Tasks about anything

‘Anonymity’

If in portraiture the camera hones its sharp focus against face.

If the subject looking back must be flash-frozen, cornered, dead-centered.

If to be recognized means the head must strain above the shoulder’s horizon or drown. The parallels nailing it in place where these lines falling into each other must meet at some point in eternity.

If to escape is no longer to be a face in the crowd. On the street. On broken stones at the base of a building. If you must know my face know my face by its glare. – Jose Perez Beduya

The author is a young Filipino artist and writer based in Ithaca, New York where he finished an MA in Creative Writing at Cornell University. He was a classmate in Art History at UP Diliman and in 1999 was one of the 20 artists featured in the CCP show I curated entitled Kaka: Extended(I)versions from Manila and California. For that exhibition – wherein artists both here and the US invaded all eight toilets of the museum – Beduya did an installation and performance piece involving a surgical mask, efficacent oil and an enormous coil of sewage piping. The accompanying text that he wrote for the catalogue was in the form of a handwritten letter to his then-girlfriend about his imminent departure from the Philippines (I could be wrong).

I wonder if the "glare" of "my face" is an attack on, or escape from, recognition – a task that burdens people with familiarities, comfort zones and too much interpretation? The poet Arthur Rimbaud clamored for the glare of the sun, so that he too can be bright and faceless, unique and anonymous at the same time.

Ronald "Poklong" Anading is a familiar person in the local art and music community; apart from actively working on his own projects he still makes time to attend other people’s exhibitions and gigs or support fellow artists on practical matters such as installation, documentation and drinking session. Yet despite such gregariousness Anading manages to remain an anonymous face in the crowd not because he is un-important but because he makes no effort to be an imp (a pa-importante person disguised as an impostor). His artworks maintain a similar elusive, almost self-effacing quality: his line drawings mark territory as much as erasing it, and by repeating profusely the drawing of a line, effectively echo the ordinariness of such gesture and form while simultaneously transforming them to something sublime and inimitable .

In a way it reminds me of the paintings of Niele Toroni, who has been painting brush marks 30 centimeters apart, for more than 30 years. His epithet and epitaph could might as well be one and the same thing, literally: dedicated to a single gesture his entire life. What a way to go and leave the world of important decisions and pa-importante identities. No more faces to recognize, no more phases to go through and sort out. Just the repetition of that One, that One that is the overwhelming presence of an anonymous line – an anonymous person. And an anonymous task given purpose by a singular mind.

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On Sept. 10, Saturday at 5 p.m., I will be holding an artist’s talk in connection with the exhibition 18 Stations to Death and Dementia at Silver Lens Gallery. This will be followed by a conversation with Carlos Celdran entitled It’s A Crazy Planets: Starlets, Dementia and Aesthetics. Silver Lens is located at 33-C South Tower, Pacific Plaza Towers, Bonifacio Global City. For more information, call 816-0044.