A Task at Once Dangerous and Ordained
A Task at Once Dangerous and Ordained
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: Philippine Daily Globe, October 05, 1990
THE course of art in this century has been largely determined by groups and movements. And so art—more than politics and religion—has become a field of endeavor where even the most harebrained alliances are taken seriously.
Talking the Manila art world has focused in recent weeks on a fledgling group of painters that meets every Saturday afternoon at the Penguin Cafe in Malate. That much of this talk has been tinged with suspicion and disdain is hardly surprising in an artistic community long fragmented and acutely paranoid. What we have here is not your usual brat pack of grinning upstarts eager to call attention to themselves by setting fire to the barn. Dubbed by the press as The Remedios Circle, the members of this casual alliance are mainstream stalwarts who are almost equally well-known, and whose stylistic range and influence span much of what we know today as contemporary art in this country.
Indeed the apprehension voiced by some of their elders seems at once well founded. The group’s commitment to “changing whatever ails Philippine art” hints strongly of its dissatisfaction with current art world values and hierarchies. And the circle’s own powerhouse cast obviously has sufficient creative and political clout to turn the old system around.
But the group’s formal debut show—at the Alliance Francaise Gallery in Makati until October 9—is surprising precisely because it says so little about The Remedios Circle itself and its immediate goals. Safely billed as a benefit exhibition and sale for Manila’s street children, it translates only as a curious call to civic-mindedness. There is a glaring absence of the revolutionary rhetoric that one has come to associate with art movements of historical significance, and the exhibited work is staid enough to parody the very system that the group seeks to reform.
Nevertheless, The Remedios Circle remains a potential force for change in a creative community grown fat, pretentious, irresponsible and sinfully materialistic. Locked in the inertia of its infancy, it must seek to channel its vaunted firepower to where it can do the most damage and the most good, even while providing tangible alternatives to the artistic ditch in which we continue to wallow. Artists of a middle generation, and heirs to a future already in sight, its members must endeavor to bridge the widening gap between a wave of elders corrupted by its own indifference, and a disenchanted younger generation now turning to the west for role-models. It is a task at once dangerous and ordained.
In 1981, desperately homesick and culturally adrift in North America, I set aside a lifetime of glitzy western influences and began working on a large canvas that sought for the first time to dig deeper into my brown man’s consciousness. The title of that piece, Return History’s Whore, Our Mother, reflected the urgency of the experience and the frustration I felt at having been unable to sit through the many layers of anthropological debris in search of the real thing. Even then I realized that a genuine Filipino identity in art would have to reach beyond hieroglyphics, costumed dancers, jungle nymphs and ash-colored icons.
The title of that painting is an apt substitute for the exhibition Arte Ethnika III, ongoing at the Madrigal Center in Alabang until November 9. Rumored to be the first leg of a traveling group show that makes use of the promotional mileage generated by a mammoth prelude at the National Museum last August, it is fraught with the pitfalls of having lost our roots and attempting to retrieve them overnight by mimicking iconographic stereotypes. Mistaking the trees for the forest, the show scratches the surface and leaves the itch unturned.
The main argument against this exhibition is its obvious lack of quality produce, built as it is around the work of rank amateurs thrust in our faces from the most abused sections of popular Pilipiniana. Bannered before unthinking audiences as a budding Pinoy renaissance in the visual arts, it is liable to do more harm than good, inspiring despair where hope springs eternal.
Very nearly overwhelmed by the rubbish on the walls is the remarkably tough functional sculpture of Rey Paz Contreras, shining like beacons in the dark. Massive, hewn with brawn and power like a blacksmith’s iron forgings, they are coaxed from century-old wood by the firm, sure hands of a master carver. In an age where art-making has become an effeminate sport—and where the mind, drunk with fanciful notions, leads the way—the pieces ooze with old world machismo. In the very least, they offer us the luxury of escape from the suffocating sleekness of other functional sculptors making good in the country today. More significantly, they bring us in touch with our recent past, a golden era when the artist and the artisan could well be one and the same, when mastery and dedicated toil were revered and emulated, and when pride in exceptional handiwork far outweighed the vague nuances of conceptual double-talk.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “A Task at Once Dangerous and Ordained” (page 1 of 1), Philippine Daily Globe, October 05, 1990
