Who is Buen Calubayan?


1. Buen Calubayan is not himself. As a unified subject, he is, rather, completely a social construct we—as deluded, fuzzy human beings always in jolly pursuit of truth, individuality, the farce of the unique artistic voice & other shams of the anthropocentric movement of the Enlightenment—would like to think of as normal & natural.


2. Which is to say: we have been naturalized to think it (that Buen Calubayan is “Buen Calubayan” ) so, for the forces that determine our identity remain hidden, unseen, cloaked in such enterprises (manipulative and manipulable alike) we hold dear & treasure forever like the universities we study & teach at, the nearby parish church, the mall where we spend time w/ loved ones, the TV & the rest of the mass media, this very gallery you’re standing in—these are all ideological apparatuses that dictate & shape who we are. Like democracy & language & capitalism & Christianity & sexuality & your parents.


3. You are, therefore, also not yourself. You are your own portrait. A simulation of a simulation.


4. To put it simply: TAO™ appears to be a collection of portraits of people—but what it is really is a collection of portraits of portraits. Or shall we say, of Portraiture. I am not Angelo V. Suárez: though I am the undersigned, I am not the undersigned. I have only been enframed to be the undersigned, enframed to be myself who I am not.


5. Those familiar w/ Buen Calubayan’s earlier, radical, non-gallery work must be in a state of intense wonder, if not shock or unspoken disappointment. The keys to your dilemmas are these: [a] Because portraiture practically has the function of photography, & “a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see” (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida), & this is one way of approaching the problematic of mediation. [b] Because there is no other place to interrogate mediation better than a place that declares itself to be an arbiter/mediator of taste, aesthetics, & “Art-ness.” [c] Because this is actually just as radical, if not more so: a kind of self-othering process that turns him into an aporia. [d] Because the Buen Calubayan you are familiar w/ is not the Buen Calubayan here—w/c is not himself either.


6. You have to understand. Essentially, Buen Calubayan does not exist. His existence purely depends on our perception of him—& all manners of perception are biased & manufactured. This bias is deftly played w/ by his manipulation of this classic genre: while portraiture is dependent on the rhetoric of mimesis or reproduction of an original (let us say, the posing subject or topic of the painting in the foreground), the painted product nonetheless is arbitrarily configured both by the artist’s hand & color-blindness, by his idiosyncratic brushwork & gestural insanities.


7. The mimetic project is thus hardly faithful to the original because mimesis as a process is always biased because in the hands of someone, just as Buen Calubayan—or the process of constructing his identity—is manufactured by someone. Or something.


8. Manufactured by whom or what, you ask? Refer to Number 2 for the answer.


9. Such that Buen Calubayan has become trademarked, just as you are—all our identities shaped by the ubiquitous hegemonies that envelop us, consume us, deceive us 24 hours a day. (Even the idea of there being 24 hours in a day has only in fact been arbitrarily enforced all over the world by dominant cultures—even though by now it feels perfectly natural to think there are 24 hours in a day.)


10. You think by coming here, you are being a good patron of the arts? You are not. By coming here, you have proven to the public that you subscribe to the idea propagated by the hegemonic Establishment that Art is something to be stored in a gallery, something to be kept passive. Like you. If you want to free art from oppressive notions of definition that limit or restrict its possibilities, you have to start believing that this exhibit is a lie, that this gallery is a lie, that Buen Calubayan & yourself are lies constructed by society to keep its sickness alive & kicking in the body politic. You have to start believing in UnArt. You have to start unbelieving. You have to unstart. You unhave. UnYou.


11. The basic equation thus: TAO = You = false = TAO™ = You™.


12. Ultimately, you are Buen Calubayan. Yet you are not Buen Calubayan.



—Angelo V. Suárez