Modernism and Locality

Martino Abellana and the Regional

Artist
Flaudette May V. Datuin
 Problem
What is the role of the regional artist?
Key terms
✔ Modernism
✔ modernity
✔ locality
Distinctions
✔ Modernity as a historical stage
✔ Modernization as a social process
✔ Modernism as a cultural process that
coincides with the development of
capitalism
Modernism
✔ movement grounded in the rejection of
classical precedent and style
✔ coincides with “modern history”
✔ period including the present but excluding
Greek and Roman epochs (Harrison)
Modernism: first usage
✔ Virtually synonymous with modernity
profound transformation of human
experience
✔ individual autonomy
✔ institutionalization of art: museums,
universities, financial markets
✔ set of attitudes towards modernity
Modernity
✔ Emancipation
✔ Expansion
✔ Renewal
✔ Democratization
Nestor Garcia Canclini
Emancipation
✔ Self-regulation
✔ independent markets
✔ regional artists organizing themselves and
attaining some kind of independence from
the State through organizations and other
initiatives
Emancipation
✔ VIVA-EXCON
✔ Baguio Arts Festival and Baguio Arts Guild
✔ Kamarikutan Gallery, Palawan
✔ Mariyah Gallery, Dumaguete
✔ Art Associations of Davao, Zamboanga,
Marbel, South Cotabato, etc
Expansion
✔ Extend knowledge
✔ production and circulation of products
✔ Abellana: Fine Arts Program in UP Cebu,
and generations of artists who bear the
stamp of his guidance
Expansion
✔ Nene Lungay, Bohol (UPCFA)
✔ Graciano Solivio, Marbel, 1950s
✔ Fred Liongoren, Marbel Art Association,
now South Cotabato Art Group, 1960s
✔ Tex Salvador, Artists Association of South
Cotabato, now Matulum Artists of South
Cotabato, 1980s
Expansion
✔ Mike Martinez, Art Association of
Zamboanga, 1980s
✔ Fr. Francisco Demetrio, Xavier University
Museo de Oro, 1967
✔ Felix Sarenas, Mandaya master carver
✔ Rodelio “Waway” Saway, organizer,
Bukidnon
Renewal
✔ Innovation and improvement
✔ iconographic and idiomatic innovations
✔ re-making images and identities
Democratization
✔ Equal opportunities, e.g. education
✔ distribution and circulation of knowledge
and art
✔ structures and technologies of modernity:
mass media, computers, internet, and so on
Modernism: second usage
✔ Artist’s
engagements with
problems of
modernity, e.g.
Painter of Modern
Life (Baudelaire)
✔ avant-garde

Mark Justiniani
Lea Padilla
Ofelia Gelvezon-Tequi

(Photos courtesy the artists)

 Li Zhanyang
Photo Courtesy Dick Daroy

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
(Photo courtesy the artist)
Migrant worker
Migrant worker

Liang Shuo

Photo courtesy Dick Daroy

Migrant worker

Dorothea Lange
Modernity:
tensions
✔ environmental
degradation

Nunelucio Alvarado
Modernity: tensions
✔ Rationality,
reason,
reflexivity
✔ dehumanization,
alienation (Marx)
Modernity: tensions

✔ Rationality,
reason, reflexivity
✔ anomie
(Durkheim)
Nuclear holocaust (WMD)

irrationality of
rationality
(Weber)

Barbara Kruger
AIDS, SARS
Modernism: third usage
✔ Modern tradition in “high art”
✔ autonomy of the “aesthetic” (Greenberg)
✔ search for new vocabularies (renewal)
✔ break from the “classical”
formal self-consciousness

Edades

Lao Lianben
Ang Kiukok
And Job Was Also Man

Formal
innovations
Engagement
with social
realities

(Photo from Cebu online website)

Philippine Modernism
✔ Not just inferior “derivatives” from within
(Manila) and beyond (global art scene)
✔ transfer and transformation in and through
the local
✔ not just formal innovations
✔ but multiple codes of interpretation
Ruptures and continuities

Colonial period
“native revolution” Esteban Villanueva
(Basi Revolt)- Luzon
middle class reform: Juan Luna (Luzon)
Ruptures and continuities

Colonial period
“homegrown” - Domingo, Malantic, Flores
educated abroad - Luna, Hidalgo, Edades
Ruptures and continuities
Amorsolo,
Planting Rice

Modern
Edades and 13 moderns (Luzon), Abellana
(Visayas)
✔ break away from Spanish academic
traditions towards New York and Paris Joya, Christ Stripped Bare
schools
conflict with socio-economic
conditions
Emancipation ✔ Chaotic and uneven
Renewal modernization
Expansion ✔ (Manila)/(regions)
Democratization ✔ New York)/Paris
✔ unequal distribution of
wealth and knowledge
✔ Class struggle,
corruption
Conflicting projects
Emancipation ✔ aesthetic advancement
Renewal and market demands
Expansion ✔ radical potential and
Democratization the state
tensions
Emancipation ✔ cooptation
Renewal ✔ standardization,
Expansion simplification
Democratization ✔ bureaucratization
✔ e.g. coffeetable books,
emphasis on
biography
tensions
Emancipation ✔ hodgepodge of styles
Renewal ✔ faddishness
Expansion ✔ affectations
Democratization ✔ novelty, exoticism
✔ “essential” identity
tensions
Emancipation ✔ failure to engage
Renewal audiences in debates
Expansion ✔ neglecting the promise
Democratization of research
✔ need for education in
the arts
Recommendations

What needs to be done?

From the regions
✔ Venture away from “essences”
“uniqueness,”or novelty of styles and forms
✔ question is not “What is Luzon, Visayas,
Mindanao art” but
✔ how is art from the regions made possible?
contexts
✔ Production
✔ cultural, thematic
✔ art history, art theory, criticism
(Flores)
production
✔ Vernacular sources
✔ contemporary sources
✔ collaboration that change the practice of
making art
✔ connection and conversation
Locality
✔ Not simply “local color”
✔ rootedness in a particular historical moment
✔ mobility facilitated by commerce, trade,
tourism, migration, education, national and
local artistic exchanges (congresses,
collaborative projects, workshops, etc)
Locality
✔ “influences”
✔ negotiation of local traditions vis-à-vis
local-global factors
✔ recognizes the artist’s agency and their
capacity to make the best of what their
traditions have to offer
From the regions
Vernacular traditions
✔ Vicente de San
Miguel, Ilongo painter
of the zarzuela era
✔ mat weavers of Samar
✔ women weavers of
Southern Mindanao
✔ Pahiyas festival
From the regions
Vernacular traditions
✔ Fidel Go, bornayan or
pottery (Vigan)
✔ Ella Arcilla, jewelry-
making (Bicol)
tradition as lived,
continuing and
emergent
 Imelda Pilapil (Impy Pilapil)
1949 Cavite, Philippines

Luis Enano Yee (Junyee)

1942 Agusan del Norte,
Philippines

Closeness and Isolation, 2000

Installation: 2 lifesize figures, one wooden and one in glass. The top figure is of a
Pintado, a tatooed visayan native from the prehispanic era.. The wooden Pintado is held
by natural fibers.
The figure below represents
a man of the computer age,
made of etched glass and
mounted on a bed of sand
production

✔ Region is not site of

essential aesthetic,
but place, that
conditions art and is
conditioned by art
production ✔ thinking beyond
region toward
national and
international scenes
discourse
✔ The Self:
✔ contemporary developments: the city,
popular culture, and so on
✔ history
✔ everyday life
Irma Lacorte: Optometry

Photo courtesy the artist

 Alma Quinto
Road 29

Photos courtesy the artist

Lydia Ingle
Tsismis
Cristina Taniguchi
Photo courtesy Kulay
Diwa
Art history
✔ Art history’s erasures - research
✔ responsive and responsible critical frames
✔ sensitivity to gender, class, ethnicity, and so
on
Historical memory
✔ Not only to correct art history’s erasures
✔ to unmask the discourses and conditions
that made such erasures possible in the first
place
✔ e.g. the notion of “genius,” “masterpiece,”
and the fine arts as a modern invention
Abellana
✔ As the Visayas’ contribution to the national
(read: Manila) canon?
✔ As the Visayan “genius?”
✔ are we going to investigate how the Manila
canon was constructed in the first place?
✔ genius and its criteria was made possible?
How is art made possible?
✔ How is the artist produced?
✔ What are the conditions that made him/her
possible?
✔ How do these conditions shape his/her
formal and thematic vocabulary?
✔ How does s/he shape these conditions?
Role of the Regional Artist?
Contribute to the projects of modernity
✔ constructing new artistic personas
✔ new images of identities/”region”
✔ renewing vocabularies: locality
✔ documentation and research
✔ rethink modernism in the metropolis
Abellana
capacity and potential for transgression and
transformation, because he has shown us
how “modernism by virtue of Cebu,
becomes local and Cebu by virtue of
modernism, through Abellana, becomes
modern.”
(Patrick Flores)