EXCESS AND FORMLESSNESS: THE ABANG-GUARD AND THE ATMOSPHERIC

Amber Jamilla Musser’s essay foregrounds multiple modes of formlessness in Abang-guard’s emphasis on making the unrecognized labor of museum guarding tangible. Nestled within their hope that greater recognition might help change the political landscape is an invitation to think complexly about how questions of representation are related to those of form. This is because their work shows how the ability to perceive form often relies on submerging something else—a condition of possibility that we might describe, in turn, as “formless.” However, the essay also argues for thinking beyond an equivalence between invisibility and formlessness by examining how Abang-guard produces a formlessness that is atmospheric and engulfing, thereby shifting the affective and political registers through which formlessness is understood. Instead of focusing only on invisibilization, Abang-guard stays with the excess of formlessness, amplifying our ability to perceive the uncapturable by labor or even representation.

Hyperallergic's 20 Must-See Art Shows in NYC This Summer

Abang-guard: Makibaka is one of Hyperallergic’s 20 Must-See Art Shows in New York City This Summer.

The Queens Museum’s building served as the New York City Pavilion at the 1964–65 World’s Fair. Sixty years later, Abang-guard, a Filipino artist duo consisting of Maureen Catbagan and Jevijoe Vitug, revisit the fair by reshaping the architecture of the Philippines and New York pavilions. Through paintings, performances, sculptures, and videos, they meditate on sites of Filipino-American remembrance, such as the Filipino Community Cultural Center in Delano, California.

Rolling Stone Philippines features Abang-guard and the Makibaka Exhibit

“As Abang-guard gets its first official solo museum show this year, it’s specifically the Filipino migrant histories that come to the fore. Their exhibition, Abang-guard: Makibaka, opened last March at the Queens Museum, which is located on the grounds where the New York World’s Fair (NYWF) was held from 1964 to 1965.

Abang-guard takes this charged temporal marker as a conceptual anchor. Ask them about it and they will give you an hours-long history lecture: It was also in 1965 when Filipino migrant farm workers like the labor leader Larry Itliong initiated the Delano Grape Strike in California, campaigning for higher wages and a retirement home. In that same year, the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act was signed, bringing a wave of Filipina nurses into American shores.” - Pristine de Leon

The full article is available both in print and web at Rolling Stone Philippines.

Featured in The Met Museum's Perspectives

An edited transcript of Abang-guard’s performative talk on Asian American Modernism accompanied by recordings of Louisa Lam’s poems is featured in The Met Museum’s Perspectives.