Catholic Capital: Consuming Manuel Ocampo

Art which challenges the existing order in its own name as art will find its inherent limit in absolute negativity.

—Manuel Ocampo

When the name of Manuel Ocampo (b. 1965) began to gain currency in the Euro-American art world in the early 1990s, the market rummaged through an oeuvre of abjections, a treasury of images that spoke of the polyglot utterances of the colonial. This sign of the colonial had underwritten the conversion of the artist's homeland, the Philippines, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries under the auspices of Spain, on the one hand, and survives to challenge the circulation of its representation in our time since the American imperialist rule throughout the first half of the twentieth century, on the other. Surely, in this scheme, the traffic of art and its affective spectacles that engulf the image of Ocampo do not elude critique; these are implicated in the very extensity of empire and its capital. From the outset, therefore, this turn in the career of Ocampo may be rendered as a turn as well in the career of the colonial as a global project in progress. Ocampo's (post)colonial image or image of the (post)colony is not of the "past," but rather contemporaneously plays out in the context of his life cycle as an agent of contemporary art and the critical inheritance of its history. It is of the enunciative present. It is before us, retroactively¹ and preposterously.²

Attending the emergence of Ocampo as an artist of note is substantial literature that seeks to explain his art to a broader public. In the effort to make the artist more accessible to the arenas of exchange, an image of Ocampo surfaces on the palimpsest of his own images. A specific reception of his position in the art world and a range of discursive interventions making sense of his distinction craft this image: just how do we apprehend Manuel Ocampo? The term we may pertain to Filipinos in the Philippines whose familiarity with Ocampo is well nigh nil. As a Filipino writer based in New York put it rather simplistically, the art of Ocampo, "which could not have but its roots in a place like the Philippines," unfortunately bypasses the perceived locus of locution: the "there" of the Philippines that discourages cultural "understanding" and therefore "cannot find vindication in its nativity—except through its alienation, its foreignness."³ But Ocampo's displacement "elsewhere" also implies "resettlement." It is in this new space of "community" and "emplacement" that the artist may secure a different entitlement to the Philippines, as well as to his "elsewhereness." And it is in this discursive sphere of metacommentary on how Ocampo had come to belong to "international art" that we may be able to rescue the artist from the art market that conscripts his labor and indulges his talent. We examine here the emergent corpus of writing on Ocampo, critical texts in various registers and formats that have significantly discussed his practice in a highly engaged manner, with the view of accessing him and finally coming to terms with his presence. A film on Ocampo, titled God Is My Co-Pilot and directed by Phillip Rodriguez, and interviews of the artist also form part of this resource.

Manuel Ocampo

Born in Quezon City in the Philippines, Ocampo was brought up in an upper-middle-class household of very religious and politically partisan parents. His father was a journalist for a publication that opposed the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and his mother was a teacher of journalism. This charged climate might have conditioned the artist's inclination in his later years. Ocampo disclosed in an interview: "When I was brought up, we were told how to feel—to look at a saint and feel his pain. It's very Catholic, and yes, it is important to me in the way that it's shaped me."⁴ Ocampo attended...