Yuletide exhibitions: Three At The Met
Yuletide exhibitions: Three At The Met
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, December 16, 1987
I WAS six years old at the onset of the 1960s, and all of 16 when the decade came to a close. I admit that much of the counter-culture double-think that bred a generation of utopian pilgrims was a trifle late in planting its seeds on our shores, by which time psychedelia and Woodstock had already been heavily tainted by hype and paranoia, genetic poisoning and teen death, underground entrepreneurship and student power. But God knows that, even here, they were years of massive upheaval, of intergenerational confrontation and the de-mystification of our elders, of disenchantment and child-like optimism both, of endless searching and postulating, of rabid anti-militarism and mind-expansion, of craving total freedom from deadweight formalism.
All that and more which characterized the decade is precisely what is missing from the rather mysterious exhibition "German Graphics: Art of the 60s" at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. There is nothing of the restlessness and candor of the time that I recognize here, except perhaps by way of a purging of traditional styles, an optical geometry squeezing out the vestiges of pictorial convention. For the most part, the art on display is sleek, frigid and mechanical, almost robotic in its molded consistency, devoid of the humanism that was the fanatical preoccupation of that era.
Where was Germany through all that transpired? Certainly, if we are to judge from the collection at the Met, its highly-touted graphic artists were all out to lunch when the gong was sounded.
The literature accompanying the exhibit that "the Sixties Artists saw themselves as rebels with a cause. They had a frenzied energy that was clearly evident in all their works. Highly individualistic and strongly confident, the Sixties Artists aimed at making a statement; it was imperative that society's ills be adequately addressed and man's complacency shaken."
I cannot agree more with the writer. And yet, obviously, something must have been lost in the dubbing. Or perhaps the Goethe think-tank in Munich has sent us the wrong crate!
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A far more engaging yearend treat is "Eyewitness `87," also at the Metropolitan Museum, which brings together outstanding entries to the international photography contest sponsored by the prestigious World Press Photo Foundation in Holland.
The Family of Man in pictures is a banquet of color, moods, facets and emotions that line the walls of the gallery like a patchwork quilt, the vibrant thread of humanity weaving through it all and obscuring the very historical references that give the individual photographs their journalistic perspective. The march of events may have been the camera's original subject; but the subject of the collective exhibit is clearly the many shades of contemporary man.
Angry Man is terrifyingly virile, grimly possessed by righteous indignation as in the photographs of streetcorner activists in Seoul, Haiti and South Africa. Oppression, like a tight lid over a boiling cauldron, is its own undoing in time.
Beleaguered Man is poignantly wind-tossed, his desperation a prayerful wailing as in photographs of mourners and terminal patients struggling to break through the darkness.
And Inquisitive Man is the portrait of his own insignificance, seeking to probe the infinite and rejoicing in the pebbles he turns.
The world around us is the realm of the camera. And the photograph, imprint of an instant, is at least some record of our fleeting existence. Photography as Art, Photography as Science, cannot begin to rival Photography the Mirror.
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My Yaya Conchita, who raised me well into puberty as both doting surrogate-mother and catquick iron fist, is now a full-fledged Canadian citizen who spends her evenings as a volunteer community worker in the poorer sections of Vancouver. Seeing her again last year, almost 20 years since she left my family's employ in tears, brought me to the startling realization that yayas never age. An enormous woman exceedingly self-assured, she talked while I listened. It was just like old times.
Did I know that mental illness was the scourge of the western world and that there were more crazies than cancer patients in the land of milk and honey? I feigned surprise because I felt that to do otherwise would be to let the air out of her tires. The reason behind this terrible epidemic of the soul, said Yaya Conchita, was the almost total absence of "genuine family ties" from contemporary western society, and she spoke with such chilling conviction that I have since become manic about weekend outings with the kids.
I was thinking of Yaya Conchita while viewing the Met exhibit "Banal na Pamilya" over the weekend, her parliamentary voice booming in my inner ear like a B-movie flashback. So securely engrained is the concept of "family" in the Pinoy, that Christmas here is more a time for snuggling together than for gift-giving. Perhaps, being a poor country, we have only each other to fall back on. And sanity on an empty stomach is at least something to be grateful for.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Yuletide exhibitions: Three At The Met” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, December 16, 1987
