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.

When the noise about Kulô became real to me, I couldn’t even believe it was about Mideo Cruz’s “Poleteismo.” My experience of the installation as part of the exhibit was limited to two points of interest: one, the manner in which the various works of Cruz were curated and put together into this one installation that allowed it to be powerful from outside without the crucifix and without zeroing in on what else was attached to those walls; and two, the fact that it still seemed to work for me, old as the work was. Context could only be the reason for the latter, and in the case of this exhibit which consisted of many old works, context was key: there’s the fact of UST no matter the individual relationships of the artists with the institution, and there’s the 150 years of Jose Rizal, a UST alumnus.

Which does bring me back to Goitia’s essay as the main point of possible contention. I thought that if offense were to be taken about this exhibit it would’ve been either in general, for the naming of UST as institutional commonality, or in particular to Goitia’s essay which put UST’s pride in Rizal in its proper place, the exhibiting artists’ varying perspectives in their art made part and parcel of a reaction to and rebellion against Dominican education. Which might be why while I walked through Cruz’s installation and took some photos, I spent infinitely more time reading the essay, installed back to back with Joseph de Luna Saguid’s poem “Kulo” in front of which I also spent a good amount of time, and could not believe its kind of daring given as well these artworks surrounding it.

I spent time in front of the video installations, stared longer at the Constantino Zicarelli graffiti at the far end of the room. I thought if anything that there was the confessional installation “Dogmatik Automatik” by Leobensant Marquez that might offend Catholic sensibilities, and Rai Cruz’s “Salinlahi” that might offend in the year of Rizal’s 150. That it was Cruz’s work that gathered such ire was surprising to me, having passed through the work as I did, and having taken pictures of that crucifix and thinking: ah, it’s a tirade against the University of the Philippines, a statement against activism, intertwined seamlessly on a collage of other dogmas and ideologies, including consumerism and varied versions of faith.

But there lies the difference between the manner in which I experienced “Poleteismo” and the manner in which most of us in this country who are now talking about it did: I actually experienced it. I didn’t rely on media’s images of it, am not imagining what it was actually like in the context of the rest of the 31 works that were in Kulô. Anyone who spoke about that work based on a fragment of it, whether they saw it in reality or in the media and in papers and online, from regular mainstream newspaper columnists to angry conservatives online, really have no right to talk about it as an artwork that offends. It’s something that offends; but it is no artwork when taken in that bit and piece of a penis. To me, “Poleteismo” was but one – old – work among others reinstalled and curated differently, and was only worth talking about given these current celebrations we are being told to hold dear.

At the Art as Threat/Threat as Art forum of the UP Department of Art Studies on August 9, Prof. Flaudette May Datuin ended her presentation on the value of and the need for the critical interpretations of the image, with the basic line: it’s the context, stupid. Which might offend, I know, but is crucial really to the understanding of any art at all, and I use the term loosely. I’ve been offended by art, have thought some art too gross for comfort, or just pointless; and each time the gut reaction is rendered irrelevant by an assessment of the piece given context, given its mode of production, given what its goals are, whether or not it’s successful, all highly subjective, yes, but at least it forces an engagement with the cultural product in front of me that is beyond whether or not it offends me, or disrespects what I believe. At least it forces me to sit and stare at images for a bit, get over my gut reaction, and ask questions, take stock. This we haven’t done, least of all for the rest of Kulô.

This is not to say that this was the best exhibit I’ve been to ever, nor that the works here were all extraordinary. This is to say that in the course of the public finally entering the gallery, all they saw were the penises on the wall, and became blind not just to the possibilities in that work, but more importantly they were blind to everything else that was there, all those other voices that were demanding engagement. We faltered here on the level of dealing with offense, because all that operated was the emotional and highly subjective, the fires of hell and the pre-dominantly Catholic country rhetoric. No compromise is possible when arguments begin on this uncritical level. And when the CCP Board decided to close the doors to the exhibit, it failed not just at taking a stand against the (apparently literal) violent and threatening reactions to the work, they also failed the rest of Kulô’s artists who did not deserve to be silenced. Spectators who entered the Main Gallery might have been blind to this exhibit, but CCP shouldn’t have been. Which does put a premium on CCP’s role in arts and culture in this country, a premium that has always been questionable, yes, but which in times like these is something we bank on, at the very least in terms of being the space where the freedom of expression is non-negotiable. That is what a center for culture that’s home to our National Artists, our most daring theater, the best of our cultural lot, should stand for, questionable as the “best and brightest” might be to the more critical of us. No ifs and buts about it, regardless of taxpayers’ money, and especially beyond the non-taxpaying members of the CBCP, CCP should’ve been able to handle this all better.

But too, there is this fact: while the conservatives and religious were quick to come together and tie the discussion neatly into a package of the anti-Christ, the arts sector beyond CCP was just not as quick, not as organized, therefore not as prepared. Maybe we were all disbelieving of how huge this complaint could become, which is to say we were naïve about the media and their ability to spin everything to their sensationalist advantage, as the facts prove in this case. Maybe we are still unprepared, as discussions are limited to Facebook with limited views and which, as writer Adam David asserts, means limited engagement: you gain likes and comments, and have the escape of unfriending a person who disagrees with what you think.

Worse, discussions happening within the art sector, expectedly varied as it is, can’t seem to find unity in the task of fighting for freedom of expression. I will be the last to say that we must not question the CCP, or the concept of censorship, or of art that seeks to offend, or the kind of art production this mixed media installation was involved in, but I will insist on asking: is this the right time for these questions? Who do we serve by asking these questions now, when the challenge is to respond to the fact of an art installation being misunderstood, an audience that has acted violently (literally) against it, and a State that has decided to bow down to pressure?

When dancer Myra Beltran spoke at the Palayain Ang Sining press conference on August 10, she read a very brief statement that was beautiful in its sincere gratitude to the dancers before her who fought against the censorship of ballet in the 1950s, and paid dearly for it, too. She spoke as a beneficiary of a struggle for this freedom we enjoy now, a freedom that everyone including those of us in the arts and creative sectors are using to speak, to write, to put up FB statuses and enjoy long comments threads. It seems time to remind all cultural workers of why these freedoms we enjoy exist; it seems time to remind the media of the same thing. It’s time for us to take stock, really, especially now that the lines are drawn, the enemies of culture are clear.

It seems that other than our need to live up to the cliché of unity – sige na, para naman sa freedom of expression ito, lahat tayo makikinabang—it’s also time to reassess our respect for the arts in general, the visual arts in particular, and that includes all of us in this sector who didn’t care much for this exhibit before it blew up in our faces. The call to reopen the exhibit in CCP is one that I agree with, but the possibility of re-exhibiting it so that we might gain a “teaching and learning moment” via “Poleteismo,” is to inflict the kind of silencing that the rest of Kulô has already gone through twice: first in the face of a camera crew and conservatives who could only see the “penises! penises!” Second, by the CCP Board that could also only hear the screams of penises! penises! A third silencing is default given the kind of attention the work will receive once it is re-exhibited with the rest of Kulô.

Maybe we have to admit that while we like to believe that re-exhibition is about showing the world what the exhibit was about, in the end, it’s really for those of us who didn’t make the effort the first time Kulô was set up, for those of us who didn’t care enough to even go once the noise began, for those of us who didn’t see it in those eight weeks since its opening on June 17 when the religious and conservatives and sensationalist media didn’t care for it at all. The truth is part of this exhibit’s mode of production was that it was at the CCP; to experience it elsewhere is to already miss an integral part of it. That it’s been closed down should be seen as part of its narrative as an exhibit, its lifespan being cut short is text in itself. More importantly, the fact that most of us didn’t see it, even those who are part of the arts and culture sector, becomes part of the text here: we know we are culpable for Kulô’s closure, because we were ignorant about it to begin with, and therefore unprepared for the backlash. Ultimately too, re-exhibiting even just “Poleteismo” would be unfair to the rest of the art that exists in this country, which are worthy of being exhibited, and have yet to be talked about. The notion of re-exhibiting Kulô on the point of “teaching and learning” also begs the question: what of all the other exhibits we’ve missed that are as important, or provocative?

Off the top of my head, if Kulô is to be reinstalled anywhere else, I’ve got a re-exhibition or two that are worthy for exactly the same pedagogical reasons, even one that also has Rizal as context (Touch Me Not recently at the Hiraya Gallery), another that has religiosity (Dex Fernandez’s \m/ at 20Square). Not as controversial, yeah, but maybe that’s because no one cared enough to see them, religious and conservatives, members of the art sector alike. Which makes this also true: to reinstall “Poleteismo” again (and again), to bring the rest of Kulô with it, is to ride on this controversy, ride on with the kind of discourse on art that cannot get over penises and posters and condoms (used and otherwise), because believe it or not, this is all it will remain about, and we would all necessarily fall into the trap of this cheap and uncritical religion versus art divide. If the goal is to talk about censorship and freedom of expression, if the task is to fight for our right to our creation of and consumption of our own art, then it seems the first step is to begin talking about art beyond the penis, yours and mine. Mine is figurative of course.***

Previously published in GMA News Online, August 11 2011.