A NATION’S 20/20 IMAGINATION

“Real politics is to engage to resolve problems within a collective with enthusiasm. It's not simply to delegate problems to the professionals. Love is like politics in that it's not a professional affair. There are no professionals in love, and none in real politics.” – Alain Badiou

“The President’s Office” (curated by Antares Bartolome[1]) occurred at the U.P. Vargas Museum from January 8 until February 9 this year. It was purportedly part of “Blind Spots,” a working series exploring restricted spaces as springboards “for imaginative construction.” So, presented with that goal, how did one—like a poet—show off anticipated wit upon neither images of seen reality nor the concocted images of surreal dreaming but upon merely hidden but ostensibly real spaces? How did the imagination work around this latency?

    But the deeper question would be: what was the resultant of such an exercise? With which did the imagination try to work? Detached humor? A more direct caustic humor? Emotional sarcasm/satire? Empathy? Sympathy? Understanding? Paranoia? Ignorance? Indifference? What? The artist could in fact have explored all these points of flight with all the usual creative aplomb or fun were he using more universal imagery, as, say, a child in a garage unseen by its mom trying to back up the car. Exploiting such an emotional scene-situation for artistic concerns and causes is commonplace, especially in the cinematic art of pounding our universalized, normal hearts.

    It’s a different story when art becomes political. The imagination may be allowed all sorts of humor and colors of expression (the too-dark, the too-red, the green with envy, the yellowed, even the too-heavenly-white), but simply cannot suffer to be seen as shallow in its working with ignorance. This, especially in a country currently under someone at the helm who has been counter-critiquing his “matatalinong” (read: ignorant) critics, labeling them as mere workers in a burgeoning criticism industry, working, that is, to keep the network or readership ratings up or keeping opposition party elements in the sound bites roster. In short, here is a president flaunting the substance of achievement while quasi-exposing what he likes to call journalism’s possibly-corrupted refusal to see the good. And, indeed, could the “fourth estate” proposal be a myth in our corrupted or partisan times?

    In this show’s case of handling a political motif, however, values other than a literal criticality’s were placed on the table. Despite the mind-influence of the more overtly political exhibition in the museum gallery’s adjoining wing (which mused on the question of land use from progressivist art’s standpoint), or despite the show’s wall notes claiming a portrayal of a “den of thieves,” in the end “The President’s Office” put forward less the emotion or intellections of politics than the luxury of the imagination, in the end clarified what installation art qua craft and art is all about. The individual concepts may indeed have been familiar, may have been established before by jokes from the drinking-binge table or the radio station booth or the sitcom set, materializing as our "expectations, fantasies, and perceived relationships that overlay our collective imaging of the seat of power." But the show’s PR-announced point—exploration rather than expression—unwittingly or wittingly succeeded as elegant executions of simple black jokes, expanding on the jokes by sheer subtlety of imagery rather than an insistent expressionist righteousness.

    For instance, with Soiree (Dahil sa Iyo), Alwin Reamillo’s offering of a possible Palace piano[2] (red, white and blue feet and the President’s seal on the body’s side for this symbol of opulence) took on the acerbic but common view of the Presidential office as one that’s often just playing our economy via the fiat of mere ear training. But departing from the clichés of radio broadcasters who may know little or nothing about fiscal policy, Reamillo donned the robe of the poet and looked for a rarer eloquence to deliver the same old message. Here, he literally filled the piano’s soundboard with a large amount of shredded bank notes (bought from a community of garbage pickers in Gloria Arroyo’s province after watching a TV report’s discovery of a Central Bank secret disposal in 2011). Then he glued a wooden heart’s-anatomy chart (“wooden” pun not intended?) to the center of the grand piano’s top, almost neutralizing the acerbic wit and projecting a serious note. Apart from the playing-with-our-money context’s referencing a central space in Malacañang called the Music Hall (often used for important meetings with selected members of the cabinet and for entertaining foreign dignitaries/diplomats), the glued-on heart’s and title’s alluding to Imelda Marcos’ favorite love song, “Dahil Sa Iyo,” the P20-P50 notes’ carrying the images of the Palace and Old Congress building, and the shreds’ simulation of a garbage dump or volcano (read: social volcano), the formal contrast between the piano’s lacquer gloss and the shredded bills’ matte truly affected glamour not only to the mind but also to the senses, taming thus the politics somewhat without erasing it. In the end, it was the elegance of the satire and our tempted senses’ reaction to the presentation apart from the sardonic statement itself that became the point. It didn’t matter now if the original criticism was correct.

    An elegant caustic humor, meanwhile, showed in the collaborative work The Stockholders by Mity de la Peña/Jed Nacabuan/Patch Qunito/J.P. Samson. This literal wall piece factured the common intelligentsia wisdom that says Philippine political maturity is rooted not in history but in cinema. Hastily painted portraits of past presidents and presidential wannabes carried titles of movies (local and Hollywood) and were placed at the tips of a painted tree’s roots. Meanwhile, right below this, Leo Abaya’s Rigodon played with the check-patterned floor tiles of the Palace and associated this with the chess game of politics by illustrating a (pseudo) chess problem using floor stickers of chess-piece shapes and photo-stickers of Philippine presidents’ faces as chess pieces (all pawns) on the fake tiles. The idea of the artist as whining mimic or mocker of a chess composer would here have to be mentally contrasted with the idea of that imagined composer who often laughingly wins.

    To address the issue of security amidst political conflict and ambition, Cian Dayrit provided readymades-of-sorts titled Trophy Pelts, involving cult-religious “bulletproof vests” placed in the gallery, thus evoking the late dictator’s (and his wife’s) predisposition to fall for such indigenous superstition as well as the present president’s adherence to ethnic Chinese-Filipino feng shui beliefs. The title may likewise refer to the belief in a throne/power as divine grace.

    But it was Manolo Sicat’s furniture set, Palamuti ng May Sala, that was able to produce a multilayered statement akin to Reamillo’s. Albeit gleaming in white, the coffeetable made of steel bars wrought into the word “Mabuhey” on its glassless top was unusable, as were the benches made from pieces of discarded wood, with their backs looking a lot like an architect’s model of slums. As foyer pieces that seemed to welcome Palace visitors to a reality beyond the whitewash, this was one of the show’s works that wore the loudest color of mockery.

    Looking outside the gallery’s glass walls from where the lobby white furniture pieces were, one could glean Buen Abrigo’s half-concealed puppet-looking armalite-toting figures with woven bags for head masks positioned on some trees, PP1017. While suggestive of Palace security sniper personnel, the woven-bags-for-masks called to mind the appearance of the local informants of the Japanese-invasion era called the “makapili”. Were these snipers supposed to be the same type of traitors, personnel deriving from a social class who have nonetheless chosen to serve lords of another social class, a ruling class?

    Another amusing piece was Lisa Ito’s Personal Domain, a wall map under glass emulating the appearance of official technical maps or military maps. However, this emulation led to surprise (or did it?) as it happened to be by a more personal presidential map where state nomenclature gave way to filial historiography. For instance, an island was named “Asyenda ni Lolo” while another was called “My Sanctuary.” Indeed, in Philippine politics elitism is a perfect equivalent of British royalism.

    Kristine Calayan’s Made to Measure featured portal columns made of raw piña fiber and rice paper, classy but vulnerable. Behind this, Mark Justiniani’s 2-in1 piece, Hole/Appointed, was outstanding. For Hole Justiniani appropriated a part of the gallery’s architecture for imagining Malacañang and the Presidential chair. While a stainless Damocles sword hung above the chair in Appointed, beside it on the white floor was a manhole-shaped glass-covered floor exit (for Hole). The hole revealed an aluminum ladder rung leading down to an unknown tunnel area, with rows of light bulbs illuminating the way. It was an elegant piece of work that was terse but sweet, with all the moods of sci-fi, spy cinema, and steampunk converging in the brain’s own creative appreciation.

    Then, coming out of a blackened wood gate (simulating precious mahogany) was the piece by Salvador Alonday, What stood there in the doorway, a sculpture of a large sea turtle with a human head (in concrete and acrylic?), possibly referencing folk parlance’s regard for the turtle-man as one who is slow and seldom comes out of his house. For a large king turtle-man to be let out of its house and beyond, out of its gate, is to hasten a political contextuality of what’s impossible, or of wishful thinking, or otherwise of a shocking fulfillment of what we think could never happen—the slow leader has come out of his comfort zone to face his nation.

    Now, what were a couple of paintings—two from Buen Calubayan’s Landscape Eternal series—doing in a show of installation art pieces, unless they were to be read as installation art pieces themselves? An erstwhile First Lady had the reputation of being a buyer and collector of expensive local paintings and priceless foreign ones, modernist as well as of previous periods, so: would she have bought these paintings of what looked like fallen bodies on a tree-surrounded rally ground and of a blood-spattered open field? Would any president’s wife or sister receive them? Should one, there’s a new paradigm.

    Noel EL Farol’s bookshelf was one compound of context pieces, with each piece its own lyric poem.

    One layer of thought would have perceived the shelf contents as mere representations of presidential books/references. Another angle would have considered expression in material execution: Unfinished Business (Series A) and (Series B) were constructions of discarded wood, thus books never touched again, never to be touched again at all; Spratly Islands’ Souvenir was a glass case filled with white silica sand, a touristy memento of what is otherwise a motif of geopolitical urgency; Filipino Favorits was another glass case containing rice and a water vessel, another touristy treatment of an economic point of class conflict; Target Appointees was a dartboard signifying a not-so-good marksmanship; while Executive Appointments’ glass case containing toy guns could have been toying with the idea of a shooting sportsman-president’s image of having appointed shooting range mates. Noli by JP and Fili by JP were books of constructed steel, presumably locked in, never to be read again, or otherwise mere monuments to a now-faux nationalist cause. Ang Bagong Balita was a copy of the Holy Bible cast in resin, unusable thus. Filosofi, a collage on found objects, seemed to signify precisely that—political philosophy as a syncretist’s collection of found objects, like slogans that can change like window curtains. Consti was supposedly a printed copy of the Constitution, or so said the engraving . . . on constructed steel—thus, again, not needing to be opened for reference since it couldn’t be opened anyway. Sure, the obvious social and political polemics of each of the Farol sub-pieces may falter in an argument of facts, but that would miss the point. Again, the point is the alienation of subjects of a land from the truth and facts behind a Presidency, any Presidency. It occurred to the artist to come up with a concept anthologizing mini-concepts, a mini-show by itself inside this anthology show—coming up with that was already a point for applause.

    Applause. Mideo Cruz inserted that audio player into Farol’s shelf and played in a loop the applause of US Congressmen for Corazon Aquino’s presence in their halls in 1986. He titled the sound recording Booby Trap, to allude perhaps to the presidential promise to pay all debts incurred by Ferdinand Marcos. Was the US Congress applause the trap that Aquino couldn’t get out of later? Was the applause and US Congress visit merely the crowning ceremony for a trap set up even before Aquino’s US-supported campaign began? In which case, who was booby-trapped, Aquino or her subjects? Consider the fact, also, that the recorded applause did sound a lot like a rainstick flurry, an aural cheese to a rat trap that would hurt.

    Finally, there was Renan Ortiz’ Sugod, positing Malacañang security in a tweaked survival video game called Lusob (Attack/Invasion). Often in a video game one can choose to be either the protagonist or the antagonist. Was the gun-wielder in the played loop a security man or a coup invader, then? Were the men in barong Tagalog executives of the Palace or were they attackers disguised in barong? Were they armed enemies or were they civilians? Whatever (partisan) setting you would have chosen for your imagination to play around in, the reality remains that the Presidency of a State presupposes enemies and conflict. And corollary to that, the hidden fact remains that the President of a given territory and race could also either be that nation’s hero or its treasonous villain.

    Reamillo’s Presidential wall seal encased in glass—and made up of shredded bank notes for border accoutrement and crab shells for the seal ground—laid the contextual axiom for all:

    Stating the obvious statement of this piece, titled Sa gisa ng Pangulo, amounted to The President having gotten to his post via a lot of hidden moolah and by the strength of his crab mentality. But could it also be usable for a non-obvious signification?—alluding to achievement by a popularity shredding the influence of moolah and by an ability to unite and trample on the need for crabs in the bucket? Whichever type of President one is, this seal can remain as the seal.

    And whichever type of President the viewer may support, the pieces in this show could remain in memory to refer to either a forgotten past, a disappointing present, or a long insufferable future. For their part, professional artists will continue to reflect a blinded and divided nation’s 20/20 imagination while abetting, examining, or merely suffering its ramifications. For art’s sake, yes, but also for reflecting on the polis. After all, political art is not just a professional affair. [END]

[1] son of activists Heber Bartolome (the folk rock singer-songwriter) and Maita Gomez (the late beauty queen)

[2] Reamillo’s is not exactly a total outsider’s perspective. The artist’s affinity with pianos (he has used the image in a previous restoration project called Nicanor Abelardo Grand Piano Project) stems from his family's involvement in maintaining all the pianos in the presidential Palace. Though he hasn't been to Malacañang himself, he often recalls the white piano his family built specially for the Marcoses. Imelda Romualdez Marcos's piano tuner was an older first cousin, whose brother also worked for Imelda’s brother and later Tacloban mayor Alfredo “Bejo” Romualdez.

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PHOTOS BORROWED FROM VARGAS MUSEUM'S WEBSITE AND FACEBOOK PAGE. OTHER PHOTOS BY MARCEL ANTONIO.

The Artist as Genetic Engineer

"Spectres of Mnemosyne"

June 4 - 24, 2012
Blanc Gallery
Unit 2-E Crown Tower, 107 HV dela Costa St., Salcedo Village, Makati City

In his first exhibition in 2010 (read my review of that show here), Gromyko Semper was both iconoclast and aniconist in his parodying and mocking icons of religion (especially Roman Catholic) and (especially religious) history. But perhaps cognizant of the fact that a parody of any sort of iconography qua a socio-political act necessarily manufactures an alternative system of iconography (iconoclasm/aniconism as its own iconography), opening thus itself to a counter-visual criticism of its visual criticism, Semper now turns to explore iconoclasm’s other option—postmodernism’s self-questioning and self-flagellating embrace of semiotics’ Marxist denouncement of both icon- and iconoclastic-touting.

     In his new works, Semper—in his usual woodcut-looking large drawings—takes off inspired by the art of Ukiyo-e and Albín Brunovský. (The drawings are teamed with responses in poetry by American poet William Nace, Jr. Nace’s postmodern poems likewise have a strongly Blakean flavour, heavily peppered with surrealism, Dada, contemporary music, and ironic mythologies urging a more eclectic Christianity—Nace is a former pastor. These literary poesies decidedly add extra layers of nuance to Semper’s drawings.)

Armed with new visual takeoff points for composition, Semper came up with what he calls “spectres.” In turn, Semper is also now wont to quote Carl Jung (“Dreams are symbolic in order that they cannot be understood, in order that the wish, which is the source of the dream, may remain unknown.” – Psychology of the Unconscious), . . . when previously he would tend to deny Roland Barthes a chance, choosing instead to go for later Terry Eagleton, with a taste for what Umberto Eco calls the “closed text.” Semper’s more senior friend, the painter Marcel Antonio, had been a sounding board for the certainty/uncertainty of that early proclivity, and the art world now knows that Antonio’s art has always been an appropriation of narrative art’s habits (“manners”) for both their narrative (“closed”) and anti-narrative (“open”) values. Having said all of the above, then, one would find the title of Semper’s present show—in referencing ghosts of memory—as verily spot-on.

     Now, looking at the artist’s “portraits of memory” in the show, we’d notice that the characters in these portraits derive from our collective (international) memory of fairy tales, legends, myths, fables and other cosmological sources, each a jumbled child of mnemonics born of this memory’s confused splicing of their sources’ genes, producing thus a new community with its own potential symbology and semiosis almost independent of their parents’ own. With these new creatures, then, Semper transforms the societal Mnemosyne of a universal myth to become a Mnemosyne of the private, almost self-indulgent, ego (the artist’s as well as the viewer’s own reading ego).

     This drunk inward contemplation (and embrace) of memories comes in the manner of an occurrence wherein a hundred influences arrive upon it to such a level of simultaneity that one already forgets the specificity of those influences, rendering it thus impossible for the occurrence to properly acknowledge an influence for a specific/distinct virtue. In Semper’s new art, therefore, the public Mnemosyne is appropriated for the production of portraits of self-indulgence, a collection that ultimately spits on emblems and their fixed genes in favor of new visual species, with each creature wallowing in its own secret aspirations and desires, removed—if possible (as per Barthes’ wonderment)—from societal contexts. In the artist’s words describing these new-mnemonic creatures, “they are codices and syntaxes of my ideologies . . . they are what I am and what I am made of.”

     Additionally, with this new exploration Semper creates a series of new private icons whose feet nonetheless rest on the ground (“I made them look like icons but I took off the halo they should have had”), like new ideal mongrels of merely self-absorbed, sometimes funny, musings (“I wanted them to be ‘fernal’, as opposed to infernal, that is to say of this world and part of it”). Portraits these are, therefore, not of our respective selves as physical figures of vanity for social consideration and awe but of our respective inner selves as “mnemosynes” of honesty.

     Building thus these new alternative icons instead of scolding old ones, Semper engineers a new democracy of iconographies, which democracy and vouching for the private memory could be the better weapon against any iconography’s bigotry and consequent authoritarianism.

— May 20, 2012

SPECTRE ACCORDING TO NIETZSCHE
18 x 12 inches
Ink on water color paper
2012

SPECTRE OF PLEROMA
18 x 12 inches
Ink on water color paper
2012

THE SPECTRE OF ORPHEUS
18 x 12 inches
Ink on water color paper
2012

Irony in Numbers

The STUPendous Show, February 23 to March 8, 2012 at Gallerie Anna, SM Mega Mall, is here being peddled as one hell of a, well, “stupendous show” by eighteen select young and not-so-young painters whose training derive from the College of Architecture and Fine Arts of the Technological University of the Philippines (TUP).

     “Stupendous” may sound like a modifier edging towards a hardsell approach to positioning an art exhibition, almost puzzling by the fact that this show involves merely paintings and not gigantic sculptures and fearsome installations. However, looking on and hard, could the point of this show lie in that very title? For to tag a bunch of quiet paintings on quiet walls in a quiet gallery with that very adjective usually reserved for extreme sports (or for hyped-up artists from the bigger universities) is an act that does carry with it the juice of irony, even tongue-in-cheek parody.

     And so, looking further at the individual pieces, and expecting to find nothing stupendous, the irony I allege seem to be truly present in the pieces. See here, for instances:

     Alrashdi Mohammad’s Yellow Spot In Nebulae illustrates through its titling act a signification or valuation method (for paintings, at least) that might proceed from mere updated allusions concerning present-day realities, in this case present-day science. However, what is here achieved seems not so much a mimicry of science illustration as a parody of painting itself, the way Franz Liszt might mock his own program music if he were to say his themes are but mere afterthoughts upon the finished products of the composition act.

     Meanwhile, Arden Mopera’s title Hitting Z Birds In One Stone for an oil piece on textured canvas may initially strike the viewer as mere forgivable bad English, but yet, what really is the canvas but itself another wall of a big rock cave on which painters paint their hunting stories? And those stories become fossilized/embedded in the rock and not with the rock, the same way pigments (the metallic ones of which are from rocks) are fossilized in the (textured) grounds and may even be pushing themselves further (via their oil) into the gesso-protected recesses of the cords of the canvas weave.

     Further, in Warrior, Mopera also seems to push forth a comment on portrait subjects as could-be warriors, with umbrellas for shields, who might best be shielding themselves from the visual interpretations of artists (and critics) who treat portraiture as a kind of visual social-science-labeling medium.

     Now, could Cesar Delgado’s Counting the Cost—despite some obvious or latent other statement—also be a comment on portraiture, presenting a disinterested subject that’s either ignoring, or unaware of, the painter and his concerns?

     There are other works in this show that manifest the ironies in painting today in more elliptical ways, elliptical for being disguised within established traditions. Chriseo Sipat’s Toxic Zone explores yet again the Pop art poetry of treading the line between oil painting and poster art, while Demosthenes Campos’ abstracts (Passage and Trail) classically extend the mixed media painting tradition of asking yet again where painting ends and where sculpture begins.

Chriseo Sipat – “Toxic Zone” – 36”x36” – Oil on canvas

Demosthenes Campos – “Passage” – 34” x 48” – Mixed Media on canvas

Demosthenes Campos – “Trail” – 37” x 48” – Mixed Media on canvas

     Then there are the likes of Joselito Jandayan, who seems to be swinging to and fro between magazine-illustration-like 3D drawing/modeling and the established visual poetic form commonly known as oil painting on canvas. In The Liar and the Beast, is Jandayan offering the argument that both the Expressionist and the Surrealist traditions of figuration are no more fanciful than the current fiction of extraterrestrial-beings-representation? In appropriating all of these traditional imageries, is Jandayan both paying tribute to those traditions as well as parodying/mocking them? Or is a tongue-in-cheek “alienization” of figures (as against a Francis Bacon seriousness) in order here? If so, isn’t that, qua attitude, by itself already a reality slap (in the Surrealist sense) on painting’s and painting collectors’ all-too-serious regard for any figuration of things blue and green and flesh-brown under the Sun?

     Lexygius Calip’s Substance (Series 1-4), meanwhile, is a mixed media on paper series that yet again represents the sculptural potential of painting, almost as if to remind us and reiterate the painting or drawing field’s kinship with the installation-art space.

     Finally, consider such approaches as Sam Penaso’s nationalistic dark earth tones upon an ethnic-faced subject ironically called “Annalyn”. This mugshot portrait, ladies and gentlemen, is not painted in dye, but in plastic acrylic—a painting medium from the 1960s Pop decade of the plastic boom. How can you be more ironic and subtly sarcastic than that? And what about a female name that combines the Latin “Anna” (19^th-century Hispanic Philippines) with the American “Lyn” (20^th-century Philippines)? How can you be more contextually expansive than that?

-- END --

The Romantic Lie: Desire, Ennui, Anxiety

Marcel Antonio's new statement at the Yuchengco Museum, February 6-25, 2012

In July of 2010, I posted a blog essay on the art of Marcel Antonio titled “Blue Funk’d Stories: The Expanding Art of Marcel Antonio” and coined the phrase-tag Blue Funk Erotica for Antonio’s art. I described Blue Funk Erotica as 1) unsmiling faces-derived figurative drama (primarily portraiture, then), 2) replete of appropriations or art-historical quotes, 3) suggestive (but only suggestive) of a narrative, 4) quasi-rebellious towards rigid allusions and painting titles’ guidance, 5) unpainterly “expressionist,” 6) of an in-a-trance mood as against a happy one, and 7) conscriptive of the painting viewer as peeper. “This erotica should stay around and keep us entranced,” I wrote, “being not so much one that tickles the groin as the kind that promotes the understanding that every face, gesture, object, color, and shape is a secret sex object and clandestine true story waiting to be told.” But also debunking a previous simplistic tag on Antonio’s art as “narrative expressionist,” I wrote: “In Antonio’s case, his blue funkism's ‘de-expression’, or ‘dis-expression’ and narrative confusion through the mannerisms of narrative imagery and titling, seems to be a produce of a Russian Formalist narrative bent on ‘defamiliarizing’ images and shapes towards a higher enigma. Thus his refusal to ‘express’.”

    The abovementioned blog started a dialogue between Antonio’s art as well as intent (of unintent) and my reading, culminating in a late-2011 production of a collection titled “The Romantic Lie: Desire, Ennui, Anxiety” which shall be shown this coming February at the Yuchengco Museum.

    This title for Antonio’s new series does not so much signal a change in his art’s direction as clarify where my reading is right and where it needs to be tweaked. For instance, while I opt for a Barthesian “variety of narrative possibilities,” Antonio’s pragmatic knowledge of his audience allows/welcomes two basic approaches to his art.

The White Ribbon

    The one approach favors rigid symbolist readings, especially as Antonio is himself attracted to the “monumental” (Antonio’s term) figure common among utopian-art compositions (e.g., Wagnerian glorifications, classical idealism, Nazi art, Stalinist totalitarian art, socialist realism, etc.) and advertising art imagery or the various idealizations of soft porn.

    But, for the other approach, Antonio acknowledges that I am right about his own efforts to frustrate, so to speak, all symbolist and narrative approaches, via experimentation with juxtapositions/relations and eclectic allusions. These experimentation, appropriations, and art-history quotes result in a dehumanized atmosphere, involving such stuff as machine aesthetics (steampunk, etc.) and the usual facial expressions of ennui and boredom, all moving towards Antonio’s intended postmodernist multiplicity of meanings. But the final result on each single canvas is an invite to a pseudo-narrative half-aware of this pseudo-ness, welcoming while parodying the various cultural and moral significations possible to professional and popular semiotics.

Ars Poetica

    In this sense, Antonio’s art would be self-described as anxious about the unknown, desirous of knowledge as a matter of course but likewise celebrating the ennui of knowledge’s elusivity, even the charm of that ennui itself alone. Ennui as both springboard and object of desire, then, visually fulfilled or illustrated on an Antonio-esque drama field.

    A final stamp to this anti-narrative effort to “recover the sensation of life” (Victor Shklovsky) is the artist’s devotion to the coloration of Diego Velázquez (recreator of the classics) or Chagall (dreamy Chagall) as well as to the latent abstract geometrics beneath all his pseudo-narrative stagings.

    I shall join Antonio in this exhibit with fourteen new poems in the exhibition catalog. Antonio also invited me to fill a curved wall he refused to use with my own paintings as the show's guest paintings. For which wall I did three shaped canvases, for a collaborative five-painting project with Antonio as counter-instigated by me. [END]

Miss Universes and "Universals"

1. No such thing as a stupid question, only a stupid situation

FIRST things first. There's no such thing as a stupid question.

     Even Lea Salonga's supposedly inane question to Miss Angola Leila Lopes (who'd go on to win the Miss Universe crown this year), dubbed by CNN.com feminist columnist Jessica Ravitz as "the dumbest question in the universe," isn't actually all that dumb if you put everything in context. "If you could change one of your physical characteristics," Salonga asked Lopes, "which one would it be and why?" According to Ravitz, ". . . it's absurd to be dismayed that a question like this would be posed at a beauty pageant. In my worldview, the mere fact that pageants exist is absurd. And I'm not alone."

     Well, I don't think she gets it. Context is everything, and, in this case, Salonga's question---actually all the questions were pre-written by the pageant committee and assigned each judge, says Salonga---was "a standard beauty contest query" that should only nudge us in our turn to ask about the motive behind the asking. Salonga hit the nail on the head when she wrote to CNN, "At the end of the day, it wasn't so much the question asked but the manner in which it was answered." After all, weren't all those questions asked during those Miss Universe pageants in the past designed to primarily test how a candidate might respond to future "stupid" questions that are going to be hurled her way in yacht parties she'll be attending as Miss Universe? Look at it this way, if you are to apply today for an account executive position at an ad agency, a position servicing that agency's stupid clients, and you wax philosophical during your interview about the world today as though you were Bell Hooks, I'm perfectly certain you wouldn't get the job. Precisely because no interviewer would probably have the mental wherewithal, in the first place, to ask questions about those areas of thought. Would anyone on those yacht parties hurl such questions as Bell Hooks might? Mm, maybe. Would there be people likely to ask the kind of questions Salonga just asked? Oh, I would assume---most definitely!

     My Facebook friend JCA wrote, "But I guess the shallowness of the questions is telling of how the organizers view their contestants." That's almost a given, similar perhaps to how designers and fashion show organizers view their adolescent models. But, again, that truth would still have to be put in context. After all, what use is the Miss Universe contest and winners to, say, Mr. Donald Trump, in the first place? The most creative and most introspective mind potentially useful to a long life of struggles in the business world never does win the "apprentice of the year" prize in Trump's The Apprentice (U.S.), does s/he, the same way that the best singer does not necessarily have to win the American Idol of the year plum. At the Miss Universe, it's not really the questions and the answers to any question that matter, it's the delivery, as Salonga rightly observed. Otherwise, the Miss Universe Q&A portion would be traditionally done in an interrogation room with cameras and would invariably last the length of a David Letterman Show interview, complete with a band to break the boredom. That is, a faux pas of an answer here could always be clarified or retracted there. Nobel laureates, after all, don't give quick answers, do they? We do not measure their intelligence by the swiftness of their replies nor by an absence of an "uhhhm, well". And as for defensiveness, Hillary Clinton's has no place in the Miss Universe contest, yet she's universally counted as one hell of a charm.

     To recap, the Miss Universe position is an account executive or account manager position. It's a low, starter's position in high society. There's no way Filipino ad industry stalwart Emily Abrera could now win a Miss Universe spot, is there? Again, I'm not saying that pretty-faced account executives can't possibly know anything about, say, Edward Said's postcolonial theories. I'm just saying they'd seldom be allowed to use that knowledge in their financial district jobs.

     But, still, there's definitely room for improvement regarding JCA's concern, reiterated by her friend Lea: "If the Ms. U. organizers are the ones preparing the questions, aren't they also underestimating the intelligence of their judges?" Well, Lea, Donald Trump underestimates the intelligence of everyone in the whole universe. But, then again, you and JCA are actually right. So that presently it might be useful to suggest to the Miss Universe pageant owners that perhaps, next time, Miss Universe contestants can come onstage in office attire for the Q&A portion. Or, if still in their gowns and in a pose, maybe while holding a wineglass, so for these candidates to be able to feel a sort of corridor meeting or yacht party situation feel in their heads, within which role-playing they could just be led to display their real brains beyond being those by merely smiling, nervous candidates onstage who have to pass a stupid test while a klieg light burns. This role-playing segment might have an effect likewise on the question-writing staff. . . . Now, even if we are to adapt this role-playing sort of Q&A segment to an in-their-swimsuits situation, supposedly a more frightening experience, the candidates can still be rendered wet and in the process of drying themselves with towels while being asked their questions, if only so that our ideal resultant could be achieved. I can assure you, such role-playing---whether with gowns or swimsuits---would break the ice. Because any candidate necessarily placed in a situation of utter nervousness when confronted with a question needing a quick answer cannot predict how her posing in front of a lot of people in an uncomfortable gown or Speedo can affect her alertness. Even a female Einstein would be trembling in that situation, and would likely feel as though she were in a Guantanamo prison being played on by a bunch of US Marines. When the most intelligent candidate fails to come through that nervous field, she gets demerits and ultimately fails to grab the crown. The merely charming and merely most diplomatic wins.

2. No such thing as an easy question, only easy situations

NOW let's go visit the question for Shamcey Supsup, who would become this 2011 contest's third runner-up: "Would you change your religious beliefs to marry the person that you love? Why or why not?"

     Some were saying this was a tad more difficult than the one given to Miss Angola. But, if my backyard statistics is right, most said this was way too easy, the too-obvious answer being a quick no.

     A Philippine Star write-up titled "How they would have answered that question" interviewed five former Filipina beauty queens. Interestingly, or not surprisingly, depending on where you're coming from, all gave that "obvious answer" in varying modes of articulateness.

     But was it really an easy question deserving of an easy answer? I believe an easier compound question would have been something like: "would you change your political beliefs to marry the person that you love? Why or why not?" But even then, putting aside the submission element in it, any answer is actually correct. "No," if one's beliefs are deep and passionate and utterly personal, "yes" if one's politics is shallow or if one has the heart of a spy. Now, having written that, I wonder if we could apply the same formula to the question for Supsup. "No," if one's religious beliefs are deep and passionate and utterly personal, "yes" if one's religious beliefs are shallow (cafeteria or cultural) or if one has the worldly heart of a multi-cultural syncretist. As for the submission part, there are a lot of reasons why one would do that. A certain tribe might require a would-be spouse's religious conversion for him/her to gain access to a conjugal wealth which might include a chain of hotels or oil derricks. Uhm, Mr. X, would you change your religion in order to marry Paris Hilton? Not that easy a question now, is it?

3. No such thing as one Universe, only universals

STILL on Supsup, my Facebook friend J- called his friends' attention to an ABS-CBN report which seemed to have been oddly written. The report zoomed in on Supsup's admission that her boyfriend had actually changed his religion for her. She is a "Christian", she's supposed to have said, and her boyfriend was formerly "Catholic".

     J- wrote: "Since when were Catholics not Christians? Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big Catholic but we were the first Christian church!"

     I had to correct J-, of course, with my modest knowledge of Christian history, thusly: "Actually the first Christians were the Jewish Christians before there were even Gentile Christians. The Jewish Christians included the Corinthians, the Ebionites, the Elcesaites, the Essenes, and the Nazarene/Nazoraean sect. Then, the first post-Jesus Jerusalem church was established by James the Just (some say with Paul), the leader of the Jewish Christian Church (Catholics insist with Peter as the "Rock" and "Chief Shepherd"). Then, even before Peter and Paul could arrive in Rome, Eastern Christianity was already being established in Asia Minor in what would later branch out to become the Church of the East, the churches of Oriental Orthodoxy, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Eastern Catholic Churches, and the Saint Thomas Christians. Even the Early Church in the Roman Empire, the prototype of the Latin Church of Constantine I (that was itself proto-Catholic), cannot be said to have already been the Roman Catholic Church as we know it today. The Roman Catholic Church, as we know it today, actually started when it was established by the emperors Theodosius I, Gratian and Valentinian II in 380 AD, when Latin Church Christianity (instead of the other Christianities, like that one by a group that would later be called Gnostic Christianity) was declared as the empire's state religion. This was at the same time that Damasus I was the Pope (who reigned till 384), when the Roman aristocracy started to take over the Church at the start of the decline of the Roman Empire. Damasus commissioned the Vulgate translation of the Bible, the early Roman Catholic Bible, and called for the Council of Rome during tensions with Bishop Nectarius of Constantinople."

     Notice that I always modified "Catholic" with the adjective "Roman". J- Facebook-liked my comment and thanked me.

     J-'s friend A- joined me, saying: "Of course not. You're not the first Christian church."

     Notice A-'s use of "church". She didn't write "yours is not the first . . ." but "you're not the . . ." Bear that in mind, because Christian authorities would repeatedly teach that the church is neither that building by the marketplace nor that institution with a flag but the people, the following of Jesus. That following can exist without a church building or a flag, and thus A-'s use of the word in her clause "you're not the first church" makes complete sense.

     J-'s friend JC chimed in, refuting my and A-'s offers, saying: "The first Christian church was the Catholic Church. Other Christian churches were just offshoots and splinter groups. Isn't this true, Kuya J-?"

     Another of J-'s friends, JBC, also joined us: "Regardless, all Christians believe in one Judeo-Christian God. Why do we have to argue about who came first when, at the end of the day, we all believe in the same divine entity?"

     JC had to add this: "Sure, dissension happened. But the original is the original."

     "Go ahead," I wrote. "If you think the Roman Catholic Church was established in 12 or 30 AD or thereabouts instead of in 380 AD by Theodosius, suit yourself, JC, I wouldn't be surprised. Nonetheless, JBC is right."

     J- Facebook-liked this, but so did JC, adding: "Thank you!"

     JC also Facebook-liked another comment from another of J-'s friends, Father V-, when the latter entered the conversation. Father V- wrote: "That's quite a splintered understanding of what the church is," referring to my splintered understanding. "When one associates the Church with a mere political faction, because Paul did this or Constantine did that, one cannot get the full picture of what the Catholic church is all about. This is seeing the church as a mere institution. But the Church is more than just a human society, and it's more than just a title. The Church, Catholic and apostolic, began when Christ brought it into the world, founding it upon his apostles, especially upon Peter. This is the Christian Church, which is only One, and which subsists in union with Peter and the successors of the apostles, who have kept the faith whole and entire despite the passage of time, despite the errors of the centuries."

     This is true, too, at least for 2nd-century claims to universalism and for claims to continuity from the church of Jesus' Apostles, for even when Protestants use the word "catholic" (with a lower-case letter c), they also use it not to refer to the Catholic Church alone but broadly to the Christian Church (regardless of denominational affiliation) and all believers in Jesus Christ all over the world, across all ages. Therefore, put aside Father V-'s Roman Catholic "especially upon Peter" emphasis and Father V-'s institutional claim that the Christian Church as One subsists in union with Peter. Put aside all the Romanism, and you'll be able to imagine the idea of inclusivism in catholicism (even via Catholicism), wherein one can embrace even those who believe Mary Magdalen was Jesus' right hand instead of Peter (Gnostic Christians, for instance).

     Now, JC loved what Father V- wrote, writing: "Yes, Father. Got it! We are the original."

     Well, if universalism (or "catholicism") also means being inclusive and Father V- would nod his head in agreement, then obviously JC couldn't have gotten it.

     I wrote, "@Father V-: Would that it were so," and I meant that the Catholic Church was not also---or was not firstly---a political entity with a divisive history and policy, "then the world would have been a much better place."

     "JC and A-," wrote J-, now seeming to have changed his mind about his post, "being 'first' is beside the point, is it not? The decorous bearing of the matter is, we are a Christian church, too. Right? :)"

     JC Facebook-liked this.

     "Ok," he wrote, "the Catholic Church is a Christian church. Christians are followers of Christ. Catholics follow Christ and his teachings . . ." and so on. I thought that was that with JC.

     Father V- came back: "By the term Catholic, meaning universal, we mean that Christians follow and believe all of the doctrines taught by Christ handed down to His Apostles by way of Scripture and tradition, teachings necessary for one to fully heed the call of Our Lord to holiness. In this sense, to be truly a follower of Christ, one needs to be catholic, universal."

     JC and another A- (A2, let's call him) Facebook-liked this. Actually, there's almost nothing worth protesting against in this statement if only the Father wasn't confusing "Catholic" with "catholic" in his explanation, almost as if to hide a logical fallacy (the 'God is love, love is blind, therefore God is blind' kind of logical fallacy) to service a metanarrative.

     I had to call A-'s reaction to this: "@A: By your comment above, I gather you're Protestant? If you are, then by Father V- you do not follow and believe all of the doctrines taught by Christ blah blah blah, you can't fully heed the call of our Lord. You are not a true follower of Christ. The only way by which you can be that is by becoming C/catholic, by becoming 'universal'."

     Father V- promptly answered my satire with a confirmation: "Well, basically that's what being a disciple is, right? It basically means following everything that the Master did and said and taught. Otherwise, what kind of disciples are we? By the word 'Catholic' (Father V-'s capitalization, not mine) I'm referring to a reality, not a denomination. We don't call ourselves catholics (Father V-'s lower case, not mine) for nothing. The name Catholic stemmed from the fact that in the Reform worked by Luther his followers broke away from Christian teaching and praxis, selecting those that were in accord with their personal beliefs and ideals and rejecting those with which they were not in accord."

     JC Facebook-liked this. Well, put aside the Father's confusing catholic with Catholic, as if catholicism or universalism is exclusive to Catholics. Lay aside the fact that Martin Luther was mainly questioning the papacy's corrupted adherence to the bright ideas concerning Purgatory and the selling of indulgences. Put aside the fact that Luther was only seeking reforms (thus Reformed) from within instead of from without, but kicked out instead by the corrupt Catholic hierarchy of his time. Put aside the fact that to imply in our time that Pope Leo X's indulgences salesmen were following Christian teaching and praxis is tantamount to qualifying and reiterating Pope Leo X's virtue on these same indulgences-selling during his time, and thus for our time. Put aside the fact that to call Pope Leo X's corruption as "within Christian praxis" could reintroduce a scandal. Put all those aside, . . . if only because Father V- was not yet finished with the Luther question.

     He continued: ". . . this is far from the logic of discipleship; the disciple is bound to his master insofar as his master is concerned. Either he accepts his master totally, and all of his teaching and the practices that he has taught him, or he is no follower of his. This is perfectly logical, and this is more so true of Christianity. When the Lord came among us as man he showed us the Father; by His teaching and actions he instituted the norm by which his followers would be known . . . this was entrusted to his Apostles, who---because of their ministry in the Church of Christ---continue the presence of Christ on earth."

     I see. From a self-contradictory explanation of catholicism as exclusive to Catholics (contradictory because while claiming he was not speaking of Catholicism as a denomination Father V- was at the same time equating catholicism with loyalty to Catholicism, in which case JC was right in Facebook-liking Father V-, for it would seem that Father V- does not include inclusivism as part of his "catholic" context), Father V- now moves to a second stage, that of equating Luther's hatred for Pope Leo X with a hatred for Jesus, as if Pope Leo X's sins and Jesus' virtue were/are one.

     Father V- was not done.

     He continued: "There is no need to be polemical here, by the way, Jojo Soria . . . what I'm trying to express is, that being a Christian necessarily means that you have to accept all of the teachings and commandments of the Lord, whether they are in accord with one's taste or not. This in Greek and in English amounts to being---what it means to be---"katholikos" or catholic. . . ."

     "@Father V-:" I wrote, "If there's no need to be polemical, then why have you and I become polemical? Was it perhaps because there was a need for it? Where did that need come from? Could it be that the polemics just grew from nowhere? If it did, then do you mean that when I write I'm being needlessly polemical, but when you write you're not being polemical but yet need to be for my enlightenment? If that is your approach, I'd fully understand the consistency."

     "Hahaha," my Facebook friend J2 butted in at this point. "Polemics," she wrote, "all but polemics."

     I wasn't exactly sure whether J2 was referencing Father V-'s polemics, my polemics, both our polemics, or the entire humanity's polemics, so I just Facebook-liked what she wrote, since it looked polemical in itself. :)

     "No," Father V- instantly wrote, "I'm just explaining things from my end. Honestly, I had no intention of being polemical. In fact, aside from the fact that I just wanted to share my view, I got interested in the topic, since expressing it here also enlightened things up for me. As a student of history I'm beginning to see that there's more than meets the eye with the term 'catholic', that its being fundamentally synonymous with 'Christian' was penned even long before the Reform; it goes way back to sources of the Christian faith."

     I Facebook-liked this.

     "Anyway," Father V- continued, "if it seems to you that we're being polemical to each other, then this won't serve us any good . . . aside from the fact that I was just trying to give reason to anyone who calls me, to give an account for the hope that is in me (cfr. 1Peter 3:15), I was beginning to see it as a stimulating conversation, both based on reason and on faith, which always need to go hand in hand in the search for the Truth that liberates. Anyway, frankly I got something from this. . . . Peace :-)"

     I Facebook-liked this.

     "Pacem in terris," I wrote, "as Pope John XXIII would have it. :)"

     Father V- Facebook-liked this. JC didn't.

     Well, not everyone among Roman Catholics ever liked what John XXIII and his Second Vatican Council tried to introduce ("to restore unity among all Christians, including seeking pardon for Catholic contributions to separation"; "to start a dialogue with the contemporary world"). Not everyone in the Church likes the idea of reconciling or breaking bread with Protestants and the Orthodox churches, much less with other religions which Pope Benedict XVI controversially is trying to realize today in spite of his conservatism. Pope Paul VI, who would continue John XXIII's mission, was another Vatican liberal, but not everyone heeded his apology for Pope Gregory's having turned Mary Magdalen into a prostitute via a simple sermon, if Catholics today are even aware that that apology and a series of revisions concerning Mary Magdalen ever happened. Not everyone in the Church liked John Paul I too, who didn't last long in the papacy. And John Paul II, who voted against a lot of tracts in John XXIII's Second Vatican Council, is probably the most loved Pope in the Roman church today, partly perhaps for his having continued facets of John XXIII's efforts, as in the area of trying to reconcile with the Jews and other Christian sects. Pope Benedict XVI, a close confidant of John Paul II, seems to want to continue John Paul II's efforts to extend just facets of the Second Vatican Council tracts---specifically that one seeking a dialogue with other religions. . . .

     But if Popes could marry, if Pope Gregory VII hadn't required clerical celibacy, then John XXIII would probably have been the sort of Pope who wouldn't mind marrying a Protestant. And I don't think that would be because his religious beliefs were shallow or that he was a syncretist. He was, rather, the one most open to differences, the one with an open ear.

     In short, he was the first to respect the various catholicisms (universalisms), in effect fulfilling the embrace of the catholic doctrine of inclusivism. He was the Vatican's Stephen Hawking, who might have theorized that there is no one universe, but universes which finally are all the same, wherein hypertravel through cosmic wormholes can be done. He was the Vatican's company merger guru.

NOW, what has all this got to do with Shamcey Supsup and her formerly-Catholic boyfriend?

     Well, picture that scene again when Hollywood actress and contest-appointed judge Vivica A. Fox asked Supsup her question. Then, picture that moment when she answered the question. Now, put her boyfriend in her place, in a sort of scene from a Mr. Universe pageant, with him being asked the same question. His answer, of course, would be something like "I already did."

     If Supsup can embrace her boyfriend's secular heroism or sacrifice at the same time that she would preach an adherence to religious loyalism among females, we could surmise that Supsup is either sexist and another religious bigot who considers other religions as crap (Roman Catholicism perhaps as anti-Christian instead of Christian for putting Church laws above Christ's laws, according to some denominations), or . . . she believes there is no one Universe but a bundle of valid universes that could access one another in mental hypertravels via physical wormholes of acceptance. Matter turns into anti-matter and becomes matter again in some other universe, then vice versa, all perfectly acceptable. Nothing is illusion anymore, everything is embraceable. So that by answering her question at the pageant with what she had or what she could come up with, she was also recognizing that stupid questions are really only stupid situations, that easy questions are really only easy situations, and that the Miss Universe is really just a construction of various beauty queen claims to various valid universals. Remember, the first requisite of beauty pageants is congeniality, not basketball-like adversity. Its objective heaven includes yacht parties. So, therefore, you just tell people what they'd want to hear and save them the trouble of religious faux-universalist noise.

     That quick choice I can understand. Even Facebook-like. [END]

Photo of Shamcey Supsup borrowed from REUTERS/Nacho Doce as used at http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/213018/20110913/miss-philippines-2011-shamcey-supsup.htm

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