Through the “Decode” exhibition at the Ateneo Art Gallery in Manila which I curated in 2003, I encountered with an art historical impotence which I self-deceptively crafted into a mediascape of modernism ergo progress:
“DECODE is a boldly speculative and experimental exhibition. The works are diverse, from sculpture to software, and the exhibition space enfolds beyond the gallery, into the Internet. Such openness and hybridism enforce the museum’s unyielding commitment to engage distances between tradition and innovation, between human and technological complexity, between art and life media. In DECODE, the introduction of new media, not only side by side but in direct dialogue with the Ateneo Art Gallery’s permanent collection of modern Philippine art, sets the stage for an interpretive framework for an art form that is always in flux. With new media in the cradle of modern art, critical insights and connections ignite; revealing how new media takes art in new directions.”
Nevertheless, the exhibition did allow me to place a veiled criticism of Philippine art within an historical and structural context. The springboard for the exhibition itself – modern art – proposes many disquieting clues on the paralysis and subservience of Philippine art history to the envisioning of a nationalism inspired by her imperialist masters and articulated by a choir of patronizing art historians.
When Philippine modern art sat next to computer art in the “Decode” exhibition, it highlighted the static reality of art’s allegiance to precious humanism and new modernisms – the old and predictable reactionaries to the ails of the technologizing world. The mantra was that the modern artist sought to present a new reality that emerged after the ravages of the Second World War, and in contemporary times, the new modern artist sought to liberate art from commercial media. This modern artist was yearning to be of service to a revolution, but because there is no real revolution in our socioeconomic life to speak of, we invent them. The task at hand is to question the values of our inventions by placing them within a critique of development and imperialism.
One hagiographic invention is that Philippine modern art is the art of becoming human. Another hagiographic invention is that artists can oppose globalization through performance art and nationalistic exhibitions. And to question the values of such inventions is to completely change our notions and expectations of art, the artistic community and social change.
The phenomena of the modern artist in the Philippines surfaced after the Second World War under the flag of the “Neo-Realists.” Such a phenomena is dramatized in the artist’s temperament and alertness to a new form of self-consciousness and subjectivity. That to be a thinking, feeling human is to be modern:
“What is this new experience of being a subject? It is to think as a human being. I am thinking as a human being when I go beyond calculation and representation. Neither the computer nor the animal thinks. What is unique to the thinking person? Feeling. Only feeling constitute what is unique to human being. Neither the animal nor the computer feels. Feeling presupposes that I feel not only the felt but the feeling itself - that I am aware that I am feeling it, that I am affected by it. And being affected demands that I express what I experience and how I experience it. Thus I also express the “I” who experiences. Only feeling allows me to think as a human being.”
The grandness of the humanization of a prosaic technological world is as infallible as the merits of ersatz nationalism. In a country made hungry by its colonial histories for the “rediscovery of the true kernel of the Filipino self” and the meaning and experience of becoming modern and human, it would be a sin to question all articulations that feed that hunger. The cultural agenda is to educate the masses who remain baffled and intimidated by Philippine modern abstract art, and to transpose that agenda in the current perceived urgency to humanize technological art. And because to be modern is to be a thinking and feeling human, the moral demand weighs greatly upon those who dare interrogate the absurdity of this illustrious modernity.
With its shared histories within American imperialism since the late nineteenth century, the post-war modernist movement in the Philippines could be more than the “creation of a new reality” that the Neo-Realists group trumpeted after the Second World War. If the modern artist has finally grasped that the task was no longer to re-present but to present an experience, we need to ask what kind of experience or “new reality” is being created, reflected or perceived. Under the influence of the philosophy of Heidegger’s logos, our art historians have raised the modern artist’s image to the text – that “a word or a name is not merely a superfluous label pasted on an already constituted object. The name shapes the reality. It “creates” or brings about the reality. With the pronouncing of the name, the reality comes to presence. In the same way, the modern painting makes us present to the unique reality experienced by the artist.” If this was true – that the modern artist supposedly found the means to get the viewer involved in the experience that the artist is participating – then we are given the challenge to question the validity of “reality.” But when art history has managed to cultivate the indomitable class of the modern artist, how could one dare question the reality presented by their interpretations of the expressions of such masters of Philippine art? Without discussion or debate, art successfully consolidated into an impotent tool of contemporary expression.
While European modernism began around the middle of the nineteenth century, art historians peg Philippine modernism with American post-war art. It was also during the post-war period that American world hegemony occurred as Europe continued to let go of her colonies and the social significance of the European avant-garde began to decline; the ‘center’ of western art began to move from Paris to New York. In this movement, the Philippines was subjected to the confluence of her two western colonizers: the rising orchestrated identity of America as the “land of the free” and the fragmented complexity of Europe as democrats and liberals laid claim to cultural and political power. But the emasculation of Philippine art from the modern era to the contemporary is due to its subservience to aestheticized politics and the dismemberment of its history from the history of social, economic and political struggle at the global scale. When artistic commentaries on U.S. Military Bases in the Philippines are confined to exposing abuse through disturbing images, the exposure can be as safe as a store display window when artists acting as “free” intellectuals (rather than paid propagandists) served the Cold War politics which placed the U.S. Military Bases at the hems of the Iron Curtain. How can Philippine art and nationalism not aspire to align with the most powerful state (and thus the most powerful culture) in the world? Wasn’t it through American intellectual culture and academism that we forged our visions of nationalism, modernism and humanism into dogma?
The lesson is to beware of art historical eulogies and rhetorics that gloss over the complex histories within which we frame the roles and relevance of our artistic practices. If our art historians daresay that “art, like philosophy and poetry, is not a luxury,” then perhaps it would be more urgent to say so not within the pompous modernist “enterprise of becoming human” – but within the reality that human life is a social life infiltrated by conflicting interests, inequalities and imperialism.
Can contemporary Philippine art still undergo a radical reformation when “it is precisely analysis that becomes sclerotic when histories of ideas are obscured – indeed obscured in masterful ways by and with art, wherever art is regarded, as it is in the mainstream of Philippine letters throughout the 20th century, as quasi-divine act”?
