Is it possible for someone named Josh Kline to be Filipino American?
Like many mixed-race/mixed-culture peoples who have emerged, are emerging, or perhaps yearn to emerge from a colonial legacy, most Filipinos see no contradiction in this racial, ethnic, and cultural mix. It is not a problem or a source of confusion to the people in that mix.
These kinds of contrasts give rise to history understood as a morass of unresolved conflicts and multiple lines of flight, rather than a unified tale of artistic development. Of course, none of the current constellations break new ground or present innovative scholarship—that is still a step too far for even #newMoMA—but they renounce the egregious evasions that were previously MoMA’s calling card.
Imagining the person of color as a counterculturalist, as a weirdo or bohemian, means imagining them as someone who cannot be processed easily into the threat/victim dichotomy, but must be imagined as someone who can wreak joy and pleasure and strangeness upon the world.
Celebrating the mystery and ingeniousness of these human activities which, for lack of a better term, we call “contemporary art.”
In the late 1980s, a series of apparently unremarkable group exhibitions begin to take place in galleries and art centers around France. Each show is presented as a selection from the holdings of a pair of young collectors. Only gradually does the public start to realize that all the artists in these shows, which run the gamut of contemporary avant-garde styles, are in fact inventions of the “collectors,” a duo of artists who have taken the postmodern tendency of stylistic diversity to an extreme end.