Cebuano modernism

Kinutil

Identity is a big issue for local artists. As it should be. In the 1970s, there was the common assertion that Philippine art was derivative and too affected by the West, especially American art. This assertion is to be expected considering that we had been colonized by Spain for over 400 years, this period immediately followed by American colonization until after the end of World II when we were “granted” independence by the US. And so it would seem logical to think we had been and are still Westernized.

And yet, the fact of this Westernization needs to be qualified. The late Cebuano painter and teacher Martino Abellana was not much perturbed by the issue of identity. He believed that a Filipino will always be Filipino and will always paint like a Filipino no matter how Westernized he or she might be. As he puts it: “A crab will always walk like a crab.”

This statement was not a welcome statement in the ’70s when the cause of nationalism was a popular cause especially among the young. Even Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law government made an issue of Filipinism. Indigenous art was an ideal much pursued by many artists at that time. And so many artists went off searching for the native roots of their art.

Much as changed since the 1970s. One reading of this is that the goals of nationalism and nativism have already been achieved. It cannot be the case that globalism has made us less Filipino and more colonial minded as a people. We have simply become less afraid of the foreign even as we grow more appreciative of our own culture.

The core assertion is that we cannot be absolutely Westernized even if we wanted to be. And the convincing evidence of this is that we cannot really look at Western culture the same way a Western person can. It is inevitable we will always look at the West from our own peculiar viewpoint; and, inevitably, from the reference point of who we are.

This fact is borne out of the Filipino experience of art. When a Filipino looks at Western art, he or she must look at it as pictures on the pages of a book. Anyone who has ever gone to a museum knows that the experience of watching the real painting is fundamentally different from watching that same painting in a book; in the same way that same painting viewed inside a computer monitor or a TV set would offer a different set of experiences entirely. Much would be missed or gained.

Thus, our understanding of Western art is peculiar to us. It is a “Filipinized” reading of Western art. And, of course, this peculiar reading requires close study because any sort of identity must derive from a mastery of only one thing: self-awareness. This is true especially where is concerned the question of modern art and how it is understood here.

Because Western modernist art is not part of our own culture, we face always the danger that we will understand it only for what is apparent rather than for what is at its core. Thus, we tend to understand it only as the movements of modernism, movements such as impressionism, expressionism, cubism, and so forth.

The schools have a lot to do with this surface understanding of modernism. Unless a teachers is a well-educated modernist, he or she will most likely miss the fact that the core project of modernism was the emancipation of the individual. All the principles of modernism derive from this process of emancipation. Absent this understanding, it is possible that an artist may seem modernist, paint like an impressionist, or expressionist, or cubist, and at the same time maintain or display the most feudal pre-modernist values, or be unmindful of the relevance of modernism to the rest of life beyond art.

This sort of modernism would be dis-attached from the changing forces of life, it would be spiritless and will ultimately become empty embellishment and decoration useful only as a dysfunctional commodity to be traded, cash for vanity and vice-versa.

Which is a real danger most Filipinos and Cebuanos face in this day and age. It is a disease for which the only cure is a deeper understanding of Western and local history and art. Modernism in the West is the easier field to understand, given the fact that modernism is dead there. The area of Cebuano modernism is the harder field of study. But it is really the more exciting since it is a study that is only now beginning to be written down.