negation (hence ‘I’m Not with Stupid’), only to drag these conjoined sentences and turn them into titular templates. In this fashion, a simple kitchen toaster is therefore labeled “This is a toaster / this is not a toaster,” a bedroom he shares with his brother is “This is Alessandro and Costantino’s bedroom / this is not Alessandro and Costantino’s bedroom,” and the stairway is—well, you get the picture.

The ‘grit’ in ‘Magritte’

Which is exactly it: whatever they do, audiences get only the picture and never the hand that makes it—flat in its concealment of real social occurrences. Ironically, this is achieved by Zicarelli without having to rely on constructed images, as in a painting or photograph, unlike Magritte who emphasized on his work’s pictorial quality. Allusion to the Belgian surrealist is inevitable, for it was his “The Treachery of Images” with its infamous depiction of a pipe and painted textual accompaniment “This is not a pipe” that jumpstarted an entire tradition of verbo-visual discourse about the complex nature of verbo-visual discourse itself.

But while Magritte only goes so far as calling attention to the simulacral character of pictures and representation (the pipe he depicts after all is, in its depiction, but an image of a pipe), Zicarelli takes the extra puff that reveals the smoke of simulation to cover up more than merely the picturality of pictures but the equal picturality of everything else. A toaster thus is not essentially a toaster, but a toaster only insofar as toasters have been socially constructed for us by the dominant classes: rectangular and electric, with double slots for dual slices of bread mysteriously analogous to the principle of binary oppositions most systems of thought are founded upon.

And there’s hardly any surprise when even the basic linguistic reality of grammar is subjected to this critique of arbitrariness. The keen observer will notice not just awkward nomenclature (e.g. “This is a DVD table / this is not a DVD table,” where the so-called DVD table is an ordinary desk on whose surface is a stack of pirated discs) but blatantly inconsistent syntactical patterns and ungrammatical moments as well (e.g. “This is light switch / this is not a light switch” [sic]), as if to bring to fore the artist’s problematic heritage. As a minoritarian cultural figure, his idiosyncratic utterance is always in danger of being rendered insignificant because incapable of proper signification—all under the hegemonic aegis of grammaticality, now unfortunately held sacred by the dominant Filipino academy.

Who knew that through sheer demystification, one could put the ‘grit’ back into ‘Magritte,’ recalling the latter’s earlier discourse into newfound utility for contemporary times? “One object suggests that there is another lurking behind it,” goes the Surrealist artist, and Zicarelli goes out of his way (while paradoxically staying home) to expose the objects that lurk behind the objects that lurk still behind other objects—systems of power that ironically loom large in spite of their concealment.

Duchampioning the invisible

To stretch the previous metaphor of travel, the path to collision with concept takes a drastic turn toward the gallery after an insightful stopover at home. But Calubayan makes sure this road is a dead-end, recalling a 1969 exhibition by Robert Barry where “for the duration of the exhibition, the gallery will remain closed.” Quite literally on a similar note, Calubayan hangs by the entrance to CCP’s Bulwagang Amorsolo the assertion that his show is “inaccessible to viewers.” By doing such, he commits the verbo-conceptual pun of simultaneously Barry-ing and barring the audience from entering physical artistic premises—acts that at once look back to conceptualist tradition yet also celebrate the spirit of transgression.

And what could be more renegade than transgressing an art model formulated by Marcel Duchamp, the prince of renegades himself? For moving beyond playing a trick on the viewer by closing down the gallery in the event of his exposition, Calubayan completely displaces the viewer in artistic practice, rendering the latter irrelevant—this in spite of Duchamp’s championing of the audience as co-creators in the completion of artistic work, as what his influential lecture “The Creative Act” indicates.

The nuances of Idiot Show for Idiots’ departure from Barry’s exhibit are critical: while the former’s strategy is personal in its rejection of the viewer, the other is spatial in its shutting down of the gallery. Additionally, this shutting down was but a one-time affair where the gallery’s closed-ness became the show itself; Calubayan’s exhibit on the other hand is serial, making use of multiple venues: the same concept is carried out in a mix of popular and unpopular locations that range from Big Sky Mind to the artist’s private studio Jelo Submarine, projected to even be brought to commercial sites like stores within malls. In this multiplicity, Idiot Show for Idiots is a kind of insistence, passing up the opportunity to relieve the audience of significance for the benefit of one specific show in favor of relieving them of significance for good.

And yet an alliance with Duchamp is strengthened by the specificity of viewership: while Calubayan could simply have opted to close down the gallery or completely bar everyone from experiencing the show, he instead chooses to single out the “viewer,” putting into question art’s common relegation to the realm of sight and visuality. What becomes of the feeler and of the listener, the smeller and the taster? In sly reversal, Calubayan arouses suspicion in the excluded audience (thereby involving them again), subtly exposing the hypocrisy involved in much of artistic practice and management. When even in the supposed age of multi- and intermedia, in a culture that professes to celebrate difference and plurality, monolithic structures and exclusionary meta-narratives are still very much in place—and one such structure begging to be subverted is the privileged position of the visual in art.

“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste,” declares Duchamp, and Calubayan treads the same path of paradox: in critiquing the exclusionary character of art systems, he himself has to commit the act of exclusion. Idiot Show for Idiots thus is both a subversion of and homage to the great French rebel—for there lies no better way to extol the virtues of artmaking than to boldly give it the finger.

With the deceptively simple yet multi-layered strategies employed by Zicarelli and Calubayan, one wonders if the two have made fools of their audiences. The narrow-minded traditionalist will probably say, “No, they have merely made fools of themselves,” and s/he is likely to be right—for in their critique of art systems they have in turn been co-opted into these very systems. And in doing so, without having to raise a pen or a brush, they have created portraits not only of the Filipino artist as a moron, but of the audience as well, of the critic and the aesthete—and most cynically, of themselves.

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Zicarelli’s I’m with Stupid / I’m Not with Stupid ran at his home in Quezon City from October 6 to 15, 2007. Calubayan’s Idiot Show for Idiots opened 6:00 p.m. at the Bulwagang Amorsolo of the Cultural Center of the Philippines on November 29 and ran until December 31, 2007.

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So this is what great octogenarian writers do on their spare time. But, alas, Manong Frankie announced that this will be his last public performance.

Video courtesy of one of our anthology’s translators and contributors, Kris Lanot-Lacaba, aka elpinoymatador. Taken during a lunch-time shindig on the last day of the Philippine PEN’s 50th Anniversary Conference, 9 December 2007.