MANUEL OCAMPO. Fear of a Kitsch Existence (extrait)

MANUEL OCAMPO Fear of a Kitsch Existence (1989 -2017)

INDEX

Fear of a Kitsch Existence Foreword Menene Gras Balaguer / pp. 6-8 "Yo maté A Historya, Victim of Art" Menene Gras Balaguer / pp. 9-27 Manuel Ocampo Rough Gatherings at the Turn of the Millennium Kevin Power / pp. 28-36 Constraints and Esc(h)atologies As things are in Manuel Ocampo's artworks Fernando Castro Flórez / pp. 37-47 Apocalypse Now The ambivalent allegories of Manuel Ocampo Jennifer P. Borum / pp. 49-53 Perverse Beauty Kenneth Baker / pp. 54-58 Two Ribs Comments to "Ni en la vida ni en la muerte" about some paintings by Manuel Ocampo Pedro G. Romero / pp. 59-66 What is Spanishness?

Conversation between Manuel Ocampo and Curro González Curro González / pp. 67-71 Manolito (To Manuel Ocampo) Guillermo Pérez-Villalta / pp. 73-75 Manuel Ocampo “Wunder Kammer” Sandra Danicke / pp. 76-77

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‘Painting is over; long live painting’ Modernist motifs in Manuel Ocampo’s global Contemporary Art Jonathan Harris / pp. 78-83 The Devil is God in exile Chon A. Noriega / pp. 85-88 Goya – Ocampo Painting Death from 1815 to 2015 Emmanuel Latreille / pp. 89-93 The Junta of the Philippines Where Ocampo meets Goya Valérie Aébi-Sarrazy / pp. 94-98 Living on the edges Conversation with Manuel Ocampo Kevin Power / pp. 99-102

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Fear of a Kitsch Existence Foreword Menene Gras Balaguer This new book on Manuel Ocampo (Manila, 1961) deals with more than three decades of the artist’s career, since the late eighties up to now. “Fear of a Kitsch Existence” is the statement given by him to refer to it as an indicator of how he thinks his artwork should be read or considered, although he leaves it open not wanting to guide in any case its perception or its interpretation. The sentence entails a rough outline of what he feels and tries to avoid, although it is not the first time he puts that into words. As it usually happens once and again with these kinds of propositions that are written on his paintings, one is reminded of the significance of all the verbal signs that show up together with the featured image like symptoms of what he wants to communicate. Here it is about “Fear of a Kitsch Existence – Star of David” (2007), a still life that imitates the moralizing vanitas of the 17th century, which became an essential complement for preaching and devotion in the north and south of Europe, for Catholics as well as for Protestants. One of the most representative artists of this pictorial gender is the Spanish painter Juan Valdés Leal (1622-1690), whose figures as part of his somber and dramatic scenes show how ephemeral life is for everybody. That was taught in some popular Latin expressions at the time as memento mori, tempus fugit, carpe diem or finis gloriae mundi and the triumph of death, which shared their meaning with the former ones.

These allegories are very common to the Baroque painting and Ocampo goes back to them reversing their meaning. He mixes some distinctive elements of the old vanitas like the skulls and some other that really desecrate the former ones. The Star of David works as a table or altar where the artist sets a skull with a lit candle at the top of it, an open book, scattered sausages falling to the ground, a half broken bottle, a can with a fish scraper, a pierced sock that shows some toes, a crow and a molar. Underneath there are some intestines of a human body or mammal, which remind us of our insignificance.

Saving the connotations of the Start of David for Judaism, Ocampo’s aesthetic is a revulsive in the face of the original vanitas. The same happens with the following painting that also bears a similar statement, “Fear of a Kitsch Existence” (2010) where he instead shows a sample of teeth and molars as if he tried to classify them following a cataloging system rather used in the field of the Natural Sciences. The optical effect is that of an x-ray of the teeth that the artist paints in black and white, deforming these calcified anatomical structures that are located in the oral cavity of humans and numerous species of vertebrates.

Both paintings refer to different periods of his career, despite the common places where all the subjects he embraces in his own style.

Gathering Ocampo’s work in this publication has been possible due to the artist collaboration and willingness. You will find around three hundred images of his artworks since the beginning of his career

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"Yo maté historya, Victim of Art"1 Menene Gras Balaguer “The Monster therefore, is the Other. And those who are not easily recognizable, who don’t have that dominant feature of “whiteness”: we are the Other, we are the Monsters. To put this close to home, the Filipino is a “Monster”. Because the Filipino has a grotesque psyche, a hybrid of Spanish, American, Chinese, Malay, and other provincial races, he is a monster. The Filipino was subsequently “domesticated” by his colonial masters and has begun to “ac/customize” himself, make himself “legitimate” and “normal” to this surrounding environment. But since he is not really the one but instead the Other, fooled by his hybrid psyche, he “begins to repeal the traumatism that is the perception of the monster.” "We are monsters: unknown, indefinable, open; with the strength to strike terror into the hearts of the guilty”2.

The background of this book that intends to gather the work of Manuel Ocampo for the last three decades can be found in the exhibition project called "Bastards of misrepresentation", which I curated at Casa Asia in 2005 as well as in the catalogue that was made with the aim of introducing the artist who, however, had already shown his paintings several times in Spain and was then known as one of the most representative artists from the Philippines.3 The statement that gave meaning to that project in Barcelona (Spain) and which Ocampo had chosen is no longer kept as such in this new monograph.

Ocampo used this statement for three of his paintings; namely, Bastards of Misrepresentation I, II and III that he made in 2004. It designated not only a group or community in his country of origin, but all the artists of a generation like his own. It was a matter of identifying himself as the colonized self, who is a bastard, whose identity is at stake as a result of the misrepresentation led by his colonial owners. Not only that, but he also granted that name to the young Filipino artists he gathered in the show he curated in 2010 for the Freies Museum in Berlin. This exhibition prospect wanted to be the mirror of the art scene happening in the Philippines. This is the reason why the artist chose a new statement for the current book “Fear of a Kitsch Existence”.

In extending the use of the bastard, it ceased to mean what it presumably seemed to designate at first, though it did not lose the semantic impact that he wanted to attribute to it by identifying other congeners in identical terms as he did with himself. Indeed, the term has acquired an unprecedented popularity among the artists of the present generations who do not hesitate to name themselves and thus to differentiate themselves from the rest. This, however, does not invalidate any of the two words that make up the name, but rather indicates how determinant it may have been to belong to this kind of community composed of "bastards", understanding that beyond the pejorative meaning of the term, it is about a social group that has been denied the right to exist. The bastard is an exponent of what he considers to be the origin of all Filipinos and a definition of their illegal identity, like that which features

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Manuel Ocampo Rough Gatherings at the Turn of the Millennium Kevin Power “I like writing about pervert killers who wear wolverine teeth.”

JAMES ELLROY “The workers are busy day and night, trying to finish the complex for the film festival’s opening night, which is scheduled in a few weeks. Toward the end one of the structures collapses and lots of workers are buried in the rubble. Big news. Cora Camacho even goes out there with a camera crew. “Manila’s Worst Disaster!” A special mass is held right there in Rizal Park, with everyone weeping and wailing over the rubble. The Archbishop gives his blessing, the First Lady blows her nose.

She orders the survivors to continue building; more cement is poured over dead bodies; they finish exactly three hours before the first foreign film is scheduled to be shown. Hoy—I’m impressed. Someday, maybe, I’ll stroll over there and see it for myself.”

JESSICA HAGEDORN: Dogeaters “Man has no future unless he can throw off the dead past and absorb the underground of his own being.”

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: Blade Runner “Don’t listen to your jack-off friends, the Valley doesn’t suck, more punks come from the Valley than Hollywood.”

FANZINE LETTER, signed “The Vermin” I would like to try and read Ocampo’s work from a different perspective than that of the postcolonial, multicultural artist/critic and deal with a more celebratory and carnivalesque side of the work. Without moralizing, his gaze parodies, pastiches, and cannibalizes shadow areas of our contemporary psyche and the alien nature of our social behaviour. It suggests that the symbols of good and evil have moved so far from their original meanings that they now appear as mere ornaments and insignia within a larger dance of generalized meaninglessness.

I open my essay with a quote from the sick, decadent, yet excessively individualized world of modernist crime fiction. This intensely fertile territory has gradually become occupied by the related genre of postmodernist cyberpunk that I shall be leaning on throughout my essay. My third quote from Burroughs, is perhaps a more accurate location of the ground within which Ocampo “weirdly” feels at home. “At home” may be an exaggerated way of phrasing it, but the truth is that Ocampo’s work takes its pulse

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Constraints and Esc(h)atologies As things are in Manuel Ocampo's artwork Fernando Castro Flórez I 1. On a wall it can be read a compromising sentence, “Poetry after Auschwitz”, written in giant letters as if it was advertising a film, above a heap of refuse, perhaps a fragment from a garbage dump landscape.

In it, the Star of David, the cross and the swastika are half–buried, aberrantly close to a sardine bone, a string of chorizo sausages, a bottle thrown there by a drunk, an empty can, and, at the far edges, a leg of ham…and a human leg. The scene is of an unspeakable sordidness and the provocation, perhaps even greater than that of the paintings at the installation. “Why do I have to care for a girl who always scratches where it itches? One and a half centuries of Modern Art in a twelve steps programme”, with canvasses lying on the floor for the visitors to step on or the hammocks where the rhetoric of the political-pious commitment and the pictorial decorative style are reduced to absurdity by a bitingly sarcastic attitude. The name of the concentration camp splashes the public’s skin acid, a public accustomed to the mud of Contemporary Art. Ocampo’s reference here is far from being a bad taste joke, quite the opposite in fact; it is a reconsideration of a problem already formulated with great intensity by Adorno in the context of its negative aesthetics.

The impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz is by no means the nearly morbid notarial minutes issued by horrified eyes. All these eyes will testify is the negation of the concept or, even worse, a secret solidarity with the murderers; in this abyss of enthusiasm, as Lyotard has referred to the concentration camp.1 One is driven to wonder about the possibility of an aesthetic experience. If in Minima moralia nihilism must take on the task of avenging the murdered, in Dialéctica negativa annihilation is contained in reflection, and after Auschwitz any possibility of making sense of the tragic fate found in there disappears into the obscenity; the violence itself would be unfair with its victims. The individual was stripped of everything even of his own terror: the absolute negativeness has lost its impact and yet, suffering still has the right to express itself, “as much right to express itself as the tortured victim has of screaming. Therefore you can see why perhaps it has been wrong to say that no more poetry could be written after Auschwitz. What is not wrong, however, is the lesser cultural question of whether there can be life after Auschwitz, if it will be allowed to the person that escaped by chance from the concentration camp to live again, when he knows he should have been murdered”.2 The guilt felt for being alive drives him to nihilism as an honour for his thought: it is the hope for the hopeless.

Nihilism can be understood as the destruction of sense, even of the very statement that everything is nothing. Amidst the wretchedness, the negative dialect shouts out that things cannot go on like this: “what a thinker should really answer when asked if he is a nihilist is: “not enough”, perhaps out of coldness, because

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Apocalypse Now The ambivalent allegories of Manuel Ocampo Jennifer P. Borum From time to time, on the evening news, Americans are treated to a particularly perverse form of entertainment: reportage on events in the Philippines. Images of greed, corruption, excess, religious fanaticism, and genocide—Imelda crooning a song to an audience of political supporters, devoted mourners paying homage to Ferdinand mummy, religious penitents crucifying themselves at Easter celebrations, the slaughter of Muslim citizens on a distant island—all seem to have been beamed into our living rooms from another planet, an alien spectacle to be consumed with a vicarious thrill. That these events are integrally linked to our own culture, that they are in fact our own culture writ large, rarely interferes with the pleasurable illusion that we remain at a safe distance from a world so completely Other.

Manuel Ocampo is a product, as well as a critic, of both Philippine and American cultures. A self-described “import” from the Philippines (Twelfth Station, 1994) who currently makes his home in Los Angeles, the common denominator of excess that links these two cultures has never been lost on Ocampo—it is the sine qua non of his painterly oeuvre. He has, from an early age, possessed an acute awareness of the postcolonial pathology that marks the collective Filipino psyche, and as a young adult on this side of the Pacific, he has assumed the mantle of resident. Other, choosing to explore the mixed blessing of his bicultural identity through a decidedly unapologetic body of work.

In recent years, artworld spin doctors have Iabeled Ocampo a “multicultural” artist in an attempt to better fit him into the fiction of contemporary avant-garde, and indeed, rigorous explorations of identity such as his have never been more timely. Yet Ocampo’s work owes nothing to the well-heeled academic discourse known as multiculturalism that has had the effect of disconnecting the notion of cultural difference from flesh and blood reality. To be sure, Ocampo’s unique brand of cultural inquiry has more to do with flesh and blood than with polite or fashionable ideas. To meet the challenge his paintings offer is to forsake the illusion of safety provided by television and academic symposium alike —lowbrow and highbrow modes, respectively, of transforming difference into an exotic form of entertainment— and recognize that his eloquently disturbing expressions of displacement and alienation characterize a reality none other than our own.

Born in Quezon City, the Philippines, to well-educated journalists, Ocampo’s earliest artistic efforts of note were cartoons published in his mother’s local newspaper, a grassroots mode of expression that remains an integral part of his mature work. Although he attended art classes sporadically, Ocampo did never receive a Formal art education as such, which places him in that compelling no-man’s land between the mainstream and self-taught artworlds arguably occupied by today’s most interesting artists.

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Perverse Beauty Kenneth Baker What would an International style of painting look like in the post-colonial, post-Cold-War era? It would look like the work of Manuel Ocampo.

But another, stranger, question follows. Can anyone but Ocampo practice this style? Could only someone of his unusual background —a denizen of both the so-called Third and First Worlds, neither an amateur painter nor an academically schooled professional— arrive at a post-colonial international style?

Born in the Philippines in 1965, trained to paint religious icons and signs, but without a diploma in art, Ocampo has lived in Asia, America and Europe. “ Lives and works everywhere”, says the biographical outline in earlier Ocampo exhibition catalog. He has been a scavenger of images around the world, but not of the new, electronically-processed images with which his generations is often identified, rather of images borrowed from shop signs, movie posters, comic books, instructional manuals, retablos, editorial cartoons and street-level political propaganda.

An international style in the 1990s must be more than eclectic. For eclectic, overwrought painting was being made everywhere in the 1980s and most of it now appears to have been provincial. It had no feeling for a world in which nationality and history were already losing their inherited meanings, with the breakdown of the superpower standoff and its systems of client states.

An international style today cannot draw subliminal power from the promise or the echo of global political or military influence, as did the avant-garde art of Bolshevik Russia and the New York School painting of the Cold War period. “International” now connotes the dominance not of a state, an ideology or a political empire but an economic regime: the reign of American-style consumer capitalism cinema scholar David James observes, since 1989 “only racial superstition and religious fanaticism [have] interrupted a triumphant new world order dominated, if no longer controlled, by US capital”. This order is tacitly political everywhere, of course, but all it requires of a local government is control over its populace and certain guarantees that markets remain permeable and wealth and information —of certain kinds— free to circulate.” Although sociologists of everyday life will continue to distinguish a Japanese from an American mode”, American historian Benjamin Barber observes, “shopping has a common signature throughout the world. Cynice might even suggest that some of the recent revolutions in Eastern Europe had as their true goal not liberty and the right to vote but well-paying jobs and the right to shop. Shopping means consumption and consumption depends on the fabrication of needs as well as of goods…”

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Two Ribs Comments to "Ni en la vida ni en la muerte" about some paintings by Manuel Ocampo Pedro G. Romero Seventh true left rib The school hacienda and everything! that the family And now possessed they go and in Jalisco splash it in the had enough newspapers. Only room for four because my little hundred and brother took twenty families. a fancy to that Everyday almost girl. You should two thousand see some twelve people ate and year-olds in this area! drank what the Because that was all. family gave them. Work The part about hanging was hard, of course—nothing was free her father (if he was there. But, what more do you want,her real father), the stuff about burning the house brothers? People like that, so well down and defecating in their orchard dressed, so well fed. They even have that a was just order and consequence.

One thing leads to

In a passage of La Rendición de Santiago ("Santiago’s Surrender"), a novel by Silverio Lanza, there is a description of the grudge and savage cruelty that our fellow citizens held against those humble soldiers that returned from the defeats in Cuba and the Philippines. “They said that at the Atocha’s gate two priests had killed a war veteran; they said that in Antón Martín square a policeman had concluded an argument with a veteran from the Cuban war with bullets”. The corrosive atmosphere can explain why Manuel Ocampo hates Europeans. At least, both scenes —priests and policemen feeding on poor mutilated war veterans in Lanza’s novel and Ocampo’s grotesque dancing characters in his why I hate Europeans (1993)— are related in their mood.

This macabre and scatological humour forges bonds. As in any identity, Ocampo’s is a construction—or better yet, it is under construction. As in comic book drawings, Manuel Ocampo should hang a sign at his door reading “Man at work”. That which is Hispanic, in that broad comes through so well in caricature, is one of his building materials. An identity made of shovelfuls of local colour that rubble of all cliché that Malcolm Lowry pushed aside from the road in order to write his Under the Volcano. Indeed it would seem that

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What is Spanishness?

Conversation between Manuel Ocampo and Curro González Curro González Curro González. Manuel, you have been living here in Seville for about three years. Now that you are permanently returning to California, maybe you can talk about your experience here and how this environment may have influenced you. Do you feel that living in a small town like Seville has changed your way of seeing the world?

Manuel Ocampo. I think I’ve been affected by many influences coming from the city and its people, but more importantly by influences from the interaction with other artists I’ve met here. Living in a small city has made me more aware of my actions and my sense of being. As a foreigner, you are constantly aware of your presence within a small community. In fact, I wanted to do a project about this feeling, by wearing a different T-shirt everyday announcing my difference. The T-shirts would have had slogans like, “El Chino del Barrio” (“The Chinese of the Neighborhood”), “Tengo la regla, pero eso no cambiara nada” (“I have my period, but that won’t change anything”), “Guiri” or “Extranjero” (“Foreigner”).

Living in a large city, like Los Angeles one can remain anonymous, just another face in the crowd. You can even get away with murder in a big city.

C.G. You employ some religious iconography in my work that we can see abundantly in this town, and iconography you used in your work even before arriving here. You paint holy images that are very common in Seville, but with a very different meaning. Has your contact with these images here changed your way of seeing this iconography?

M.O. What came about with that iconography in my work is an interesting play of associations, between my roots in the Philippines and its connections to Spain and the United States. When I first visited Spain in 1996 during the Holy Week, what impressed me most was the image of hooded figures. In Spain, the hooded figure is a nazareno or religious penitent while in the US, hooded figures signify the Ku Klux Klan. In the Philippines, the katipuneros are the KKK (Kagalanggalangan Ktaastaasang Katipuneros), a masonic brotherhood of anti-colonialist revolutionaries. I’ve been able to bring those three elements into play in my work. The image of the hooded figure, for me , works as an ambiguous vessel, maybe a selfportrait, something I can identify with and at the same time distance myself from.

C.G. So you are addressing to these elements as the construction of your cultural basis.

M.O. More or less, yes. A play of signifiers.

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Manolito (To Manuel Ocampo) Guillermo Pérez-Villalta They used to meet in the schoolyard, right next to the toilets. There stood the shed with the water pump where they used to with their legs hanging until the Father Prefect blew his whistle and shouted “Don’t climb up there! You can be electrocuted!” A war of resilience ensued—in a little while they were back, with their hands under their thighs and heels kicking the shed’s wooden door where there was a painted skull surrounded by the headline “Death Danger”. Another blast from the whistle. And that’s how the entire recess was spent. They didn’t chat much amongst themselves, since they were all engaged in staring at the Father Prefect and kicking the door. It was the Father Prefect who dubbed them: los traviesos [mischief-makers-trans.] “They are naughty boys” he would say “but with a few corrections, they’ll turn out all right.” From “travieso” we adopted the abbreviation “trav” in our talk. The idea of correction seemed unlikely—the “travs” were a stubborn lot.

I was attracted to the “travs”. I liked the way they dressed—they wore beautiful tattoos and had a special way of looking at the world. The other gangs weren’t as interesting. The “mods”, for instance, always wore disdainful expressions, and their monochrome graffiti were terribly insipid. And you can’t imagine what showoffs they were. Moreover, they choose the most public places to do their graffiti, hence the big wall near the entrance, the bottom of the swimming pool in the winter and everywhere that was good enough.

Then there were the “wise-guy”, who were a little more amusing, but they spent their time arguing and their graffiti were kind of shoddy. I liked to hang with them a little, but finally I realized that all they cared about was arguing for the sake of arguing—the subject didn’t matter to them at all. Blah, blah, blah, all day long. There were also some of them which followed his path and made more interesting graffiti. Like me, they came and went and finally had little space for their drawings, and had to spend most of their time looking for it. But I was also interested in people and I spent my time watching the different gangs.

I already mentioned that I liked the “travs”, but soon I got interested in one in particular. His name was Manolito and it took me a while to find out who he was, since he was quite reserved and shy. I noticed him because one day in the hall there appeared a magnificent graffiti with huge letters that said: “The Father Prefect does it with Ruiz Ortíz”. The message itself was funny enough, but the way it was done was fantastic, since it was easy to confuse it with the slogan that ran all along the highway, put up God knows when, they said “Young People are the Birds that Brighten the Skies of the Motherland”. The colours of the two slogans were similar, if not identical. In fact, nobody seemed to notice the graffiti, and it remained there untouched for days. But it was different—there was something subtle about it that the “mods” would have approved of if they had been clever enough to notice it. In the end I liked it a lot and I wondered who had done it.

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Manuel Ocampo "Wunder Kammer" Sandra Danicke He is fond of image of a man in a hood. It is every bit as ambivalent as he is, as contradictory as his own work. In Spain, for instance, a man wearing a tall pointed hood is a penitent. In the Philippines it is the sign of a freemason, an anticolonialist revolutionary. In the U.S.A, a hood identifies its wearer as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Manuel Ocampo is a Filipino. He has lived in Manila, Los Angeles, Rome and Seville. His is a multiple identity -coloured equally by Catholicism and chewing gun, Marxism and Mickey Mouse, and the shock that people experience looking at his paintings the great- the greatestsymbols are brought together in the grotesque pantomime. Manuel Ocampo seems blithely unaware of any taboos. He gives the Virgin Mary a pair of bat’s wings and juxtaposes her quite irreverently with genitals, sausages and a chicken leg. The “Madonna of the European Union” sports an SS-uniform and angel’s wings. A contorted Jesus on the Cross drops a pig’s knuckle from his hand, or in another work has been mounted by a comic figure donkey and is already drooling at the mouth, while Marx and Lenin share the two halves of a bikini between them. The decorative element in his works is of no more concern to him than their political scurrility. Ocampo employs a deliberately naive-looking process of dumbing-down, so that even historical tragedies turn into farces. It is conspicuous how often the artist uses the swastika, for instance, in his paintings. Like the hooded man, the swastika originally had more than one meaning, it’s simply that people choose to forget this. Manuel Ocampo combines the polluted symbol with those of Christianity and Marxism, not to mention entrails and excreta, and knows no bounds, whirling up as he does political and religious imagery into a powerful gesture that simultaneously casts a ray of humour on their pomposity.

According to him, a poem after Auschwitz consists of an organic heap of feet, skulls and eyes. That’s going beyond a joke, one might think, but the offensiveness of Ocampo’s work is more than a mere pose. He demonstratively degrades Adorno’s dictum to a vacuous phrase and takes the achievements of Modernism to task. Political art has turned into something very condescending and elitist, says Ocampo, and often consists of nothing more than the artist parading their political consciousness. That is not to say that Ocampo’s work is totally void of morality, on the contrary, Ocampo depicts a decadent and depraved world whose icons and symbols have been bled dry and serve as little more than kitsch. He exposes civilisation’s achievements as hypocrisy and presents us with chaos in the form of a collective mental state—but in place of the moralist’s raised finger we see a mischievous wink and the desire to break taboos.

His scenarios are apocalypses made picture: stark scenes seething with violence, decadence, and blasphemy, which depict the tortures of the Spanish colonial rulers alongside the insignia of heavy metal of the typology of splatter movies. A mixture of comic book world and Baroque battlescape, complete

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'Painting is over; long live painting' Modernist motifs in Manuel Ocampo’s global Contemporary Art Jonathan Harris ‘Be modern, collectors, museums. If you have old paintings do not despair. Retain your memories but detourn them so that they correspond with your era…Painting is over. You might as well finish it off. Long live painting.’

So exhorted artist and sometime situationist Asger Jorn in 1959. This refrain had often been heard in the twentieth century: painting is ‘impossible, useless, yet possible nonetheless!’1 It certainly seems possible, and necessary, for Philippines-born Manuel Ocampo, whose works since the 1990s demonstrate something of what T.J. Clark once called the hideous liveliness of abstract painting.2 Hideousness (horror or dread), and a kind of monstrous ‘liveliness’ both seem to be apt descriptors when surveying Ocampo’s oeuvre. The whole world in all its fecund vileness appears to be in there (and in the Philippines), including the world of art.

From his work The land where monkeys have no tails (1993) – a crude map of the colonized Philippines with the word ‘Europa’ stamped on it, along with the location of its varied racial subgroups identified with racist epithets – to Sin Tiluto (1996), showing Magritte-like caricatures of serial noses and yellowish snot emblazoned with the legend ‘The development of abstract art being/nonbeing version,’ Ocampo detourns painting through an invigorating recycling of avant garde tropes and techniques. But, however lumpenly figurative these paintings certainly are, Ocampo’s art, I shall claim, is ultimately an elevated, abstract and philosophical conceit.

Jorn’s thematic procedures and preoccupations are not very far away too, though Ocampo appears not ever to impress his ostensibly vile sentiments directly on to appropriated visual materials; rather the compositions rely on his sui generis comic book / graffiti language of forms and meanings. But a textbook knowledge of modernism subtends from within Ocampo’s lexicon. He is both very well-read and reads modernism through his own particular ‘postcolonial’ lens. That perspective is his contribution to this instance of the revivification of painting, which may also stand as a model of or for global contemporary art (a broader thesis I shall address in a moment). That Ocampo’s work might be in some ways exemplary of ‘global art’ or ‘globalized art’ will be my overriding contention. Whether that is a good or a bad thing, or whether its possible goodness or badness is somehow ruled out of deliberation in the work’s very production as such, remains a moot point.

For Ocampo may revivify painting but it is not possible nor desirable to revive the conventions or convictions of evaluative judgement that modernist criticism thrived and then dined on for a hundred years or so. That is to say, Ocampo’s paintings are certainly often about vileness and decrepitude (of forms and meanings, and maybe of painting as a form of declining meaning, pace Baudelaire’s writings on Manet), but I am not at all clear that Ocampo’s paintings themselves are vile or decrepit.3 That uncertainty, to be clear, makes

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The Devil is God in exile Chon A. Noriega In a recent interview in Flash Art, Manuel Ocampo rejects two appropriate labels for the so-called political artist: multiculturalism and the bad boy. If the former provides a belated marketing catchall for excluded “minority” artists, the latter is the well-worn persona of the avant-garde artist begging to be spanked as he is let through the gallery door. Ocampo wants neither position; nor does he want to be seen in simple terms as political, religious, or iconoclastic, although he locates these aspects within the “performance” of his images. Instead, Ocampo would like to be the Devil, since, as he argues, “The Devil is God in exile”.1 In expressing such a desire, Ocampo engages in two reversals: between form and content, and between the universal and the particular. First, in his jockeying for position within the critical discourse of contemporary art, he subordinates social content to an agnostic belief in the image. In this manner, Ocampo opens up a space between the two prevailing avant-garde orientations: the politics of the signifier, and the politics of the signified. It is a space where doubt and hope commingle.

Second, in rejecting the inevitable glissando from complaint to commodity that attends the avant-garde art object, Ocampo does not claim greater purity, but, rather, greater defilement: he would like to be the Devil. But Ocampo does not stop with a simple act of one-unmanship; instead, he confounds the hermeneutic altogether in proposing that the particular and the universal can be reversed: The Devil is God in exile. How can God be in exile? After all, God represents the universal; all else is particular, and, as a consequence, “the relation between these two orders must also be opaque and incomprehensible”.2 For a particular body to express the universal, then, it must claim a special status through revelation, transcendence, or incarnation—in short, it must claim to be the privileged agent of history. For Ernesto Laclau, “the modern idea of a universal class and the various forms of Eurocentrism are nothing but historical effects of this logic of incarnation”.3 But Ocampo looks in the other direction, not toward universalism, but toward the absolute particularity of exile. In thus looking against the grain of a Western historiography that mystifies the imbrication of modernity with colonialism, he locates exile as the space where the universal becomes particular, and, hence, becomes knowable in human terms. It is a space where belief and despair commingle.

Born and raised in the Philippines, Ocampo is largely self-taught as a painter; he first published cartoons in his mother’s newspaper in Quezon City, then was “instructed by a Catholic priest to create impeccable facsimiles of Spanish colonial folk painting” to be sold to European and American collectors as the real thing.4 It is in these two experiences —working within the circulation of discourse (mass media) and commodities (colonial baroque)— that Ocampo developed a hybrid vocabulary. His work collages various

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Goya - Ocampo Painting Death from 1815 to 2015 Emmanuel Latreille In an interview in 2005 with Curro González entitled “What is Spanishness?”1, Manuel Ocampo, who had just left Seville, his home for the last three years, described the difficulty of being a foreigner in a medium-sized town. Contemplating his impending return to the United States, he said: “Living in a large city, like Los Angeles, one can be very anonymous, just another face in the crowd. You can get away with murder in a big city”.2 Threatening or threatened, through his experience of racial difference, the Filipino immigrant Ocampo expressed the brutal violence that sometimes underpins otherness: “Se puede asesinar”! Yet in the rest of this interview, there were no further expressions of violence and death. Is that not one of the most striking characteristics of this hypothetical “Spanishness”, which two neo-latinos, a Sevillan gringo and a “Chino del Barrio”3, had set out to define? What is Spanish culture for us French people, if not a way of facing death, telling or painting it, but also enacting it in the strange ritual of the corrida? Its direct representation, and the brutality of the physical destruction that is given or received, seem to be constants in that country, embodied culturally by the persistence of religious rituals older than those which Christianity endeavoured to impose on the nations of Europe from the first millennium onwards. And which those same European nations exported all over the world, including the Philippines, from the 2nd half of the 16th century onwards.

The Sessions of the Junta of the Royal Company of the Philippines by Goya is assuredly a painting whose central theme is death. We know that it is a “symbolic” death, that of Miguel de Lardizabal, imprisoned then exiled by a tyrant monarch, Ferdinand VII. The latter, betraying the ideas of an enlightened intelligentsia who had hoped he would bring in a political renaissance founded on Enlightenment values (which Goya supported), is the “puppet” at the centre of the impressive composition. At the far left of the painting, barely lower than him, his victim stands in the bay of a tall window; there are two figures in front of him, hiding his body with their overlaid silhouettes. Looking over them, Lardizabal watches the area where the sessions are taking place, with a resigned expression on his face. His position in relation to the general scene is similar to that of the spectator contemplating it from another point of view, but at virtually the same height (the composition’s vanishing point is a short distance below the head of the former Minister for the Indies, in the body of the King). When all is said and done, Lardizabal seems to be not so much looking at the outside world as dwelling on sad inner considerations: in his wide open eyes and tight lips, we can see a last goodbye, just before he is pushed out with no hope of return. Yet this depiction of a figure who is both an observer and partially “covered” can be seen even more clearly at the end of the front row of shareholders, located precisely in front of Lardizabal.

This time it is an anonymous person who, alone, seems to want to attract the attention of the painting’s spectator, while his face and chest are being eaten away by a black silhouette, more

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The Junta of the Philippines Where Ocampo meets Goya Valérie Aébi-Sarrazy The Goya Museum has taken the opportunity to invite a Filipino artist, Manuel Ocampo, to undertake a residency for the bicentennial of Francisco Goya’s painting Sessions of the Junta of the Royal Company of the Philippines, in order to create a set of artworks for the summer exhibition Ocampo chez Goya, La Junte des Philippines 1815-20151 (Ocampo at the Goya Museum, The Junta of the Philippines 1815-2015).

Ocampo’s decision to spend time at a Hispanic art museum during his international travels is of special significance. The two-hundred years separating the Manilan painter from Goya’s work have borne witness to the birth of modern art, from historical avant-gardes to the meeting of worldwide art movements to which Manuel Ocampo is heir. Despite this, both painters are often united by audacious concepts which include an element of provocation2 regardless of their origins.

Manuel Ocampo expresses himself through a specific type of artistic production - “A painting without inhibitions, improbably generous, always sneaking up from behind, and from far away”.3 He came to the fore on the international scene, where he developed this recognisable style. This took place in the eighties, a decade that saw the emergence of a multi-faceted art scene, a large part of which celebrated the return to painting. His career path shaped by globalisation explains his composite production and his unique way of revisiting images, all images, in figurative signs and otherwise. Below, we will give a few examples to further explain his approach and discuss the aspects of his work that interested us.

Manuel Ocampo in context If contemporary art is undeniably influenced by modern art, this is because it raises the same unavoidable questions: about representation and subversion, issues of repetition, references, quotations, the quest for the unconventional and the attraction to subversion or provocation. It above all highlights the way artists perceive and understand art history.

At the end of the 70s, in Europe and North America, the New Painting brought together groups of artists who had decided to break away from the legacy of the conceptual period and asserted their right to produce Bad Painting. Thus, in the USA, its representatives displayed an absence of technical knowledge.

Invention gave way to copying. David Salle and Julian Schnabel, to name but two, expressed a fierce determination to turn their back on elitist culture by distinguishing themselves from conceptual art. The related movement of street art, graffiti and tagging swiftly spread across public spaces, such as subways (Keith Haring) and the walls of tower blocks and factories (Jean-Michel Basquiat), with the sole aim of

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Living on the edges Conversation with Manuel Ocampo Kevin Power Kevin Power. You live culturally “in between”, on the edges at the frontiers of different cultures, with a manifest tendency to willfully contaminate images, references, and thoughts. What were the images, incidents, or cultural presences that caught your attention or impression you during your stay in Spain? I am thinking both in the more superficial retinal sense and about impressions that many over a period of time have lodged in your mind.

Manuel Ocampo. I am quite envious of who are tied to the culture of their birth and who are raised in distinctly strong cultures. As a person raised in a smegmatic culture like that of like Philippines, I sometimes have a desire to fit into a more homogenous culture. But in trying to fit in, I contaminate it; by contaminating it, I make it mine. In some ways, I’m creating a sense of imaginary idealized culture based on the images one appropriates and tries to fit in with one’s identity. As a Filipino living in the U.S a carcinogenic culture—and as an immigrant, one’s feelings and identity get Gore-Bushianly discombobulated.

Oftentimes my work results in cardiac nihilism as cynicism which, funny enough, many critics see as a multicultural, left-learning, political, anticolonialist statement. This reading is very simplistic and naive, which in some ways leads me to be confused about which teabag is my own work. A lot of people see my work as anti-Church, when it could just be in fact that the Church is being glorified in the wrong way. I over charged my earlier paintings with obvious emotive rhetoric so as to put that rhetoric into question.

My situation as an immigrant artist reminds me sometimes of Derrida’s monster. My friend, the artist/writer Arvin Flores, aka Artbin —who’s in the same identity boat as I am— remixes the French philosopher’s theoretical meditations on the monster and transposes it to the Filipino: the Monster is something “that appears for the first time and, consequently, is not yet recognized… a monster is a species for which we do not yet have a name”; it is abstract. It is unknown, and therefore “open” to definition. It could exhibit certain characteristics that are recognizable to us, combined with other things that may also be familiar —a “hybrid”— and because we don’t yet understand this thing, it appears grotesque. “That is what title word ‘monster’ means—it shows itself in some thing that is not yet shown and that therefore looks like a hallucination; it strikes the eye, it frightens precisely because no anticipation had prepared one to identify this figure…”

The Monster therefore, is the Other. And those who are not easily recognizable, who don’t have that dominant feature of “whiteness”: we are the Other, we are the Monsters. To put this close to home, the Filipino is a “Monster”. Because the Filipino has a grotesque psyche, a hybrid of Spanish, American, Chinese, Malay, and other provincial races, he is a monster. The Filipino was subsequently “domesticated”

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BIOGRAPHY Manuel Ocampo 1965 Born in Quezon City, Philippines. Lives and works in the Philippines Education 1985 California State University, Bakersfield, CA 1984 University of the Philippines, Quezon City

Selected solo exhibitions 2017 Œuvres: 1994-2016, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris 2016 Paintings to Take Drugs to, The Drawing Room (Contemporary Art), Manila 2015 Goya vu par Ocampo. La Junte des Philippines 1815-2015, Musée Goya, Castres, France

Nosbaum & Reding, Luxembourg

The Devil Follows Me Day and Night Because He Is Afraid to Be Alone,

The Drawing Room (Contemporary Art), Singapore

The Corrections, Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York 2014 Notes from the Ste Anne Asylum, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris 2013 Twenty Years of Intestinal Mishaps, Carré St. Anne, Montpellier, France

The Corrections, SOD Space of Drawings, Copenhagen

Perverse Sublime of the Toxic, Nosbaum & Reding, Luxembourg

2012 Les maîtres du désordre, Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik, Bonn, Germany

Cryptic Slaughter, Finale Art File, Manila

The 80s, Topaz Arts, New York

The View through the Bull of a Manual Laborer of Menagerie Gussied over White Ground:

Twenty Years of Self-Loathing and Intestinal Mishaps, Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York 2011

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Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill, Graz, Austria The Ghost Poo of Painting, Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf, Germany Contemporary Psychology and The Theoretical Steroid Defiled Modernist Chicken, Space of Drawings (SOD), Copenhagen Rebels of Abstraction and the Ghost Poo of Painting, adhoc galería, Vigo, Spain The Beer Belly Masculinity Intensification Program or When Hangover Becomes Form, Kaliman Rawlins, Gallery, Melbourne, Australia The Painter’s Equipment, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Singapore

2010

An Arcane Recipe Involving Ingredients Cannibalized from the Reliquaries of Some Profane Illumination, Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York An Exhibition of Collaborations with Seven Imaginary Friends Showing a Variety of Painterly Mishaps Flaunted as Majestic Embellishments, Nosbaum & Reding, Luxembourg

2009

The Reincarnation of Modernism in Hellish Form, Galerie Bongout, Berlin Monuments to the Institutional Critique of Myself, Pablo Fort, Manila She Has a Hot Ass: The Demystification of Art and Its Incorporation into the Practice of Everyday Life Could Only be Achieved Through the Deliberate Lowering of Standards, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, Australia Monument to the Aesthetisization of Desublimated Fantasies Rendered Impotent by Unredeemable Gestures, Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Frankfurt, Germany Painting as an Attempt to Memorialize Reality’s Triumph over Art, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Brussels

2008 Uplands Gallery, Melbourne, Australia

Finale Art Fair, Manila

Galeria Tomas March, Valencia, Spain 2007 Guided by Sausage, Nosbaum & Reding, Luxembourg

Guided by Sausage, Le (9) bis, Saint-Étienne, France

Kitsch Recovery Program, Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, Los Angeles 2006

En el cielo no hay cerveza sin alcohol (with Curro González), adhoc galería, Vigo, Spain Down with Reality, Galerie Jesco von Puttkamer, Berlin Kitsch Recovery Program: An Image Is Just a Pathetic Attempt to Do Justice to a Picture, Nosbaum & Reding, Luxembourg No System Can Give the Masses the Proper Social Graces (with Damien Deroubaix), Haptic at La Maison Rouge, Paris Gray Kapernekas Gallery, New York Down with Reality, Galerie Jesco von Puttkamer, Berlin

2005

Mumu Territorium, Art Center SM Megamall, Mandaluyong Metro Manila, Philippines The Holocaustic Spackle in the Murals of the Quixotic Inseminators, Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, Los Angeles Bastards of Misrepresentation, Casa Asia, Barcelona New Works, LAC - Lieu d’Art Contemporain, Sigean, France

2004

Moral Stories: Fuck the Third World, Galeria Tomas March, Valencia, Spain Bastards, Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Frankfurt, Germany Finale Art File, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong Metro Manila, Philippines Miserable Intentions (with Gaston Damag), Alimentation Générale – Nosbaum & Reding, Luxembourg

2003 Sprüth Magers Projekte, Munich, Germany

Wunderkammer, Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst, Augsburg, Germany

Lee Almighty, Magnet Gallery, Quezon City, Philippines 105

2002 An All Out Attempt at Transcendence, Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Frankfurt, Germany

Comprehensible Only to a Few Initiates, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris

The Inadequacy of the Struggle against the Inadequacy of the Struggle, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco 2001 Presenting the Undisclosed System of References in the Loophole of Misunderstanding, Galeria OMR, Mexico City

Free Aesthetic Pleasure Now!, Babilonia 1808, Berkeley, CA 2000

Those Long Dormant Pimples of Inattention Counterattacking the Hyper-Convoluted Dramas of the Gaze, Sprüth Magers Projekte, Munich, and Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Frankfurt, Germany Those Long Dormant Pimples of Inattention Meandering through the Cranium Arcade of Pitiless Logic Swastikating between Love and Hate, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York The Stream of Transcendent Object-Making Consciously Working towards the Goal, Galerie Michael Neff, Frankfurt, Germany

1999

The Nature of Culture: Manuel Ocampo/Gaston Damag; Interventions in the Monasterio de la Cartuja de Santa Maria de las Cuevas, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla, Spain The Inversion of the Ideal: Navigating the Landscape of Intestinal Muck, Swastikating between Love and Hate, Galeria Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid

1998

To Infinity and Beyond: Presenting the Unpresentable – The Sublime or the Lack Thereof, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris Yo tambien soy pintura, Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, Badajoz, Spain Why Must I Care For a Girl Who Always Scratches Wherever She Itches: 1-1/2 Centuries of Modern Art, Delfina, London, and Centre Cultural Tecla Sala, Barcelona Galerie Philomene Magers, Cologne, Germany

1997 Heridas de la lengua, Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

Hacer pintura es hacer patria, Galeria OMR, Mexico City 1996 Annina Nosei Gallery, New York 1995 Ciocca Raffaelli Arte Contemporaneo, Milan

Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris

Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal 1994 Paraiso Abierto a Todos, The Mexican Museum, San Francisco

Stations of the Cross, Annina Nosei Gallery, New York 1993 New Paintings, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries/Fred Hoffman Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA

Manuel Ocampo, Galeria OMR, Mexico City 1992 Grupo de Gago, Weingart Center Gallery, Occidental College, Los Angeles

Matrix/Berkeley 150, Berkeley University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, CA

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1991 M.J.O., Jay Chiat Residence, New York

Manuel Ocampo, Fred Hoffman Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

1990 Substancias Irritantes, Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman College, Orange, CA 1989 John Thomas Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

The Onyx Café, Los Angeles 1988 Lies, Falls Hopes, and Megalomania, La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles

Selected group exhibitions 2017 The Spectre of Comparison, Pavilion of the Philippines, 57th International Art Exhibition,

La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy 2016 Underbrut, Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille, France

Plus jamais seul, Hervé di Rosa et les arts modestes, La Maison Rouge, Paris

Transnational Narrations: Paperworks, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila 2015–2016 Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s, Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; Telfair Museum

of Art, Savannah, GA; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI; and

Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 2015

“Die Kunst, die Kunst – ich pfeife auf die Kunst”: Arthur Cravan im Ring mit 13 Künstlern unserer Zeit, 8. Salon, Hamburg, Germany First Look: Collecting Contemporary at the Asian, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco Wasak! Filipino Art Today, Arndt Berlin, Berlin

2014 Possession II, Coventry School of Art and Design, Coventry, UK

Divine Comedy, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany 2013 Les Maîtres du désordre, Fundación la Caixa, Madrid

Manilla Vice, Curated by Manuel Ocampo, Musée international des arts modestes, Sète, France 2012

7th Asia Pacific Triennial Exhibition, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia Bastards of Misrepresentation, H Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand I’m so Goth I’m Dead, Queens Nails Annex, San Francisco Manuel Ocampo/Paul Pretzer/Joachim Weischer, Conrads, Düsseldorf, Germany Flying, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin

2011 Terrible Beauty: Art, Crisis, Change and The Office of Non-Compliance,

Dublin Contemporary 2011, Dublin, Ireland 2010 Free Range Aesthetics: Pussyfooting through the Detritus Mind Field of Reality, Skyline College,

San Bruno, CA Painting with a Hammer to Nail the Crotch of Civilization: A Group Show of

Wall Works and Tattoo Imagery, Manila Contemporary, Makati City, Philippines

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2009

Reflexus Arte Contemporanea, Porto, Portugal The Making of Art, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany Kenneth Anger’s cycle, Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon, Portugal Entre chien et loup, Caroline Pagès Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal

2008

Problems with Style, Green Papaya Art Project, Manila Magnet Gallery, Manila Bongout, Berlin Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, Portugal Morts de rire, La Panacée, Montpellier, France Et tout pour les mange-tripes!, Musée Pierre André Benoit & Espace de Rochebelle, Alès, France À Thélème, Priape s’est cogné…, CIRCA - La Chartreuse, Villeneuve lez Avignon, France

2007

Rooms, Conversations, Frac Île-de-France, Le Plateau, Paris L’Explosition, Frac Languedoc-Roussillon, Montpellier, France Messages Abroad, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris Kinky Sex, Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, Los Angeles Nosbaum & Reding at Artnews Projects, Berlin

2006 Five Stories High, Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

Wonder and Horror of the Human Head, 4-F Gallery, Los Angeles

Painting Codes, Galleria Comunale d’Arte Contemporanea di Monfalcone, Italy 2004 Birth – Sex – Death, Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium

La alegria de mi sueños, Seville Biennale, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporánea, Sevilla, Spain 2003 End of the Start, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco

The Broken Mirror, Leroy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University, New York 2002 Extranjeros: Los Otros Artistas Españoles, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, Spain

Disarming Parables: Collection Highlights, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA

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2001

Plateau of Mankind, 49. Esposizione Internazionale, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy 2. Berlin Biennale, Berlin Les Chiens Andalous, Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Vom Eindruck zum Ausdruck: Grässlin Collection, Hamburg, Germany Contemporary Devotion, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA Circos Globulos: Selected Works from the Babilonia Wilner Collection, Babilonia 1808, Berkeley, CA

2000

Salon, Delfina, London Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles Faith: The Impact of Judeo-Christian Religion on Art at the Millenium, Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT Faith: The Impact of Judeo-Christian Religion on Art at the Millenium, Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT Partage d’Exotismes, 5th Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon, Lyon, France Sammlung Falckenberg, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany

2000 The Sensational Line, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO 1999

Vestiges of War, 1899–1999: The Philippine-American War and Its Aftermath, Asian/Pacific/ American Studies Gallery, New York University, New York Jardín de Eros, Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, Palau de la Virreina/Centre Cultural Tecla Sala, Barcelona, and Bergen Kunstmuseum, Bergen, Norway Sensibilidade Apocaliptica, Festival Atlantico ’99, Lisbon, Portugal

1998

At Home and Abroad: 21 Contemporary Filipino Artists, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco Double Trouble: The Patchett Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego Pop Surrealism, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT Cien Años Despues, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila; Puerto Rico; Havana; and Valencia, Spain

1997

American Stories: Amidst Displacement and Transformation, Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo Arte Chido!, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City Memories of Overdevelopment, Irvine Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine Nu-Glu, Joseph Helman Gallery, New York Past Time, Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh Pervasive Referents, Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York Unmapping the Earth, ’97 Kwangju Biennial, Korea Art and Provocation: Images from Rebels, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Colorado

1996 Annual Exhibition, American Academy in Rome, Italy 1995 Eye Tattooed America, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California, USA

In the Light of Goya, Berkeley University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, CA

Post-Colonial California, San Francisco State University, San Francisco 1994

Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, The Asia Society, New York Icastica, Galeria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy Jean-Michel Basquiat & Manuel Ocampo, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle Manuel Ocampo & Don Ed Hardy, Cavin Morris Gallery, New York Sacred and Profane, Studio Nosei, Rome Unholy Wars, Postmasters, New York

1993

43rd Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Drawing the Line Against Aids, 45th Venice Biennial at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy In Out of the Cold, Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco Medialismo, Trevi Flash Art Museum, Trevi, Italy

1992 documenta IX, documenta-Halle, Kassel, Germany

Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 1991 Individual Realities in the California Art Scene, Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

Mike Bidlo, Manuel Ocampo, Andres Serrano, Saatchi Collection, London 109

AWARDS 1998 1996 1995/96 1995

Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Artists at Giverny Program National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Arts Rome Prize in Visual Arts, American Academy in Rome Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc./Art Matters Foundation

PUBLIC COLLETIONS Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), Canary Islands, Spain Fonds national d’art contemporain, Paris, France Fonds régional d’art contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon, Montpellier, France Fonds régional d’art contemporain Île-de-France, Le Plateau, Paris, France Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM), Valencia, Spain Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California, USA Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Mudam), Luxembourg, Luxembourg Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC), Badajoz, Spain Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS), Madrid, Spain Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, Portugal Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, California, USA Oakland Museum, Oakland, California, USA The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, USA Museu de Arte Moderna, Sintra, Portugal Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Monographic publications Ocampo chez Goya. Exh. cat. Goya vu par Ocampo. La Junte des Philippines 1815-2015. Castres: Musée Goya - Musée d’art hispanique, 2015.

Manuel Ocampo. Exh. cat. Carré Sainte-Anne, Montpellier. Paris: Liénart, 2013.

Manuel Ocampo: Bastards of Misrepresentation. Exh. cat. Barcelona: Casa Asia, 2005.

Manuel Ocampo: Wunderkammer. Exh. cat. Augsburg: Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst e. V., 2003.

The Inversion of the Ideal: Navigating the Landscape of Intestinal Muck, Swastikating between Love and Hate.

Exh. cat. Madrid: Galeria Soledad Lorenzo, 1999.

Why Must I Care For a Girl Who Always Scratches Wherever She Itches: 1-1/2 Centuries of Modern Art. Exh. cat. London: Delfina, and Barcelona: Centre Cultural Tecla Sala, 1999.

Manuel Ocampo: Hacer pintura es hacer patria. Exh. cat. Mexico City: Galeria OMR, 1997.

Manuel Ocampo: Heridas de la lengua. Exh. cat. Santa Monica: Track 16 Gallery/Smart Art Press, 1997.

Manuel Ocampo: Virgin Destroyer. Honolulu: Hardy Marks, 1994.

Serie “Projet” 15: Manuel Ocampo. Exh. cat. Montreal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1995.

Group publications Manila Vice. Exh. cat. Musée international des arts modestes, Sète. Lyon: Fage, 2013.

Flying. Exh. cat. Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2012.

Art Now: 137 Artists at the Rise of the New Millennium, ed. Burkhard Riemschneider. Cologne: Taschen, 2002.

Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting, ed. Barry Schwabsky. Phaidon: London, 2002.

Les Chiens Andalous. Exh. cat. Santa Monica: Track 16 Gallery/Smart Art Press, 2001.

Asian Collection 50: From the Collection of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Fukuoka: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 2000.

The Nature of Culture: Manuel Ocampo/Gaston Damag; Interventions in the Monasterio de la Cartuja de Santa Maria de las Cuevas. Exh. cat. Sevilla: Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, 1999.

Yo tambien soy pintura. Exh. cat. Badajoz: Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, 1998.

Jean-Michel Basquiat/Manuel Ocampo. Exh. cat. Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, 1994.

Mike Bidlo/Manuel Ocampo/Andres Serrano. Exh. cat. London: Saatchi Collection, 1991.

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