Portrait of the nation in arts and books

This year-ender must begin with a disclaimer: this is as limited as the many other essays that claim to look back at 2010. This is as limited as time allows, as the amount of books I could afford and get to read, as the number of exhibits I could go to. The only thing this list can promise is this: that all of what’s here I have consumed, that all of them I did experience. Maybe that’s a promise for truthfulness in 2011, too, more than anything else. So here, what has become a top 13, superstition notwithstanding, for what happened in arts and books the past year, not necessarily the best of it, maybe just the good in it, and what I wish it means for us all in 2011. 1. Art and the elections. Signos was a group exhibit at the SM Megamall Art Center inspired by the national elections, but which clearly was working against it. In the hands of the younger of our artists what might have begun as an exhibit on the things to consider as we vote, became very clearly about issues that were so large and looming, no one vote could solve it. Particularly: Mark Salvatus’ My Farmville, a rendering of the Facebook role-playing game vis a vis the real haciendas and feudal lords among us and in government; Teta Tulay’s installation Under Duress which spoke not just of torture and the disappeared, but more importantly points to the truth of an oppressive time’s continued existence; Kalye Collective’s critical take on religiosity as dangerously all-encompassing. 2. Art critical. Of itself, that is. In Moneyobra by Artery Manila, art turned upon itself and decided to talk about the money that goes into its own consumption. The art space’s standard structures were torn down, and made into a strange enough stage for just stating the obvious: art’s value in itself is its irony. The usual bright lights of this mall art space were made dimmer and warmer, almost museum-like. And the works, some of them by artists whose pieces are often pre-bought by art patrons who prove they don’t care for the works really, were not for sale. None of them had prices, all of them were there as a matter of exhibition. And of making a point. One well taken, but I’m not one to afford a painting anyway.

3. The Aquilizans are home! Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan came home from Australia, to a collaborative exhibit at the UP Vargas Museum early in the year. Here, and with most of the Aquilizans’ work exhibited in various group exhibits throughout the year, we are reminded of how space and memory may be bound in installations that echo with notions of nation and its loss, citizenship and its transience, lives led and the absences and endings they require. Yes, it was as painful -- and liberating -- as it sounds. 4. Disorder of the times. Kiri Dalena’s The Present Disorder is the Order of the Future at mo._ gallery was a stark reminder of state violence that remains true even when we don’t feel threatened at all. A wall is filled with tombstones carved with slogans and idioms of Marcos’ Martial Law; on the floor before it are scattered figures of different body parts with some of them identifiably a crumpled torso, arms and legs, but with many of them too small or unidentifiable. The only light in the darkened room comes from video footage on loop of a ride through a regular provincial dirt road with no houses or people in sight. The effect was eerie, one that could only resonate given the continued loss of activist lives, they who are considered enemies of the state. And it seems all the more important to repeat that yes, this is happening even when we might not feel threatened at all. 5. Grabbing you, in panic. Dina Gadia is a young spit of a girl with the most inspired up-yours to pop art as we know it. And this is to say that while the form in her solo exhibit How Does That Grab You Darling? is familiar to us and might be easy to dismiss, you pay attention to detail because her wit, her self-reflexivity, her intelligence is in the nuances of her art, both within and against pop art as it is. In Paper Panic though, while taking this wit to the form of paper collages, she also reflects a maturity with subject matter that cuts across colonization and oppression, without killing the sense of humor that’s always implicit in her work, the one that will make you shake your head, both in laughter and in panic. 6. Inhale, exhale. Leslie de Chavez’s installations in Buntong Hininga creatively tied together political truths and national images via layers of bamboo and concrete and resin, with ladders for the craziness of bureaucracy, monkeys for government officials, the things we say under our breathes in concrete. Leslie filled both Silverlens, Slab and 20 Square with a very clear perspective about the politics of this nation and our downfall within it. It was everything and daring, and elicited exactly the exhibit’s title. 7. Celebrating Salvatus. This seems to be the year of Mark Salvatus, whom I always imagine to have various incarnations as street artist, but in the past year has become known for installations that are lived, such as his time spent in a city jail for Do or Die and Secret Garden both of which won him the Ateneo Art Award and a foreign artist residency at the end of last year. The latter of course isn’t new for Mark who has in fact been traveling abroad for different residencies and projects, and who by all counts has yet to compromise his art. There is a consistency to Mark’s perspective that is about living within a space, and creating from it, with a certainty that comes from a clear sense of what is just and right and concretely real. There is also always the possibility of dark humor and the reconfiguration of the flimsy as with his work in Paper Panic. There is every reason to celebrate with Salvatus around. 8. Going West. Was something I thought was worthwhile doing throughout the year, because while West Gallery is out of the way there was no one visit that meant no exhibit to like -- or dislike for that matter -- across all three galleries, no going home from West Gallery without an exhibit stuck in my head. This year, the tip of the iceberg: the sad calm in Catalina Africa’s Etymology of Disaster, the necessary bad taste in the mouth left in a good way by Felix Bacolor’s Meet Your Meat, the loud white noise in MM Yu’s If You Could Hear A Pin Drop, Steve Santos’ beautiful soft thick lines in his Recent Works. 9. Nick Joaquin revisited. In late 2009, Anvil Publishing released National Artist Nick Joaquin’s Reportage on Crime, thirteen horror happenings that hit the headlines and Reportage on Lovers, A medley of factual romances, happy or tragical, most of which made the news, both originally published in 1977 with little fanfare, and in 2010, it seems like it’s barely been talked about save for a few reviews. This lack of attention is a sad thing really, given how Quijano de Manila just might be the one Pinoy writer who took liberties with journalistic writing like no other; the one Pinoy essayist who was doing version(s) of creative non-fiction before the label existed. Recently, Anvil also came out with a Joaquin novella Candido’s Apocalypse, currently on top of my pile of must-reads (with Gina Apostol’s novel The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata coming in second), because it is Nick Joaquin. All these books at prices so affordable, the author himself must be shaking his head while downing a bottle of beer at the state of the Pinoy book. 10. One ilustrado, literally. A look at the year 2010 wouldn’t be complete without mention of Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado, which has come a long way since its 2008 Palanca Award win for the novel. I love Ilustrado because I think it's adventurous in the way that the novels of Ninotchka Rosca and Eric Gamalinda are, at the same time that it proves itself a study in these fragmented times of writing and discipline, research and history. And yet. My apprehensions about the text as a rendering of life in Pinoy hands and the histories (ir)relevant to it, could only really be about my apprehensions about Syjuco and his grand conclusions about this nation he doesn’t live in but of which he speaks about with confidence. And that’s Syjuco the author and not the one within the book. My review of the latter shall happen soon. 11. Three chicks. The opposite end of the Syjuco success pole just might be Asian chick lit from Singapore written by three Filipina writers, finally getting published in Manila. Tara FT Sering, Maya O. Calica and Noelle Chua wrote one chick novel each in 2009 for a Singapore publisher, and all of them were declared bestsellers there. In the first half of 2010 we finally got it in Manila and it was as expected: a measure of good Pinoy chick lit writing with mostly non-Pinoy characters in a setting that’s not Manila. Now really, that’s a success worth celebrating for Philippine writing, no matter what you believe about chick lit as fluff. Which is just wrong by the way. 12. An indie book fair for the win! The Better Living Through Xeroxography (BLTX) 2010 happened at the tail-end of the year with much success. The small little-known bar Ilyong’s in Cubao (not X) was filled to its low rafters, and people could only spill out as a matter of not drowning in the crowd inside. But people stayed and if the organizers’ post-mortem is to be believed books from and by independent presses, xeroxed and hand-bound books were sold aplenty that night. The indie book is definitely giving the vanity publication a good name, though maybe it’s time for the latter’s redefinition, given the former. 13. Good poetry as few and far between. And then there is The Collapse of What Separates Us by Vincenz Serrano (High Chair, 2010). Released during the BLTX, Serrano’s kind of poetry is a reminder that there are many stories still, many poems yet, to be written about and within this nation, and that its complexities can only be that of the poem’s. In his first book, Serrano walks through the streets of Manila with a sophisticated view that we know from Nick Joaquin, but with a keen sense of its unfaithfulness to what it sees, and its removal and inclusion in the act of seeing. These poems take us by the hand and point at the relevance of the real given the romance of poetry, conscious of the possibility that these can cancel each other out, maybe is even hopeful for this cancellation because it will prove the survival of the image. Through Serrano’s poetry a walk through the streets of this nation, both imagined and real, cinematic and otherwise, is a worthwhile endeavor. More beautiful in its stark disparities, almost crystalline in its (self-)destruction. And so it is that there seems to be more art exhibits here than books, and I realize that has much to do with the facts of consumption. Many of the books I bought and loved this year were High Chair poetry books published in 2009 such as Oliver Ortega’s Mga Tala sa Alaala ng Kagandahan and in 2008 such as Mesandel Vertusio Arguelles’ Parang. Re-prints (in six fantastic variants!) of Adam David’s El Bimbo Variations were also a wonderful gift to self, but this was originally published in 2008 too. In the end though the more basic and bigger reason for the disparity between art and books here is this fact: art exhibits are free, openings even give you free food and drink (haha!) and books just aren’t. That, ladies and gentlemen, is my middle-class limitation. - GMANews.TV