Fig. 1. Agustin Rodriguez, Untitled (Dreamwalk Series), 2020. Photograph inkjet print on paper. Courtesy of the Artist.
A Preamble About Art (and a Disclaimer About Being an Artist)
I am not an artist. (Or, at least, I do not dare call myself an artist). Neither am I a photographer. (Again, I don't dare.) However, I am driven to create camera based visual works that express my insights into something about human existence. It is a desire which I am driven to fulfill as much as my main life’s work will permit me. The reason for this passion is that it expresses and deepens my encounters with the transcendent. Perhaps I can explain this best by describing what I experience when I encounter a work of art.
I am particularly drawn to works of art that are considered melancholic or heartbreaking. I remember listening to The Beatles in our yard in the 70s. I was always alone and the sorrows of “Eleanor Rigby” resonated deep in what I would now characterize as my loob. The image of Fr. McKenzie “darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there” said something about my life. Although at that time I did not know what darning socks meant, I knew very well what it is like to be doing something lonely in the night when there's nobody there. This experience still holds true for me. I am drawn to the music of Cynthia Alexander, Joni Mitchell, and The National. The films of Lino Brocka drew me to a lifelong love affair with the cinematic arts. And the photographs of W. Eugene Smith, Ansel Adams, and Dianne Arbus drew me to a lifelong passion for photography. This attraction and resonance persists until my middle age. Recently, I have been drawn to a kind of Filipino cinema where silence defines space and time, and reflects the expanse of emptiness in the modern urban world. I wonder about this because now that I am middle aged, I am not a particularly melancholic person. I have made my peace with finitude and death. But I believe that the attraction to this sadness in film bears an insight into what defines the greatest works art—although I don't believe that all the films I was drawn to were great works of art, or art at all. I believe that one of the primary reason for human beings to create art is the need to express our deepest tragedies and sorrows. Sorrow, melancholia, sadness, and tragedy are the primary impulse for art.
Art works which bear the sorrows of human existence are some of the most insightful because they are one of our first signals to the transcendent. At least, that is my earliest experience of art and that is what first drew me to immerse in music, cinema, painting, and photography. (If we think about it, some of humanity’s first great works are related to the burial of the dead.) Films about loneliness, photographs that capture unguarded moments when faces are vulnerable, music that makes present the loss, and paintings that portray the undoing of the things we create say something about how we long for a fullness beyond this lack. Dianne Arbus' portraits and Kiri Dalena's documentaries are compelling primarily because their works make present the brokenness of people, their fragility, and their sorrows. In Arbus' photographs, the faces of the “freaks” of society are captured as they cast an appearance of strength when their being worn down by their otherness is all too present. In Dalena's documentaries we see how children who have survived unimaginable violence can be restored to innocent exuberance amidst the shadows of their monsters cast.
Fig. 2. Agustin Rodriguez, Untitled (Dreamwalk Series), 2020. Photograph inkjet print on paper. Courtesy of the Artist.
This is the heart of artistic creation. Artists create because they intuit the good that transcends the sufferings and sorrows of finitude. Even if the work of art presents human suffering and brokenness, it hints at a fullness beyond. Artistic intuition intuits a good beyond failed dreams, broken bodies, unrealized possibilities, regretted self-realizations, unintended acts of cruelty, our deaths, and the deaths of the people we love. There is a fullness that will negate all our suffering. There is a something or someone, a love or a beloved beyond being, that can overcome the wounds of our finite existence. And that intuition is precisely the source of the sense of the tragic and the ground of our hope. Our sense of the tragic is caused by the awareness that beyond everything that breaks us is the promise of an authentic wholeness. If there was no promise life would only be tragic. However, the awareness that there might be a promise of a genuine fullness that calls us to hope, a nostalgia for a true dwelling and a more truer way of being that is not yet or may never be is the vision that art presents. I am drawn to the great works of art and even try to participate in artistic creation because when I do, I dwell in the nostalgia of the promise of the good beyond this finitude in which I dwell.
Fig. 3 - 5. Agustin Rodriguez, Untitled (Dreamwalk Series), 2020. Photograph inkjet print on paper. Courtesy of the Artist.
What does this preamble have to do with my photographic practice? I am drawn to engage in creative work that awakens the nostalgia for a promise. Perhaps because of my immersion in the photographic, musical, literary, performance, and cinematic arts, I was made alert to the signals of the transcendent in this finite world of ours. Like a resonance in the loob, I am given an intuition of the presencing of the traces of the infinite. Being given these intuitions, I am driven to translate them into a tangible form to celebrate for and with others the trace of that presencing. Unfortunately, although I have been gifted with the resonance of the presencing of the traces in my deepest self, I am not gifted with the ability to create in the traditional arts. Fortunately, the camera exists.
Making Photographs
Again, I am not a photographer. Far from it. I don't have the skill to produce great photographs with the camera. I have always used some form of entry level SLR with the cheapest lens (I only learned that they were at this level when I Googled them) and learned how to take pictures with these. I eventually moved to the digital format by using (entry level) mirrorless cameras. For all my 4 decades of photographing, I have never produced satisfactory images. This is partly because of the lack of equipment. My cameras and lenses are always at the beginner level and always at least four models behind. I have never been a technical person who delights in the tool and its workings, and I have never had enough money to spend on such things. But this is also partly because I don’t have the virtues of precision and patience, as well as the calculative instincts to frame images and catch the play of light with this instrument. Photography is one of the most technical of the arts and calls for certain technical capacities and virtues. Nonetheless, I have been blessed with the longing to express what I intuited as the traces of the good. And so, all my life I have been driven to try and capture these traces in the form of images taken with a camera. But because the images I produced were never satisfying , I would manipulate them in ways that admittedly lacked finesse but satisfied my need.
In order to produce images that capture my intuitions, I color my pictures. In the old days of film, I would photocopy the black and white prints and use pastel sticks to color over them. My only technique was to wipe over the colored pictures with with tissue to smoothen the tint on the image. Ever since I learned to use digital cameras, I crudely manipulate the images on basic programs which allow me to crop, adjust for brightness, color, exposure, saturation, and contrast, print the images on bond or water color paper, and paint on them using water color pencils or paste and gouache. I then cut and paste to layer or connect and extend images. In this way, I am able to create pieces that are up to 3 x 1.5 meters, though now I focus on postcard sized images. This is my technique because I cannot take beautiful or technically satisfactory pictures, I do not know how to paint or draw, but I am driven to capture the traces of the transcendent.
I am sharing all this not because I believe my work or process is new or inspiring. Rather, I am reflecting on my technique to explain why we are called to create art: how, even if we are not artists, there are ways of expressing our insights. One does not need the best equipment to do this. I would like to advocate for my technique to anyone who, like me, is called by intuition to create art. What I mean by being called to art is being awakened to the desire to express the presencing of the good. If one is called by the desire to capture the trace of the transcendent, one should not be limited by limitations. The very heart of art is to express human finitude before the transcendent good. One must, as one is called, create as best as one can.
Fig. 6 - 10. Agustin Rodriguez, Cityscape, 2020. Photograph, cut-out, watercolor,
inkjet print on paper. Images courtesy of the Artist.
Like the Filipino home builder who is called to build a home for their family with the material given by poverty, we should treat all available material as an opportunity. Found materials like used wood, scraps of corrugated iron, and the discarded appliances from other homes can be of use to build and adorn their homes. And it will be no less authentic a dwelling as long as it bears in finite form the eternal love that defines the family. So my aesthetic could be likened to the “iskwater" method of home building. It is also similar to the “remedyo” method of mechanics who do not always have access to the new and exact spare parts for a car. They use what they can find and find ways to make it work for the vehicle that someone needs for their livelihood, hence the proliferation of the engine shop. This Filipino methodology is perhaps not the best way to do things, especially in photography which is a very precise technology. But if the necessity for expression exists, a creative mind can make it work. Need and desire are the drivers of Filipino creativity. My photographic practice is an inheritor of this tradition.
The Aesthetic of Squalor
Fortunately, this remedyo non-technique, is very useful for an aesthetics of squalor, which defines the images I produce. Being a child of the city, particularly of Cubao, but who learned photography in Quiapo with Honesto Vitug (the forever dean of Philippine photojournalism who, like a young fool, I never appreciated enough then), who traversed the lengths of Aurora Boulevard from Katipunan to Nagtahan, and being a dweller in the anachronisms of Marikina and San Juan, I bathed in the light of a city whose borders, alleys, and rivers were accented with squalor. All my life, especially in my youth when I grew up in a decidedly non-gentrified Metro Manila, where swanky was tolerant of faded and frayed, I lived in a world that seemed to be comfortable living with the undoing of things. It was a world that was shedding the glories of a colonial past and dreaming of the promised happiness of the yet unsullied American dream.
Fig. 11. Agustin Rodriguez, Cityscape, 2020. Photograph inkjet print, watercolor on paper. Images courtesy of the Artist.
Universities in Manila, for instance, were surrounded by houses which in their prime might have been bright and crisp but now are darked and soggy because of the coat of dust and damp. Houses in San Juan told of how they were built to host the minor aristocrats posing like the colonizers trying to revive former glories. The colonizers have gone and all that was left of that nostalgia was the sounds of Spanish spoken conversations among the newly demoted lower middle class and their homes in a permanent state of disrepair. My own childhood home was built on the hopes of upper class mobility. It ended up being a money trap with peeling paint, uneven furniture, rusting, leaky roofs, and dark storage places filled with stuff that was kept for much too long because of the fear that we could never be able to replace them or that they would earn us something significant one day. I lived in a city where signs of the slow undoing of time was ever present. And this slow undoing brought feelings of melancholy and nostalgia.
Dwelling on the borders of squalor, gifted with the awareness that people dwelt amongst reminders that something has been lost and something is hoped for—an awareness that our lives are lived on the border of something beyond this disappointment, loss, and decay—I believe I had a persistent sense of the transcendent. Squalor for me has always been a cipher for the transcendent, a signal for a fundamental longing for the promise that there was a good toward which we were living. Although squalor presenced what could be but was not, it was good to encounter and dwell with it because it concretely hinted at the promise. Squalor was not the good and in fact felt like the decay of the good, but it made me intuit that there was being beyond this decay and we belonged to it. That is precisely what my attempts at artistic creation attempted to convey or share with others. I hoped that the image captured by the lens would be the concrete signal for others to become aware of or even remember that there is a promise of a good beyond finitude. This is why my photographs have always been about the squalor of the city.
Fig. 12 - 15. Agustin Rodriguez, Cityscape, 2020. Photographs. Images courtesy of the Artist.
My pictures or photograph based works are my way of working on my nostalgia for the good beyond finitude. I use my camera to follow the traces of the good because, with the image, I can dwell more with the call of the absence. And hopefully I can share that call as an invitation to dwell in the presence of what is beyond us but to which we belong. Also, the act of trying to recreate something of the trace or the effect of the trace affords me time to dwell in the trace. As I work on ways of capturing the significations of the squalor, I am given time to dwell in what it is able to awaken in me. Working on the photographs gives me time to dwell in what may be in the picture. Thus, I can say that my work is the work of nostalgia. It might not succeed, but it serves my need to keep alive the call of the good.
The Camera as the Given To
Photography is particularly apt as medium for my use because its mechanism emulates my experience as a receiver of the trace. To borrow from the philosophers Jaque Derrida and Jean Luc Marion, there is a transcendent play that gives beings to presence. This means that there is a something beyond and above us, a dynamic play that makes things come to presence. Maybe it is what the philosophers call Being or maybe it is what people of faith call God: whatever it is, it is the good or fullness that makes beings come to presence in the world. People are receivers of the presencing of beings. We are the given to. But when we are given to, we not just given the physical presencing of things but we are also given the presence of the play that gives beings to be present. This is the particular capability of the human person, we are capable to receiving the presencing of the good that gives.
The camera too is the given to. The play of light gives being to presencing as image. Good photographers are able to work the camera so that it functions well as the given to. It receives what is given by the play of light and presences an image that makes even more present what is given. Without the camera, things that are given to light may go unnoticed, however the best photographers make them presence as framed. As framed, the given is again given by the given to. The camera captures the given image and given it again with a more intense presencing in the way it is framed. The camera as given to gives. By framing the given to presence (i.e. photographing the phenomenon seen), photographs can make present the good that gives (in pictures). The greatest photographers are able to do that.
Ansel Adams is a good example. He photographs landscapes that are given to millions every day. However, this landscape was given to him as the trace of the good and with his mastery, it was given to his viewers by framing it with his camera. The camera can give to the viewer the landscape as it is giver by the play of the transcendent good. Adams used the camera to be given to and in his framing of the play of light is able to use his camera to give to the viewer. Similarly, Diane Arbus sees invisible people, “circus freaks,” and the discarded in American society. She sees people who are unseen even if people pass them by every day and actively avoid seeing them. But she learned to use her camera to receive the presencing of these unseen people and she was able to let her camera give to her viewers what it was given. In that way, the making present of the invisible people through the photograph allows us to see the transcendent good that promises that their pain is not the last word. To see the dignity that presences in the captured images of the invisible people reveals the good beyond finitude. Diane Arbus’ camera gives us the trace of that good because she captures so well the good that gives in the play of light.
Fig. 16 - 18. Agustin Rodriguez, Erasures, 2020. Photographs. Images courtesy of the Artist.
This can be said of the camera work in Kiri Dalena’s erasures. In her series Life Masks in which she photographs activists, artists, and writers posed in their dwellings wearing crudely hewn white masks (like a parody of death masks worn by the living who are clearly faced by their own mortality) the camera captures the person being given. These are persons whose lives mattered in society, who contributed to the defense of human rights, the upliftment of their people, and the celebration of life through art, persons who were very present in their societies but are facing mortality and could be forgotten. Posing these people wearing these masks reveals their vulnerability despite their dignity built from a life doing good. These people presence as people who struggle to establish the good in a world that insists on perpetuating its machineries of exploitation and violence. Dalena’s photographs captures the dignity beyond mortality and shares it with us to receive an an insight into the good that transcends death.
My work doesn’t come near to the beauty of any of their works. However, it is driven by the same desire to capture what is given by the good that gives. I feel that I am given the transcendent in squalor. And although I cannot fully capture the trace because of my lack of capability and maybe the lack of my equipment, I feel that my remedyo techniques help me come closest to capturing what is given in the squalor and to sharing these traces with others. It is my way of sharing the invitation from the good that gives to contemplate its promise.
Fig. 19. Agustin Rodriguez, Erasures, 2020. Photographs. Images courtesy of the Artist.
The gift of the trace comes in the least expected moments. Sometimes it is a paper bag nailed to a moss tinted wall, varied colored GI sheets over an informal settlement, the last standing wall in a demolished building, a couple who live from their cart, and houses that are past their prime housing students trying their best to take part in the city’s prosperity: all scenes too easy to overlook but somehow say something about something beyond. If I were better equipped with insight and talent I would create more authentic art. But with the remedyo technique, everyone can be given to. We only need to hone our capacity to see, or more precisely to be given to. With a greater capacity to be given to, we can use any instrument, even the lowest level phone camera to be given to. But more importantly, if we are able to become the given to that receives the world as given by the transcendent other, we may transform our way of being in the world, to be properly immersed in the play that gives—and in giving promises.
June 2024
Comments