Issue 15 - Pdf Ctrl+P - CTRL+P: a journal of contemporary art

who believe their professional endeavors should transcend market concerns, appealing
instead, to aesthetic, philosophic, or even ethical and moral concerns. No less than Eileen
Legaspi-Ramirez, guest- and co-editor for this issue expressed such anxiety, by prefacing
her editorial with a disclosure about her soiled image of the art market and a recounting
of her painful encounter, in 1994, with “vultures” who were circling her grandfather’s,
National Artist Cesar Legaspi’s, deathbed knowing that their investment will multiply
at his passing.
Marina Cruz, a young rising star whose success in art fairs and auctions Legaspi-
Ramirez describes as “dramatic” expressed at one point during her talk in the forum:
“Are we less ‘good’ because we are commercially successful?” All she desires (perhaps
naively, as another panelist points), she says, is for her work to be appreciated by the different
publics—from the most knowledgeable of insiders to the least initiated art world
‘outsiders,’ the people who, driven by curiosity, take the time to stop and look at the works
she was documenting outside her house. The fact that collectors buy her works is a stroke
of luck she is humbly grateful for, but like other artists present in the forum, she values
critical validation and recognition equally, if not more, than her commercial success.
Joselina Cruz in her talk, on the other hand, took the Ctrl+P forum brief to task
for what she perceived as unproblematized observation that boundaries are blurring between
biennales/triennales, on one hand and art fairs, on the other. The first Philippine
curator to join an international curatorial team in the biennale mode, Cruz insisted that
while both have validation powers, the latter are more open-ended, more price-driven.
Biennales, on the other hand, are more rigorously framed by a theoretical and critical
mentality, even if such criticality is often compromised and limited—as she relates in
her essay on her experiences curating the most recent Singapore Biennale—by logistic
and contextual givens. Caught between what Gina Fairley describes as “a schizophrenic
ricochet between the institutional white cube and the raw (un)familiar site, which has
increasingly become a marketing chip to identifying and growing these events to local
and international audiences” and layered “with a trend to package these exhibitions with
other events,” the biennale’s critical and self-reflexive edge, start to blur—exactly the
point of the Ctrl+P forum brief and call for papers.
For Eliza Tan, the Venice Biennale similarly offers nothing perspectivally fresh,
although she took diligent note of the good pace, narrative roundness and accessibility,
and the hushed, un-ostentatious character of works in the curated segments. And in a
more optimistic vein, Patrick Flores hailed the Gwanju Biennale as having a more robust
theoretical frame and discussion, which was absent, he writes, in other eight biennales
that opened in the same season of the year in Asia. Contributing to a section of Gwanju
Biennale called Position Papers, he centered on four germinal figures on Southeast Asia,
one of whom, Raymundo Albano, pioneered the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP)
collection. The contributions of Albano along with other lively minds of the early 70s to
the 80s, most of whom are still active today (Sibayan, Pastor Roces, Chabet, to name a
few) are reckoned with in Flores’ other essay in this issue—a reprint from the catalogue
on the survey exhibition on the CCP collection, “Suddenly Turning Visible.”
Jay Bautista’s essay on Philippine competitions rounds out—though in a less scholarly
and critical vein—the material on the Philippine art world. It contains historical
information that may prove useful to the uninitiated as well as anyone who is unfamiliar
with Philippine art history. Along with the brief review of the Thirteen Artists Awards by
Rina Alphonso, which the CCP bestows on young artists nominated and deemed promising
by a panel of jurors, Bautista’s essay tells us that, critical as we may be of competitions
and awards, they remain influential shapers of careers, artistic directions and values,
even as they are beset, as Legaspi-Ramirez recounts in her experience as juror, with the
infrastructural and logistic constraints that similarly limit resource-rich blue-chip events
like the biennales and triennales.
As I write this, the CCP is holding a necrological service for the National Artist
Awards, believed to have “died” because tainted by the unprincipled intervention of the
state led by an unethical leader and her cohorts. Questions of creative autonomy, respect
for peer-initiated process, and delicadeza vis-à-vis presidential prerogative empowered
Ctrl+P September 2009