Female Focus
Female Focus
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: Sunday Globe Leisure, April 07, 1991
'Are we missing the cue, boys? Should we dress and market ourselves as an endangered species like the homeless and disabled?'
MAMA, mia, it must still be Women’s Month. How else can we explain the sudden glut in women’s art exhibits at a time when only a few doddering old dicks could possibly be making any money from their paintings? Are we missing the cue here, boys? Should we dress and market ourselves as an endangered species like the homeless and the disabled? Could there really be gold in thar them hills? And what of that crawling embarrassment Tagle and his sloganeering brood of performing lice? Should they seriously consider a sex change?
Let me make myself perfectly clear. Like any man of the ’90s, I have grown to admire women as a whole, perhaps even to envy them their solidarity and their glorious awakening. Everything from Benazir Bhutto to Cindy Rothrock gets my nod. But as an incurable cynic, I have a great many reservations regarding “isms” in general and “womanism” in particular. I have seen far too much ineptitude slip through the backdoor in the name of movements and sisterhood, simply by the flashing of membership cards in all of the right faces.
Not everything by women is good, just as not all cat litter is smelly. Some of the worst “art” confronting us today is by women, hanging tough in their mock-oriental frames along the corridors and byways of Manila’s five-star hotels. You know its makers: students of Professor Ho To Tai and his expensive summer course in Chinese brushwork, ageing colegialas stranded somewhere between their last child and menopause, Sylvia Reynoso cooking lessons and fundraising work for Caritas. They paint not out of inspiration, but out of sheer boredom. Their most common crimes are clumsy still-lifes and sumi landscapes, followed closely by old churches, pets, ballet dancers and wishy-washy abstracts in oils and needlepoint. At times, they may even attempt to sculpt, snap a camera or spin pottery. Always, they crave the title “artist”, and their accomplices in these dark deeds are those infernal galleries-for-hire that will gladly show anything and everything for a stiff fee.
The Liongoren Art Gallery in Cubao, the Vicente Madrigal Center in Ayala Alabang, and the Vargas Museum at the UP campus in Diliman are hardly mercenary spaces. They are, however, among the venues currently hosting shows exclusively dedicated to women’s art, and are therefore laboring against the popular notion that so much “art” by women is born out of whim and caprice, not out of talent.
The Vargas Museum is showcasing assorted pieces by over 20 ladies who are all active members of the feminist alliance known as Kasibulan. The group draws its lines along women’s rights and their search for a distinct social identity in the Philippine context. But membership ties appear to be the only qualifying factor behind this commemorative mass action. A sorority picnic in an appropriately obscure clearing, it succeeds only in saying that women create art— sometimes well and sometimes not—and that they can be motivated into exhibiting together by a sense of obligation and esprit d’corps.
On the other hand, the commercial gallery of Fred and Norma Liongoren has been shuffling its own selection of women artists for years, almost like a best-dressed list or like a little league ballclub drafting and shedding pool picks for its seasonal lineup. The squad it has fielded for the ongoing exhibition Walong Filipina is competent enough, made up of grizzled veterans and hardworking rookies alike who possess market credentials or political clout. Remy Boquiren, Charito Bitanga, Anna Fer, Pacita Abad, Veronica Lim-Yuyitung, Jeannie Javelosa, Lita Puyat and Ida Bugayong may never win the President’s Cup, but on a good day, they are more than capable of fastbreaking the Liongorens all the way to the bank.
The group exhibition of 13 women artists at the Madrigal Center until April 30 is possibly the most curatorially forthright of the three, with curator Lui Bacaltos venturing a personal selection that outreaches comraderie, bankability and artworld machinations. In the process of piecing together a wide assortment of concerns, styles and viewpoints, however, she has opened her gallery to precisely the kind of amateur fare that gives women’s exhibits a bad name. Even the best pieces here border on trivial pursuits, and not a few of the paintings are appallingly bad. Of the artists in focus—Thelma Badon, Tensie Bello, Charito Bitanga, Ivi Cosio, Tessie Dichupa, Yvonne Jurado, Sipra T. Kamatoy, Baidy Mendoza, Asha Menghrajani, Inma Ortoll-Mutuc, Rhoda Recto, Susan Fetalvero Roces and Maida Sobretodo—only Bitanga, Recto, Badon Kamatoy, Bello, Sobretodo and Ortoll-Mutuc display some competence and depth. The rest should seriously contemplate another hobby or be more discriminating about what they show.
I have heard some pretty dumb reasons in my day for bunching artists together in a single exhibit, but none as dumb as gender. And that’s no sexist joke.
'I have heard some pretty dumb excuse in my day for bunching artists together in a single exhibit, but none as dumb as gender.'
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Female Focus” (page 1 of 1), Sunday Globe Leisure, April 07, 1991
