Adventures Past Circuits: Sociality in Philippine Conceptual Writing

Abstract

There is not much of a tradition of conceptual writing to speak of in the Philippines. A descendant of, and arguably a less popular exponent of the Western avant-garde, conceptualism is usually associated with Sol Lewitt’s sentences-as-manifesto, and the more contemporary works of Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place. This paper looks at two works by Angelo Suarez, a writer, artist, and activist, who at some point markedly identified himself as a proponent of conceptual writing in the Philippines. Through a close analysis of CIRCUIT (The Blurb Project) and Maliit Lang Yung Sa ‘yo, Itabi mo, Magpadaan Ka: Adventures in Parataxis, this paper aims to show the potentials of conceptualist practice in positing anew, and reframing old debates related to cultural production. Doing such can also expand the categories usually deployed in cultural analysis (form, content), bringing to the foreground the more obscured but no less important considerations such as the materials used in, or situations informing the work, or the very materiality of cultural work. CIRCUIT and Maliit Lang Yung Sa ‘yo make explicit how one’s social networks can figure in artmaking, and how a seemingly trifling event such as riding taxis can lead to the meaningful redistribution of roles in literary production. The paper will also try to establish possible links, however indirect, between the more long-standing oral tradition in the Philippines and Suarez’s conceptualist works, particularly Maliit Lang Yung Sa ‘yo.  In all, conceptual writing can reintroduce the social aspects of art objects and production, after having been effaced by an overemphasis on what does art convey, and how does it convey it.