hi! Welcome to this
online conversation with between myself
hg masters
and marion pastor roces about her book
of essays called
"Gathering: Political writing on art and
culture" which was
produced by the museum of contemporary
art and design
in manila and published in 2019
and is now being distributed
with the partnership of nus press in
Singapore. So that's why we're here.
I'm joined with Marian herself from
Manila
and so i'm gonna just introduce a
little bit about
talk about the book and then Marian is
going to 
read a passage and then
we will just have a short conversation
but at any time
if you'd like to send in questions
via the Facebook page
that would be great too so thanks for
joining us
So with me this evening is Marian
who has been writing since the early
1970s,
writing critically about art, cultural
institutions, their
manifestations of power and the forms of
art
that can kind of resist or stand in
exception to
let's say colonial or modernist ideas of
high art.
Then over the course of this incredible
time span that
is captured in this book of essays
Marian has worked for various
cultural organizations including the
Cultural Center for the Philippines
and then she went on to become a
researcher and scholar of
indigenous textiles from the Philippines
and Indonesia
and since 1999 has been a museum
consultant, curator and designer through
her own company
called Tau inc.
Some of the museum projects that she's
worked on have included
the up manila's museum of a history of
ideas, the Yuchengo museum the museum
of contemporary art and design as well
as
a project called the museum of
indigenous knowledge
which i believe is still in development.
So the book gathering um
i can hold it up.... Gathering comprises 40 essays
collected
starting from 1974 all the way through
2018. and i would say that these essays span a
wide range of topics from the
philippines art scene
to more thematic reflections on
forms of culture, national identity,
modernity, conceptions of Asia
that were in a discursive sense emerging
in the early 1990s.
You know your interest in
engaging with art has
continued and as well as
textiles, the study of languages,
and the politics of beauty,
so collectively this this book Gathering
is really a conversation about
theories of culture that you know in
some ways are specific to
your milieu but i find that we as
readers
or myself as a reader uh that these
conversations are really
urgent and applicable to lots of
different fields and lots of different
conversations and geographies that are
happening
uh at the moment and all over the world.
So i find there are lots of recurring
interests in your essays
as well as the kind of depictions of a
disjuncture between
a cultural scene in the Philippines and
the rest of the world
and then also within the Philippines
itself.
and you really understand and portray
across these essays how
cultural organizations and institutions
are sort of
projectors and facilitators of forms of
political power.
One of the other things i have to say
about this book is that it's a real
delight and pleasure to
read and that's because of your very
unique
voice and style and
people who have known you longer and in
more contexts
really also appreciate this fact so in
the introduction to the book
the dramaturg and cultural theory
theorist Rustam Barucha, he explains
like that how and why this book can be
considered a gathering
and he says he really attributes that to
your
what he calls absolutely relentless — no
holds barred — commitment to critique
and also your very distinct voice which
he
proposes kind of marries a kind of
classical writing voice to
a kind of speaking voice.
He boils this down to saying that
your voice refuses to be disciplined and
he describes it as a
saying things the way they need to be
told and to hell with academic propriety...
So if that's not a selling point for
this book i don't know what it is
The person who spearheaded this book,
the Mcat's director Justlina Cruz
she also notes a similar thing in her
introduction
in her publisher's notes she says the
she evokes really the first time she
heard
or encountered you speaking and she was
really
captured by how your when she says your
provocative ideas were couched in an
extraordinary language.
So i think language remains a really
important part of,
not only the things that you discuss but
how you discuss them.
You know and for myself as someone who
writes about art you know i'm
very compelled to see and to experience
like new ways of
talking and writing about art that sort of escape kind of either
magazine style writing or the kind of
academic style writing so and for me
reading
your works for all of these decades you
know
it's really kind of is an inspiration.
So I thought we should allow since
uh the real star of the show is is you,
like to let you read some of your, or a passage from one of your essays and so
people
can get a sense of your style and
personality. So
i'm gonna turn it over to you thank you...
I wasn't aware that it was a style at
all
uh well that's one of the things that
you're not aware of when you're writing
for sure so at the start before i read
i do need to... This is not just a thank
you, 
because this book would not have been
possible without
really two years of work of a group of
people, around, that were formed by, Joselina Cruz
in MCAD. They are Sam Marcelo who is
an
excellent editor and Jay Yao who is the
book designer
and Mary Anne Pernia
who ran after all of the essays... I'm
sorry that this sounds like you know
the big thank you but i'll tell you why
this was utterly important
um the essays were published all over
the world
and it was published as early as the
1970s and also the 80s and it was
really nearly to me impossible
to find them. Many of the publication
houses were dead.
in the sheer labor of tracking down more
than 40 essays all over the world and
asking for permissions
from whoever was still alive um that
took some doing. So it is with
a great deal of gratitude that i should
like to begin
any question with this book
all right so the title of the book is
gathering and i stole this word
um i stole it before in 1991
from homie baba so those of you who are
familiar
with mr baba and his theoretical work
would recall gathering
i took it because i was trying to name
an exhibition that i was
putting together at griffith university
of australian art
and i'll read from what was
the catalan this was an effort to
explain why i stole the word so
gathering
it's not collecting it's not amassing
it's not for closing it's not harvesting
not a lasting after
not the social gathering the bourgeois
institution
not the creation of a defined collective
rather it might be a summoning
up of energy of thoughts
a wit with meditativeness
but also urgency
i gather that in quotations it's not the
same as i know
it might be a receiving of additions
the creation of mass although perhaps
not quite recollage
yet it might be a keenness towards
concealed
knowledges but i'm very interested in
concealed knowledge
uh two there is a death as when one is
gathered
up to one's ancestors whoever they may
be
a storm gathers like an ominous swelling
or a momentum with no clear trajectory
possibilities in the charge chemistry of
assad
includes making gatherings to draw
together folds and wrinkles
in book binding it is to take a group of
leads imagining
and insisting on an order the same word
has female
and male inflections neither of which is
essentially liberating or essentially
oppressive
gather carries only a spectral
recollection of gathering as cosmology
hunter gatherer the gathering seems to
be
always this will be a threat
gather the clothes a storm
is gathering
i'll end there
thank you thank you maybe you could
describe just the context of this
larger essay and you know where where it
goes from there
it's also quite a unique uh edition
or format yes
um i was on a fellowship at griffith
university graphic artworks
and um they have a collection of
australian art essentially but it also
goes into the store straits island so
part of my fellowship was to actually
curate an exhibition
with the incumbent curator so we
co-curated
uh since my knowledge of australian art
was uh
well not deep at that point i um
we constructed a brochure where
beth jackson my co-curator uh would put
in one paragraph and i'll put in another
paragraph
and and so we gathered this uh two uh
voices as it were uh to construct the
catalog so i was actually rather
um pleased with the fact that we didn't
have to be
um inordinately knowledgeable of
something
that well we were probably not
interested in taking full ways into
scholarship
but that an exhibit was possible with a
curator who didn't really know the
collection
beyond about three months of studying it
so that was the exhibition
i also was thinking about um you know
the
the book has a kind of gathering of
multiple
uh conversations that you yourself have
been having i mean
maybe with other people whether it's
homie baba
or you know fellow colleagues who are
fellow artists
friends you know but also almost in a
way with yourself
yes because they span
such a long time so one of the things
that i was wondering was
if in the process of gathering all these
texts together
you had really noticed a kind of
evolution of your thinking
or is evolution maybe not the way to
think about
such a large body or of works or
also span of time do you see it more as
like an
elaboration or have you been thinking
about it
i'd like to answer that question uh i
suppose a bit
further on in our conversation if i
might actually postpone that
because um when
the book was getting done got
gathered uh and we
we were already in conversation with the
two individuals who were
who were going to write the introduction
to the book so that's elena rivera
mirano
who's a dearly friend of mine and rustum
barucha the dramaturg
and theory who lived in calgary and
um they read everything
they they went through the entire thing
and it is a privilege of course
um at the end of more than 40 years
to have such close reading uh
this this truly is a
it's a different feeling now
what they got out of it was a major
experience for me
they got different things so
elena mirano looked through the whole
thing
and she ended the introduction
with a sentence that says that
i have been writing about death for
since the 1970s that dance
was the actual running thread
for five decades i didn't know what
so to realize after close reading
from another individual that you were
actually doing something that was like i
was totally unaware of then that's where
the writer actually
begins to think that um you've released
something of yourself that you didn't
even know was there
and so i begin with that then i'll go to
rustom
in a minute i begin with that in order
to say
that sometimes we're not conscious about
what we're doing
i mean we're doing one project after
another project and then it's that it's
five
decades uh and then now you let someone
go through it and
something emerges that resonated with me
i think it is true
now rustom rustom you
read a bit of what he had to say about
undiscipline and i fully agree um
rustom another dear friend he
seems to have borrowed his way into
wormholes i'd use the word uh in
in my texts as i apparently
transited between one language to
another and in many ways
uh the first word that comes out of
anyone's mouth
about my book is about language and
there's just
multiplicities of languages not just
languages languages but languages within
one person
uh and not just bilingualism but
inflection in like different inflections
different dialect
dialectical variations and rustum
appears to have followed me
through those wormholes between
languages
and each language apparently uh of
course i was trying to describe this but
being described by another human being
was pretty spectacular
how each language is a different
architecture
architectural space it's a different
brain space
and it's not just um you know
different species of things but the the
variation of difference was pretty
vast and i hadn't realized that i
was describing the transiting
from one language to another the actual
transiting
and the reason i believe that uh it was
perfectly possible for myself to do it
is because i am very aware that i come
from a culture that is quite oral
and so my facility with written language
is certainly not as fluent as my
facility with orality
so this is the reason why i didn't think
it was ever
a style you are actually
um speaking when you speak to me to a
person whose
background culture is an oral culture
um it has a different i find for
instance that i had
to give a keynote um
and those things are performances uh i
write it by hand because it has a
connection with my brain
if i write it for publication i write it
to the computer
so these are different parts of the
brain functioning i think so
yes it's what you're conscious of and
what you're not conscious of
i hope that answers the question i'll go
to your actual question in a bit
i have to stop here
no i mean i i mean personally i think
that's true for all of us you know i
mean
you know inevitably looking back you
find certain threads you know of things
that you did when you were much younger
or earlier in life that you know
obviously led
or they blossomed or you just you
explored them in more depth over time i
mean
yeah but maybe you could explain how you
know you i
at least to my perspective you've done a
lot of different things
with your professional careers and with
your energies so
maybe you could explain how writing has
worked in tandem with or cohabited with
those different other practices of yours
well i i write i
am an independent curator i have made
museums
and exhibitions in different parts of
the world in different parts of the
philippines
i do
i am a partner in a think tank so we do
policy work
and i am very politically active so
there's a lot of political work in my
life
when i think about all of this
simultaneously i realize
that
as a curator i have to find a way
outside text
because writing is text
curatorship is space
and uh you can't privilege text
as you deal with the physicality of
space
so that's changing now
but spatial comprehension remains a
rather important part of uh curatorship
now policy work is a projection into the
future it's an imagining of
a space in the future a space in which
life can
transpire so that's different from text
that's actually like um
a kind of wishful thinking which is what
policy work is
so the first thing i want to say about
about the relationship of writing to the
other things that i'm doing is that i'm
very conscious that i don't want to
privilege text
in the same way that i don't want to
privilege specs because
i would like to give a jew
honor to oral cultures
non-literate cultures
so there's that but since all these
areas of work curatorship police
work political work um they all require
a critical imagination
and the infrastructure of critical
thought the
implicated implicatedness of work today
uh in criticism with work in the past in
criticism
is text and in this respect
resisting text is is absurd
so i might say this um
and this will sound heavily theoretical
to you but it really is not
what i have found productive is the
struggle itself to figure out
uh to figure out this matters not once
and for all but repetitively for every
project
what is the relationship with text and
this space what is the relationship
of text with this particular policy area
which has to do with the lives of very
poor people for example
so um it gets rerun
it gets rerun this uh this trying to
figure out
the relationship with shifts so
in some all this means
in practical terms all this means is
that the privileging of text
to me must be resisted by myself perhaps
not other people
um and that the absurdity of it must be
made productive
i mean i think that's part of the
pleasure or like
joy that one experiences
in and i think this is what uh rustam is
really
one thing that he's really pointing to
is that because you don't
i mean i i don't necessarily see this as
i mean i think what you do this
interesting is you bridge orality and
the written word without like you know
even for myself like
i don't talk the way i write you know
there's
much bigger like this kind of western
education where
we really learn to write in a voice that
is not our spoken voice so
for me and i think this is what rustom
makes the
the point of is that you really collapse
the two in a way
that is very very engaging
and pleasurable because it just gives
you access
like it you feel in closer proximity to
you as the writer
because it's this voice that is coming
from a place that is
you know in a way closer to your actual
person
you know rather than the sort of
formality of a lot of especially more
academic or
more you know the kinds of texts that
accompany a lot of cultural
activities or uh you know museums or
so so for me that's a certain kind of
pleasure
well there's pleasure for me
um and this pleasure in language
uh i might also add that um you
mentioned that i
also talked to myself and there are many
cells in each of us
uh so i'm not certainly privileging my
own positionality in my own culture
but uh the reason i decided to write one
essay where i talk to different
selves is because those different selves
have different languages
and and they do talk to each other and
i'm sure you recognize that
uh that's fun
yeah i mean you you obviously created
these i i
almost didn't want to give it away but i
mean there are these uh
and it is very playful like you know the
the many sides
of and the many incarnations of yourself
and
you know the way that your friends can
recognize them and and appreciate
them and see them as distinct um you
know i think is a very developed and
nuanced sense of self or
cultivation of self um that on the one
hand
you know at first might strike someone
as you know
from yeah but it's absolutely you know
but then it sounds wonderful
and you start thinking well you know
yeah sure i do the same thing i'm one
person with
you know this group of people and i'm
another person in a different context or
in a different
professional role and you know so so why
not embrace these multiple
selves and voices that we all carry
around
well i'd like to jump in and say that i
began to theorize it over the last
perhaps decade
that identity itself and you know
identity politics tends to
um kind of spiral downwards into some
original self or some
more authentic self than the other
selves but then in fact
uh as it plays out in human lives um
there is so much negotiation between and
among different cells
and and i do find that the politics
itself
of identity uh will privilege oneself
over another self depending on
the circumstances and uh
um methods of empowerment and
self-empowerment
you choose right do you think then you
would answer this question
about um whether or not over time
um your thoughts about certain topics
have
kind of evolved
i guess what i'm trying to ask is
whether you think or whether you noticed
in the course of
gathering texts together whether you saw
them as an evolution of topics or just
more of like an a deeper exploration of
them over time
yeah about criticality of course when
you're young
and i i was young in the 70s
and in the 80s and you study your
positions and you develop your arguments
and i fell into the trap of figuring an
ethical way forward
into a text or into a curatorial project
or into a political project with
the need to determine what you think
might be destructive and
avoided or renounced
denounced rejected
embraced you make up you make those
decisions
in criticism uh
i hadn't realized until much later
how dualistic how binary that
is i have a deeper appreciation
of the folly of that kind of dualism
it's it is biblical and in many senses
that kind of manikin died
uh from the abrahamic religions
uh obviously to which i was born
um has to be outgrown
i think so how did i outgrow it about 15
years ago i began
to take the list seriously
a particular line uh
lines of light the delusion lines of
light
um and i began to recognize the
ethical need in criticism to look at the
desolate landscape
a malignant landscape and to try
hard to find lines of light
uh because if you see things as black
and white or
east and west then um
it's not rigorous enough it's not
strategically good
um and it doesn't exercise
um it doesn't exercise what needs to be
exercised when you come to actual
political engagement so yes
um to find the surplus
traces that might embody a
potential uh the potential or the
possibility of emancipation
may be nearly invisible but we need to
find those
in every malignant situation and to find
in any situation that looks um
happy um the
the things that may be unhappy in them
so i i've changed in in that respect
there's another way and it's related
that i've changed
and so it's a rupture again um
from that binary uh
positionality and i'm by no means
talking about
um being things being all relative of
course i'm not talking about that
but i'm talking about uh for example uh
the book empire by negri and hard i'm
sure you're familiar with it and i find
the two authors to be
um overly romantic but i did get
something from them that i have actually
taken as a
life lesson which is uh that there is no
outside position there's no outside
position we are in empire it
is it has no center it's
de-territorialized the flows are here
there and everywhere especially now
and um and
you do not have an outside
and you'll just have to figure out your
critique as
embedded
within it um that is a
that's a fundamental change in the way
i've been thinking oh and it happened
about 15 years ago
one i mean from my perspective also
one way that i thought i saw
you experiencing or maybe this is
another rupture or
related rupture was this idea or
interest that you developed in
craft and which
in certain essays you really put in
opposition to practices of fine art
in a way that for me drew out a lot of
the contradictions of
and problems of just what you were
talking about this kind of
let's say happy situation like uh if the
happy situation is
modernity and development and you know
uh cultural funding and cultural
institutions and
you know an art scene you know you
really find
a really rich universe of
very important and for you obviously
very gratifying
cultural production that just doesn't
fit into these
other sort of discursive paradigms or
philosophical paradigms
that you also were coming out of and
that i feel this
real strong sense that this was also a
kind of
release or uh way
like a line of flight towards a
different way of thinking about culture
indeed um but when i made that jump uh
and it was with a dear friend of mine
the conceptual artist judy sebayan we
both
um plunged into traditional textile
research
after beginning our beginning our as it
were are used in art with conceptualism
uh and with the 1970s vanguard in the
philippines
um not in search of some kind of
romantic roots
but as a as a disturbed soul
as disturbed souls about in fact
the uh the binary
between art and craft which i've always
felt was
um honorous the binary
because as you know this is
institutional and you know that it comes
from the renaissance
and it comes from an understanding the
craft has nothing to do with the brain
where an art is supposed to be driven by
hard thought like science
um now i'm i'm not prepared to take a
look at
a fabulous ego textile and think that it
is the work of hands
without a brain but it is simply uh
it is simply insane to think of such
artistic production as
hand the craft
and that it should remain until the 20th
century until now
um should be um well we should invade
violently against that this
categorization but as you know the
institutional categorization of art and
craft
is is to do with funding it's to do with
what museums do what
um there's a lot of problems with
assigning everything to ethnography and
then assigning
another set of things to fine arts um
i think that the um
the taxonomizing technologies
deserve serious attention more serious
attention than
we've not exhausted serious attention to
the taxonomies
but it's a hard slog it
has taken me nearly 50 years
to find a project in which i could
actually construct an
accession record a museum accession
record that does not
include that that taxonomy in the dna
and i have a project right now where
we're going into the creation of the
accessioning system
and the categories of accessioning and
what is this what is that
what do you classify as ethnographic
what do you classify as a class
classify as contemporary art now this is
not nihilism this is not
collapsing boundaries this is simply
thinking hard about taxonomies and
political
implications in marginalization and
um the creation of dominant groups of
people
and um
in the art system in which a lot of
trafficking
and a lot of money is being made on the
taxonomies
so as you can see you've actually
pressed the button here
i'm actually quite passionate
about the taxonomizing systems
well i mean we also you know in lots of
in our own ways
when we're stuck in like let's say more
narrow discourses we tend
to just take these tax on taxonomic
systems as being
you know quite small and useful um you
know
without looking at the larger uh
like system that they're a part of and
also how they function in them
so you know in my context of sort of
contemporary art
you know if there's a contemporary
museum
in the philippines that is showing
modern art you know
that's great but you know we tend to
just focus on what the art is
and what you know the product the
projects are and its history but we
don't tend to
connect it in the ways that you do in
your writing to
you know the political power structure
towards the
struggle for a national identity or the
discourse over
the struggle for a national identity uh
so you know this is another way in which
you know i found the craft
aspect that appears early on in your
thinking and writing
because it because you're so interested
in this 1970s era
marcos uh regime project of the cultural
center of the philippines and because
you worked there you know you really
know the institution
and you really saw it from the inside
and in a way participated from it
and then so your arrival to craft is
like a is a kind of liberation from this
and then also through that you you find
language
you like through i mean you can really
see how you become interested in trying
to find
new uh ways of talking about
craft in the same way the craft exists
outside of
a modernist taxonomy of culture
you realize that there's no language for
craft so
then in your essays we get to witness
you
looking ruminating thinking exploring
these different words that
you know through the many sort of the
polymorphous languages that you in a way
can draw on
uh you find we get to witness you
thinking about that and that is also
very interesting to think about
how language really of course is the
basis for these taxonomic systems so
once you want to get away from the
taxonomy you also need to go out and
search for a new language
and a new taxonomy which you do not
for a moment presume will be liberating
for the rest of eternity
these are constant things but what i'd
like to say is that i would not have
been able to think about
language taxonomy words without an early
introduction into conceptualism
and this is what i mean by it actually
feeds into each other i don't i
simply do not think that i could have
rethought
uh the category craft without
conceptualism
without being 20 years old and listening
to the music of jose maceda
uh on 20 20 cassette recorders at the
same time
um so yes it was um
uh it was an education that went around
from contemporary art
maybe maybe then i should mention that
or i can ask you about this because
the very last essay in the book um
is called uh conceptual art
authoritarianism
1970s asia
so in a way it very nicely
encapsulates all of these
interests that you had sort of very
early on in your writing
and but then of course it brings us into
the present
um so it really it looks you make this
comparison between the cultural center
of the philippines
and the projects of that were happening
more or less contemporaneously in iran
uh with faradiba
and her sort of modernist state project
and her interest in contemporary art of
the 70s and the tehran museum of
contemporary art and
yeah um but
you you i mean i think the interesting
thing is that when you
you try to make a deeper point about
the ways that culture functions in
let's say iniquitous or unjust
social context i mean you go beyond this
idea of what you say that
culture's not just window dressing for
fascism
but that there's something about how
fascism in these contexts this is your
term for it it defanged
uh modalities of thought and
uh creative ways that can take stock of
authoritarianism
that's fine i think that kind of
reflection on the things that happened
you know now 40 years ago
uh is is of course really relevant to
keep in mind again because we're facing
this sort of new wave of
uh authoritarianism you know in
different ways and
in different manners all over the globe
but
there's definitely this return
yes there's definitely this return so
let's go back to that period because i
think
that um to discuss the marcuses and the
cultural country alone
inside the philippines well that brings
you some ways but it doesn't bring you
very far i think the 70s was
was just at the tail end of the cold war
it was still the cold war
there was the vietnam war that was going
on but at the same time there was a
whole there was a band of dictators all
over the world you had
you had the guy you had pinochet at the
same time you had
um well you had everybody in southeast
asia including pol pot
at the same time uh you had mass
murderers
at the same time and and you knew that
this was embedded
in the geopolitics of all the cold war
now in this context a lot of
avant-garde movements erupted in the
courts of
the dictators and
um this is quite personal as a matter of
fact for me
because um
i i spent my first um
years of work as an assistant curator at
the cultural center it was just three
years but in those three years
in the um from 1974.
um i met rudolf maria and
handled francis bacon paintings
and you get calls about um
okay is it possible to buy a
michelangelo from
malacanang palace from imelda's people
and uh you had this traffic van clyburn
and then one day and this is another
essay in the book i met
jose balamanesh from iran
in australia but he had the same
experience
of meeting this traffic of international
stars
in tehran and so
it is impossible now to think of what
transpired
in the 70s outside the geopolitical
and how do you then think of the
um implicated matter the complicity of
art
but we can't think of the complexity of
art in very
simple-minded terms uh
we can't say that just because um
senators
was in uh persepolis
uh that he was complicit in the regime
of the shah of iran of reza pallavi
it's yes on a matter of as a matter of
fact there is at least one
very rigorous scholar who is doing an
archaeology of uh
shiraz and persepolis and what
transpired there and that a lot of
things that happened since the 1970s
did emerge out of persepolis so
in my essay i tried to show that things
transpire differently from imelda's uh
cultural center and
and um
enormous uh parade of uh
persia but that's only two
to two nodes you've got chile you've got
nicaragua
you've got uh cambodia uh
happening at the same time how do you
wrap your head around this
but um this is the reason why i i
have begun i i began my
writing and professional life thinking
about um
power uh and so i'm glad that that
cultural studies came along and it
studies power but
of late i've been actually focusing on
on complexity
as a subject itself as something of
course there's there's the consensus the
sciences which helps a great deal um but
not just complexity not just
complex thing and complexity and what's
the difference but the orders of
complexity
the the scale of density
which we need to wrap our heads around
because we
simply cannot understand the world right
now
it really is to me a matter of
getting annihilated if we cannot wrap
ourselves around
complexity itself uh and if it was
really hard to figure it out in the
1970s it is
well we've got we've got some serious
thinking to do and serious action
to perform
yeah i mean i think i thought i thought
the way that you talked about how
however you want to call this political
opposition i mean
fascism um is you know an easy
let's say summation for it but the fact
that it's it's not so much that it's
about the prohibition
on certain activities or cultures
uh you know like that will be allowed to
continue and i think that's why it's
interesting that
you make reference to the the 1970s and
the philippines and iran
because it's just a reminder for all of
us who weren't there
you know that sure you can have this
idea of certain historical regimes but
there was actually life continued under
those regimes and life might also be
allowed to continue
um under whatever regimes will come or
that we're already
under but it's you know
i think the important thing that you say
at the very end is that
it's about this defanging of
um ways of thinking and creating so that
you know and i think that's what i i'm
hearing you say now
maybe that is what is different about
today as opposed to
the older older we hope that doesn't
happen again
because uh what i feel um
so terribly uh upset
about is that all the conceptualism all
the utopianism of course we know that
utopianism is
is a dream we know that but we still
wish
part of us still go after utopian
agendas but let's set this aside let's
just think of
um of conceptualism
of the 1970s as the critique of the art
system
and how why do we still have an art
system that
is market driven without
being self-conscious of market forces
why do we why did we have after the 70s
a huge amount of work
in feminism in civil rights in race
relations and still end up
with what's going on in the united
states right now with what's going on in
the philippines right how did we end up
here
when we thought at least until about
five years ago that we had in fact
built on uh ideas of emancipation that
we had built
on uh postcolonial theory we tried to
build
societies that were inclusive and
participatory
uh in which you we need to create
systems to empower the little guys
how did we get back to where we are
right now
and i think part of the reason is
because
the art defined
um the by by
talking constantly about
experimentation by by
uttering words like uh
post-coloniality
by um by using the jargon
by by creating it into jargon instead of
political
action of a very rigorous sword
we lost it
we
we we exhausted
uh utopian agendas
we allowed the words to be appropriated
by people like duterte
and trump who speak who's
borrowed and not borrowed who's stolen
uh both colonial um words
we allowed it to happen
and so we're back here uh i'm not
you know overly pessimistic i i think
this is
the i happen to think that this is like
the
um it's a dying beast
that's uh that's being extremely violent
at the moment
but we did do something with all of the
the critiques of modernity that we
engaged in in the 1970s we did do
something we did do something about
feminism and the civil rights movement
and race relations we
it happened black lives matter that
that's strong but the reaction is
unbelievable
and so the lesson to be learned is how
you do not
make um you do not make art effect
because effect art is going to enable
these things
and that's what i said in the end of my
work yeah
exactly i mean it's amazing that it
like that it it really brings us to the
present in this way that
you know i mean maybe now two years
after you've
given that paper and you know it or
every day let's say it gets
clearer and clearer but um you know
yeah these i guess these are just words
that are
things that we need to think about but i
think what's interesting about the book
as a whole is also that we get to
experience like
your journey through these different
eras and through these different periods
of time
so in a way you know where the book
starts is
at a certain place in you know your own
personal life but let's say also
in your thinking but also in the
political context and then
you know there's this in a way a voyage
away from certain institutions
um and apparatuses of the state
into you know less you know both more
practical fields like your interest in
crafts and
more philosophical uh conversations
about language and
national identity and then you know
right at the end it's like
it just comes home you know to this
place that is is more familiar to us
um present but um if i have a few more
moments
do i have a few more moments um
i'd like to recall just a very tiny
piece in the book which is a
um a review i did of rustum baruches and
we began with wisdom
um another asia where he wrote about
rabindranath tagore
the japanese curator both constructing
asia
at the beginning of the 20th century and
that
tagore has had these
spoke bengali and english of course
tagore spoke
bengali and okakura spoke english and
japanese and there was a love affair
between tagore's
niece and okakura which carried on for
quite a bit of time and
this brings me back to language and
friendship
the lovers only communicated in english
it was the only possible language in
which they could communicate
because obviously okapura did not speak
bengali
and
the woman whose name i forget right now
does not speak japanese
so it was a modern love and modernity
could not be carried in bengali or
japanese
it could be carried and conveyed in
english
and so you to me it's also the
friendship between rustom and myself
and elena merano and myself it
is a um
it's a finding of that space in which
your possibilities can be expressed
and can be realized but it's all hemmed
in by the barriers of language and
culture
and distance and institutions
um and all of that it's a small space
isn't it
it was a space of love
in a language that neither of them could
speak very well
john i'd like to end actually on that
note
i think that's a great list and
i'm not i'm not seeing any immediate
questions so
but oh let's see comment from
peter um is that
fascinating marion this rethinking the
taxonomies of classification of art
slash
material visual culture would love to
hear more do you see any potential
across the region to build
some momentum and more allies for this
rethinking process
uh peter i should certainly hope so i am
at liberty to announce that i am
creating a new museum for the cultural
center of the philippines they've just
commissioned me
it is called a.m i've named it 21 a.m
it's a 21st century art museum and
uh it it exists on three spaces it
exists
uh completely online it exists in one
part of the cultural center building and
it also exists everywhere
now as you know it is possible to do
that
and to create a new institution like
that but
uh the most important thing is my brief
when i was commissioned was to put
together all of the collections of the
cultural center and they do have
what is called an ethnographic
collection which i collected for the
cultural center in 1986.
so i'm familiar with that uh and then
there is their modern collection
and then there is their contemporary
collection and to
put them all together in one accession
system
so it gave me the opportunity
to now rethink not only the categories
but the words
how you enter into the record
oh and do you still use the word craft
as a category as a descriptive word
so um this is happening right now peter
and i would really like to have some
conversations with museums around the
region
uh to see if uh this thing that i'm
creating with my company uh
dowing to re-um
it's a computer program but as you know
um the dna of any museum is in
the accession system and that's where
you
uh that's where you can actually attend
to the grain
of classification and all of the
political that happens
as a result of the way you classify
things
so yes there's an opportunity there's a
line of light
i mean congratulations i think that's
great news and
i think we'll all uh look forward to
hearing more about it and hopefully
seeing it
in not too long not too long not too
long
well online yeah that would be great
yeah the future so um
well marion thank you so much for
joining me and talking
and again sharing so much about the
things you think about and
things you're working on and the things
you have written about
um so and we're lucky that this book
exists
and so many people work so hard to
bring it together and this book is
available um so that the nus
press is also offering a 15 discount
uh so if you use the code roc
es15 at checkout
you will get a discount
on the book and it's valid until october
4th
and you can also purchase the book
through the art asia pacific
website and if you have
other comments or questions also yeah
the art asia pacific facebook
page is there and we will also
i think along with nuspress will also be
sharing an edited version of this talk
so that you can circulate it further to
friends family and anybody who might be
interested in
uh hearing more from marion and hearing
more about the book
which is really an incredible book so
thank you marion
thank you hd thank you feature yes thank
you
thanks goodbye
all right goodbye
you
