FRISSON: the Collected Criticism of Alice Guillermo
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FRIS SON: The Collected Criticism of Alice Guillermo Reviewing Current Art | 23 The Social Form of Art | 4 Patrick D. Flores Abstract and/or Figurative: A Wrong Choice | 9 SON: Assessing Alice G. Guillermo a Corpus | 115 Annotating Alice: A Biography from Her Bibliography | 16 Roberto G. Paulino Rendering Culture Political | 161 Timeline | 237 Acknowledgment | 241 Biographies | 242 PCAN | 243 Broadening the Public Sphere of Art | 191 FRISSON The Social Form of Art by Patrick D. Flores The criticism of Alice Guillermo presents an instance in which the encounter of the work of art resists a series of possible alienations even as it profoundly acknowledges the integrity of distinct form. The critic in this situation attentively dwells on the material of this form so that she may be able to explicate the ecology and the sociality without which it cannot concretize. The work of art, therefore, becomes the work of the world, extensively and deeply conceived. Such present-ness is vital as the critic faces the work in the world and tries to ramify that world beyond what is before her. This is one alienation that is calibrated. The work of art transpiring in the world becomes the work of the critic who lets it matter in language, freights it and leavens it with presence so that human potential unerringly turns plastic, or better still, animate: Against the cold stone, tomblike and silent, are the living glances, supplicating, questioning, challenging, or speaking—the eyes quick with feeling or the movements of thought, the mouths delicately shaping speech, the expressive gestures, and the bodies in their postures determined by the conditions of work and social circumstance. The workers reach out to the viewer with a finely focused human presence, a pervading reality made even more acute by an implicit sense of struggle, a vital tension coming through.1 Guillermo, however, does not only constellate the work and the world. She is also interested in how the work and the world play out in time. Though this effort need not end up in a proposition of art history, it is nearly by default an articulation of a desire to historicize or to furnish a context for that which materializes as art. The art critical practice of Guillermo, therefore, is parlayed into a consolidation of sorts of an art historical discourse. The criticism of the everyday life of art and exhibition-making becomes the primary ethnographic datum, as it were, of art history. While mediated by procedure, the categories of artwork, artist, and exhibition become some kind of evidence of the life/ world of art in time. Here, the status of these agencies is complicated because the supposed object of critique is actually the subjectivity of the critique. The work of art finally overcomes both the isolation and the seriality of objecthood within an autonomous space, as it is reinscribed within a wider meshwork of relations. This is the second moment of alienation that is hurdled. The third one intersects with the professional biography of Guillermo as a teacher, scholar, and academician within a broadly intuited realm of the Humanities. She would situate the study of art across the politics of culture and its contentious representations. In this regard, she was insistent on a reappraisal of the discriminations of high art and the recuperation of a genus of art that has been stigmatized as bearing inferior aesthetic valence. For her, the binarisms wedded into fine art and folk art, art and craft, and so on are not only needless, they ultimately affirm the untenable asymmetries of class, ethnicity, and the other constitutions of the self. In other words, she sought to restore the generative relationships of forms within a more generous Humanities, one that 4 The Collected Criticism of Alice Guillermo does not only invest in art but in an affective sensibility that is not beholden to the doxa and habitus of a cultural elite. This made her engage in a wide gamut of interests and disciplines, as she wrote not only on the visual arts but on film, literature, and performance as well as forayed into the commentary of the public sphere and the socio-political sensorium in general. She may have been the only practitioner of this kind in her time: a critic of faceted sympathies and a gifted observer of all things Philippine. All told, the Humanities inspired Guillermo to evoke the big picture, as it were. What this anthology offers to the reader is the relationship of the art critic to the language with which to disseminate the criticism. This is a language shaped by academic knowledge as well as experience with the material of art and the life of artists. The interplay between the two is oftentimes complex, steeped in contradictions as well as in efforts at reconstruction which defy convenient dualities. Moreover, this language passes through circuits that are not exclusively within the domain of the art world and academe, which in the long term may morph into echo chambers and hermetic circles. The language of art criticism is transformed time and again through the parole of its dissemination and the politics of reading itself. What is gathered here are essays for the mass-circulation popular press that addresses a general audience. The critic finds the most suitable pitch or tone with which to put the discourse across without necessarily diminishing its theoretical density. This is a tough act to carry out, but one that is finessed over years of practice. It is for this reason that Guillermo’s turn of phrase can at once be lyrical and incendiary. Most of all, it is ostensive, alert and wide-eyed to metaphorical cognates. It is demonstrative, precise in its simulation of an ambience, punctual in its poetic urgency. For instance: There is a continuous sense of submergence and perilous drifting in a Freudian sea, twilight-violet or blood-red, where the convolutions of brain and gut become chambers of coral and sea anemone. Space here is transparent and in timeless suspension, enclosed and hermetic as in a womb. In the fluid vehicle, brains float and innards unravel and spread out for scrutiny as hairlike cilia comb the waters and absurd organic accordions contract and expand. At one time, a homunculus with a threatening face and vestigial claws rends the nightmare open.2 The other aspect that his compendium focuses on in the conduct of critical writing is method. Guillermo’s sustained argumentation on the intricate relationship between art and the socius and the concomitant dynamism that both infuse into each other is supported by a scheme of thinking and writing that endeavors to cast art as an integral form. This is wrought in the dialectic between historical forces and the aesthetic intervention, a mixture of the delicate touching at the seams of Theodor Adorno and the rupture prefigured by Walter Benjamin. Guillermo reweaves this theoretical textile through a careful teasing out of the strands of the formal fabric without letting the fabric overdetermine the form as mere sociological function. Useful in this operation is her turn to the semiotic as a sieve through which the material condition of art and the artistic condition of the material are imagined to condense 5 FRISSON in sensuous particularity and political quality. Layered around this formativity of the artwork is the ideological formation of the beholder, a subject to be sure, of the Althusserian apparatus and its negative critique. It is at this point that Guillermo delicately pushes and pulls the various forms of materiality as a way to elude the capture of instrumentalization or idealization and the defiles of reduction or generalization. Her sensitivity to humanistic philosophy, materialist critique, and the history of art strongly places her at an angle of vision to enable her to discern the nodes of context and the elucidations of emergence. Forms, therefore, are rooted and yet released, relativized and yet distinguished, cherished and yet implicated. A work of art in Guillermo’s critical program is not reducible to a leviathan force; it is rather rendered complicit and intractable in an assemblage or a conjuncture. An encompassing “cognitive mapping” is revealed through levels of facture and meaning even as a singularity finds it ground. In grappling with language, the art critic astutely choreographs the tension between form and content. These categories are provisional, with their autonomies or self-sufficiencies dissolved in a vigorous interaction between discrepant phases of a work’s formativity. In the succeeding quote, Guillermo reveals the reciprocations between technique and discourse as well as the conjuration of a feeling: Conflict is expressed in a vigorous dialectic of lines, as in Eskirol. The continuous oscillation of outlines and the lively dialogue of gesture is disciplined by a stern geometric framework of verticals and horizontals. This may likewise function on the symbolic level, articulating the barrier separating protagonist and antagonist in the conflict…Characterization is achieved through gesture and telling detail: the sleek mustache of the ilustrado, the long flowing hair of Sisa. Faces speak, mock, grieve, or silently stare. At times, a kind of historical atmosphere is attained, summing up in an image the collective experiences of a people. But one important contribution of Castillo is the image of the hero that is realized in a few of his works. Truly, here is an artist who has not, in any obscure or patent form, betrayed the people in his portrayal of them.3 The language and the method of criticism are finally sharpened in light of the praxis of Guillermo, foremost as a writer in media and popular culture who endeavors to reach out to a wide public that is introduced to the modernities of an aesthetic situation, or specifically, the appreciation of specific objects, actions, and sensations that fall under the epistemological category of art.