Art and The Fair Gender
Art and The Fair Gender
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, February 06, 1988
AS a man of the '80s, I have grown to admire women, perhaps even to envy their awakening and their sense of solidarity. But as a man of the arts, I have grown to fear women with a secret shadder.
Perhaps it's because women have become so militantly self-righteous and self-assured that they inspire me to caution in everything I say, write and paint. I remember a time when the artist Meps Endaya — of whom I am really quite fond — mailed me back the invitation to my latest exhibit with the passionate notation: "Protest! Stop exploitation of women in the arts!" My paintings then were essentially abstract and were really quite genderless, and I could not begin to imagine how they might have hinted to Meps of my "closet" chauvinism. But trust me for all its worth; women artists can spot sexist crimes almost before they happen.
There is another, more compelling reason for my insecurity, and it has to do with the sudden predominance of women in the local artworld's ever-shifting hierarchies. We now have women almost exclusively running the business end of things, women dispensing grants and graces, women judging our worth, women lording it over us in national art competitions, women winning men's awards, women painting and sculpting and writing like men. Why, even artworld fixtures like Paras-Perez and Chabet well-known for cloning their own — are now cloning girls instead of boys! And I must say it all frightens me.
Last Thursday marked the beginning of the end for the rest of Adam's ribs. In a single evening, we saw the opening of an exhibit of visual art works by Anne de Guzman, Lydia Ingle, Valeria Cavestany and Judy Sibayan; we witnessed the premiere screening of Alfred Yuson's film on "Nine Filipina Visual Artists"; and we drank ourselves into a stupor to commemorate the launching of a special issue of "Carocoa" exclusively featuring women poets.
Thank goodness noted painter Jaime de Guzman is no Danny Dalena, or he would have laid an egg fretting over the potential "threat" that sleeps in his bed. The highlight of Pinaglabanan's ongoing exhibition "Four Women," his wife Anne has unveiled a suite of paintings in oils and pastels that have an unmistakable aura of importance about them — wonderfully-inspired works residing in fantasy, childlike insight and mirth. With a deft hand, a clever mind and a pure heart, she depicts a shangrila of boundless beauty, a netherworld laden with innocence and lurking danger. Had I the money to spare, I would have bought the collection intact in one of those rare instances where sheer delight would have compelled me. For I loved Anne's paintings and would have found the long and arduous trek to Pinaglabanan worthwhile if only for having seen them.
Had I any money left over, I would doubtless have spent it on some canvases by Lydia Ingle, still another major talent who hails from the Dayao of my youth. Her paintings are dense, brooding and sometimes oppressive, intuiting a twilight state bordering on ennui that is the realm of exiles and countryside intellectuals. Ingle's world is rooted in an eternity of passing moments, each fairly much the same as the one before it, a scenario ripe for graceful ageing, quiet, guarded decadence — and suicide. One cannot possibly know the length of a long year, the slow, deliberate plodding of hours, days and nights, without dreaming the dreams of a far-flung privileged class, a petty-bourgeoisie of the soil that lives and breeds and dies in suspended animation. I suspect that Lydia Ingle — sensitive artist and full-fledged mother — has dreamed those dreams before, and has been roused more than once by the vagrant ghosts that populate them.
An artist of infinite charm but not necessarily of vision, Valeria Cavestany has developed into a painter of stylishness and flourish since her first outing at the Galeria de las Islas late last year. Her brush is spontaneous, at times gifted, and her abiding penchant for ethno-pop devices should give my good friend Pacita Abad a case of nervous dermatosis. But Cavestany's work needs substance, lest it be mistaken for empty, and substance is a rare bird indeed. Whether or not this painter O. Catalan origin eventually bags the right hen is still anybody's guess.
For that matter, can anyone tell me if Judy Sibayan was ever in Pinaglabanan at all? Her name is on the poster, but her work is as anonymous, as gestural and as lame as a campaign promise. Of course, Judy Sibayan y Frey has never been a visual arts virtuoso — preferring, by force of circumstance, to hang obliquely in the conceptual art of excuses — and there was never any expectation on our part of seeing great paintings from her end. Inspite of this, she manages to disappoint, which in her own mental space-warp is probably no small triumph in itself.
Two-and-a-half out of four isn't bad for Pinaglabanan's February show "Four Women." Not with 9 celluloid starlets and 19 lady-poets to back them up en masse. And if that doesn't worry you, Sly Stallone, you forget that the fair gender finds its greatest strength in numbers.
What the heck, why worry? It's only status.
(To be continued)
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Art and The Fair Gender” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, February 06, 1988
