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The decade of the 1950s saw a people still reeling from the aftermath of the second human holocaust, otherwise known as World War II. Part of the national pain and collective endeavour were rebuiliding the entire body politic and a re-clarification of Filipino identity, invariably calld Filipino culture. Due to the European interlopers, our otherwise strong Asian culture was damaged by 333 years of friarocracy, and later by 48 years of so-called democracy, American style. Meanwhile, pockets of rebellion were being staged against the estsblished order, led byby by the people driven by their own agenda for the populist weal. Enter so-called American altruism. This was as core a subtle but surefire incursion into the Filipino thought, particularly at its most vulnerable stage. Some Filipino visual artists were sent to the US as scholars, with the stipulation that they must return to the Philippines after finishing their studies. A subtle but surefire refocusing of some thoughts had taken place. Arturo Rogerio Luz had nothing to do had nothing to do with any scholarship from the US. He studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts where he received a Diploma in Art, reportedly on his own. When he returned to the Philippines, the contents of his works were culled from Philippine realities then obtaining in the ‘50s, like a washerwoman balancing an empty batya made of GI sheet on her head, New Year revelers, street musicians, and a metro-polis enjoying a building room. While such subjects were localized, they were articulated virtually through the eye of the great Swiss artist, Paul Klee, with some linear variations. Lavandera shows a washerwoman in silhouette, except her eyes done in yellow. Her bandana forms a blunt-tipped triangle with the washerwoman, in bold and light linear patterns. The yellow empty batya virtually pushes the washerwoman down with its linear scallops and contours sharpened by black border lines. This work is a study of an inverse picotrial structure, whereby batya and not the basal portion of the washerwoman’s torso, becomes the suspended support of a buoyant weight. In the Philippines, New Year is welcomed with so much revelry. Like fiestas, the revelry is always an expected leveler because revelry knows no age group. No professional enclave. No economic factor. In Bagong Taon, Luz is more focused on the revelers than on revelry. Among the three riding not on a tandem bicycle but on a two-rider contraption which must be pedalled away, the backseat rider is by his lonesome best blowing a minisicule cardboard horn. the sustained skeletal silhouettes of the bicycle and the three riders -- except for the riders’ pants and sandos -- show the subjects in suspended animation. this runs counter to mobility, but Luz achieved stabi- lity. Man With Guitar shows a street guitarist, again in silhouette, strumming his guitar that looks like a violin. Although his arms and head are distorted, his torso still conformsto correct anatomy. The accordion metal door at the background is actualized in relatively diffused linear patterns. A faint light behind the guitarist “radiates” no farther than the fourth bar on the guitarist’s left side. Buildings rising in the metro- polis were obviously familiar sights toward the end of the decade. City shows buildings rising to various heights but with a common denominator: they are all linear. The finely-drawn vertical lines, almost in equal distances, are ocassionaly cross-hatched by converging diagonals for visual breaks in a continous vertical direction. The off-white backgrounds suggests no more than the visual emphasis not on itself, but on the occasional interfacing of the strucutres within a clearly stated horizontal thematic frame. The works of Luz in this decade show no emotion. Malang was busy tickling the funny bones of the readers of the defunct Manila Chronicle with his comic strips: Chain Gang Charlie, Cosme the Cop (Ret.), and Beelzebub. Th ordinary people occasionally had turns for soul-searching, gentle needling on complacency, and other mundane minutiae that form the stuff of Philippine life. Meanwhile, Abdul Asia Imao was winding up his studies at the then UP School of Fine Arts, major in sculpting. This was in the latter half of the ‘50s. At this time Imao was already defying some of the thought traditions in muslim culture. He was doing busts of people, both classmates of his and some Muslim warriors. Where some Muslim heroes and heroines and aspects of Muslim culture were being wordified by campus academics, Imao, the only Muslim art student concretized some of his people. Muslim Warrior is shown in full glory, his turban a symbol of social class. His stance in an “open” and “closed”composition by virtue of the legs and right arm, respectively, shows a brave warrior, a resolute man and a judiciously proud human being. Imao was already making the Diliman crowd aware of Muslim people and Muslim history through his sculptures and paintings. The 1960s The presidential elections, each with uncommon intensity, were held in the 1960s, namely: 1961, 1965, 1969. Elsewhere in the world, the Vietnam War reged, the peace ad-vocates kept doing their thing rather noisily, and the flower people who swept the youth worldwide were into chanting all kinds of slo-gans like “make peace, not war.” On the home front, the stirrings of student activism were already being felt. Bencab was already a sophomore at the onset of the ‘60s, and starting to make a name as an illustrator in some of the weekly magazines. While Imao was pursuing graduate studies at the University of Kansas as a Fulbright-Smith-Mundt scholar, Luz (1960) was into another kind of art this time and some sculptures in wood. Gradation Gray is an inverted gradation of gray, meaning the gradation proceeds from light to dark following a foreground to back- ground pictorial recession. Anito Sculpture is conceived and actualized in the style of op art. Here is a work whose stark symmetry denies the sculptural piece any information of action, tension and a structural relation- ship with its various parts. In the mid-60s, Luz did an old subject, musicians, this time with clearly stated originality in composition. The seemingly spindly lines are a clear visual statement, removed from the linearism of Klee. No less than eight musicians do their thing, their stylized torsos either juxtaposed or interfaced, in the process making stylized letters of the English alphabet, like E, A, P, D, X, W and N in various fonts. The background which can be divided into four uneven digonal shapes, hold the “letterismic” torsos in place. With this work, Luz showed the possibilities of rendering a given subject into abstract forms. For his part, Malang kept stalking the sleazy streets of the metropolis lugging his artist’s kit: a watercolor set, pen, India ink, pencil, art paper. The shanties of Manila and elsewhere may strike some people as visual eyesores and a disgrace to society. One primary reason: the squalor in which people live is an insult to humanity in he large. However, in Malang’s head, heart and hands, such visual images are a haven for a unique kind of human interrelationship: bonding. His shanties, for instance, are noted for their bright (and happy) colors. His personal reason: he has always known happiness. His barong-barong dwellers may count among th less privileged membes of society, but they possess what some megarich people may not process: happiness just by being alive. Pictorially, his works may have no back-ground. The shanties and people may look pasted on, “reminiscent of his being car-toonist,” as one art writer said, revealing a shallow reading of the artist’s works. By eliminating background structures as in Pink Roof, Malang succeeded in focusing attention on the pink roof and the person whose frontal directional relationship with the viewer poses questions whose answers must be society-based. The 1970s The decade of the 70s witnessed the curtailment of our Constitutional freedoms. All this began on 21 September 1972. Then President Marcos declared martial law. A year earlier, in 1971, Bencab predicted the eventual muzzling of press freedom. Only 29 years old at the time, he was undaunted and fearless in depicting the impending decapitation of the press with a lithograph showing a shrouded printing press. There was no more stopping the "needling" of Bencab on the national conscience. The images that were coming out of his head and landing on his art papers and canvases are Filipino heroes and heroines of the previous century. Soldier is one of them. Three uniformed soldiers of 1896 rise in full glory, ready for any eventuality. They are headless heroes--the better to draw attention to their sides displaying side arms as symbols for the attainment of national freedom and racial dignity. By eliminating their heads, Bencab was no doubt interested in challenging his viewers to sup-plant their heads into the headless bodies of the heroes of 1896. A call to arms is a message that cannot be ignored. Martial Law was already three years old when Bencab dared the Marcos dictatorship to test the limits of its dictatorial wisdom. Imaginary Patriot shows a crumpled flag with the red field on the left side of the viewer. The flag is cut halfway down. The white triangular field displays the three stars, two of which clearly, and the sun can hardly be made out as the sun of the Philippine flag. A dictatorship that has made a mockery of a free and independent republic. The reversed display of the Philippine flag is a call for a people's revolution, a call to arms because the flag is displayed that way only if the country is at war. The white triangular field, in white off-white alteration within three horizontal folds, obliterates Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, which the white triangle and three stars symbolize. The sun with its eight rays is likewise obliterated, suggesting the dictatorship's diminution of the role and sacrifices of the so-called original provinces that rose up in arms against the Spaniards and their ilk. But to Bencab, the country and the Filipino people refuse to be kowtowed by the dictatorship. This is clearly shown by the razor-sharp contours of the flag and the celestial bodies, and the ray of hope intimidated by the forceful horizontal shaft of light color overhead. More images of the Filipino emerged from the creative head of Bencab. Portrait of a Modern Pinay Abroad shows two women as symbols of Filipina women living in an austere environment peopled by characters alien to her culture. Attached to the austere wall is a rack for ladle and such, but strongly alludes to prison bars behind which "the modern Pinay" sits on a chair--a virtual prisoner in a world of emptiness. Notwithstanding what other things the friars in the previous centuries did to our women, one thing must be acknowledged: they taught our women how to carry their bearings with dignity. Two Mestizas proves this. The two women, who may have been the off springs of unwed fathers called priests, carry the national costume for women and their bodies with élan--very much unlike some women of today, mestizas or what man topographies. Imao, for his part, was bringing Muslim art into the cultural mainstream. His series in sarimanok, in metal and on canvas, are incisive interpretations of the icon in juxtaposition with some Muslim mosque and waves. In Sarimanok and Mosque for instance, the mythical bird with a fish not in its beak this time, forms the core of the horizontal composition. The tail of the bird becomes the prow of the boat, while the minified ogee-shaped dome of the mosque intimates an upward push for an overall crossbar with a central axis. Sarimosque as the title explains, is a coupling of the sarimanok and a mosque. The abstracted neck and beak of the sarimanok and the ogee dome taper upward in thematic confluence. Both symbolize Muslim culture. In Creative Fishes all the shapes are colored flat for that is how Muslims color shapes. Tradition dictates what is. In this decade, the sculptures of Luz are diametrically different from his paintings in conception, particularly in attitude toward form. His sculptures have massive, clear forms realized through either straight or curved lines as in Painted Steel. His minimalism becomes the work's magnified structural come-on ironically. The decade of the '70s did not refocus Malang's thematic concerns. He did not venture into political subjects, meaning those that dealt with the so-called New Society either way. He continued with his timely and timeless subjects, like women, flowers, landscapes, mother and child, and so on. In Mother and Child, the mother is clad in the national costume for women, complete with butterfly sleeves. Her minified, ogee-like head is set against a circle in half, each with five sunbursts that terminate in a rectangular frame. The child is likewise frontally oriented, the arms spread sideways like the horizontal beams of a cross. The three stylized ovals within an equally stylized circle hardly create any metaphor. Instead, they are pictoral units meant to repeat the three horizontal and vertical groups with the vertical group at the center providing the fulcrum. Before the decade was out, he did Woman, one among many such subjects, carrying a bundle of flowers in both arms. Intimations of barong-barongs still obtain, without any person looking out of a window. The reversal of size (the woman is taller than the shanties) comes as the artist's freedom to express his concept of humanity, meaning people are central in society and loom larger than certain kinds of realities. |
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Copyright
© 2000 The President's Committee on Culture and the Arts |