'Piglas': People's Struggle Immortalized
'Piglas': People's Struggle Immortalized
By Cesare A.L. Syjuco
Published in: Ang Pahayagang Malaya, April 22, 1986
The ongoing mammoth exhibition Piglas: Art at the Crossroads, scheduled to open at the Cultural Center of the Philippines on April 19, could well be the most historically significant activity to be staged by the local art community in recent memory. Certainly, it is the most ambitious cultural project to be organized and carried out since the four-day people's revolt that toppled the 20-year-old Marcos government last February.
Even more importantly, however, the activity has been envisioned as a concerted mass-action by local artists to virtually occupy and liberate the "cultural seat-of-power" of a repressive regime, a symbolic rite delivering the once-omnipotent CCP to the Filipino Nation in whose name the extravagant facility was importance in comparison purported to have been built in the early 1970s.
Once a private stable for Madame Marcos' small handful of artistic proteges, the imposing cast-concrete structure on Roxas Blvd. is to finally open its doors to the people and the entire local artworld at large. No other incident or occurence, apart from the spontaneous public storming and take-over of Malacanang Palace on Feb. 25 this year, can claim to be more symbolically liberational in principle than the democratization of the Iron Lady's professed magnum opus, the Cultural Center of the Philippines.
For what could well be the very first time, the existing spaces at the CCP Main Gallery, Small Gallery, Museum Hallway, Fifth Gallery, Little Theater Lobby, garden areas and corridors are to host a dramatic outpouring of previously concealed or suppressed emotional manifestations captured in the collective works of Filipino painters, video artists, musicians and performers – a historic gathering dedicated to, and staged solely for the benefit of the people.
A majority of the participating artists will be exhibiting their work at the CCP without precedent, shut out in the past by the center's notoriously elitist policies and a long-standing boycott of the facility by the Concerned Artists of the Philippines.
That the CCP has been the target of past criticism ranging from outright discrimination to the manipulation of contemporary artistic trends, is now of small with the role it has played as the former First Lady's opulent showcase and objectified alter-ego. Ferdinand Marcos may have etched his monolithic likeness in stone, but his wife Imelda had built a quake-proof repository of her own where once the bay lapped rhythmically on the shores.
Piglas, therefore, may be deemed a rite of exorcism to drive out the ghosts of the past – no less real for all the purging than the tribe of restless souls trapped at the nearby Film Center – a mandatory offering to appease an angry god and a rightfully indignant population.
Emotions, doubtless, will run high, as will the incidence of outlandish work and behavior. No collective gathering of the country's creative talents in any one place can ever hope to be elegantly laidback. Liberation is hardly ever an exercise in etiquette, anymore, at least, than liberators in action are mild-mannered and genteel.
The Chinese believe that wanton noise-making with the aid of pyrotechnics is an essential ingredient to driving out the nasties. And the nasties, in this case, have been around a very long time.
The sub-title "Art at the Crossroads" cannot be more apt. Where artists are gifted with liberation and subsequent freedom, we can only surmise as to what they will do with it. The old saying goes that you can only lead a horse to water. Our art now stands at the crossroads of change, an exhilarating variety of options now open to our pursuit. Whether it will fare well on its own, or at least fare better than when it was manacled to a megalomaniac nursemaid, is a matter that only the coming years will determine for sure.
When the shouting is over, it will be back to business at the CCP. Vigilance should be the watchword in any case, be the center under new management or returned to the care of a rehabilitated and repentant old guard. Forgiveness is easy and is virtuous to boot. But for the great majority of artists to relinquish their hold yet again, and to surrender themselves once more to the machinations of an annointed few, would be plain stupidity.
Artists of the Philippines, the Cultural Center is now finally yours. But only for as long as you continue to want it and work diligently at keeping it.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “'Piglas': People's Struggle Immortalized” (page 1 of 1), Ang Pahayagang Malaya, April 22, 1986
