Art Talk by Oscar Campomanes: The Text-Image as Sign in Verbal and Visual Art: Semiology and Iconology in the Las Rimas Art Exhibit
1pm June 23, Tuesday, UP College of Fine Arts. Free and Open to all
Prof. Oscar V. Campomanes, Department of English, Ateneo de Manila University
ABSTRACT | Part-lecture and part-conversation with the UP Artists’ Circle members and audience, this presentation revisits some key critical and theoretical ideas about the text-image nexus in modern verbal art (poetry) and visual art (painting). Drawing from Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of art, sign/semiotic theory, and what is now called iconology, and using the Las Rimas exhibition at the Asia Gallery and its Curator’s Notes as pretexts, this lecture/conversation aims to interrogate the critical and creative assumptions, as well theoretical traditions, that inform an ambitious attempt by collaborating young artists of UP to foreground the question of translation and tradition between the two sister-arts of versification and visualization. Arguing that this attempt is salutary for seeking to initiate a rethinking of formal and cultural translation in the context of tradition’s transmission in Philippine artmaking and historical consciousness (with its unusual gestures toward conceptual art and conceptual writing), this presentation concludes with a preliminary estimate of the Las Rimas Project’s distinctive contributions both to culture and critical theory in general and the revitalization of Philippine artmaking in particular.
THE SPEAKER | Professor Oscar V. Campomanes teaches literary and cultural studies fulltime in the Department of English at the Ateneo de Manila and, occasionally, in the UST Graduate School as Associate Professorial Lecturer in Cultural Studies Theory, Postcolonialism, Semiotics, Media Criticism, and Visuality. An American Studies expert and literary scholar/cultural critic, Prof. Campomanes’ works have appeared in various learned journals and critical anthologies published locally and abroad. He is also contributor to such now-standard reference texts in the USA as the Encyclopedia of the American Left (1990), the Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1994), the Cambridge Inter-Ethnic Companion to Asian American Literature (1997), and the Blackwell Companion to Asian American Literature (2004). With twoedited volumes to his name (Historical Reflections on US Governance & Civil Society, De La Salle University Press, 2001; Culture and Governance, Development Academy of the Philippines, 2004) and a third one forthcoming from another local university press, he is currently working on a retrospective anthology of his various essays in postcolonial, Americanist, cultural, and literary critique. As a founding and core member of ARTERY-Manila, a Malate-based art advocacy and management organization, he has also published essays in art and media criticism in such venues as the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Washington Square Gallery (USA); he hopes to reprint and co-publish his essays in art criticism with those of a fellow writer, in a single anthology, within the next two years.
