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

why they create the way they do,” on the one hand, and to advance the central aesthetic
thesis that “ours is an art of objectifying visual pleasure,” 23 on the other. The walls were
painted peach, alluding to the “physicalization of pleasure”: the exhibitionary and the
artistic merge. The critic Cid Reyes was able to propose categories of analysis for this
particular pursuit of a Filipino aesthetic in painting: frontality of image; fragmentation:
openness of forms; décor: enhancements of the picture plane; horror vacui: appropriation
of space; ‘focal point’: leading the eye to pasture; recession: shallow space; and color:
radiation of energy.” 24
This was the second and may have been the last serious attempt of the CCP to
strive for discursive density in relation to its collection. The first one was done in 1980
with the exhibition curated by the critic and printmaker Rodolfo Paras Perez titled Five
Directions; it attempted to map out “for meditation the various permutations, perplexities,
the five identifiable tendencies, the ambitions deemed characteristic of Philippine
art” 25 : non-objectivist, macro-visionist, magic realist, Laguna lake shore, conceptualist.
Curiously missing was the social realist aesthetic that had already potently posited its
agenda since 1971, finding its impetus with the founding of Kaisahan in 1976. Surely,
the omission was obvious: the MOPA might not have wanted to present art that tried to
disclose an abject social condition, a far cry from Imelda’s idealized City of Man, for
which the government was responsible. This policing was, therefore, political, something
that might have also permeated the choices for the Thirteen Artists. As social realist
Renato Habulan would reflect on his belated conferment in 1990 along with confreres
Pablo Baens Santos, Edgar Talusan Fernandez, Antipas Delotavo, and Neil Doloricon:
“Our selection was a vindication of work that was deserving but could not be displayed
because of the dissenting political implication they held during the Marcos era. We
may have even deserved nomination in the 1970s, but this could not happen under the
(Marcos)administration.” 26 This umbrage is not as simple as it looks, because on the
other hand, the modernist canon makers in New York like Museum of Modern Art’s
Alfred Barr during the Cold War would juxtapose the freedom of abstract expressionism
with the fascism of socialist realism.
Marian Pastor Roces reviewed Five Directions and thought it iterative and recursive:
it “moves into itself and around and over again, in a steady, non-corrective, immutable,
static, state.” 27 While viewed as curatorially faulty, this exhibition, along with The Sensuous
Eye, constitutes the only consolidated effort of the Center to assess its collection,
coextensively and implicitly with its exhibitions, in relation to both aesthetics and art
history. From this stock taking, we could infer artistic leanings in terms of themes, forms,
and ideas, on the one hand, and a deeper structure of an aesthetic sensibility that is constantly
eluded by its grail that is the Filipino, on the other.
NOW: Simula Pa Lamang
The turn away from neorealism towards the contemporary may have been heralded
by Raymundo Albano at the Center, who insisted on working on the now, its labor as
the advent of an alternative universe that was present—and that was only the beginning.
Albano widened the parameters of art and invested the modern not only with the notion
of the new, but the urgency of the now, its being essential in development that must seize
the day, demanding quick action and being forward looking, the better perhaps to slay
the feudal time of oligarchy that Marcos so despised, assiduously tried to dismantle, and
replaced with technocrats and cronies of a developing nation state.
It is in this segment of the exhibition that the documentation of the projects at the
Center becomes extremely helpful. Albano diligently annotated them, dutifully wrote
curatorial briefs, and kept photographs in tidy volumes that serve as our map to the
labyrinths of the spaces and the laboratories that they had become in the seventies and
eighties. We may designate this juncture as the carnival world and adventure time of Albano,
one of the most solvent periods in Philippine art history, rivaled only by the hectic
routine at the Philippine Art Gallery and the steady production of protest art during the
Marcos administration.
40 Ctrl+P September 2009