In late 2002, I was invited by Filipino visual artist and curator Imelda Cajipe-Endaya to participate as an artist in the third phase of the national traveling exhibition called “Sungdu-an” (Confluence). “Sungdu-an” was conceived in 1995 and is a flagship project of the Committee on Visual Arts (CVA) of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), the main governmental body in charge of cultural affairs. As a national project, “Sungdu-an” has become a gathering of artists from all over the country and a leading venue where local artists, whether upcoming or established, can present thought-provoking visual artworks.
Being a resident of Metropolitan Manila, it was under “Sungdu-an National Capital Region (NCR)” that I presented my work. The theme of “Sungdu-an NCR 3” was “Making the Local.” According to its organizers, “Making the Local” brings together the different aspects of Philippine social realities that make up the artists’ works. The word “making” implies that art is dynamic and contextual, and by focusing on “local, the Sungdu-an organizers sought to question the dichotomy between “local” and “global” and attempt to rescue the connotations of “local” with an interval between poor and mediocre quality.
According to “Sungdu-an NCR 3” curator Cajipe-Endaya, the exhibition is anchored on the need to re-examine the prevailing argument that in the globalized universe, nation is a myth, and that all nations are imagined communities. In Philippine Realpolitik, nation is claimed by all—oppressive regimes, bureaucratic corruptors, people power movements, populist rebellions, fissured revolution, separatist movements, terrorisms. Yet transcending these is nation as a politico-conceptual pivot, and in the interstices of this complicated site—artists’ studios, hard disks, memory sticks, compact disks, alternative spaces, crafting communities, protest movement, street rallies, artistic collaboratives, and the gallery, —we find among Manila’s emerging artists those using history, race memory, and cultural identity as platform for visual articulation, some consciously, others subconsciously, thus serving the cause of empowering disempowered Filipinos in our increasingly globalized milieu. Situated within the complexities of NCR beyond its demographic locus, “Sungdu-an” focuses on how individual artists and art collectives struggle to rediscover the true kernel of the Filipino self—the light that awakens a strong sense of community—thus multiplying and binding selves and communities into a nation which otherwise is fast disappearing both in realpolitik and in the globalization’s virtual realm.
Basically, “Sungdu-an” was a display of how contemporary art and artists in the Philippines were supposedly crucial to social change.
In August 2003, I curated an exhibition called “Decode” for the Ateneo Art Gallery. While I was busy as a curator for this “new media” exhibition, my work as an artist was being presented at the Pasig City Museum for “Sungdu-an” which also opened in August 2003. The curatorial framework for “Decode” was an investigation of the conceptual and historical continuity between Philippine post-war art and Philippine “new media” art. I also wanted to make clear the corruption in this continuity by making reference to the exploitation of artists enamored by the wonders of their commercial digital tools. In hindsight, my participation in “Sungdu-an” also demonstrated how I compromised myself and allowed myself to be corrupted by the institutions of Philippine contemporary art: I reconstructed my work to fit within the antiquated “display cases” of museums, and within this context I mistakenly believed that art was a tool for social change.
The art critic Eric Florentino wrote in his “COW Essay”:
“Sungdu-an NCR 3 is yet another castle we build on sand. Admittedly, its curator is nurturing and steadfast, and yes, her artists are competent and reliable. But this is irrelevant, because I’m not questioning their pedigrees anyway. What I am questioning is the Philippine viability of endeavors like this, as well as our motives for launching/sustaining them in the first place. For the infrastructure supporting Meps (Imelda Cajipe-Endaya) and her artists is crumbling, and the battleground is shifting under their very noses. There is a clear and present danger that they—who are among our best people today—will merely become fodder for an obsolete cannon we insistently and sloppily aim at the wrong target. And this is demoralizing. For if this is how thoughtlessly the art community deploys the best of us, how else will it treat the rest of us?”
Florentino brazenly attacks the structural problems of the official cultural institutions and their disregard for cultural work, from “some idiot from the Department of Budget and Management [saying] that artists aren’t worth much and someone from the NCCA believed her”, to “the NCCA’s charter [that] is vague concerning honoraria, and some Project Development Officers now interpret this to allow no honoraria for cultural workers at all.” Underlying these symptoms are official corruption and capital flight, citing official corruption at 60% of current fund injection, and the boom in the luxury-goods market despite the economic slump (“the presidents of Piaget and Rado both defied a terrorism-related international travel ban to the Philippines, just to launch their new collections of luxury watches, even though their embassies were closed. And Bulgari is opening another store by yearend”). And so Florentino asks, why, for starters, don’t our cultural institutions get the government to see art as a hedge against capital flight, calling for a closer attention to the psychology of art acquisition? Florentino still believes in the art market, that contrary to artworld thought, there is still much loose money going around – it’s just not going to the arts and so the community is starving needlessly.
On a more fundamental level, Florentino was asking that there be a change in the source and nature of wealth.
Indeed, what is the use in the grand national tour and display of patriotism through the arts, when the entire official structure is corrupt, when we can’t balance economic and national security, and when nationalism is about artistic stunts and noise barrages against a globalization we never really understood?
“We bring into “Sungdu-an” the manifold voices of new art and current art making within the purview of nationalism” is the high hope of the government flagship project. “Sungdu-an” demanded a tall order while the official cultural institutions manufactured their display without constructing a support structure because “artists aren’t worth much anyway.” If the selected artists in “Sungdu-an” worked in the political and sought to challenge dominant institutions, then why are they so grateful for being selected to display their wares through an archaic official cultural institution? Why are the attacks being made within the compliance and ridicule of the institutions themselves?
Florentino prescribes:
“If we can’t give these artists the support that they need to “make a difference,” then the humane thing to do is to just send them home, like leukemia victims too late for chemotherapy, to enjoy the rest of their artistic careers in complacency and oblivion, wallowing in the contentment of cows.”
Evidently, contemporary Philippine visual art operates within the whims of the institutions of cultural power and can neither oppose nor articulate alternatives to the existing capitalist socioeconomic order. At its best, art could only make visible some vague commentaries or cynical performances. Perhaps, as Florentino hopes, at least a macroeconomic apologia for art patronage could be made, but if it were to be made within the unreformed official cultural institutions themselves, then the erosion of intellectual and cultural life would have been complete; the struggle would have been finished. Perhaps it is indeed almost finished – and without even such an apologia to speak of – because “Sungdu-an” did manage to collar the country’s best and most dissident artists without struggle or a whimper, all of us happily caged in the prestige of the “museumified” cultural institutions. It was under the banner of nationalism that we were gathered to display thanks to the orchestration of a cultural institution that practices the most nebulous and self-destructive forms of nationalism.
So I would go further with Florentino’s prescription – assuming that neither a radical change in our official institutions nor an economic ascent can transpire within our lifetimes, we must learn to stray away from home where we can question our values on national emergence without being nailed to the cross and happily displayed in a museum. But even then, there are numerous places away from home that are not much different – the Philippines being an appendage of a dominant Euro-American cultural ideology that thrives on careerism and a manufactured individual freedom under capitalism. So those who stray must be prepared to deny their desires.
