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

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pati mga pagmumura at depressed anomalies mo.
pati yung text ng anak ko sakin natangay din. puucha talaga kasama ng lahat ng contact number ninyo. letse
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pero kung sakaling makita nyo, paki-message lang ako, may star na pula nga pala yung fon ko, sa noo. at 50pesos load ata.
maraming salamat





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[
…when man works, he interacts with nature and transforms it. But in the process nature also interacts with man and transforms his consciousness.’

‘Tell me what you do and I’ll tell you who you are.’

‘That, briefly, was Marx’s point. How we work affects our consciousness, but our consciousness also affects the way we work. You could say it is an interactive relationship between hand and consciousness. Thus the way you think is closely connected to the job you do.’

‘So it must be depressing to be unemployed.’

‘Yes. A person who is unemployed is, in a sense, empty. Hegel was aware of this early on. To both Hegel and Marx, work was a positive thing, and was closely connected with the essence of mankind.’

‘So it must also be positive to a worker?’

‘Yes, originally. But this is precisely where Marx aimed his criticism of the capitalist method of production.’

‘What was that?’

‘Under the capitalist system, the worker labors for someone else. His labor is thus something external to him—or something that does not belong to him. The worker becomes alien to his work—but at the same time also alien to himself. He loses touch with his own reality. Marx says, with a Hegelian expression, that the worker becomes alienated.’

‘I have an aunt who has worked in a factory, packaging candy for over twenty years, so I can easily understand what you mean. She says she hates going to work, every single morning.’

‘But if she hates her work, Sophie, she must hate herself, in a sense.’

‘She hates candy, that’s for sure.’

‘In a capitalist society, labor is organized in such a way that the worker in fact slaves for another social class. Thus the worker transfers his own labor—and with it, the whole of his life—to the bourgeoisie.’

‘Is it really that bad?’

‘We’re talking about Marx, and we must therefore take our point of departure in the social conditions during the middle of the last century. So the answer must be a resounding yes. The worker could have a 12- hour working day in a freezing cold production hall. The pay was often so poor that children and expectant mothers also had to work. This led to unspeakable social conditions. In many places, part of the wages was paid out in the form of cheap liquor, and women were obliged to supplement their earnings by prostitution. Their customers were the respected citizenry of the town. In short, in the precise situation that should have been the honorable hallmark of mankind, namely work, the worker was turned into a beast of burden.’

‘That infuriates me!’

‘It infuriated Marx too. And while it was happening, the children of the bourgeoisie played the violin in warm, spacious living rooms after a refreshing bath. Or they sat of the piano while waiting for their four- course dinner. The violin and the piano could have served lust as well as a diversion after a long horseback ride.’
‘Ugh! How unjust!’

]


Excerpt
Gaarder, Jostein Marx/Sophie’s World, pp. 329-330 translation by Paulette MØller Phoenix 1996