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.
We know the value of the moving picture, and I shall not begin on the kind of cinema / film / industry that the access to this technology has meant in the more impoverished nations of this world from which independence has meant more creative films. Of course even that, at least in our shores, is beginning to be the exception instead of the rule.
At the Singapore Biennale 2011, the moving picture, the camera itself, is focused on things other than just making movies. This is not to say that there are no films here: it’s to say that the films become not just cinema, but actually and truly, installation art. It’s not to say that film ain’t art, but in the hands of curatorship that actually treats film as art, the act of entering a room, putting on headphones (or not) and just watching, seems more like a spectatorship of art, and not just movie viewing.
Ryan Trecartin‘s Re’Search Wait’S (US) is a video installation in one of the first floor rooms of the Singapore Arts Museum. Entering the space, the gut reaction is to cover one’s ears and be an old lady about it: this is too noisy, too confusing, too much. After all it is four videos playing at the same time, only made distinct by the seating made available for each one: a sofa at the far end, bleachers on the other, a bed and a dining table in front of each of the other two. The images are of people performing extreme human behavior, from cross dressing to heavy goth make-up, big fake boobs and made-to-shock outfits, a statement really on the behaviors and superficialities that contemporary media have imposed on identity. The movements are frantic, the editing making it more frenetic, but the effect really is for the spectator not to sit on one side and watch one thing, as it seems to call out to be viewed all at once.
Ryan Trecartin's "Re'Search Wait'S" dissects current image creation by doing it in your face
This room and its noise, both auditory and visual, just demands spectatorship. The lights are low, as if you were to relax on the sofa, or fall asleep with these movies on and it necessarily invokes awe in the way that art-you-don’t-quite-get-the-first-time requires you to sit and stare and concentrate.
At the National Museum of Singapore‘s lower ground floor, where what I thought was the best curated area for the Biennale was set-up, the video installations don’t just require a sit-down, as it does challenge the spectator’s ability at bombardment: it might not be as noisy literally, but there is enough here to keep the eye moving, the mind perturbed.
The Propeller Group‘s “TVC Communism” (Vietnam) is one huge screen divided into 12 squares, almost as if it were a game show with 12 contestants, except that it had only about 4 to 5 people in different moments of (in)action in every square: only one person speaks at a time, but every person in every frame is in movement, writing on the white board, pacing across the room, smiling at whoever’s in the room as well.
As such the discussion remains animated, even as only one person is speaking, yet there is also an amount of introspection and quiet because these are what the screens necessarily capture. Thinking and quiet is shown to be as important as verbal articulations, but it’s more than these too: it’s a glimpse into the process of creating copy, into the thought process that goes into advertising, one that highlights on the one hand its absurdity (how hard is it to sell something, really?), on the other its seriousness (how is it to sell something really?). That they are in fact talking about communism in Viet Nam, adds another layer of humor really, if not a contradiction that kills.
Which is also what happens when you’re watching a video installation that speaks precisely of both surveillance and anonymity, of the every day and its being extraordinary in its normalcy. Because to watch a camera, watching people, is just the strangest act of surveillance still, or big brother syndrome that we’d like to deny we know of.
At the old Kallang Airport, the second floor rooms of one wing have broken down walls and make distinct works by five different artists by utilizing light and wall space and media. Leopold Kessler‘s three small flatscreen installations is distinct because it isn’t at all visually overwhelming and is barely with any sound. It is counterpoint to the other screen at the far end of this room, a long and narrow flatscreen that reveals the sounds and sights of water ebbing and flowing in and from the underground water drainage system of Singapore, a work by Charles Lim (Singapore).
Charles Lim's "All Lines Flow Out" is video installation...... and dried leaves from the drainage systems in nets.
The latter is “All Lines Flow Out” something that may be seen as easily and simply the untold story of water: there is nothing extraordinary about that ordinariness. except that the visual of these waters is almost hypnotic, with the tunnel in sight, and the water movements seemingly flowing. Yet the visual is also one that comes from a drifter, the one whose path cannot be recorded by water, the one who is as transient as every other piece of lifeless form that traverses the unseen and disregarded systems of an ordered society.
Sitting through the movement of water here, one is reminded not so much of its easy flow, as it is of its seeming chaos, the impossibility of its capture, the random act(s) of violence in its mere existence. Dried leaves in nets hang from the ceiling behind the bench for spectators: the effect is a seeming entrapment, on the one hand seemingly flimsy, on the other almost a drowning.
Sitting in front of Kessler’s three small screens against one wall meanwhile is when spectatorship becomes the act of watching people watching something happen. Kessler (Germany) deals with the every day by experimenting with people’s reactions to minor disturbances to the standard operations of daily living. in “Secured/London” (2005) a latch is installed in a London phone booth, revealing people’s almost automatic acquisition of the habit; in “Diplom/Academycable” (2004) a stretch of electrical cord cuts across the city from an electrical socket in the fine arts university of Kessler to his own apartment, stopping traffic and messing up pedestrian movement in the process; in “Import/Budapest-Vienna” (2006) Kessler smokes cigarettes from a pack attached to a train that stops from Budapest to the public’s surprise if not disgust, except that they are in too much of a rush to care.
The latter is what’s ultimately interesting about this act of watching Kessler’s experiments: as you sit and watch, you’re actually looking at people who barely slow down, revealing only the smallest of reactions, almost always just a surprised look at the man who’s smoking a cigarette where it ain’t allowed, or walking through the city with an electrical cord.
But people in these videos are busier than I am, seated as I was in front of those screens on a hot Singapore day. These people I’m watching are Kessler’s subjects as they are these works’ objects, a revelation of how we are all objectified by the system of the every day, regardless of whether we know it or not, or want it for that matter. In this sense that camera on people, with the slightest of reactions if at all, is already a revelation of that which the every day forgets, which the normal silences.
Jill Magid's "Evidence Locker" forces spectator to be surveillance
It is this silence that’s also inherent in Jill Magid‘s “Evidence Locker” (US) a project that had her working within the system of surveillance in Liverpool, where she becomes its self-conscious subject. She walks the city vis a vis CCTV cameras capturing her every movement; she walks the city and has four different conversations with it, each one being shown on big TV screens in one area of the NMS. Magid’s work creates instances of intimacy that seem totally removed from what surveillance is suppose to capture, from what it is suppose to see: movements not people, action not personality.
Beat Streuli's "Storylines" rocks my world.
It’s in this sense that I could only love the three huge screens that make up Beat Streuli‘s “Storylines” (Switzerland). Using video clips and still photos of people walking through the cities of New York and Singapore, the effect of a room’s walls filled with larger than life digital images of people one after the other is like livingprecisely in what is a virtual city. The people’s everyday expressions are a surprisingly interesting look at people, the kind of seeing that is only possible given the size of these screens, their faces up close. Individuality and personality are thus proven possible despite a camera, precisely because of a camera that intelligently captures people.
It’s Superflex (Denmark) meanwhile that bravely refuses people’s notion(s) of the sacred, the important, the imperialist symbol that is untouchable. In “Flooded McDonald’s” Superflex creates a replica of a standard McDonald’s store and floods it, until Ronald McDonald begins to float with every piece of fastfood in the store.
Superflex's "Flooded McDonald's" is self explanatory eh?RonaldMcDonald as imperialist symbol, floats and drowns in Superflex's work
My first reaction to it was laughter — it’s everything and funny to see Ronald McDonald slowly lose footing and be trapped afloat in that tiny store. And then it slowly becomes love: how else does one react to the obvious distaste for McDonald’s and its transnational character? Ronald ain’t the one drowning in a flood, as it is all of us.
In all these works, the TV as medium, the camera as tool, the visuals presented, require of the spectator a participation on the level not just of viewing, but also of seeing: these aren’t stories being told, as they are camera images that exist in the every day, and their process of questioning the normalcy of precisely that. These are video concepts that insist on being critical of its own existence, that lives up self-reflexivity to the hilt, making it seem like a mirror on that bigger camera that’s on all of us.
It’s in this sense that these works required me to be spectator of art versus just movie viewer (though of course these must be intertwined in some form), requiring me to keep from insisting on a story or a narrative, forcing me to instead focus on what is there which, in all these works here, is about just what’s out there, too: the normalcy and standardization of normal life is the subject and object of these video installations. The resistances and rebellions that are possible within it is what these works of art reveal, no matter how small, and spectators are really all but required to watch these videos and not just see moments. Instead we are forced to see people, and how they themselves crack that system in their acts of seeing, as do these video installations that gently insist — nay, demand — that these systems be questioned and critiqued.
That it none of these works were loud and serious, grim and determined, works perfectly with the kind of revolt these video installations allow: one that is about sitting quietly, watching intently, and being forced into an amount of self-reflexivity. Like those cameras, and as expected, we’ve been trained to see images and not people. And no, there’s nothing relaxing or quiet or normal about seeing them all for the first time, and dealing with what this act of seeing reveals about them, about us.
Welcome to video installation art spectatorship! You’ve got nothing to lose but your movie viewing habits.
when you’re told point blank by a foreigner, and with all honesty instead of malice, that they don’t know anything about Manila, that when he told his friends he wanted to go there they asked “Why?”, that in fact Manila is at the bottom of his list of cities to see, how do you even respond? it gets worse, too. you’re asked do you enjoy Manila? is it a safe city? the answer to the first question is easy of course.
sometimes my honesty does get the better of me. especially since i know they’d see i’m lying through my teeth otherwise.
Tatsu Nishi (Japan) covers up the iconic Merlion, making it into a hotel room.
the happy giddy context of wine in our bodies and the Merlion all covered up by a red box shall save the day: we talk about art in Manila given the art that’s here, Louie Cordero’s paean to the urban legend of videoke singing of My Way, Mark Salvatus’ interest in empty walls and capturing what’s untraceable in people. we talk about the absurdity of what they’ve seen in Manila: a Virgin Mary portrait that is actually made up of words of the Old Testament that you can only read through a magnifying glass (i want to know where that exactly is), the Socialist Bar in Manila where a naive foreigner could only walk into (no it’s not really socialist eh?).
we talk about their horror stories: of walking through the city itself of Manila, across the stretch of CCP and realizing that lamp posts slowly but surely ceased to be lit. of being told by their family and friends to keep safe by hiding their cellphones and ipods, by not wearing any jewelry at all. both of them were men who’ve gone to Manila on almost adventures. and despite the horrible hotel service at Clark Pampanga both (because now they know me, we say) are thinking of going back there and doing things differently, give it another chance.
and then faced with a man who knows nothing about the Philippines, he says. and who, in the middle of talking about Jollibee and Manny Pacquiao, Apl D Ap and carjacking (yes you fall back on all that), says excitedly: oh the au pairs! that is your contribution to the world. he then goes on to talk about his au pair who played favorites, of friends who had au pair trouble. and i could only but mention nurses and teachers, and thank the heavens for the New Yorker from Japan who had a grade three Filipino homeroom teacher, Ms. Caoili (god bless her), who was just wonderful she says.
but there is no escaping Manila and its stereotypes, especially because i could not for the life of me say they weren’t true. i couldn’t lie and say that walking through the streets of and around CCP was safe, given that still stark media memory of the bus hostage taking. i couldn’t say that if they looked at a map, they could go through the galleries and museums across Makati City, and they’d be fine: the lack of a map is contingent on the lack of order that would otherwise protect pedestrians, local and foreign after all. i couldn’t say just come — COME to Manila! it’s totally different from what you imagine.
Louie Cordero's "My We" at the Singapore Biennale 2011
because what if it’s exactly the same as, or worse than, what they imagine.
that they imagine the worst of Manila is just sad, but also it is not unexplainable. you only walk the streets of one of the safest cities like Singapore and you know that there must be something we can do about our own city. you think of Bangkok or Hanoi or Phnom Penh or New Delhi, and while it might be easy to imagine the dangers of these spaces as well, it still seems a lot safer.
or maybe its vibrant cultural images are just more concrete, more real. it seems that the dangers of a third world city (country) are balance out by a sense of its cultural vibrancy, its ability to speak of itself strongly and concretely to be about something, that something making it worthy of a visit, that something as its best cultural product and production, its best tourist attraction.
you want Manila (and the Philippines) to be a tourist destination? let’s begin by agreeing on how we’re selling it and what we’re going to say about its cultural productions. stop making it seem like the cheapest country in the world: because we know how cheap means two things.
and realize that really, being hospitable doesn’t cut it anymore. nor do our notion(s) of diversity and being free-for-all.
it is with deadlines looming and the need to earn my keep that I write this. which is to say I have more important things to do with my time, including of course your notion(s) of action, as they do include what you wouldn’t be caught dead doing for nation.
but your tirade against the armchair … este … the revolutionary armchair … no wait, the armchair revolutionary! cannot be left unquestioned, lest the world thinks we all agree with you, and that would ultimately be a misrepresentation of this country’s ability at coming together and kicking presidents out: nakaupo man tayo sa armchair o lupa ng EDSA, nakataas man ang ating kamao sa Mendiola o nagki-click ng mouse maghapon.
this is not to say at all that I’m a revolutionary — my knowledge of who exactly are the revolutionaries of our time keeps me from imagining myself as that. you meanwhile seem to have no issue with calling yourself such, seeing as you critique its armchair version because as far as you’re concerned real revolutionaries translate it into action: I imagine you mean that workshop you had with your Pinoy Power NGO?
don’t worry, I shall get to that in a bit.
right now I find the need to write you as a matter of defending my chair, which is not an armchair, as it is an ergonomic chair — the better for one’s lower back. this is to defend this chair, many versions of which exist across this country, and in every space in the world where there’s a Filipino. this is to defend this chair, because on it sits the Pinoy who clicks on the Like and Dislike button on FB, and (re-)Tweets what he or she thinks.
I’d tell you with as much excitement that we’ve been doing this all this time, but I don’t want to rain on your parade of imagined self-importance. instead let me point out two things:
(1) all the activists on my FB friend list and the ones I follow on Twitter are activists period. do you follow them too, Jim? these are intelligent people who continue to teach this side of the world about nation, extending the teaching process to Twitter and FB, and yes, blogging (which I presume is an evil too as far as you’re concerned — oh the time we waste just sitting to blog!)
I don’t know where you’ve been Jim, but we established a long time ago, and I think it’s now common sense, that these social networking sites reproduce who we are as people to begin with. tool po ang tawag sa FB at Twitter, Tumblr at Posterous na ginagamit natin para sa ating mga pagkilos sa labas ng virtual nating mundo. who exactly said and believed that this was an end in itself?
I do wonder now: when you admonish them people who Tweet and put up FB statuses, and question what it is they’re doing, who are you talking to? obviously not the activists who have continued to exist, over and above your leaving and living again in this country Jim. or is this really just your recent realization about yourself?
(2) or maybe you mean me? with no time really other than the few precious minutes I spend finishing a cup of coffee, which I use to do any or all of the following: look at my Twitter feed and retweet the tweets I agree with, look at my FB News Feed and Like the statuses that are funny or relevant or both, Share notes that I feel are important to read for whoever will catch it up on their News Feeds. if there’s time, I might tag the people who I feel must read these posts, be it on Twitter or FB.
but you know, time away from writing means no money to pay the bills, Jim. and things aren’t difficult for me, as it actually is for a bigger working class in this country: the ones who are underpaid and mistreated, underemployed and overworked, be it in BPOs across the country, or just in horrid creative jobs that really only look good on paper, all of the educated class who would know to use FB and twitter as tools, if not as possible escape.
and so you see Jim, I’m actually happy enough when there’s any sense of nation in the FB statuses or tweets of my students — now all mostly working in crappy jobs that don’t do justice to their skills or intelligence. I celebrate when they Like an FB post of mine that’s about the fight for passing the RH Bill, or about a current event or other that they might not even know of otherwise. I take the chance to respond to their questions on my blog, or in private messages, because you know it means they took time, that there was time spent at thinking about nation, at removing one’s head from the daily grind and clicking on what Miss Ina said today about nation.
that Like, that (re-)tweet, that Shared FB note, means more to me because I know of the lives they live, and the way in which time is equal to money where they work. and yes, those Likes or Shared posts from public school teachers where I used to work, the ones who keep my feet on the ground, the ones who have taught me more than they can imagine because of the lives they live: those are enough too, Jim.
because the question really is: who can afford to get out of his armchair and scream at people to do the same? no really, Jim. isn’t this just all about you?
yet you speak as if it’s about us, as if you know all of us; you speak as if we are all in the same boat. and you question us, Jim, you question us who are here, have stayed, and have no where to go really, though we might leave and work odd jobs elsewhere — not at all the case for you, right? you speak of us who can’t just go around building NGOs, holding photography workshops, being paid for being us, Jim.
you are not the same as the rest of us, and I said it long ago, and I’ll say it now: you and Carlos Celdran are in the same boat, from which you have the option to watch us all sink, from which you both speak of changing nation, and yet will keep the status quo. unlike you though, Carlos has been touring us through Manila, and fighting for the RH Bill, to his own detriment. what have you done that even equals that, Jim?
not much, really. and yet you will brag about making your house a relief and donation center in light of the 2009 floods in Luzon, to which I respond with two questions: (1) what have you done since then? (2011 na diba?), and (2) why do you speak like you have a monopoly on this act of opening up one’s house and home?
countless Filipinos did this in Manila and beyond post-Ondoy, Jim, and they might have been tweeting and putting up FB statuses while they were doing it, too. you don’t know my sister-in-law, but she lives in The Netherlands, has three young kids and a house to keep, and she kept an operation going in the aftermath of Ondoy. like many Filipinos here and across the world, she didn’t even think of bragging about it. for most Filipinos the relief operations were not a claim to fame, or a claim to moral high ground. in fact it was nothing but a national spirit that cut across the world, in every tiny space there was a Filipino. yes, chairs included.
you have single handedly made it seem like we weren’t doing much during Ondoy, Jim, and I don’t know how that helps nation — how that helps any of us — in any way.
nor is it clear how a weekend workshop of 99 people who ate like the poor in one exercise — only sardines and instant mami you say — helps nation. no really: how does a workshop where you ask the question “are we a people wired to fail?” help nation? where does a workshop even stand, that whole weekend spent talking to each other about being Pinoy, in the context of the urgencies that we live with in this nation every day, both personal and national.
sa totoo lang Jim, many of us don’t need to do an exercise where we can feel like the rich or poor: we know exactly what that disparity is like. many of us don’t have time to talk about being Filipino and Filipino identity Jim, instead we live it and its contingent oppressions every day.
and this is not a question of you having the privilege of time and money Jim. it’s a question of what it is you’re doing with it. because there is no reason to blame us for the time that you have on your hands; no reason to look at our tweets and FB statuses and think: what are they doing with their time? and finding only the answers that are about highlighting what you’ve done.
in truth: you’re writing on air, Jim, in a country where writers write with their own blood, and die poor and hungry.
really now Jim, you must know this is a lot of crap. and you must know it because you’re talking to yourself, sitting in every kind of chair you’ve got in your house. and no, there’s nothing revolutionary about that.
