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Dissonant Umbrellas: Notes Toward a Gesamtkunstwerk
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Angelo V. Suarez's "Dissonant Umbrellas: Notes Toward a Gesamtkunstwerk" is a collaborative work with Keith Dador, Costantino Zicarelli, Stephanie Yapnayon, Mike Mendoza and Macy Cruz, Dwein Balatazar and Julie Grafia, Mark Salvatus, and Sandra Palomar whose disparate but conceptually interrelated visuals are strung together by a sprawling critico-creative text rooted in marginal traditions in poetry, raising such aberrant issues like the place of materiality in the mainly abstract nature of literature. Besides yanking together the visual and the literary, it also attempts to blur distinctions between reader and writer, speaker and addressee, etc., ending up also fusing Filipino and English into a continuous, verbal idiom. In a sense, Dissonant Umbrellas is a verbo-visual discourse about verbo-visual discourse itself.
Prof. Oscar V. Campomanes: "A reference to Dada this late in post-modernity? Our residual moderns here might scoff at the gesture as passé. A resuscitation of the Wagnerian notion of Gesamtkunstwerk (total art)? Our fiercely genre-bound artists are likely to raise their brows in skepticism. A 'speak-back' to the once-revolutionary insights of Saussurean structuralism? Local literary critics who style themselves as 'post-theoretical' are certain to dismiss the effort as once-startling but now unwarranted. But no matter, and who cares about the self-appointed cadres of modernism, theoretical discourse, and the avant-garde (themselves already anachronistic positionings in our present times)? This work of Gelo Suarez and his collaborators is best read as simulacral (reproductions without originals). More aptly is it regarded as virtual, moving toward and beyond what people prize nowadays as performance. It is a creative text that refuses to cohere and in that sense is also critique, subjecting our age-old certainties about artmaking to crisis and unsettlement. Riddles/ripples shall eddy from it, washing over and across our tightly guarded turfs!"
Angelo V. Suarez's "Dissonant Umbrellas: Notes Toward a Gesamtkunstwerk" is a collaborative work with Keith Dador, Costantino Zicarelli, Stephanie Yapnayon, Mike Mendoza and Macy Cruz, Dwein Balatazar and Julie Grafia, Mark Salvatus, and Sandra Palomar whose disparate but conceptually interrelated visuals are strung together by a sprawling critico-creative text rooted in marginal traditions in poetry, raising such aberrant issues like the place of materiality in the mainly abstract nature of literature. Besides yanking together the visual and the literary, it also attempts to blur distinctions between reader and writer, speaker and addressee, etc., ending up also fusing Filipino and English into a continuous, verbal idiom. In a sense, Dissonant Umbrellas is a verbo-visual discourse about verbo-visual discourse itself.
Prof. Oscar V. Campomanes: "A reference to Dada this late in post-modernity? Our residual moderns here might scoff at the gesture as passé. A resuscitation of the Wagnerian notion of Gesamtkunstwerk (total art)? Our fiercely genre-bound artists are likely to raise their brows in skepticism. A 'speak-back' to the once-revolutionary insights of Saussurean structuralism? Local literary critics who style themselves as 'post-theoretical' are certain to dismiss the effort as once-startling but now unwarranted. But no matter, and who cares about the self-appointed cadres of modernism, theoretical discourse, and the avant-garde (themselves already anachronistic positionings in our present times)? This work of Gelo Suarez and his collaborators is best read as simulacral (reproductions without originals). More aptly is it regarded as virtual, moving toward and beyond what people prize nowadays as performance. It is a creative text that refuses to cohere and in that sense is also critique, subjecting our age-old certainties about artmaking to crisis and unsettlement. Riddles/ripples shall eddy from it, washing over and across our tightly guarded turfs!"
- GenresPoetry
140 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
1 person is currently reading
23 people want to read
About the author
Angelo V. Suárez
12 books36 followersAngelo V. Suárez, an MA Communication student at the University of Santo Tomas, is the author of two books of poetry: The Nymph of MTV and else it was purely girls . He has won prizes from the Carlos Palanca and Maningning Miclat Foundations, and the National Book Award from the Manila Critics Circle and the first Bridges of Struga International Poetry Prize from UNESCO and the Republic of Macedonia for Nymph . He is currently working in close collaboration with visual artists on two new books, s&wich and Dissonant Umbrellas: Notes Toward a Gesamtkunstwerk.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 17, 2015
I am no poet so I used to think that poets are those people who have nothing much to do in life so they have time to play with words in the minds. They think of ideas they feel strongly about then they choose words to form rhymes and then verses to form stanzas and stanzas to form the poems. I used to brush aside poems in favor of prose because I want complete and clear communication and I don't have the luxury of time to think of the message the poet wants to convey. Fair?
Not after I attended the interview with National Artist Virgilio Almario, a.k.a., Rio Alma when our book club read and discussed Sentimental, mga tula ng pag-ibig, lungkot at paglimot early this year, 2015. He said that poets think of the right words. The poet makes sure that each word in the poem has a reason why it is there. He challenges poets to write about something that hasn't been written because if it has been written, why the eff it has to be written again? A good poet, according to him, has to convey a message of universal truth that people can identify with and hopefully learn lessons or expand their life perspectives or broaden their mind sets. All of these while making the reading memorable by being lost in the beauty of the poet's words.
Actually, I only added the last two parts because that's how I felt reading Angelo V. Suarez.
This is a tricky book to rate. I would understand if readers would rate this with 1 or 2 stars especially if you don't know poetry like me before that interview with Rio Alma. You know while reading that not only Suarez chose the exact words to express himself but he also hired the most brilliant young artists to put the right illustrations to go with his carefully-crafted book. There is a page where he suggested that you cut for a "strange pattern." (Sorry, Angelo. I did not do that but I peeped into the page before that to imagine how it would look like). There are several pages with the face of a black man who I thought to be Andy Warhol only to later find out (Thanks, Wikipedia) that Andy Warhol was an American lady. Shame on me.
If you are looking for poems about love, there is not much in here. These are an artsy book of poems that deal with the philosophy of our daily lives that includes riding in the train, going to work or school and seeing the security guards or praying to the statue of the Sto. Nino. There I am, the visual me, those images are in the book and they are the ones that stayed in my mind after I closed this piece of art. Well, I might as well say that this is about walking in the rain while your upturned umbrella because of the strong wind.
Just read this book, okay?
Not after I attended the interview with National Artist Virgilio Almario, a.k.a., Rio Alma when our book club read and discussed Sentimental, mga tula ng pag-ibig, lungkot at paglimot early this year, 2015. He said that poets think of the right words. The poet makes sure that each word in the poem has a reason why it is there. He challenges poets to write about something that hasn't been written because if it has been written, why the eff it has to be written again? A good poet, according to him, has to convey a message of universal truth that people can identify with and hopefully learn lessons or expand their life perspectives or broaden their mind sets. All of these while making the reading memorable by being lost in the beauty of the poet's words.
Actually, I only added the last two parts because that's how I felt reading Angelo V. Suarez.
This is a tricky book to rate. I would understand if readers would rate this with 1 or 2 stars especially if you don't know poetry like me before that interview with Rio Alma. You know while reading that not only Suarez chose the exact words to express himself but he also hired the most brilliant young artists to put the right illustrations to go with his carefully-crafted book. There is a page where he suggested that you cut for a "strange pattern." (Sorry, Angelo. I did not do that but I peeped into the page before that to imagine how it would look like). There are several pages with the face of a black man who I thought to be Andy Warhol only to later find out (Thanks, Wikipedia) that Andy Warhol was an American lady. Shame on me.
If you are looking for poems about love, there is not much in here. These are an artsy book of poems that deal with the philosophy of our daily lives that includes riding in the train, going to work or school and seeing the security guards or praying to the statue of the Sto. Nino. There I am, the visual me, those images are in the book and they are the ones that stayed in my mind after I closed this piece of art. Well, I might as well say that this is about walking in the rain while your upturned umbrella because of the strong wind.
Just read this book, okay?
January 3, 2018
"Forget about your destination : this is an abduction. Repetition."
A place no where to go, no way to start...
A place no where to go, no way to start...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews