From Social Realism to the Specter of Abstraction: Conceptualizing the Visual Practices of H. R. Ocampo

Abstract

This study of National Artist H. R. Ocampo argues for the critical necessity of producing a theoretical language adequate to modernist abstract painting in the Philippines. It situates Ocampo’s stylistic shift from Social Realism to what is called “Neorealism” in the context of a post-war exhaustion of the narrative possibilities of nationalism. Both as a result of foreign domination and in order to get at a “pre-ideological” reality, the visual is first sheared off from a matrix of linguistic signification unavoidably overdetermined by questions of the nation. Later, with the Marcos appropriations of Philippine modernism, the momentarily autonomous visual indexed by abstract art is itself shown to be caught up in the ongoing argument over authentic nationalism. Beginning with Ocampo’s Social Realist short story “Rice and Bullets,” the essay explores the logic of abstraction and figuration in Ocampo’s work. The essay argues that his process of abstraction is intimately connected to people’s struggles, the sense that politics was somehow deeper than available language, and a world-historical shift in the nature of signification. The essay then turns to the fate of international abstract art and proposes some readings of the later abstract paintings of Ocampo. Finally it draws on Vicente Rafael’s reading of writer Jose “Pete” Lacaba’s politicization during the First Quarter Storm, to indicate some of the ways in which abstract images dissociated from “reality” might be utilized in the struggle for social justice.