Mobilize art
There is, these days, hardly any conversation in the the tri-cities of Cebu, Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu and its immediate environs where people, in the course of their daily lives, have to, in one way or another, deal with these cities that does not touch on the upcoming Asean meeting.
The actual content of these will vary, as conversations always do. But it is as good a wager as the bet that the 'cheapest, world-class' Cebu International Convention Center won't be finished on time despite the incredible yet predictable and expected contortions its proponents and beneficiaries are now undergoing on the meaning or
extent of the word 'finished,' that these conversations will touch wholly or in part on how an incredible inconvenience, nuisance and imposition the preparations for this Asean meeting is getting to be and how it will be so much more of that during meeting itself. And, for what?
Yet, inconvenience is our daily bread. So much so that we are often unaware that much of this is caused by our own inconsiderate, callous and even stupid behavior. Still, the inconvenience that we are being asked to bear – and then not apparently equitably because, as reports have it, a rich enclave has flatly refused access through their village as an alternative route to ease the burdens of the poorer citizens whose normal routes to or from the city center will be closed – are such that it approaches the scale, in extant memory, of a natural calamity; typhoon Ruping in the 90's and martial law in the 70s.
My own conversations have been with friends who have businesses that will be adversely affected by this ghost town immobilization approach to security and also 'beautification' to the Asean meeting but mostly with artist friends and art students, all at UP Cebu. They are also affected as all schools indeed are, mostly because of the forced resetting of the school calendar.
While many students do welcome the early vacation – after all it is common knowledge that school for many students is just a distraction between vacations -- not all realize the dint this will make in their education and that school administrators will have to arrange for make-up classes. The students will have to 'pay' for this early vacation.
But, this is not the concern of the students I have talked or am talking to. They are fine arts students whose annual MindWorks have to be reset downwards like everything else to accommodate the early vacation imposition that is eating considerably into their preparation time.
I have been asked to be resource speaker for their workshop that usually precedes this activity. My topic is on performance art, of which, I have been doing most of, of late. And, performance art has been the strong suit of this activity; the only continuing event of this sort in the country, the students are, rightly, proud to say.
I have told the students that this situation is ripe for a performance art intervention, reminding them that performance art developed out of a history of engagements by artist with the socio-political concerns of their day, first as a reaction to the bourgeousie commodification of art on one hand and in the sterile formalism of 'modern art's art for art's sake' on the other.
MindWorks is on December 7. It will be at UP though exactly where is still to be decided. It might even, as has been suggested, have 'guerilla' components that will just pop-up and happen in public places around the city.
Other groups are also preparing their reactions to the Asean meeting. They will, for sure, focus on other issues. They will also be peaceful, as they promised. A bloom of a hundred flowers. Even Mayor Osmeña has publicly said he will allow such blooming, though not as poetically as that.
Still, our slogan: Immobilize life? Mobilize art!
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
11.23.06 kulturnatib
Artport
Airports are not just gateways to the skies. They are welcome mats where places, countries put, as it were, their best foot forward. And as often, this is not just the technological foot, although certainly it also is since flying is nothing if not technological, but mostly the cultural foot as well.
The newest airport where the art is prominently displayed is the Suvarnabhumi Airport of Bangkok. On approach from Manila, I was impressed by the quarter-onion structure not knowing that this was the new airport I had previously been asked as to whether I was landing on the old or new airport.
Coming from a country where airports are nondescript and remarkable only for the corruption scandals that accompany or even underlie their construction, I am easily impressed. But, not knowing much about this airport, my initial favorable impression was soon to be overtaken. Positively so.
On the corridors from the arrival tube to the immigration control station, I had my initial glimpse of what soon was apparent everywhere in the interior of this airport: Thai art, religious, traditional and more impressively, contemporary.
On the corridors were large scale paintings. In hallways were gigantic statues of Buddhist or Hindu personages and facsimile of temples and royal structures.
Unfortunately, I just barely had time to rush through these works. I had a connecting flight to hurry after. Moreover, I had to see if the cheaper alternatives promised in the internet was available which meant looking for ticketing offices that turned out to be on an upper level about half a kilometer on foot but near the check-in counters which I had to go through.
On the way to the next departure gate were more art, more traditional works this time.
But it was on the return trip where I was most impressed. Our flight's baggage retrieval was assigned to the far most baggage bay. This necessitated traveling through the other bays that were separated by walls on which were large scale murals and, on the wall that separated our bay from the exit ramp, about two dozen contemporary works.
The murals were a hybrid of traditional themes and contemporary techniques using almost entirely the most traditional of colors: gold, in elaborate and giddy detail that I saw earlier in Khmer art and architecture and would see soon thereafter in its Thai counterpart.
Yet, it was the contemporary works that transfixed me. And, shamed me as well. First, in how little I know of the contemporary art and the leading artists of our neighbors and second, in how far behind we are in the appreciation, even access to contemporary art, especially local and then foreign.
Still, it was a good, inspiring experience. It made travel less the necessary chore that it often is. It was a timely reminder that in the rush between here and there can be things that give us pause, affords us reflection and provide us an occasion for respite and rest.
Even then, the day before I was headed to the way to the same airport for the exit flight home, I saw a newspaper headline saying an official committee had determined that this airport was only going to be ready in the next six months.
It was difficult to understand this. Surely it couldn't have been talking about the art inside. As far as I could determine, they were all ready to go, but most importantly, to stay.
Airports are not just gateways to the skies. They are welcome mats where places, countries put, as it were, their best foot forward. And as often, this is not just the technological foot, although certainly it also is since flying is nothing if not technological, but mostly the cultural foot as well.
The newest airport where the art is prominently displayed is the Suvarnabhumi Airport of Bangkok. On approach from Manila, I was impressed by the quarter-onion structure not knowing that this was the new airport I had previously been asked as to whether I was landing on the old or new airport.
Coming from a country where airports are nondescript and remarkable only for the corruption scandals that accompany or even underlie their construction, I am easily impressed. But, not knowing much about this airport, my initial favorable impression was soon to be overtaken. Positively so.
On the corridors from the arrival tube to the immigration control station, I had my initial glimpse of what soon was apparent everywhere in the interior of this airport: Thai art, religious, traditional and more impressively, contemporary.
On the corridors were large scale paintings. In hallways were gigantic statues of Buddhist or Hindu personages and facsimile of temples and royal structures.
Unfortunately, I just barely had time to rush through these works. I had a connecting flight to hurry after. Moreover, I had to see if the cheaper alternatives promised in the internet was available which meant looking for ticketing offices that turned out to be on an upper level about half a kilometer on foot but near the check-in counters which I had to go through.
On the way to the next departure gate were more art, more traditional works this time.
But it was on the return trip where I was most impressed. Our flight's baggage retrieval was assigned to the far most baggage bay. This necessitated traveling through the other bays that were separated by walls on which were large scale murals and, on the wall that separated our bay from the exit ramp, about two dozen contemporary works.
The murals were a hybrid of traditional themes and contemporary techniques using almost entirely the most traditional of colors: gold, in elaborate and giddy detail that I saw earlier in Khmer art and architecture and would see soon thereafter in its Thai counterpart.
Yet, it was the contemporary works that transfixed me. And, shamed me as well. First, in how little I know of the contemporary art and the leading artists of our neighbors and second, in how far behind we are in the appreciation, even access to contemporary art, especially local and then foreign.
Still, it was a good, inspiring experience. It made travel less the necessary chore that it often is. It was a timely reminder that in the rush between here and there can be things that give us pause, affords us reflection and provide us an occasion for respite and rest.
Even then, the day before I was headed to the way to the same airport for the exit flight home, I saw a newspaper headline saying an official committee had determined that this airport was only going to be ready in the next six months.
It was difficult to understand this. Surely it couldn't have been talking about the art inside. As far as I could determine, they were all ready to go, but most importantly, to stay.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
11.16.06 kulturnatib
The high school
As our jetliner was taxiing through the tarmac from the runway where we had just made a bumpy landing, we were informed of the local time. I looked at my watch. It was now advanced. I set it back by an hour in accordance with the time advisory from the airplane crew.
I had known from mostly second or third-hand sources that a visit to Cambodia is not just a step back in time -- and not just an hour but even to as far back before our own calendar when the great Ankor Wat complex in Siem Reap was built – but it is a step back beyond time when man existentially confronts his most contradictory instincts and where the triumph of brutality makes mockery of his proud claim – always clothed in the loftiest of rhetoric -- to be above the animal kingdom.
It looks like an ordinary high school campus with multi-story buildings, spacious rooms, wide corridors and staircases and ample playing fields. Yet, it is a high school campus with an extraordinary history; a burden imposed directly and indirectly by those who fervently believed history to be putty in their hands.
It was built in 1962 and named Ponhea Yat High School, after a Royal ancestor of King Norodom Sihanouk. In the 1970, during the regime the of the American encouraged Lon Nol, a general who came into power through a coup de e'tat in 1969 it was renamed Tuol Svay Prey High School.
It wasn't until 1976 that this campus was turned into the widely suspected and universally feared security facility of the Toul Sleng, the most secret security department of the Khmer Rouge regime who overthrew the Lon Nol government in December of 1974. This department was responsible for the systematic if arbitrary slaughter of millions of Cambodians who were dumped into shallow and hastily dug mass graves across the country, thereafter named the killing fields.
With the facility itself statistics vary with the high estimate of 22,000 detained and tortured there with as little as a dozen surviving. The official Documentation Center of Cambodia put the numbers of detainees at 10,499, though, it says, this does not include the number of children and babies detained there along with their families. After their torture and detention in Toul Sleng, these were herded mostly to and killed in Choeung Ek just outside Phnom Pehn, where an official memorial now stands.
Following a Vietnamese offensive, Phnom Pehn was captured in 1979. The Khmer Rouge were deposed though they continued a guerrilla struggle until the death of its leader, Pol Pot, in 1998 that signaled the collapse of the Khmer Rouge movement.
In 1980, the Toul Sleng Historical Museum of Genocide opened in the same premises that had been vacated and left almost intact by the retreating Khmer Rouge, including thousands of pictures they meticulously took of every prisoner that was interred there. Among these are of mothers and their infants, teenagers, girls, nondescript Cambodians from all walks with fear or resignation stamped on their eyes, one or two, incredibly, smiling, a caucasian with an Elvis hairdo and others.
The first visitors to the museum were ordinary Cambodians searching for information about their relatives that were lost or were feared to have been victims of the genocide. There were also attempts at forensic examination of the heaps of bones that were uncovered.
With the withdrawal of the Vietnamese expeditionary force in 1989, the signing of the international peace agreement in 1991 and the elections and reestablishment of the Kingdom of Cambodia in 1993, the country opened up to more foreign investors and tourists.
Now, this once nondescript high school campus is a tourist attraction, a must-visit in Phnom Pehn, the center of the grim, sobering and often stomach-churling reminder of the the unspeakable evils that man is capable of. And, sadly, that we will often allow him or her, as we did on countless occasions in the past and presently, on a large scale, in Darfur and the various wars on terrorism, and on a smaller scale, the vigilante killings in Cebu, Davao and the political killings all over the country.
As our jetliner was taxiing through the tarmac from the runway where we had just made a bumpy landing, we were informed of the local time. I looked at my watch. It was now advanced. I set it back by an hour in accordance with the time advisory from the airplane crew.
I had known from mostly second or third-hand sources that a visit to Cambodia is not just a step back in time -- and not just an hour but even to as far back before our own calendar when the great Ankor Wat complex in Siem Reap was built – but it is a step back beyond time when man existentially confronts his most contradictory instincts and where the triumph of brutality makes mockery of his proud claim – always clothed in the loftiest of rhetoric -- to be above the animal kingdom.
It looks like an ordinary high school campus with multi-story buildings, spacious rooms, wide corridors and staircases and ample playing fields. Yet, it is a high school campus with an extraordinary history; a burden imposed directly and indirectly by those who fervently believed history to be putty in their hands.
It was built in 1962 and named Ponhea Yat High School, after a Royal ancestor of King Norodom Sihanouk. In the 1970, during the regime the of the American encouraged Lon Nol, a general who came into power through a coup de e'tat in 1969 it was renamed Tuol Svay Prey High School.
It wasn't until 1976 that this campus was turned into the widely suspected and universally feared security facility of the Toul Sleng, the most secret security department of the Khmer Rouge regime who overthrew the Lon Nol government in December of 1974. This department was responsible for the systematic if arbitrary slaughter of millions of Cambodians who were dumped into shallow and hastily dug mass graves across the country, thereafter named the killing fields.
With the facility itself statistics vary with the high estimate of 22,000 detained and tortured there with as little as a dozen surviving. The official Documentation Center of Cambodia put the numbers of detainees at 10,499, though, it says, this does not include the number of children and babies detained there along with their families. After their torture and detention in Toul Sleng, these were herded mostly to and killed in Choeung Ek just outside Phnom Pehn, where an official memorial now stands.
Following a Vietnamese offensive, Phnom Pehn was captured in 1979. The Khmer Rouge were deposed though they continued a guerrilla struggle until the death of its leader, Pol Pot, in 1998 that signaled the collapse of the Khmer Rouge movement.
In 1980, the Toul Sleng Historical Museum of Genocide opened in the same premises that had been vacated and left almost intact by the retreating Khmer Rouge, including thousands of pictures they meticulously took of every prisoner that was interred there. Among these are of mothers and their infants, teenagers, girls, nondescript Cambodians from all walks with fear or resignation stamped on their eyes, one or two, incredibly, smiling, a caucasian with an Elvis hairdo and others.
The first visitors to the museum were ordinary Cambodians searching for information about their relatives that were lost or were feared to have been victims of the genocide. There were also attempts at forensic examination of the heaps of bones that were uncovered.
With the withdrawal of the Vietnamese expeditionary force in 1989, the signing of the international peace agreement in 1991 and the elections and reestablishment of the Kingdom of Cambodia in 1993, the country opened up to more foreign investors and tourists.
Now, this once nondescript high school campus is a tourist attraction, a must-visit in Phnom Pehn, the center of the grim, sobering and often stomach-churling reminder of the the unspeakable evils that man is capable of. And, sadly, that we will often allow him or her, as we did on countless occasions in the past and presently, on a large scale, in Darfur and the various wars on terrorism, and on a smaller scale, the vigilante killings in Cebu, Davao and the political killings all over the country.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
11.09.06 kulturnatib
Art spaces
I have been in discussions with a friend a few times about art spaces, or its earlier provenance, art galleries. The first question he asked is, are there many galleries here? No, there are not. And, more to the point, there are none that are real galleries, in a sense of having curators, a curated exhibit program – usually on an annual basis, based on the longer term thrusts of the gallery, and a proper organization for handling or ensuring the protection of the interests of artists, much less the interests of collectors and, if they are ever recognized as having any interests at all to protect, the public.
Galleries, or what stands for galleries here are simply spaces where the most basic amenities are provided – even then, often they have to be begged for, art works are thrown together, willy-nilly and, where the public and collectors must find their own way through the maze or haze of ascertaining artistic value, cultural significance, and then, for collectors, commensurate monetary value.
This is a pity seeing the number of practicing artists and art organizations here plus this city's attempts – often expressed, dead-pan seriously, as a certainty – at being world-class. There simply is no question of being world class when culture and the arts are mere afterthoughts in the minds and plans of city authorities, both in government and the private sector and the artists or cultural workers languish in neglect, stagnation or, worse, exploited situations.
With our art collective, we tried our hand at running an alternative space; alternative that is to the existing commercial spaces – that even then were and are far from the ideal practice for such spaces. We were fired up by the idea, and for a while, the practice of a space that featured innovative exhibits, had a program of art education with artists talks, art discussions, workshops, etc.
In the end, however, we decided on giving up the space, though we continue as a collective, continue to practice our art with a decidedly collective, collaborative bent that now, more than before, explores public space as alternative venue.
From that experience, we affirmed that a collective, collaborative approach can be a good, even necessary, countervailing balance to the present heavily commercial art space model. At the same time, we also realized that the business model of matching cost with revenues is as equally necessary with revenues not necessarily always equated with sales. There are revenue opportunities from grants, exchanges and the like.
Yet our most important learning experience is that while our collective approach was successful in providing the vision for our space it did not translate to operational efficiency and efficacy. There has to be one person to take care of the day to day management of all aspects of the business, even if its premises are from a not-for-profit perspective.
Still this does not preclude a for-profit perspective. This is what our friend is trying to explore. It has been done elsewhere. Can it be done here? That is the question we are helping him try to answer.
While we pride ourselves in being wild-eyed, contemporary experimentalists, it is here where we agree that the only way to go is to be clear-eyed realists. Still, dreams are part of reality, and it is a dream we share that a real professional contemporary space that helps the city mature culturally is a necessity, for us, perhaps our friend and, definitely, our collective future.
I have been in discussions with a friend a few times about art spaces, or its earlier provenance, art galleries. The first question he asked is, are there many galleries here? No, there are not. And, more to the point, there are none that are real galleries, in a sense of having curators, a curated exhibit program – usually on an annual basis, based on the longer term thrusts of the gallery, and a proper organization for handling or ensuring the protection of the interests of artists, much less the interests of collectors and, if they are ever recognized as having any interests at all to protect, the public.
Galleries, or what stands for galleries here are simply spaces where the most basic amenities are provided – even then, often they have to be begged for, art works are thrown together, willy-nilly and, where the public and collectors must find their own way through the maze or haze of ascertaining artistic value, cultural significance, and then, for collectors, commensurate monetary value.
This is a pity seeing the number of practicing artists and art organizations here plus this city's attempts – often expressed, dead-pan seriously, as a certainty – at being world-class. There simply is no question of being world class when culture and the arts are mere afterthoughts in the minds and plans of city authorities, both in government and the private sector and the artists or cultural workers languish in neglect, stagnation or, worse, exploited situations.
With our art collective, we tried our hand at running an alternative space; alternative that is to the existing commercial spaces – that even then were and are far from the ideal practice for such spaces. We were fired up by the idea, and for a while, the practice of a space that featured innovative exhibits, had a program of art education with artists talks, art discussions, workshops, etc.
In the end, however, we decided on giving up the space, though we continue as a collective, continue to practice our art with a decidedly collective, collaborative bent that now, more than before, explores public space as alternative venue.
From that experience, we affirmed that a collective, collaborative approach can be a good, even necessary, countervailing balance to the present heavily commercial art space model. At the same time, we also realized that the business model of matching cost with revenues is as equally necessary with revenues not necessarily always equated with sales. There are revenue opportunities from grants, exchanges and the like.
Yet our most important learning experience is that while our collective approach was successful in providing the vision for our space it did not translate to operational efficiency and efficacy. There has to be one person to take care of the day to day management of all aspects of the business, even if its premises are from a not-for-profit perspective.
Still this does not preclude a for-profit perspective. This is what our friend is trying to explore. It has been done elsewhere. Can it be done here? That is the question we are helping him try to answer.
While we pride ourselves in being wild-eyed, contemporary experimentalists, it is here where we agree that the only way to go is to be clear-eyed realists. Still, dreams are part of reality, and it is a dream we share that a real professional contemporary space that helps the city mature culturally is a necessity, for us, perhaps our friend and, definitely, our collective future.
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