The practice of artist Glenn Bautista (b. 1947, d. 2014) plies multiple forms, content, and media. This has been outlined in a 1997 survey monograph penned by art historian Alice Guillermo. As if acting as supplement to the monograph, a blog was created by the artist a decade later. Written in his perspective, the blog contains stories about his life and practice; intimate correspondences with family, friends, and fellow artists; and photographs of the artist and his works from various collections. This paper considers the blog as a personal archive, lending a view of the internal life of the artist, alongside the sociality it is embedded in. Framed within notions of “traces of individual life” and “evidence of us” asserted by archival science scholars Catherine Hobbs and Sue McKemmish, respectively, the study argues that the archive acts as a cornerstone in reanimating the art historical discourse on his practice by surfacing its rootedness in spirituality conceived to be both intimately personal and social.

Primarily an outlet for reminiscence prompted by old photographs salvaged, digitized, and shared to him by his son, writing for his blog was, according to the artist, not only a gesture of “writing about the past,” but simultaneously an activity “relating it to the present.” Likened loosely to a self-archive—a political maneuver in democratizing publishing among academic circles, the blog is construed not only to provide avenues for art historians to uncover new perspectives on his practice due to the wider accessibility of relevant materials, but also to present the artist’s contemporary acts of rearticulating his practice and what it stands for, seen in retrospect, and unburdened by the viewpoints of gatekeepers. It shows how personal history in this archive, as the articulated form of memory and motive, is actively shaped and highly mediated.