What Ails The CCP Annual?
What Ails The CCP Annual?
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, November 11, 1987
I REMEMBER my father-in-law hearing Holy Mass on every first Friday of the month, praying for a swift and dignified death. As providence would have it, he eventually got his wish, which must have been a source of great satisfaction for him. "The dead have dignity," he liked to say, "but the dying have only our pity."
You must forgive me, dear reader, if this bit of reminiscing is laced with morbidity, but you will see that, in this case, its most apt. The CCP's Annual for the Visual Arts - now on its eleventh year - is like a ravaged carcass hooked up to a mechanical life-support system. It breathes but it is as good as dead. And we have nothing but the most profound pity for it.
There was a time when this very same CCP Annual was a major highlight of the cultural calendar, an event that was received each year with considerable anticipation. In those glory days, young artists would have killed to facilitate their participation, even while their more established brethren took pains to have their works ready for this yearend reckoning.
It was only much later, during the waning years of the Marcos regime, that some of the CCP's institutional luster was lost in the wake of widespread disenchantment with the administration it represented. And with that, community participation in virtually all of its activities began to slide - its visual arts annual included.
The outcome of this year's event should have been one of resounding success. This is, after all, the first such annual to be presented under the auspices of the Aquino administration - and even more importantly, the first annual to have been organized by the new CCP through its year-old subsidiary: the much-ballyhooed Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines (CAMP).
I do not pretend to have seen every visual arts annual that the CCP has put together in the past 12 years. But I am inclined to believe the resounding consensus that this year's event is the poorest one yet - being, by far, the poorest in attendance, the poorest in representation, and the poorest in quality.
Popular opinion likewise has it that the artistic community's growing dissatisfaction with CAMP itself is the only possible reason why our artists failed to turn up for the annual in anywhere near significant numbers. Traditionally, this yearend exhibit has been a barometer-of-sorts not only for the state of the visual arts in this country, but also as some distinct measure of CCP's rapport with individual artists and the various existing artworld factions.
It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that CAMP has not only failed in its principal task of winning more friends for the CCP and establishing itself as a vital link with the artistic community as a whole, but has also managed, in its short lifetime, to further alienate the Cultural Center of the Philippines from the great majority of artists it purports to serve, and has further contributed to the erosion of popular trust in the CCP.
Already, talk is rife that CAMP's small inner circle of administrators and consultants is an imperious, self-aggrandizing and arrogant lot, given to empty rhetoric and petty intrigues. Some are said to be tainted by their own vested interests within the artworld itself, while still others are notoriously elitist or are fashionably opinionated to the point where they favor certain artists and styles to the detriment of everyone and everything else. Even CAMP's much-publicized "Exhibition Grants Program" - a project which proposed in essence to open CCP galleries to the larger artistic community - is now the cause for much bad blood and bickering, with artists questioning the validity of the few choices made.
It is said that the "topic" prescribed for this year's visual arts annual - regarding the influence of other artists on one's own work - was much too restricting and far too demeaning to interest most prospective participants. It is said that CAMP wilfully dropped a number of outstanding talents from CCP's original roster of museum artists, resulting in much bruised pride that it can ill afford at this point in time. It is said that many artists who have been hurt, slighted, or otherwise put off by CAMP's sloppy ways have vowed never to step foot in the CCP again.
A word of caution is called for here. While it is typical of artists to turn their backs on an institution that fails to keep faith with them, recent history has proven that ruling cliques actually thrive on boycotts, gaining even more ground by default.
It is also fair to mention for the record that, despite the annual's disheartening outcome, a number of participating artists were no less outstanding. They include Aca Verzosa, Jun Domingo, Lao Lianben, John Cinco, Roy Veneracion, Charlie Co, Jose Legaspi, Agnes Arellano, Sid Hildawa, Jr., Stella Rojas, Orville Tiamson, Binggay Caguiat, and even the sardonically humorous Michael Adams and Romeo Lee, probably the only two foreign artists in participation. Perhaps some of them actually wish they had stayed home. I know I do.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “What Ails The CCP Annual?” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, November 11, 1987
