Jeffrey Balintong

Contemporary Philippines Arts

The history of contemporary Philippine art traverses a vibrant terrain of artistic practices that delicately and urgently mediate the modernity of art history, institutions, exhibition-making, and the expansive activity of curatorial work. It performs this range of gestures to speak to and intervene in the ever-changing political milieu and the vast ecology, as well as ethnicity, of the archipelago.

 

The CCP was a venue for modern and international art and helped cultivate ideas of contemporary conceptualist and performance art. The practice of Raymundo Albano, curator of various spaces within the Center from 1970/1 until his death in 1985, is important in the development of curatorial discourse and practice in the Philippines. During his term, he conceptualized the idea of Developmental Art, which for him was a “powerful curatorial stance” inspired by “government projects for fast implementation.” Albano’s provocations inspired a rethinking of the nature of the art work: its form, cultural lineage, relationship with the audience, and ability to absorb the desire for distinction and identity. His initiative Art of the Regions, which presented the works of Junyee, Genera Banzon, and Santiago Bose is exemplary. Apart from these initiations, Albano also inaugurated the CCP Annual, a presentation of representative works of the year; and oversaw the publications Philippine Art Supplement, a bi-monthly art journal that ran from 1980 to 1982, and the three-issue magazine Marks, with Johnny Manahan.

In 1981, Junyee organized the project Los Baños Siteworks. It was an exhibition held in a three-hectare “halfway ground between the mountain and the city.” For this platform, the region is imagined as a site and a sensibility away from the conventions of the typical gallery exhibition: “By utilizing nature’s raw materials as medium, the relationship between the art object and its surroundings are fused further into one cohesive whole.” The trope of region was a way of shifting the ecology of contemporary art exhibition, now “no longer confined within the boundary of gallery walls.” As Junyee describes the works in the exhibition: “Like extensions of nature, the works sprouted from the ground, floated in the air, surrounded an area, dangled from branches in random arrangement around the exhibition site.”

Outside the Center, “social realism” developed in response to an increasingly authoritarian political milieu under the auspices of the developmentalist regime of Marcos. The term was explicated by critic Alice Guillermo who describes it as “not as a particular style but a commonly shared sociopolitical orientation which espouses the cause of society’s exploited and oppressed classes and their aspiration for change.” According to her, social realism was “rooted as it is in a commitment to social ideals within a dynamic conception of history, social realism in the visual arts grew out of the politicized Filipino consciousness.” The latter was forged by the Philippine revolution against Spain in 1896 and the continuing struggles against all oppressive systems. Guillermo argues that social realism in the Philippines “stresses the choice of contemporary subject matter drawn from the conditions and events of one’s time,” and “is essentially based on a keen awareness of conflict.” Whereas realism may be construed as a merely stylistic term, social realism is a “shared point of view which seeks to expose or lay bare the true conditions of Philippine society.” The work of the collective Kaisahan (Solidarity, 1975-6) whose members included painters Papo de Asis, Pablo Baen Santos, Orlando Castillo, Jose Cuaresma, Neil Doloricon, Edgar Talusan Fernandez, Charles Funk, Renato Habulan, Albert Jimenez, Al Manrique, Jose Tence Ruiz, and later joined by Vin Toledo, became emblematic of this tendency.

The quicksilver practice of the wunderkind David Medalla flourished during this milieu, albeit in an idiosyncratic vein. He was a homo ludens, provocateur, poet, and a prominent figure in modern and contemporary art in the Philippines and elsewhere who worked on kinetic, installative, participatory art, and other actions that do not neatly fall into accepted categories. During the opening of the CCP in 1969, he led a blitzkrieg demonstration that protested against what he saw as the Center’s philistinism. Caught by a cop securing the grand opening, Medalla was escorted outside, and when asked if he had the necessary permit to protest, he handed over his invitation, from the First Lady Imelda Marcos no less, and invoked his right to unfurl his art work—a cartolina on which was hand-painted: “A BAS LA MYSTIFICATION! DOWN WITH THE PHILISTINES!”

The government of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos was deposed in 1986 by way of the EDSA People Power uprising. With the uprising came a renewed democratic impetus that skewed the priorities of institutions ensconced by the Marcoses. From being a venue for international travelling exhibitions, the MET focused on Filipino art. The CCP started to exhibit works of social realist artists, which could not be hosted in the 1970s. The DCP was absorbed by the Department of Trade and Industry. The administration of the MOPA was debated upon by organizations in a series of meetings revolving around the anxiety of what it takes for a post-Marcos institution to be democratic. In the end, it was discovered that the site of MOPA was not owned by the Philippine national government and that the institution itself did not have funds to continue its operations; ultimately, it was shuttered.

The democratic impulse, alongside its myriad mystification from a resurgent pre-Marcos oligarchy, informed artistic practices and shaped ecologies of participation during this period. Artist collectives were formed as part of the renewed sense of democratized practice. Kababaihan sa Sining at Bagong Sibol na Kamalayan (Women in the Arts in an Emerging Consciousness, KASIBULAN) was founded in 1987 by visual artists Ida Bugayong, Julie Lluch Dalena, Imelda Cajipe Endaya, Brenda Fajardo, and Anna Fer. It was inspired by a consultation conference on Women Development organized by the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW). At the heart of the organization was the goal to surface a “collective consciousness of Filipino women from which new image and identity can emerge and transformation can begin by giving a sense of power and empowerment” by creating “network[s] with women artists regionally, nationally, and internationally.” This collective consciousness presents itself in “her visual language, her sensibility, and artistic excellence” and in “symbolism, imagery, values, and beliefs of women’s personal and collective transformation” and in an interest in “crafts that are the traditional domain of women—tribal, indigenous, or folk, as an alternative effort to the inescapable influence of Western modernism.”  Besides such aspiration, the group also endeavored to “assist women’s groups in resolving women issues that have long hindered the socio-economic and cultural growth of Filipino women.” The membership was “open to all women in the arts—visual, literary, and performing artists including art historians, educators, and critics who demonstrate a willingness to work for the sisterhood’s goals.” From monthly fora, to exhibitions, to publications, the KASIBULAN fostered a community of women artists, conscious of the issues of gender and the potentials of feminist struggle if the consciousness veered towards it.