Category Archive for: pulitika

kultura

romance(s) in Catalina Africa’s “The Etymology of Disaster”

It’s easy to be distracted by how pretty the works of Catalina Africa are in The Etymology of Disaster (West Gallery, West Avenue, Quezon City). The work that welcomes you to the exhibit after all, is a collage of black and white photos of sunsets, reminiscent of and invoking romance, the kind that we all know off. The letters that spell “departure” in bold bright pink letters makes it seem like both sunsets and disasters are happy. This dynamic between the brightness and the darkness, though all romantic.

Our shadows in boxes

A non-descript shadow box with a bunch of brightly colored used and uneven candles seems happy from afar. Up close you’ll find that it is attached to a mirror, is bound by a chain, atop what looks to be a tiny skateboard. “Home Guide to Bullfighting” requires the spectator’s reflection, as her incomplete image disturbed by the candles attached to the mirror, necessarily invokes an amount of discomfort. The sadness comes from the realization that this might be about you, and the ways in which home is about a bullfight, is about being chained down, is about wanting to get away, candles as symbol of both hope and death.

“Maybe, Baby (Study for a Parfait)” is a shadowbox with a piece of shell against what looks like a chest x-ray result. The word “maybe” is spelled out on the shell, the last four letters in white ink, the yellow letter M hanging from the shell. The light and love in a piece of shell, something that’s cliché souvenir, which is always one of a kind, ties the rarity with the uncertainty of something being experienced again. The x-ray kills the romance, as it proves life at the same time that it fails to see its heart. Maybe, there is love here. Maybe there is heart. Maybe, baby, there’s romance.

Breaking it gently, subtly

Africa’s “Broken Pleases” is an enlarged photo of the beach, with brown sand, a dark sea and blue skies. Bright colored balloons fly against the sky, though not freely: the balloons are tied to a step ladder, the same color of the sand. The sky is alive, as are the balloons, and yet what is alive is held down by what’s on land. This is how things are broken, where what pleases is destroyed by what it has to live with: the sky against the darkness of the beach, the balloons against land.

This dynamic of being held down, is also in “Happy Camping II” – a triptych of photos of a wooden house set-up against the greenery of a park. The first image shows the facade of the house, the second is its other side which reveals it to be a one-dimensional structure, the third seems to show one of two panels used on the house. While there is no destruction here in the conventional sense, the slow revelation of what this house actually – to be just a piece of plywood, be further divided into smaller pieces of wood panels – invokes a strange sense of sadness at how true it could all still be.

No happy in the ending

The rendering of sunsets and moments and love in “The Etymology of Disaster” is a happy and romantic thing by itself – there is nothing here that’s sad or destructive. Until the bright pink letters that spell “departure” sinks in, and you realize what these sunsets actually are: they are endings. And with the notion of leaving, of separation, of impending absence, Africa is able to point out that there is no happiness in these endings, there are no happy endings.

Which is true as well for the romance with poverty that popular culture lives off of, the kind that allows for a brand like the defunct Wowowee, to invoke so many other images, including that of tragedy. In “Wowowee” Africa installs seven photos, one for each letter, each one rendered through colorful flowers and twigs, and set against the ground upon which too many died in the show’s stampede. The prettiness of the flowers and their bright colors, don’t do much for the sadness that happens with this ending.

Meet yourself

It’s in “Happy Camping I” though, that the mind of Africa comes alive. A framed white piece of paper, written on which is an extended spider map in pencil. The map begins at the center with the word “LET’S” – obviously a reference to the invitation, “Let’s go camping!” What floored me was the thought process that went into this work, where that center branched out into six thoughts that interconnect at certain points, allowing for a set of activities that could/would happen in chronological order.

Camping here becomes analogous with doing whatever it is we want, beyond rules and parents and school and convention. Here, happiness is borne of this unimaginable freedom that would allow us to talk about “ordering someone to take off his pants, exhausting all possibilities, making a soundtrack for pissing, gambling our lives away, engaging in dangerous liaisons, starting a fire, smoking grass.”

Of course what is ultimately sad is the fact that while these are freedoms we hold dear, we cannot easily (if at all!) exercise these freedoms. And that, Africa teaches us, is where our romance with disaster lies.

—

note: all photos taken byme. the West Gallery site is down, but it’s at http://www.westgallery.org.

other reviews up at: suddenschool and nothingspaces.

komentaryo

month two of P-Noy: notes of a pinay or the honeymoon is over*

It seems fitting to write this now that Noynoy has finally taken responsibility for the August 23 hostage tragedy. And yes that is what it was, in fact it was a crisis, by 12 nn, if you were watching it from 9AM, like I was. In fact if you were watching it from the very beginning, when all it was was a minor news report, with no live footage yet, you’d know (1) to thank media, for once, and (2) that it was always Noynoy’s call, always Malacanang’s call, and it was obvious that here, the call was to NOT do anything other than watch local officials, who is now apparently only Isko Moreno for the City of Manila. in fact, we saw him so much during the hostage crisis, that I almost forgot Mayor Lim was, in fact, Mayor.

I also forgot we had a president. Pramis. Early in the day, the question was which action star cum senator would come to the rescue, my bet was Jejomar himself, though he ain’t action star or senator, but you get my drift. Over lunch, I wondered what was taking so long. By meryenda, my question was WTF?

But of course the past month also meant many things other than the hostage taking that was allowed to turn into a tragedy. At the end of month two there was sudden silence about Hacienda Luisita, after all that noise in the beginning of the month, with Christian Monsod calling the HL lawyer out on what it was they were actually doing to farmers, that is, making them believe that what they were getting was all they were due. There too, were press releases on the plan to reconfigure basic education into 12 years, which of course the Magsaysay Awardees have said is beside the point, and really seems to be a decision that’s without common sense. Any sane person can see that it isn’t quantity, it’s quality. This is even more true for the public school system, but how many of the higher Dep Ed officials have entered a public school in the past two years?  That is the question. An even better question? Why aren’t relevant organizations and partylists, teachers and parents, being consulted about, and listened to, in relation to this major change in a system off of which they live and have been created? And let’s not forget that fab moment when P-Noy said that at the end of the day, he is the commander in chief, and therefore Rear Admiral Feliciano Angue had no right to question the demotion he had been given. Well.

Ah, but then these things have been overshadowed yes? By the aftermath of the hostage crisis and the death of innocent foreigners. Suffice it to say that we deserve it all, everything the world has to say, and even more so after the bungled reaction(s) of government, including P-Noy’s post-crisis. And while I agree with de Quiros that it’s better late than never, goodness gracious, that can only be true if the late reaction is in fact the correct one. It is beyond me how a president with a communications group could be so messed up in, well, communicating.

But maybe it’s no surprise. After all, we have media that can barely survive the aftermath of the hostage tragedy, too. Yes, there should be a lot of shame here, flunking the test and all. At least GMA 7 turned upon itself and chose to be reflexive right away, though it’s difficult to forgive Mel Tiangco for asking about P-Noy’s love life at the presscon. ABS-CBN 2’s Maria Ressa was on a roll on Twitter the whole time the hostage taking was going on, and it was clear that she wasn’t going to be apologetic. Instead, she is going to burn bridges, and put salt in HK Chinese wounds. And now that Pia Hontiveros has written about her experience on the ground (we saw Pia on TV when there was talk that Mendoza wanted media people to go into the bus), and Patricia Evangelista too, on her take about P-Noy’s handling of it, this becomes the easy question: pray tell, ABS-CBN News and Public Affairs, was there a memo?

Are the Lopezes finally burning that Aquino bridge?

Abangan.

*because if the Aquino sisters are already counting down the months to their brother’s and family’s freedom from us all, seeing us as the burden in their lives as if their brother didn’t run for office, well, this honeymoon’s obviously over.

komentaryo

august 23 2010: hostage crisis

where was the President of the Philippines, on a day like today, when a hostage situation began at 9AM, and escalatedto a crisis when it had yet to be resolved by 12NN, and now at 8:05PM, it is a quiet bus, the windows and doors have been rammed through by the police, and the hostages seem to be all but dead.

where were you today Mr. President of the Philippines? where was your government? literally and figuratively, in all honesty.

that is all I want to know.

kultura

Heroism and cliche in Looking for Juan 2010

a version of this was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 31 2010.

It is everything and fantastic this CANVAS project that is Looking For Juan. After all, the overwrought discussion of identity seems to be at a dead-end, where insisting on Filipino-ness is adjudged too nativist and always anti-America. This forgets that when we insist on being part our colonizers, there seems to be a refusal to deal with looking at our identities as separate still from these colonizers. Meanwhile it’s easy to see why we’ve arrived at this roadblock.

And yet, this year Looking for Juan (Vargas Museum, U.P. Diliman) is in a bigger, brighter (also hotter) venue (where are those rich UP alumni to air-condition this place when you need them?), and doesn’t seem to want to stop with talking about identity. But maybe too much of a good thing can be bad?

Because with the question of everyday heroes, cliché is the name of this game. It doesn’t help that the way in which the exhibit was curated grouped the works thematically, making the clichés more obviously about sameness. And when I say that there are paintings that are the same, I mean the artistic individual creativities (difference in media, notions of genre) get dissolved in the stark similarities, of imagery, of thought-process, of just basic idea.

Workers as working heroes

Name it, and you’ve got that Filipino worker here. There are no call center agents, or yuppies, or any enslaved white-collar workers thought, instead there are images of the kargador, the fisherman, the farmer, the magtataho, the teacher, the health worker, the basurero (that last one is a sculpture). One wonders at what point it becomes less respectful and more a politically-incorrect romance with these images. After all, these workers aren’t given lives other than the work they do, and in the few paintings that show workers’ conditions, badly-written captions that accompany the work ruin things altogether.

Thank goodness for “Minimum Wage Earner” by Renato Barja, where the construction worker is rightfully the color of the soot that he creates and lives with, where he is given a cup of coffee, a cigarette and a fiery sunrise in the background, where his big eyes are allowed its sadness and its weariness, even more importantly its defeat. Where the last thing you will think of is celebration or romance, or cliché.

Jojo Ballo’s “Tuwing Umaga”, which uses charcoal on canvas, would’ve been more powerful left without its caption cum explanation. Maan de Loloya’s “Kargador” meanwhile, fails at its cleanliness, which doesn’t work as irony for what it is that the main image is doing, i.e., carrying on top of her head a “crime scene” of her oppressive past and present: an MMDA sign, pink stilettos, guns, a balikbayan box, a buwaya. Had this been dirtier it would make sense that the smaller versions of this character look up dumbfounded at, some are apathetic towards, this bigger image’s act of cleaning up.

The cliché of the OFW, and motherhood

Because we know this to be true: that the OFW is the new hero of nation. And so, there are a good number of works here that are all about this heroism, and while some do fail at bringing something new to the OFW stereotype, there are those that just succeed. Yveese Belen’s “In Every Corner” is a canvas divided into 8 x 4 square, with every other square filled with an image of tiny brown workers doing various jobs. What is extraordinary here is the detail where the workers are actually in action, doing their jobs, making it more of a tribute to what they do, versus a romantic notion of just them.

The other OFW paintings don’t quite survive their captions, although Cana Valencia’s “Bagong Bayani” does just because it’s a different image compared to all the others here: much of the canvas is taken up by a Swiss knife made into the Philippine flag, the sun used as the O to the FW. From this center, what the knife’s various tools reveal are Filipinos’ various jobs across the world. It’s everything and refreshing, removing the sadness implicit in the mere fact of OFWs.

And those mother images? All about the clichés of pregnancy and giving life, or holding the child’s hand and protecting her, of motherhood as powerful in itself, period. That might be true, but there are so many other ways in which mothers are heroes, that would’ve been nice to see, too.

Some powerful imagery

Dante Lerma’s “Call Juan-24/7-Heroes” has such a powerful image that’s failed by its title and caption. A woman in a Maria Clara costume stands against a Coca-Cola refrigerator. Her foot is up against the wall, revealing running shoes, and she is holding her phone as if writing a text message. From afar, it was easily a rendering of the notion(s) of womanhood and tradition, the powerful woman vis a vis the meek and tamed. With that title about heroes being on call? It is everything and disappointing.

Cathy Lasam’s “Mommy” is wonderful in its experimentation with texture, folding up paper to create a pattern that renders the quiet – and I daresay cliché – image of the mother more dynamic, more interestingly alive and truthful to the multi-dimensionality of all our mothers in our lives. Janelle Tang’s “May Bago Akong Laruan” layers acrylic on canvas to create the layers of a paper doll. Here, the clothes floating on the canvas create the images of a mother and a child, even when they don’t exist on the page itself. The heroism would lie in the idea of powerfully creating our own images, yes? But that caption is an absolute let-down.

Fernando Sena’s “Tatay, Nanay, Mga Tunay na Bayani” was a refreshing complexity in the midst of these works, where abstraction seemed to be few and far between. Sena’s take on the cliché of parents as heroes is done in cubist abstraction, where two tiny one-dimensional faces represent parents, that create what look like structures that go up higher and higher, evolving into darker, deeper, more serious colors, as it goes up the canvas. It’s a celebration of the default power of parenting to build, to create, regardless of whether it wants to or not; it’s a reminder, maybe even a warning.

The universal Pinoy hero

What becomes infinitely more problematic here though is the idea of every Filipino as hero. It is here that the paintings seem to all work towards the media-created notion that we can all change this world just by voting once. As if things are ever that easy. Here, laughter is celebrated even when it’s really more a negative than a positive in the way that it fails to consider oppression. There is the teacher, the student-journalist, the environmentalist. There are hands! Just too many notions of hands, both in titles and captions, and outright in images that we’ve all seen before, some of them in our grade school art projects.

The ones that survive this part of the exhibit are those works that have different images, even when these titles and/or captions want to kill the work altogether. Dante Aligaen’s “It’s In Our Hands (It Always Was)” is a black and white mixed media work of a skull from which emanates a halo and the rays of a sun, flowers/grass/weeds spewing out from the main image, and bombs ready to fall from the sky. It’s a fascinating take on pride and yabang, the kind that can get us all messed up about what’s good and what’s evil.

Liza Flores’ “You, Me” could’ve done with a more creative title and less of a caption, because it is wonderful in itself, where the notion of reflection works both with and without another, except for oneself, where the dark and cold and the bright and sunny seem to be one and the same, versus being two sides of the same coin, where heroism is ultimately about staying where you are, regardless of how difficult, or how seemingly easy.

The rest of the many works here insist that we can all be heroes, be it through images of Rizal (too many of them, too!) or through the images of the youth as the future. But while this seems wonderful, the idea of our own individual heroisms at this point doesn’t seem all that possible, does it? Maybe it isn’t even truthful, as it is more than anything about romance and false hopes? Buen Calubayan’s “Pinger” seems to be the answer. It’s nothing but a black tarpaulin with an enlarged red digital print of the artist’s dirty finger, accompanied by this line: “Ako ang simula ng pagbabago? O panggagago?”

How’s that for a caption that works.

komentaryo

SATUR IS THE ONE

Satur Ocampo is the one senatoriable who has gotten flack for being guest candidate of NP, which is surprising given how this refuses to believe the truth that he and Liza Maza are running with the party, and not within it. Why is it so hard to understand that?

The better question is would we give Satur and Liza the same problem had they run with LP? It’s obvious that people who use the NP reason against Satur and Liza are silently/unconsciously pushing for Noynoy. So between a rags-to-riches capitalist and a middle-class haciendero, we go with the unapologetic former?

And let’s not even begin with running independently. That would’ve meant votes, yes, but not a nationwide campaign. This is the reason why I miss Mar Roxas for president — at least he was open to real progressive senatoriables. The Aquino siblings have called the left “a noisy minority,” Ninoy must be turning in his grave.

The whole anti-NP, pro-LP, anti-Satur  rhetoric? Interesting. But wrong. And unfair to this nation that would gain so much with real progressives in the Senate.

Because Satur is the one senatoriable who has consistently fought for our human rights to our freedoms and has sacrificed life and limb for it. He was journalist and writer before becoming activist, a story that we should all be jealous of, a story that we should all want to have as writers/artists of whatever kind. Satur has lived a life for this nation literally. Can any other senatoriable say that?

And yet, Satur is the one senatoriable who has had to deal with not being forgiven. For a nation that can forgive plunderers and human rights violators, killers and thieves, and a president like GMA, it cannot for the life of it forgive this man. He who has paid for his sins with time in jail more than any other person in government has. He who has missed time with family in the name of nation. As congressman he lived in Congress with Liza and Teddy Casino because GMA was out to get them. All of them lost their pork barrel.

And no, Satur does not carry a gun. In fact Satur is the one who walks among us, and we fail to see him because he isn’t in a fancy car, doesn’t use police escorts, refuses the lifestyle changes public office requires. The same may be said of Liza, who I chanced upon in a karenderya, who talked to me like we were old friends, even when I was someone she didn’t know from eve.

Satur is the one senatoriable who, if you spend time looking at his Congress page has done good to nation, consistently and for the long term. Anyone who questions his stand on the extension of CARP is ill-informed about the state of agrarian reform in this country; anyone who thinks Hontiveros is the one woman to save farmers in this country, IS JUST WRONG. Please read up, please know how CARP has killed farmers and let hacienderos go free. Please read up on GARB and know enough to see that this is what real agrarian reform looks like, the Hacienda Luisitas of this country be damned.

Read up on Satur, on this, the last day before elections, and see yourselves. See how scared you are of real progressives, compared to your fear of men with guns goons gold, yes, there are many of them in government. See how scared you are of real fundamental change in nation, when your own candidate – whoever he is – uses the word change, too. See how real change looks, how a man can move from a life of privacy, to the underground to above ground, to doing more in Congress than many of our representatives combined. See this man for what he is.

He is an activist who has spoken to the masses in the countryside, has lived to walk the streets and in our consciousness, has consistently dealt with nation by listening to the people and understanding what it needs. He is a leftist, because he has always had the interests of the masses in his heart and soul and actions, has always wished for them a life that’s better than all this, has always worked towards making our oppressions pay for the unjust lives we live. The question is: Why do you fear this at all?

Realize that in the end, a vote against Satur is your own vote against nation, because here and now, his kind of progressive and nothing else is what we need. His kind of decency, his sense of justice, his kind of life. He is the kind of man this nation needs in the Senate.

Satur is the one and shading #37 is a vote for real concrete change. It is a vote for a nation that isn’t afraid to fight for its freedoms. It is a vote for a nation that deserves to have Satur as Senator now. Voting for Satur is voting for a future that will infinitely better, because we aren’t afraid anymore. It is one that we, the masses, the greater majority deserve.