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

The MOPA was dedicated to Philippine modern art in contradistinction to another
Imelda brainchild, the Metropolitan Museum of Manila or the MET that was decidedly
international in its projection, having opened in 1977 with loans from the Brooklyn
Museum and other galleries or collections in the United States, 13 most notably Armand
Hammer’s. Like MOPA, which commenced with a Federico Aguilar Alcuaz event under
Luz’s directorship, the MET was directed by Arturo Luz. Through the years, it hosted the
exhibitions of Paul Klee and Joseph Beuys, Byzantine icons, Yugoslav naïf paintings, the
Vatican Collection, among countless others. The MET after Marcos, in some version of
the developmentalist model, pursued an “art for all” vision, and interestingly this meant
overturning the Luz museography. According to Felice Sta. Maria, MET President from
1986 to 1993: “For Philippine museums, adherence to the Western museum paradigm
led to an isolationist image, incomprehensible texts, and ineffective programs—a total
museological dysfunction…It dampened the raison d’etre of museums as cultural and
educational institutions for the general public.” 14 It may seem then that post-Marcos
likewise meant post-Luz.
Fourth, the somewhat unpredictable and unsystematic admission of gifts, contributions,
and art left behind by artists, a practice that was practically dependent on the social
networks of Imelda Marcos and Raymundo Albano, who did not have the budget to buy.
There had been purchases after the Marcos period, governed by no clear-cut acquisition
guidelines. This could be attributed to an anti-CCP outlook that infected the CCP, that
is, an aversion to curatorial engineering. Reigning in a scenario soaked in people-power
euphoria were the tedious and ultimately reactionary concepts of decolonization and
indigenization, informed by the populist nationalism of a coalition of anti-dictatorship
forces. The plurality that was unleashed by the fall of the house of Marcos found its expression
in Piglas: Art at the Crossroads, the come-one, come-all exhibition at the Center
in 1986 that, as it is in all days of deliverance, let the barbarians at the gate, anybody
who thought of himself or herself as artist, crash the fold of culture’s grand catacomb.
Marian Pastor Roces interjects: “It was extremely difficult to keep the exhibit free from
the emotional issues surrounding the CCP itself. It was impossible to screen out works
which did not seem to have anything to do with art at the crossroads. It was, to say the
least, impossible to ‘curate.’” 15 This could only be indicative of the semblance of strict
curatorial control in the previous years and the irresistible urge to negate it when the
party was finally over.
In light of these developments at the CCP, one way of piecing together the sources
of the collection would be to match exhibitions at the CCP and the existence of objects
in these exhibitions with the registry. For instance, Lani Maestro’s work in the collection
might have come from her exhibition at the CCP Museum Hallway in 1981 based on the
visual documentation. Cid Reyes also confides that Arturo Luz bought some of his works
at his Chroma exhibition at the Hyatt in 1973 on behalf of Imelda; and one of these, the
tondo Volta Redonda I, is in the collection. And we take note of a Betsy Westendorp de
Brias exhibition of Marcosiana in 1975; a portrait of Ferdinand Marcos is in the storage.
To summarize, the collection at the Center was assembled under the broad rubrics of
commission, purchase, and gift. A curious note: In 1976, in time for the International
Monetary Fund-World Bank Meeting, an exhibition of reproductions of modern masters
(Picasso, Bacon, Magritte, Klee) was held at the CCP to shore up a proposal for a collection
of international contemporary art at the Center.
Ethic of Collecting
It may be useful to tentatively assume that the logic of collecting at the Center was
contingent on a level of connoisseurship represented by the taste of Imelda Marcos and
the coterie around her: Leandro Locsin, Arturo Luz, and Roberto Chabet. At the outset,
a particular type of internationalist abstraction of a late modern pedigree would frame
this disposition, although Imelda also favored nativist inclinations in the works of, let us
say, Carlos Francisco of Angono, Rizal. Locsin’s design of the building, a cross between
brutalist minimalism and nativist quotation of the bahay kubo (nipa hut) morphology,
set the tone, inflected by the exacting predilections of Luz and, later, Chabet. They
36 Ctrl+P September 2009