Between Abstraction and Materiality: Carlos Villa and the Politics of Asian American Art

Abstract

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Filipino American artist Carlos Villa developed a set of experimental methods and idioms—namely, abstraction, abject sensibility, and intense materiality—that would accompany his renewed interest in self-identity and community expression. While these strategies coincided with the broader artistic tendency of the 1960s and ’70s toward unconventional materiality and a deliberately indecorous sensibility, Villa’s far-reaching concern for the racialized condition of Filipinx America compels a reconsideration of his work vis-à-vis the historical and discursive contexts of Filipinx America. This article combines formal analysis with readings from Filipinx/Asian American studies and critical theory to argue that Villa’s experimental methods expose and reroute the multifarious ways in which Filipinx America has been subjected to the violence of the visual regimes of colonialism and modernity. They reorient the predicaments of Filipinx America towards imagining alternative modes of existence and possibilities of freedom, and a rethinking of the politics of Asian American art.