Fugitive Land
In his wide ranging 2019 book, How to Hide an Empire, historian Daniel Immerwahr charts how American imperialism eschewed past models of conquest and the US, instead, created a network of small -scale territories and military bases that dotted the globe, without a large colonial enterprise and primarily out of the eyes of its citizens. Certainly, the white settler land grab is very much part of US history, especially throughout the course of the 19th Century when Indigenous land was brutally taken in the name of progress and westward expansion. So much of the violence, exploitation, and extralegal maneuverings of this period would serve as the foundation for an American version of empire鈥攐ne in which so-called territories are a grey area in US law and, subsequently through advancements in communications and logistics technologies, those bases can be far from one another and no longer required traditional colonial structures to support them. In effect, most mainlanders had little knowledge of the very people that constituted the country in its entirety鈥攖hat by 1940, 12.6% of the US population did not live in the contiguous states.
Santiago Bose, who can be regarded as the grandfather of Filipino contemporary art, grew up in amid the physical manifestations of this American empire. Born just after World War II, in 1949 in Baguio City, he grew up in a city that was built from scratch in the early 1900s by the US occupation, originally as a summer retreat for the white colonizers complete with 鈥渓arge government buildings, commanding views, a grand axis cutting through the Baguio meadow.鈥� Growing up in this built environment in the 1960s, Bose was first exposed to rock 鈥榥鈥� roll as well as American and European art through the nearby American military bases. Though as his biographer Jonathan Best relates, Bose鈥檚 memories of his youth 鈥渟oured as he grew older and came to feel Filipinos were being treated like second-class citizens in their own country when they visited the American bases.鈥�
In Bose鈥檚 assemblage, Baguio Souvenirs (1976), the composition is bisected horizontally with an off-white band running across the top and a thin, desaturated red below, to resemble the corridors of an administrative building. Embedded into the 鈥渨all鈥� are turn-of-the-century surveyor photographs of his hometown. Acting like windows looking out onto the landscape, the appropriated pictures were taken at a commanding height, depicting orderly rows of buildings along wide streets and green fields divided in to crisp geometries by intersecting roads. While they are actual photographs of a real place, they are also a colonizer鈥檚 fantasy鈥攁 landscape that is organized and pacified, largely devoid of any people. With a trickster鈥檚 wit, Bose appropriates the very images initially used to survey and control the land and have them speak back, against the legacy of imperial might.
Stephanie Syjuco鈥檚 early three-channel video Body Double (Platoon/Apocalypse Now/Hamburger Hill) (2007) makes use an entirely different set of source imagery which, like Bose, she turns back on itself. Looking at the three titular Hollywood films about the Vietnam War, Syjuco excises the sections of footage that solely depict foliage and landscape, devoid of humans. Sections of jungle appear and disappear in regular, silent geometries鈥攁 rectangular sliver of blurry greenery, a square close-up of grass, a wide shot of the sun piercing the canopy overhead. The three movies were shot in the Philippines to stand in for Vietnam (hence the body double), in a sense producing a colonial ouroboros. Syjuco says, 鈥淭he irony of this鈥攖he restaging of an entirely different war being shot in a tropical-like environment of an ex-American colony (the Philippines having been under American colonial rule from 1989 to 1946)鈥攚as not lost on me as a Filipinx American artist interested in the construction and fabrication of history.
By working with marble sourced from the Danby Quarry in Vermont鈥攖hat largest underground quarry in the world鈥�Michael Joo sets notions of location along an expansive geologic timeline. His Epi- (Montclair Mariposa Cross-Cut) (2024) features a wide slab of marble held up on a steel truss as if it were a roadside billboard. The verso of the slab is coated with silver nitrate鈥攁 material used to mirror surfaces and is a precursor to silver compounds used in black-and-white photography鈥攚hich leaks through the cracks along the face of the stone. The sculpture suggests an inchoate mirror or photograph, charged with the potential for reflection or depicting a captured image without ever doing so. Writing about a related 2014鈥�15 sculpture, art historian Miwon Kwon said: 鈥淭he work does not offer a surrogate view (of another place, another scene, a feeling or thought, imagined or real) and at the same time does not affirm the position of the viewing subject in the space of the presentation.鈥濃伒 Through its horizontal format, Epi- suggests a view of a landscape without ever providing one and likewise its silvering yields no reflection to satisfy the viewer.
Set in this sequence, these works of Bose, Syjuco, and Joo demonstrate a series of refusals. Bose adeptly renders the tools of oppression inoperable, and by incorporating them into his art, he makes visible the apparatus of colonialism itself. Through deliberate deletion, Syjuco looks to the moving image and its systems of distribution to show how they reinforce nationalist fantasies. Joo鈥檚 sculpture is devoid of representation. Informed by the work of Bose and Syjuco, the work takes on an anti-colonialist stance, and through its very being it counters the idea of a landscapes ripe for conquest and instead reinforces a notion of tectonic history, a timeline that extends forwards and backwards beyond any human timeframe and any kind of nationalistic mythmaking.
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In his wide ranging 2019 book, How to Hide an Empire, historian Daniel Immerwahr charts how American imperialism eschewed past models of conquest and the US, instead, created a network of small -scale territories and military bases that dotted the globe, without a large colonial enterprise and primarily out of the eyes of its citizens. Certainly, the white settler land grab is very much part of US history, especially throughout the course of the 19th Century when Indigenous land was brutally taken in the name of progress and westward expansion. So much of the violence, exploitation, and extralegal maneuverings of this period would serve as the foundation for an American version of empire鈥攐ne in which so-called territories are a grey area in US law and, subsequently through advancements in communications and logistics technologies, those bases can be far from one another and no longer required traditional colonial structures to support them. In effect, most mainlanders had little knowledge of the very people that constituted the country in its entirety鈥攖hat by 1940, 12.6% of the US population did not live in the contiguous states.
Santiago Bose, who can be regarded as the grandfather of Filipino contemporary art, grew up in amid the physical manifestations of this American empire. Born just after World War II, in 1949 in Baguio City, he grew up in a city that was built from scratch in the early 1900s by the US occupation, originally as a summer retreat for the white colonizers complete with 鈥渓arge government buildings, commanding views, a grand axis cutting through the Baguio meadow.鈥� Growing up in this built environment in the 1960s, Bose was first exposed to rock 鈥榥鈥� roll as well as American and European art through the nearby American military bases. Though as his biographer Jonathan Best relates, Bose鈥檚 memories of his youth 鈥渟oured as he grew older and came to feel Filipinos were being treated like second-class citizens in their own country when they visited the American bases.鈥�
In Bose鈥檚 assemblage, Baguio Souvenirs (1976), the composition is bisected horizontally with an off-white band running across the top and a thin, desaturated red below, to resemble the corridors of an administrative building. Embedded into the 鈥渨all鈥� are turn-of-the-century surveyor photographs of his hometown. Acting like windows looking out onto the landscape, the appropriated pictures were taken at a commanding height, depicting orderly rows of buildings along wide streets and green fields divided in to crisp geometries by intersecting roads. While they are actual photographs of a real place, they are also a colonizer鈥檚 fantasy鈥攁 landscape that is organized and pacified, largely devoid of any people. With a trickster鈥檚 wit, Bose appropriates the very images initially used to survey and control the land and have them speak back, against the legacy of imperial might.
Stephanie Syjuco鈥檚 early three-channel video Body Double (Platoon/Apocalypse Now/Hamburger Hill) (2007) makes use an entirely different set of source imagery which, like Bose, she turns back on itself. Looking at the three titular Hollywood films about the Vietnam War, Syjuco excises the sections of footage that solely depict foliage and landscape, devoid of humans. Sections of jungle appear and disappear in regular, silent geometries鈥攁 rectangular sliver of blurry greenery, a square close-up of grass, a wide shot of the sun piercing the canopy overhead. The three movies were shot in the Philippines to stand in for Vietnam (hence the body double), in a sense producing a colonial ouroboros. Syjuco says, 鈥淭he irony of this鈥攖he restaging of an entirely different war being shot in a tropical-like environment of an ex-American colony (the Philippines having been under American colonial rule from 1989 to 1946)鈥攚as not lost on me as a Filipinx American artist interested in the construction and fabrication of history.
By working with marble sourced from the Danby Quarry in Vermont鈥攖hat largest underground quarry in the world鈥�Michael Joo sets notions of location along an expansive geologic timeline. His Epi- (Montclair Mariposa Cross-Cut) (2024) features a wide slab of marble held up on a steel truss as if it were a roadside billboard. The verso of the slab is coated with silver nitrate鈥攁 material used to mirror surfaces and is a precursor to silver compounds used in black-and-white photography鈥攚hich leaks through the cracks along the face of the stone. The sculpture suggests an inchoate mirror or photograph, charged with the potential for reflection or depicting a captured image without ever doing so. Writing about a related 2014鈥�15 sculpture, art historian Miwon Kwon said: 鈥淭he work does not offer a surrogate view (of another place, another scene, a feeling or thought, imagined or real) and at the same time does not affirm the position of the viewing subject in the space of the presentation.鈥濃伒 Through its horizontal format, Epi- suggests a view of a landscape without ever providing one and likewise its silvering yields no reflection to satisfy the viewer.
Set in this sequence, these works of Bose, Syjuco, and Joo demonstrate a series of refusals. Bose adeptly renders the tools of oppression inoperable, and by incorporating them into his art, he makes visible the apparatus of colonialism itself. Through deliberate deletion, Syjuco looks to the moving image and its systems of distribution to show how they reinforce nationalist fantasies. Joo鈥檚 sculpture is devoid of representation. Informed by the work of Bose and Syjuco, the work takes on an anti-colonialist stance, and through its very being it counters the idea of a landscapes ripe for conquest and instead reinforces a notion of tectonic history, a timeline that extends forwards and backwards beyond any human timeframe and any kind of nationalistic mythmaking.
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