A Big Hand For A Big Little Book
A Big Hand For A Big Little Book
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, December 09, 1987
ART’S greatest champion has always been the written word. That much is impossible to refute, except perhaps with even more words. The printed page is art’s intermediary, art’s chronicler, art’s dynamic wellspring of feedback and impetus.
Thus, even the artists of De Stijl — impassioned men of intellect who sought to concretize painting and thereby rid it of its classical debt to literature — fought much of their determined struggle with the pen, waging their rebellion against literature with an outpouring of words.
In a contemporary context, the need to disseminate artistic produce to a worldwide audience has all but apprenticed art to the realm of books. Much of the art we “see” in our lifetime is in the form of pulp-paper reproductions pressed between their covers. And the words that inevitably crowd these poor facsimiles often shape our own understanding of the art itself, bending our perception of the work according to the writer’s whim.
Purita Kalaw-Ledesma’s latest volume on Philippine Art, aptly entitled “Philippine Art Gallery: The Biggest Little Room” would have been a thoroughly commendable effort by virtue of the text alone, being a comprehensive retelling of a golden chapter in our contemporary art history spawned by a fledgling showroom that operated largely on borrowed time and money. In her own venerable capacity as a pioneering patron of modern art in this country and founder of the 40-year-old Art Association of the Philippines (AAP), Mrs. Ledesma weaves a thoroughly fascinating tale that recounts the frustrations and triumphs of a major artistic movement in its infancy and adolescence, a quasi-historical document written in unpretentious prose and with a scholar’s acute peripheral gaze.
The gutsy and heroic Lyd Arguilla, the charismatic Fernando Zobel, the fabled company of writers and painters that eventually drove a wedge for modernism into soil that was yet untilled, the nostalgic romance of a glorious era and its historically fated personages, all come to life in the author’s vivid hindsight, toned with sober reminiscing rare enough in an area of concern that practically begs to be mythologized. The welcome result reads like an eyewitness account that deliberately draws few conclusions, allowing us to ponder our own assessment against the reality of current-day developments.
Mrs. Ledesma hardly bats for the sainthood of her peers, carefully pointing out that the artists of that time were largely driven by a compulsion to imitate their western counterparts, and only much later, consciously laboring to explore their own homegrown references. She seems more than willing to concede, for instance, that popular cult heroes Hernando Ocampo and Vicente Manansala were themselves flawed mortals, and that their no-less-rightful places in history were due, at least in part, to a perfectly charmed combination: that of being the right people at precisely the right time.
But it is the book’s decidedly unorthodox format that makes it even more remarkable, I think, if only because it succeeds quite admirably in substantiating the spirit of Mrs. Ledesma’s subject over and above the weight of her text. A veritable collage of dynamic shapes that both jar our sensibilities and compel our interest, many of the key pages are literally directional signposts folded into triangles and laminated onto acetate sheets, generating a visual aggressiveness that affirms the materiality of the paper pages beyond the traditional guise of “neutral space.” The book, in this case, asserts itself as factual object, palpable and vital as the art itself, transcending its conventional role as a mute vessel for words, and bravely tipping the scales in favor of the pictorial.
It is said that the competent historian seeks always to unravel the essence without coloring the facts. It is also said that the measure of a true artist is that artist’s willingness to take risks. Purita Kalaw-Ledesma, we might conclude from this new volume, lives up to her reputation as both chronicler and visionary.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “A Big Hand For A Big Little Book” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, December 09, 1987
