Category Archive for: pulitika

Kulô before/after the hysteria

August 20, 2011

Going to art exhibits and events since 2009, I find that what I enjoy most about it is the solitude and silence. I’m not known in art circles (or any circle for that matter) and can go around unobtrusively; on “gallery days” it’s rare that there are other spectators, least of all someone I know, in these art spaces. It’s a gift, a break I take even as it requires trips to places from UN Avenue in Manila to West Avenue in Quezon City. The time becomes mine, the art I own with my gaze.

It was with this same gaze, within the same task of going to see as many exhibits as I can, that I went to Kulô at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) on July 2 2011. I was doing Virgin Labfest 7 marathons, and made sure to come early to spend a good hour at the gallery. A day or so after, I virtually happened upon participating artist Pocholo Goitia and told him how much I loved the exhibit, the best of the Rizal efforts I’d seen so far; a couple of weeks after he tells me in passing that it’s gotten into some controversy or other and I brush it off: who has cared about art in the past three years that I’ve been engaging with it in my own way(s)? Given Kulô’s premises I also thought the only ones who’d wrongly take offense would be the University of Santo Tomas (UST), alumni as the exhibiting artists are of the said university, the Goitia essay particularly placing the exhibit within, beyond and against the said institution. (more…)

komentaryo

boiling over: Kulo

August 9, 2011

there is no excuse — no excuse — for a President who not only presumes that 85% of this country are the same kind of Catholic; he also then thinks that this is a valid enough reason to gauge public anger. no excuse for a President who is as bad as Vic de Leon Lima. let me not begin with the fact that his own father died for democracy and freedom, the same things that this President has sacrificed here. and you are wrong, Ser Noy, this is not a question of whether or not freedom is absolute; it’s a question of you folding to the CBCP and Pinoy conservatives, who in this country have proven themselves as bad as the kukluxklan. this is about you — and everybody else who sacrificed critical thinking in this case — revealing whose got the balls. and it is apparently all them priests and conservatives who could only zero in on those penises, because that’s all that was in that exhibit as far as they were concerned.

except that there were these works:

Jose Tence Ruiz's CSI Chimoy Si Imbisibol

all of the exhibit Kulo is here.

kultura

Rizal as someone who lived

July 20, 2011

It might be out of the way, and painfully in the middle of the corporate hustle and bustle of Makati, but Rizalizing the Future was a good enough reason to leave anti-corporatism in the car and step into the Yuchengco Museum.

The hook, and one of the more powerful things in this exhibit, is the inclusion of Team Manila’s contemporary renderings on wood of Jose Rizal in shades (and later on their other Pepe products), in colors too vivid you forget he’s national hero. In “Rizal in Shades” one can only thank the heavens for Team Manila’s reconfiguration of history into interesting and viable images that comes from a stable and consistent sense of popular nationalism. Let me forget, of course, that I have yet to be able to afford one of their products.

Truth to tell, in the context of the museum, this was a feat in itself; in the context of the exhibit it would be the portent of the diversity that’s here, only united by notions of Rizal. Contradictions are welcome! Hear! Hear! Your telling of this story is as good as mine!

As it turns out, this works infinitely well with the Rizal heirs’ exhibition of things / correspondence / lives equated with our national hero. At first glance the collection seems too trivial for comfort, but in reality, it is more inspiring than we’d like to admit. Art as inspiration to do better in our lives seems cliché, never mind that it has as market the younger students among us, yet there is an amount of greatness in Rizal that’s difficult to ignore, or not be inspired by, the jaded among us notwithstanding.

At the very least, you must get goose bumps looking at the pencil sketches of portraits Rizal did himself.

the rest is here!

kultura

notes on OPM 1: celebrity versus talent

July 19, 2011

We say it often, and truth to tell in these shores it is true: many of our less talented singers have albums, and many of our more talented musicians are without jobs. But what of the non-singer, someone who doesn’t sing at all, gathering a strong enough following for her CDs that she’s now on her fifth (count that!) solo album—and yes, that’s not counting the one she did with her son, and another about the rosary.

Welcome the celebrity CD! At the center of which is Kris Aquino. Judy Ann Santos began this kind of production with Ang Kuwento ng Buhay Ko (2007) where her TV show and movie theme songs were interspersed with her recorded thoughts about particular times in her life. This album had an all-Filipino, all-original set of songs that still made it original Pilipino music (OPM) by all counts, over and above Judy Ann.

But Kris, unlike Judy Ann, began this enterprise not to do a retrospective on her life, which would’ve meant just planning one CD. Instead, tied as the industry of celebrity is to selling the personal, Kris immersed herself in doing self-help albums, which is what most of these are. But unlike self-help albums done by experts in some form of counseling or other (think Dr. Phil on CD), most of Kris’ albums are only about her: when she came out with first CD Songs of Love and Healing, there was soon after a public marital crisis and pregnancy difficulties; when her mother Cory died she did The Greatest Love (2008), a tribute album; when her brother Noynoy was running for president she came out with Blessings of Love (2010), which was filled with nationalist and campaign songs.

the rest of it is here!

komentaryo

Jose Rizal: simple pero rock

July 4, 2011

Over Rizal, Monuments to a Hero had all the makings of superficiality. After all, in light of Jose Rizal’s sesquicentennial his monuments seem like the most flimsy of subjects; in light of the more important question of his continued relevance, this exhibit risked the possibility of being absolutely irrelevant.

But there was more here than just photos of Rizal statues, and while the curatorial note speaks of memory and remembering, the sheer number of these monuments across the country surprisingly reminds of a predisposition to forget, where archetypes end up meaning nothing, and portrayals of heroes are but one-dimensional representations.

What Over Rizal reveals is that at some point archetypes can turn out to be real and one-dimensionality can become a foregone conclusion. These photos taken together might in fact give the more discerning spectator a sense of the kind of narrative we collectively build as a nation about Rizal, even and precisely on the level of the seemingly harmless monument.

click here for the rest of it!

Katrina Stuart Santiago