10.23.08 kulturnatib

Art auction
No word can be more appropriate for what will take place tomorrow at SM City Cebu Art Center. The word is 'auction,' and is derived from the Latin augēre, which means to increase or augment.

Increase and augment are precisely the objectives for Mugnang-Halad. Fund-raising is the more popular term for this.

But, since this is also an exhibit, the organizers, Pusod, Inc., surely hope that it won't only be funds that will be raised but certainly art awareness and appreciation as well.

With the works on the block and on exhibit the viewing and bidding public will be treated to one of the finest artistic smorgasbord from artists across the country.

The artists are grouped into six groups or sets with an equal number of art works per set and an even distribution among them of the better and less nationally known. It will be the sets that will be up for grabs or bids.

All it takes is a P3,000 ticket or joiner's fee.

The money that will be raised with the auction, which is, frankly, the more immediate concern, will go towards increasing and augmenting the funds for the hosting of the Visayas Islands Visual Artists Exhibit/Conference (VIVA ExCon).

The bulk of the funding, however, is provided by a grant from the National Commission on Culture and the Arts (NCCA), the main partner of VIVA ExCon since its inception.

This ExCon, established in 1990, happens every two years – making it a biennial – is the longest running, uninterrupted art event of its kind in the country. It will be its 10th edition or the 18th year in existence.

More significantly, it will be the repeat edition here.

After going around the major Visayan islands, a move that was strongly endorsed by the Cebu delegation, it subsequently saw uneven hosting success yet at the same time significantly increasing interest for the visual arts in the host areas, the VIVA ExCon is returning to Cebu next month from the 27th to the 29th.

In 1998 Cebu hosted the 5th edition, after Bacolod (twice), Dumaguete and Ilo-ilo. That hosting provided some benchmarks for the VIVA ExCon and similar events in the country; The most well attended, the most extensive simultaneous exhibits in three different venues and the longest in duration and, most importantly, exemplary financial management.

This, admittedly, is not one of the most attractive colors for most artists especially for an event of this scope and complexity. Yet, in 1998 Cebu artists proved that it can be done.

This year, beginning with this auction, a new generation of artists who have graduated from playing assisting roles in 1998 to leadership positions now, will prove it again.

What will be more difficult to prove is where the Visayan artists or Visayan arts is headed. In all these years that has been a question that the ExCons succeed mostly in side stepping. Or, even not bothering to ask.

This is the million dollar question that will take more than an auction or, perhaps, even an ExCon to answer.

10.16.08 kulturnatib

Art and autumn
I am not a landscape artist. Or, more precisely, I am not a landscape painter. I do not paint landscapes. I have, however, tried my hand at it. In art school you have to. At least in the art school that I attended. I wouldn't say I was any good. Just good enough to squeeze through with a passing grade.

Over a year later, though, after passing over arts school, I tried landscape painting again. Just that one time. For no other reason than the landscape seemed to be begging to be painted. Or, as some of my landscape artist friends would probably have it, it was challenging my talents, like a young, sassy girl who would goad the hormonal control of a young boy.

The latter is actually more like it. I was the young boy with more hormones than I knew what to do with and, worse, nothing to do it with.

A dorm mate in school had invited me over to their place for a weekend. Their house was on a hill that had one of the most glorious views of the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, USA, which, in autumn was even more glorious.

The mountain was on fire; Golden yellow, luscious orange, blazing red, royal purples, deep browns. Such, and all the hues in between, are the colors of autumn.

But I had none of those colors, or any other color, for that matter. I had exchanged musical chromatics for visual hues. Yet, the moment called for a visual palette.

My dorm mate's sister came to the rescue. Her make-up kit did, to be exact.

I don't remember exactly how that attempt -- probably the first landscape painting with a make-up kit in the history of art -- turned out. It would be safe to say that it would have confirmed the grade I earned in landscape painting class.

Also, it would have reinforced what I learned in all those odd years in art school though this wasn't taught consciously or was even explicitly part of the curriculum: art as a work of humans is different from nature however one tries to approach, mimic or copy nature using whatever medium.

This distinction or divide between art or culture and nature is, thankfully -- others would say frustratingly, -- not so clean and clear cut. Discussion, disagreement and debate on their respective boundaries and territories continue. They keep art schools in business. Artists, too.

Here, in the northern hemisphere, it is autumn once again. It is the same but different. The leaves are still in their falling fiery fineness. But they no longer tempt me. No longer, at least, to paint them. I am beyond that. I no longer see the point in that, though, for others, some artist friends who will no doubt call this season a landscape painting heaven, it will continue to have its allure for capturing in art particularly in the genre called realism or naturalism.

I am content now just to walk through a forest canopy of this kaleidoscope of color that, for all its liveliness is really a farewell to one season and the welcoming of another.

Strapped on my back is another life, 6 kilos and gaining fast, really a season coming into her own as I give way mine, hopefully, along the way providing her with enough experiences in the appreciation of both culture and nature for her to learn to paint her life as she needs to, however she wants to.

10.09.08 kulturnatib

The encampment
It is a dark night. It is past 8pm. Because it is now officially Autumn, it is cold. Why, then, exhibit an outdoor installation art piece at this time of the year? And, why, is it open for public viewing only between 7pm and midnight?

The answers soon present themselves. There are 70 of them although one reads them better only with the help of a provided LED mini flashlight or, better, one appreciates them best when one steps inside.

They are printed in explanatory text on plastic laminated sheets in both English and French hung on the door flap, citing historical references, statistical information or more poignantly and powerfully telling personal stories.

They are contained in daily objects, in art works, in mementos, in diaries, in photographs and other things that are summarized in the explanatory or narrative text yet they provide the gestalt that says more than words in strikingly or hauntingly creative ways.

They are inside white canvass field tents that, in its militarily precise arrangement, can only be some sort of encampment, the sort that the exhibit statement suggests to be metaphorically of the archaeological kind where, “a dig for artifacts is replaced by a dig into the collective memory . . .” or, also, collective forgetting or denial.

They are at Major's Hill Park, a popular public space within walking distance from the halls of parliament, in the shadows of the spires of this institution representing the collective called Canada.

They are the installation art piece called, “The Encampment,” a work conceived by Thom Sokoloski and creative collaborators from all over the country who have responded to the call for participation in creating this piece that deals with the issue and reality of persons with intellectual disabilities through history, legislation, social attitudes and more compellingly, through personal stories of intellectually disabled individuals themselves.

They are classified by authorities as having an IQ of 70 or less. Hence, the 70 tents.

The tents are largely in the dark. Each are supplied with a camping lamp that illuminates the inside and their contents. But only so much that one really has to step in for closer inspection. From the outside, they glow dimly, making them look like floating cocoons.

On each door flap post is a small, key-chain size LED flashlight for reading accompanying text. The power switch is difficult to operate, making reading less than straight forward.

Yet one reads about the wholesale discrimination, disregard, exclusion, violence and dehumanization that visits the lives and days of the the intellectually disabled with communities often abetting it, at the very least by looking away. One also reads of the victory of some who persist and triumph though never far from the shadow of the stigma.

This exhibit, a version of which will also be installed in Toronto and New York, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Canadian Association for Community Living, whose advocacy is assisting communities in becoming more welcoming and supportive of people with intellectual disabilities.

How better to celebrate than with art? Or, even so much better, participative, collaborative, engaging, inclusion challenging public art?