03.01.07 kulturnatib

Don Quixote

Don Quixote is one of my favorite literary characters. As a visual artist, a performance artist in particular, I identify with Don Quixote. I feel like him, always trying to explain that he has to do battle with the windmills for the sake of his love Dulcinea, when I try to explain to people what performance art is.

Over the weekend, I was at an art exhibit forum at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. There, we as the exhibiting artists were made to explain our works. I represented our group, the Lunâ Art Collective. The consensus was that the exhibit, which was really more about artist groups than individual artists, had the common ground of trying to be relevant to the times.

Relevance in art is something that most artists don't really care to talk much about. For them, as for much of the public, relevance is really just another word for Quixotic.

Yet, our difference with Don Quixote is that while he didn't recognize the windmills for what they were, we do. We recognize that it is the windmills of the mind that our art battles with.

But this column is not about those battles. A battle that, by the way, was almost joined when a woman at the forum drew first blood by exclaiming that she didn't find anything particularly new with the works, that they were all so passé and it were as if we were not moving forward at all from the social realism of the 80's.

No, this column is not about that. This column is about how in such Quixotic gatherings there is bound to be a real Don Quixote around.

This Don Quixote didn't look anything like Don Quixote. He looked fit, on the short side, was deeply tanned and moved about with the confidence of a salesman. He was looking for George So, an artist from Davao, representing the Davao Artists' Foundation, another of the exhibiting groups.

Orly, bay, he says, holding out a hand with a sure grip. I had to look for you when I heard about this Davao group and that there was a representative here, he went on. George introduces me. We shake hands.

It wasn't immediately clear why Orly or Orlando Ongkingco was there except for an assumed interest in the arts. Soon, it became clear that he didn't have an interest. He had a passion. A Quixotic one.

I also work with an art form, he said. A traditional art form that, like many traditional forms we are losing because of disinterest on one hand, commercialization, paradoxically, on the other hand and mostly because of government neglect. Our neighbors in Asia celebrate this art form in annual festivals, complete with full government support, he continued.

He proceeded to take out a presentation folder full of newspaper clippings of such festivals and pictures of him participating in them. Jakarta, Brunei, Cambodia, Vietnam, he's been there. And, here, look, that's me with the Philippine Ambassador to France in one of my workshops there.

While he holds the official position of president of the Kite Association of the Philippines, and just recently, was elected the Deputy President of the Asean Kite Federation, that had just been recognized as an official accredited cultural organization by the Asean, he is really more the unofficial, self-appointed ambassador of the back to the traditional kite movement of the Philippines.

I helped Bear Brand when they first organized their kite festival, he revealed. But soon, he got disillusioned when it was clear that Bear Brand's interest was not in the kites but in selling their brand. Soon, he said, kids were looking up and saying, “hey, there's Bear Brand” and not, “hey, there's a kite.”

It is not just any kite that he is interested in, though he says that rekindling the interest in kite flying, especially kite making is a good start. His interest is in the traditional kite, that, if I recall right, is called the baki-baki locally. This is the kite with an oval body, a curved triangular fishtail and a pyramidal head. Sometimes, across the body is a bow with a string across that makes a humming sound in the air.

He doesn't make a living off it, but he does makes kites. So does his wife. People do come and ask for us to make special kites, special traditional kites which is our expertise, he explains. They can't compete, he admits, with cheap plastic Chinese kites. He doesn't want to. Theirs is business, ours is art.

We nod. We agree. Sally forth, brother. The windmills are waiting.