The Eye Of The Fish. Luis H. Francia
as you might think.”
Within a month, he had purchased property in Baguio, financing the purchase by selling off his collection of antique Philippine maps. In a period of two to three years, he had built his home, made up of two modest but well-designed buildings separated by a Japanese garden. The Baguio Artists Guild, which he helped to found, was at the forefront of the regional art movements in the country, and proving to be much more dynamic than the art scene in Manila, which is still very much enthralled by the Western model. In 1993, he chaired perhaps the guild’s most successful festival, which, for the first time, had invited foreign artists to participate. Its theme was Salubungan Agos, or Cross Currents. Painters, writers, performance artists, photographers, and critics, mostly from the Asia Pacific region, gathered in Baguio. Baguio’s small-city atmosphere fostered an informality that enhanced the exchange of perspectives, not the least of which were the enjoyable all-night sessions at Café by the Ruins, a popular, open-air café near City Hall. There, well-known Philippine writers such as Alfred Yuson, Ricardo de Ungria, and José Dalisay Jr., read from their works. There, too, amidst impromptu jam sessions by musicians in the café’s garden, discussions quickly became festive, boisterous—and fun. I had been a participant, collaborating with two friends, Los Angeles-based visual artist Yong Soon Min and her husband, the writer Allan deSouza, on an installation entitled Geographies of Desire that explored the intersections between colonial history and the way that that history continued to exploit, through mass merchandising, the former subjects of empire.
The art up in Baguio had a raw quality and, unlike in Manila, a spiritual element that acknowledged the rituals and the animist traditions of the Cordilleras. The Baguio artists had become the new shamans, opening up in directions previously looked down on as “folk art,” claiming the freedom to utilize Philippine icons, mythology, popular images, and native materials as well, from handmade paper to bamboo and woven mats. In the process, they were able to recontextualize themselves and the native self. Here, Bencab had found his niche, his home.
Unlike Bencab, Santiago Bose, another founding member of the guild, is from Baguio. This is where, after living abroad for several years, he grew up, and where he has returned. Santi, as his friends call him, is a Baguio artist of imagination and wit; once, he set up a bamboo mock-radar dish on a hill facing a real radar installation that had been put up by the U.S. military on another hill. We had become friends in Manhattan, where he had been living, but shortly after Aquino came to power in 1986, Bose (an only child) returned to Baguio in order to attend to his father, who had a history of high blood presure and was very ill. His mother passed away unexpectedly, before his father subsequently did, and an aunt quickly followed. Immediately his clan became suspicious. Perhaps someone, a mangkukulam, or sorcerer, had cast an evil spell on the family. In a city known for its healers, ranging from tribal herbolarios and shamans to psychic surgeons, it was easy to engage a warlock to find out who was behind this deadly mischief. Reading the signs, the warlock said the unlucky spell had been cast by a former girlfriend of one of Santi’s cousins. Cherchez la femme. Fortunately, no retribution was necessary, only a counter spell, to break the hex.
BAG artists were somewhat like that warlock, engaged in break-ing the Western hex. Keeping an eye out for a new Magellan, a great number of Filipino artists had ignored their indigenous traditions, and subsequently had a flawed sense of themselves as creators. With the founding of the guild, Santi now had another reason for staying. He had grown dissatisfied with working in New York where the art of countries like the Philippines had been routinely ignored. New York had numerous exhibition spaces, and Santi had had both group and solo shows in the early 1980s. But these were usually tagged as works by “minority” artists or by “people of color.” Such labels were deliberately misread by the cultural mavens with clout as implying tokenism rather than merit—a misreading that helped to justify their avoidance. It was a little different if you were a black artist or writer, where your work would be reacted to, noticed, or reviewed by the establishment, in part to assuage their collective guilt over the horrendous history of slavery and oppression. The art itself sometimes seemed secondary in these reviews, a perception that tainted even the most enthusiastic assessments.
As with so many Filipinos in the American diaspora, Santi felt that, as the ex-colonized, we were invisible. When acknowledged, which wasn’t often, we were seen as country cousins, asked, though politely, to remain in the kitchen, from where we could peek into the drawing- and living-rooms of the elite. If allowed in, it was only intermittently as transients or sojourners. Immensely complicating this process was the lack of historical awareness, and the often wilful ignorance of most Americans, of Westerners, about who we were and whence we came. (“The Philippines? Where is that?” “East of New Jersey.” “You speak English so well.” “I learned it on the plane coming over.”) Santi had had enough of that; he felt that creating a homegrown, largely self-taught aesthetic was crucial to moving away from what he termed an “overdependence on the West.”
Here in microcosm was the continuing, usually lopsided, dialectic between Third World assertions and First World dominance of resources and information. Here too was a dialectic between Baguio and Manila. Manila continued to be the breeding- and feeding-ground of artists whose mindset had been almost totally dominated by Western art history, and who produced work as though they were part of—rather than outside—that history. Their aesthetics, their works, were often emasculated to fit a so-called “international style,” which could then be placed on the global, i.e., Western, art market. Prettified eunuchs guarding the seraglio, they in effect reenforced, rather than deconstructed, the whole process of neocolonization. BAG would be an agent of decolonization, a raison d’etre that went hand in hand with the spirit of resistance that characterized the Cordilleras.
Switching to Tagalog, Santi states emphatically, “Kung Manila ang pipinta ng Igorot, iba. Kung Igorot ang pipinta sa Igorot, hindi ma-misrepresent.” (“When Manila portrays the Igorot, it’s different. When the Igorot portrays the Igorot, it’s accurate.”) The main issue was and would always be one of control. Bose’s efforts and those of Bencab and other fellow Baguio artists were related to the task of reclaiming both cultural and psychic territory from the invader, nowadays as likely to wear the glittery garb of pop culture as a military uniform.
In one of Bose’s installations, Pasyon at Rebolusyon, with its explicit reference to Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution (a seminal work on nineteenth-century Filipino peasant aspirations for independence contextualized through sacred texts on Christ’s sufferings), indigenous materials, local iconography including a revolutionary flag, inscriptions, and miniature figures make up an ironic and highly eloquent altar. The piece continues his often irreverent attempts to articulate the nationalist feelings of those whom Carlos Bulosan, a Filipino poet and prose writer who had died of tuberculosis in Seattle in 1956, termed “the nameless in history.”
If the works of Bose exuded the ambiguities of a postcolonial sit-uation, so too did the works of two other guild founders, filmmaker Eric De Guia and installation artist Roberto Villanueva. De Guia’s 1977 Perfumed Nightmare, his first film, had been a hit in international film festivals from Berlin to Tokyo. A wry and quietly funny commentary on the neocolonial condition, the film was a sustained laugh at ourselves, at Catholicism, at our infatuation with Western technology—all the absurdities of a postcolonial hangover. The works of Villanueva, on the other hand, clearly reiterated the importance of nearly forgotten highland ritual and symbol. He used such forms as the village dapay (a circle of stone seats surrounding a hearth, where tribal elders would gather to discuss important matters) as well as ritualistic offerings to animist spirits, such as the launching of mini-boats on lakes, as reminders of a center the displaced Filipino needed to retreat to. Villanueva often placed himself at the vortex of his installations, performing as both artist and shaman. And indeed he succeeded in being both, his works at once timeless in their transcendental simplicity and elegantly modern. His last installation before he passed away from leukemia was a series of giant slim cylinders, each eight meters long, symbolizing acupuncture needles with which to help heal a wounded earth. Villanueva had an acute sense of how the pain inflicted over the centuries by both colonized and colonizer had seeped into the very ground they stood on.
The efforts of the Baguio artists to shape their own creative destinies