It seems like an easy enough case of copyright infringement really. Filipino artist Leeroy New files a case against the producers of the movie “Enteng Ng Ina Mo” for copying his original muscle dress design and using it as the costume of its main villainess Satana. New wants to be paid P10 million pesos in damages; certainly a small amount given the P180 million plus that “Enteng” earned in its eight days of screening. (more…)
in November 2010, i blogged about Lucio Tan getting away with the plan to lay off regular Philippine Airline workers in favor of outsourcing services, with the Department of Labor and Employment siding with him. now, almost a year since, PNoy proves himself an Hacienda Luisita heir, and actually says the PALEA workers who are on strike might be held liable for economic sabotage.
the President is saying that these regular employees who have served PAL — and therefore the public — for years are to be blamed for making the company that’s retrenching them lose money? here for the world to see, the mind of a President who mouths his matuwid na daan rhetoric at the same time that he sacrifices 2,600 workers’ lives and their families’ lives for who exactly?
because in whose mind would it be normal and rational, just and fair, to lay off 2,600 employees favouring one of the richest Filipinos of 2009. really, now. Lucio Tan’s net worth then was at $1.7 billion dollars. that’s P78 BILLION PESOS. This year, he’s second richest in the land, with a net worth of $2.1 billion dollars, that’s close to P90 BILLION PESOS (89.67 to be exact).
according to DOLE, the rich are to be pitied because business is down, and therefore we must allow them to retrench workers.
let’s be clear here: we should feel no pity – at all – for Tan and his PAL management. they are not the oppressed here. and if you think otherwise, you should read up. or maybe try being an employee for once, and then talk to me about oppression.
because oppression is when you’re issued a gag order that disallows you to talk about your salary – not because it’s big mind you, but because it’s lower than most other pilots. in August, 27 pilots resigned because they wanted better wages. but this resignation was also about taking a stand against the way they were being treated by Tan and PAL management.
before this, 11 co-pilots had been forced to resign by PAL management because they wanted these pilots to fly planes under Air Philippines and Aero Filipinas – both owned by Tan. the point? these pilots would be hired as contractual employees, which means theirwages would be cut in half,low as it already is in PAL.
but it can only get worse. Tan and PAL management did want to work on these spin-off companies so they might gain more profit, but this wasn’t in the form of hiring old workers on a contractual basis; it was to outsource employment which makes imperative the termination of 2,600 workers.
you ask why didn’t PAL employees hold a strike earlier? why did they wait for things to be so bad, to come to a head, to pile up like this? a history lesson might be in order: 12 years ago in retaliation against striking workers, the PAL management terminated 600 pilots and almost 2,000 members of the cabin crew. and yes, that case of wrongful termination is still in our courts.
so you see, Lucio Tan has gotten away with murder in this country, in so many ways, and too many times. governments have let him kill, time and again.
it might be good to remind PNoy that his mother, seeing as she is always invoked by him and his sisters, never dealt with Lucio Tan – in fact Cory was seen as hostile towards Tan, thank goodness.
and just in case this isn’t enough to convince PNoy that his delegation of this job has fallen on horrible hands. read the DOLE’s justification of its decision, it’s so naive – or maybe just blind – to the workings of a capitalist empire like the one Lucio Tan’s creating for himself. DOLE believed PAL when the latter said it has been suffering financially the past two years, though a look at PAL’s own milestones shows that it has done nothing in the past two years but to acquire and to expand. it sure doesn’t look like a business that’s suffering. Cebu Pacific might have beaten it already, but that doesn’t mean it’s in the red.
oh and just so you know, in 1998 PAL also used as excuse financial difficulties to defend its downsizing of operations and termination of employees. but too, maybe all it takes is to imagine how far Lucio Tan’s money – the one that’s declared in and everything else extraneous to those richest man in the Philippines numbers – could go into spending on PAL employees’ wages or just making lives better all around.
but too, there’s an even easier question to ask: if Lucio Tan is second richest man in this country, howthef*#@! can the same man have a business that’s going under?
Enjoy Division is a group exhibit not just with a wonderful title, but which had a curatorial note by Antares Gomez Bartolome that the Light&Space Contemporary gallery decided to put down.
the said note was critical of Malaysian curator Adeline Ooi’s assessment of Philippine contemporary art which looked down on us, i.e., “We already know you were conquered by the Spanish, sold to the Americans, raped by the Japanese and totally fucked over by Marcoses” but which praised artists influenced by Roberto Chabet. (that article was up at businessworld which now requires you to pay to see its archives. bleh.)
since Light&Space Contemporary’s censorship of the curatorial note, artists of Enjoy Division have decided to take down the exhibit.
it seems about right that they do, given the fact that there is no intelligent response from the gallery — at least none that’s been made public — other than what’s here.
via @Antares Gomez B. on Facebook (August 29)
Dear Light & Space Contemporary,
I am posting this essay for purposes of establishing a dialogue. Kindly reply with your reason/s for taking the essay down. So far, all I have is a forwarded message from Buen Abrigo, one of our organizers, who received a message from you. It reads: “Ano ba nangyari? tinangal namin yung writeup nyo, sablay sya men, sabihin nyo sa writer nyo, d namin susuportahan yung writeup, di pwde i publish gamit anglight and space. Maganda sana at solid yung show pero panira lang yung writer, gusto mo magusap tayo mamaya para malinaw sa inyo kung bakit d approve yung writeup.”
it’s interesting here how a show is judged as “maganda at solid” extraneous to its a curatorial note. the next step would’ve been for the gallery to explain their reasons for saying yes to this exhibit to begin with — what exactly did they think it would be about? — because they seem to be surprised about that note, when it could only be an integral part of the process of putting up that exhibition. of course it’s entirely possible that the process is different for this gallery, and that they were really truly surprised, then maybe the question should be: why? what was so wrong about an essay that critiques a foreigner’s take on Pinoy art?
and really, how do we deal with the notions of the curatorial note being separate from the exhibit it curates? though maybe let’s start by talking about the difference between the curatorial note and its writer: sablay yung write-up? panira yung writer? ganda.
via @Antares Gomez B. on Facebook UPDATE (August 31):
During our exhibition group’s meeting yesterday evening, we decided to ask the gallery for a written explanation for their decision to ban the essay. We received two text messages from them.
“Right din ng gallery na tanggalin ang mga bagay na negative or nakakasira sa gallery at sa mga tao na involved dito, ayaw namin makisama sa drama nyo kay ooi”
-Pow Martinez 30 Aug 2011 9:43pm
“Pwede naman palitan yung exhibit text nyo na walang name dropping na negative na sinasabi.”
-Pow Martinez 30 Aug 2011 10:08pm
We decided to ask if these two messages constituted the official statement of the gallery as they were rather general and vague.
We then received a telephone call from Pow Martinez where Buen Abrigo explained that the works could not sacrifice the essay, that the works were the manifestations and elaborations of the essay’s sentiment and vice versa, and that the criticism of how certain parties are distorting and exploiting (the making of) art history was integral to the exhibition’s concept.
The reply was that the gallery did not agree with our concept. “Lame” was the word.
We have since decided to withdraw our works from this so-called alternative space.
Despite our disappointment with the gallery management, we take heart that the exhibition was able to highlight the ideological lines that divide the milieu we are part of, lines that help determine the breadth, pitch, and span of critical art production and discourse.
and so it becomes clear: as far as the gallery’s concerned: (1) no curatorial note can say anything negative and/or namedrop, and (2) responding to a foreign curator’s statements about Philippine art is “drama” that’s negative. and yes, we got that loud and clear, it’s the gallery’s right to take down a curatorial note, BUT keep the exhibit that goes with it as if it stands on its own. got it.
so you know, there is actual debate and engagement with the strategies/tragedies/ concepts/ideologies/fictions that create this art world, and then there’s murahan at personalan, walang paliwanagan. and there are mafias and cliques and friendships, a refusal to change the way things are, and the general disregard for and distrust in criticism, even when they dish it against critics who engage them in intelligent discourse.
right here is why i never agreed with the idea that the one great thing to come out of the conservative controversy that was poleteismo is that people will start talking about philippine art. because the censorship of Enjoy Division’s curatorial note was infinitely more offensive and should resonate for anyone who writes — anyone at all — and as such demands involvement from those who joined the fray of kulo’s closure.
but the national artist and the high-and-mighty writers of this world don’t seem to care about art anymore, even when it’s been trampled upon by a foreigner with false grand statements about Pinoy art, even when it is censored in light of protecting one way of viewing art making in this country.
we prove in the end that post-poleteismo, and save for the grand couple of weeks when everyone was suddenly an art critic in this country and no one complained, the issue of censorship in the arts and the systems that allow it — without the noise of the penis — will only fall on deaf ears.
on August 11 the presscon of the group Palayain Ang Sining became interesting to me for many reasons, least of all what was being said. and no, this wasn’t a measure of who was speaking, or what was being said, but the kind of room it became, filled with media as it was.
and no, pinky webb wasn’t even there. neither was karen davila. but there were men with huge versions of their penises, este, long hard lenses. and they weren’t pointing it at who was talking.
i’m this close to that man’s elbow because he was practically standing over the girl beside me. we were facing the front of the room where National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera, Karen Flores-Ocampo, Myra Beltran, etal., were making their statements about freedom of expression, which should’ve matter to all of us in the audience. except that these men weren’t interested in who was talking, nor did they want to gain a better sense of what’s actually going on here, complicit as they’ve been in the manner in which freedom of expression has been compromised given media’s treatment of the exhibit Kulo.
instead they had their sights set on the one person they had sacrificed and made into their headline, and who was refusing to speak that day, who has (thankfully) refused to speak since.
what astounded me about these members of the media, in this small conference room of the college of mass comm in UP, was not so much that they were zeroing in on mideo, but that they were ultimately bastos about it. they not only had their backs turned to the ones speaking in front, they also kept disrupting the proceedings as they reprimanded each other and talked in loud whispers among themselves. they didn’t evenstop taking pictures as we sang the national anthem. they didn’t stopfor the national anthem when there was a Philippine flag in that room.
that morning, and without a doubt, the media showed what it is they’re made of, and why they are so capable of irresponsibility and sensationalism. we should all just admit that in the end, when push comes to shove, all we want is to find an enemy and serve him on a silver platter to the religious and conservatives and powerful in this country, thinking that we’re gaining tickets to heaven by doing so.
in truth, we’ve built a version of hell here, and it’s pretty clear who the devils are.
let me skip the fact that this artwork is old, i.e., this is the nth version of it that’s been exhibited. let me not do a review of the whole exhibit Kulo here, as i hope to still be able to do that with more time in my hands.
in fact, this i feel is more urgent. elsewhere i praise pinky webb. since two days ago, i have completely changed my mind about her.
by this fact: upon a complaint, and many others who agreed on her show exklusibong, explosibong, expose‘s FB page, she does two stories on mideo cruz‘s art installation “Poleteismo” at the Cultural Center of the Philippines gallery. the follow up story is what i get to see, where pinky reveals herself as the worse kind of media personality there is, doing a story on a creative work and in the process proving that she actually thinks little — if at all — of art and creativity.
i don’t care how many people complain about an artwork, and i get the capitalist intent of the media believing that sensationalism is a service to the public. but it should be the media’s responsibility to see an artwork and not miss the fact that it is an artwork. i’m the last person who will insist that we cannot be offended by art — even i have limitations. but at the very least a piece of art should be seen in its totality, not at all what pinky did here.
instead her camera focused on the christ’s face attached to which was a wooden penis; the drawing that likened him to micky mouse; the condoms hanging/attached to certain religious images. when faced with mideo, her question of him was to the effect: anong pumasok sa isip mo at nagawa mo ‘to?
obviously pinky was coming from a place of agreement with those who have complained about “Poleteismo;” obviously this was pinky revealing herself as the conservative that she is, as a media personality who is limited by her notion(s) of art, or lack of it; obviously pinky is a perfect example of objectivity proving itself only a stance that panders to the Pinoy church, noisy and controversial and powerful as it is.
because at the very least, pinky should’ve featured that work as a whole, that is a whole goddamn room, and not zero in on its parts as if that was the whole work. when i saw “Poleteismo” i did not quickly or easily associate it with religiosity, as i did with icons and institutions, belief systems and ideologies: imelda and ferdie, mickey mouse, robert jaworski, showbiz personalities, the university of the philippines, activism, slogans, chants, sex, and yes, Catholicism. the latter is not only one of many things here, it is crucial to see it as such because it’s the only way to experience the space (again, this was practically a whole room) and let its bombardment of images do what it must: startle you, disgust you, at the very least force you to see that this was not just about religiosity as it was about idolatry.
after which we might argue about what exactly this work questions, what it puts side by side with catholicism, what it says about the state of the nation since 2007 when a version of it was first installed. then let’s talk about whether we should take offense at all, given our catholicism, or whether or not this is the kind of catholicism that’s embroiled in all the other things we hold dear sinful and evil as they might be considered.
pinky herself performed the travesty and tragedy that this work critiques, and she has no idea. i’d be sad about it, were i not dismayed that she didn’t know better.
to have even walked through that space and spoken to the artist, all captured on the XXX camera, and then to have asked those questions, is a measure of pinky and no one else. my undergraduate students would’ve asked infinitely better questions of mideo and of CCP Visual Arts director karen ocampo-flores, who has said as much about the manner in which “Poleteismo” has been treated in parts versus in its entirety.
of course the latter is expected of the Pinoy Church, petty as they are, lost as they are in the changing — almost static — contemporary times. but to have the media, and popular media at that! failing to be critical precisely of the premises of this complaint against “Poleteismo,” failing to see the work and thinking ah, that complaint could be wrong, is just unforgivable. you know what else is a measure of bad journalism here? in the course of that segment, i did not hear pinky mention the title of the mideo’s work (though i might have missed it as i was getting more and more incensed by the minute). she also kept calling the work an “exhibit” — which it isn’t. she wouldn’t have had the right to talk about the exhibit as a whole either, i.e. Kulo itself, because she didn’t even mention the rest of those works. which is just irresponsible too, to have failed not just in seeing the entirety of “Poleteismo,” but also in placing it in the context of the bigger exhibit.
what pinky did was the height of sensationalist reportage, with the arts as sacrificial lamb, bringing on discussions on morality and money, the bane of the culture industry in this country. that segment on “Poleteismo” ends with pinky saying something to the effect that creative freedom must not impinge upon religious beliefs. oh but what to do with someone who did not even get into the creativity of something? what of someone who will fight for freedom of expression in the media, but will absolutely fail to get art productions? good lord (yes using his name in vain, so sue me).
of course i can hear the bottom line here: for pinky it’s that someone actually complained about that artwork and was offended, well let me throw this into the picture:
i am offended by this project of Sen. TG Guingona because it is an unnecessary use of taxpayers money, since the people he talked to for Design Para sa Lahat are rich people to begin with who do not need any financial support in doing what they already do and have the infrastructure for! i am disgusted and offended and angered by this, and i am complaining! and i want to put in the word konyo for more sensationalism.
sige nga, sinong makakagawa ng feature tungkol diyan?