Two Pinoy artists were chosen to be part of the Singapore Biennale 2011, and while this might seem like a quirk of fate that’s like most of the grants and awards they’ve individually received before, there is much to be said about the fact that these two artists are Louie Cordero and Mark Salvatus.
In an essay written for the Biennale on these two artists, Dr. Patrick D. Flores (Curator, Vargas Museum) draws similarities between Cordero and Salvatus succinctly: These two are masters of living in these spaces that are theirs, both imagined and real. The former via popular culture that’s crass and painful and class-based, the former based on the streets we walk, the poverty that’s normal, the deprivation that’s default. With eyes wide open, Cordero and Salvatus are able to live here, even as they elude it, escape it, and find a way for it to become the subject of art without romanticizing it.
I might not be doing justice to Flores here, of course. But there is much justice in the works of Salvatus and Cordero.
very few things survive the stretch of Bonifacio High Street, save for tents selling real estate. after all there’s “public art” here, ones that don’t change and are mostly closely guarded: a two dimensional mickey mouse here, an unconventional slide there, an inverted fountain further down. in this context, art of any form, installations of any other kind, would just seem out of place.
but the way of the cross as reconsidered and reconfigured by Church Simplified succeeds in this space, both as art installations, and as a popularization of what is a ritual that has ceased to be simple, with Catholicism that’s everything and difficult to deal with given our own human rights and the Church’s insistence on moral authority. but i digress.
on the path of the conventional Visita Iglesia with the Nanay, we were both only surprised. she had done it countless times as a Catholic school girl, and i had done it with Lola Nena and Lolo Ding one holyweek, when I was the easiest teenage girl to drag around the city. this was the first time mother (her) and daughter (me) were out there, combing the nearby churches, and finding that for most of them the Stations of the Cross within the Church were covered up: the more important ritual was the adoration of the altar of repose, and the stations were relegated to a makeshift set-up in the courtyard or parking lot. it made for a less solemn time at prayer and meditation in front of each station, it made for a feeling that we were being discouraged to go through this Maundy Thursday ritual.
meanwhile at BoniHighStreet, and via Church Simplified, the stations of the cross are freed from the structures and new rituals of the conventional church, and surprisingly can work in the midst of commercial establishments — high end ones at that. don’t worry, the irony isn’t lost on me, though this time it does seem overrated.
no, this isn’t quite a modern take on the way or stations of the cross, as it is a popularization of it. Walkway: Reflections on the Stations of the Cross begins with step one: put it elsewhere other than a church. then moves on to step two: talk about it in words that are easy to understand, in a way that’s also about an amount of reflection, in a manner that is a conversation between equals, paraphrasing — quite well, I might add — from original texts that tell the story of Jesus Christ’s journey to death and resurrection. what is more laudable is the fact of tone: each of the 12 stations are spoken of comfortably, forcing a sense of familiarity even on the non-religious (i.e., ME).
listen in on how judgmental YOU sound
that is to say that the re-imagination that this way of the cross allows the spectator is one that is almost beyond religion and religiosity, and is about the gift of a story, one that’s told so well, it becomes believable and real, no matter if you are believer or not. this is a wonderful gift really, one that happens in stark contrast to the way in which the conventional Church talks about the death and suffering of Christ as always frighteningly about our sins, period.
the more powerful stations I thought were ones that forced spectator to deal with some quiet, if not reflection. station #5 which is the scourging, is re-titled “the whip” and talks about the process of scourging and the weapon that’s used to inflict pain on its victim. the rendering of the whip, hanging lengthwise against bloodied black walls, actually works not just as reminder, but as art installation: there is restraint here, a sense of someone taking control and seeing the value of what in the end is a quiet violence, more powerful than any of the installations on this stretch of BoniHighStreet.
the scourging as the whip as art installation
the quiet of charity was in that lone statue of a kid on a platform for station #4 entitled “the verdict”, a retelling of Jesus being judged by Pilate. the statue was made clearly into a street kid given the huge tattered shirt he was wearing, which was also ultimately about the same kind of control and restraint that’s in “the whip” and in art installation, both.
charity for one. irony in action.
the power of restraint in creating just the right amount of drama meanwhile is in station #6 re-titled “the curse” from the conventional Jesus is crowned with thorns station. here, a crown is put on a pedestal of sorts, surrounded by thorns and encased in glass. the light that shines from within the casing, would be too much given the gold of the crown, were it not a well chosen deep red light, one that doesn’t shine through the glass but stays within it. this provides just the right amount of drama, highlighting the difference of this station from the rest of the installations and stations that are mostly in black.
equally wonderful about Church Simplified’s ways of the cross is its requirement of involvement: you read about “the two simons” and are told to think of someone who has helped you in a time of dire need, and to pick other people’s prayers from a bowl and say the prayer for them, as you leave your own wishes in the same bowl. you are Simon of Cyrene as the next person will be for you.
let someone else say your prayer
then there are the acts of carrying a cross in station #8, or of nailing one’s sins as represented by black cloth from station #6 onto station #9 “the crucifixion”, or of lifting an old black telephone and listening to people talking about and prejudging somebody else. there are the acts of walking through darkness inside a tent to signify the “seeming” darkness of Good Friday in station #12, or of writing down the name of a person you wish to thank by saying a little prayer for her in station #13 “the cloth”, about the story of Easter.
what these stations required of me as spectator were surprisingly easy to get into, on the one hand as a meditation, on the other as a way of dealing with this story of one man whose story is also that of a society. one that’s so familiar, one that’s exactly where we’re at still, the one we continue to (re-)create.
what is striking though in the process of walking through Church Simplified’s stations of the cross is its ability at reconfiguring this story into one that’s current and relevant, complete with really cool Christian rock music (that i’m now hunting down), and activities that don’t fall into the trap of making things fun-without-a-point. instead what’s here is a story told and reconfigured into hope, and possibility, and light. plenty of it. and in the face of a conventional Catholic Church that’s in the throes of losing plenty of its believers, in the midst of arguing with our own Catholic selves about the contradictions between this Church and our own real lives, this popularization is exactly what local Catholicism needs. less of the preaching and instilling fear, more of the talking to us all as equals, yes? there is hope for Catholic religiosity in this country yet.
Baffling is the tiny art space that is 20 Square in SLab at Silverlens Gallery (Pasong Tamo Ext., Makati City). Sometimes it’s but an extension of the rest of the works in SLab; most other times that I’ve been there, it’s a measure of artists’ creativity in smaller works, something that I imagine is about discipline and control.
And then at other times, I am surprised and want to live in 20 Square. Dex Fernandez’sm/ made me want to do exactly that. I wanted to find a chair and sit in the middle of the small room and stare at the small sculptures attached to the walls. Of course a chair for one would’ve filled that tiny space.
Images of a crowd in a small space is also what the idea of m/ creates; m/ is the symbol for that rock ‘n’ roll signal we do with our fingers (pinky and index fingers up, middle fingers kept down by thumb). It is also what you think of first when you enter that room and see what seems to be a version of a rock poster. Fernandez brings back memories of rock concerts (OPM and otherwise), and crowds, and drinking and noise. I almost wished they were playing some rock music inside the tiny room.
The first thing that strikes you when you enter the Looking For Juan (L4J) art space (Serendra, Taguig City) for the Mga Kuwentong EDSA exhibit is how familiar the images on both the small and large canvasses are, with faces and figures both real and abstract that speak of a time we might be too young to remember.
But the icons / slogans / colors continue to have currency.
Two artists are part of this exhibit, from different generations, both working with the EDSA Revolution of 1986 as premise. The works here are so obviously different, the similarities are just startling.
The failure happens first on the level of being disallowed to take photos in the Ayala Museum, something that’s even stranger when the exhibit is purportedly about people power, and yet the people aren’t allowed to take photos anywhere in that museum, a reminder really of why I’ve stopped going there.
It took an exhibit like Revolution Revisited(Ayala Museum, Makati City now up at on a mall and campus tour) by photographer Kim Komenich to make me step foot in this museum again; it is also an exhibit that I can barely be happy about. Komenich’s curatorial note attached to the exhibit is a failure in itself, a re-writing of history from an obviously removed perspective, one that has stuck to a narrative of EDSA 1986 that has since become highly questionable, if not proven false.
Two of the more glaring things: many factors informed the people’s march to the streets on February 22 to 25 1986. There was the cheating in the snap elections, the only one that Komenich acknowledges, but also: the civil disobedience campaign that had Cory and the people going up against the oligarchies and capitalists, the military defection of Juan Ponce Enrile and Fidel Ramos even when that was filled with too many silences still, and the truth that since Ninoy’s funeral march the people had gained an amount of courage that just kept on growing, through the Cory campaign, then the snap elections and poll watching, fearlessly ignoring the possibility of being picked up by the ever-watchful Marcos military.
Another glaring historical mistake was the assertion that February 25 1986 was the birth of what Komenich calls “the people power phenomenon.” What of tanks being stopped on February 23? What of people welcoming defiant soldiers who refused to disperse the crowds on February 24? What of artists and celebrities coming out to the streets and providing entertainment through the wee hours of February 23 to February 25?
I cringe at the idea that the 25th was the one day that gave birth to people power. I dare argue that its birth happened when people showed literally the kind of power they hold collectively, not when the dictator and his family began packing their things to leave Malacañang. I daresay that people power was born when people joined Cory’s civil disobedience campaign and literally refused to buy San Miguel and Nestle products, emptied Rustan’s of its shoppers, closed down banks, deemed the economy unstable. These were the same people who thought to, who knew to, stop tanks at EDSA. They proved people power then.
Komenich’s reading of EDSA ‘86 to be about cheating in the snap elections and the Marcos dictatorship ultimately just allowed it to revolve around the Cory-Marcos dichotomy, which wasn’t all that those four days was about. This reading of EDSA ’86 actually set this exhibit up for failure.
Which is not to say that it didn’t try to speak of the people, too; except that the way it did only begged the question: but in what light? The exhibit begins with photos of the every man pre-EDSA ‘86: a farmer with a carabao in the fields, a woman carrying a new born baby surrounded by even more of her children, a malnourished boy looking out onto the world. Then Revolution Revisited goes back and forth, from a photo of Cory Aquino’s proclamation rally and the aforementioned every Pinoy in 1986, to 1983 onwards with photos of Lean Alejandro, Evelio Javier, Ninoy Aquino and the snap elections. What was more surprising to me than the fact that our local photographers have their own versions of these photos, is the fact that of the four days of EDSA, what this exhibit had was only three days — three days! There were no photos of Day 3, February 24 1986, unless my turning around and going back to look for even just one photo was a failure in curation.
Day Three of course was a crucial time of defections and false alarms, people jumping and celebrating, government stations being taken over, as well as the threat of Marines in Camp Aguinaldo poised to shoot at Crame. Its absence in a revisiting of EDSA ’86 just seemed like a huge dark gaping hole.
Meanwhile, the stretch of colored photos at the end of this black and white exhibit highlighted even more the distance of the power players from the people who made EDSA happen. That these personalities were allowed to speak about EDSA seems like the most redundant of things: we know what presidential daughter, now sister, Pinky Aquino-Abelleda, as well as Fidel Ramos, Juan Ponce Enrile and the rich of this country, would say about EDSA ‘86: they’ve been saying it the past 25 years.
And then there is this: these personalities are already the ones who contribute to a mainstream narrative that speaks of EDSA ’86 on the superficial level of unity and the general notion of change. They are also part of the oligarchies and powers that Cory had set out to fight through the civil disobedience campaign. Pray tell why would I want a businessman and capitalist to talk to me about EDSA ’86?
Ah, but Revolution Revisited also lets the faces of the every Pinoy in the beginning of the exhibit to speak at this point. Their photos are taken within the same contexts as before, reminding us that the farmer is still a farmer, the impoverished mother is still such, except that it’s been 25 years. Yes, nothing has changed for them, and this they also say in so many words. The malnourished boy has since died, and his family is still as poor as they were in ’86.
Thus this exhibit ends with the heaviest of feelings about EDSA ’86, highlighting the idea that it has led to nothing, that it was to a certain extent pointless. To have ended with the impoverished and the constancy of their conditions is to forget that EDSA ‘86 was a promise of possibility. That the poor are still such, that the conditions have stayed the same, is the fault of those big personalities who were in power yet have failed to truly affect change. It is not the failure of EDSA ‘86, or of people power at all.
Revolution Revisited in this form is thus just a reminder of the fact that Komenich’s perspective is that of someone who might have lived with us in those four days of EDSA, and who might think himself one with us. But ultimately this exhibit is reminder that he is just a foreigner who fails tremendously to see and celebrate EDSA ’86 for what it was then, and what it should be about now: a time when the greatness of a people was proven by their collective ability to be fearless and courageous in the face of possible death.
This exhibit’s revisiting of EDSA 1986 fails the people power revolution; as such it also ultimately fails all of us.
Revolution Revisited ran until March 5 2011 at the Ayala Museum, Makati Avenue corner Dela Rosa St., Makati City, and is now on a mall andcampus tour.
EDSA 1986 historical facts from reading Chronology of a Revolution by Angela Stuart-Santiago. All of it is up at EDSARevolution.com.
