The beauty agenda

Recently, I had the pleasure of organizing one of the post-symposium events for a significant international conference organized by the independent curator and critic Marian Pastor Roces and her Edge Curatorial Projects Inc., with financial support from The Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development and the institutional backing of the National Museum.

"The Politics of Beauty," which was held from Jan. 27-30 at the National Arts Center, Mt. Makiling, Los Baños, was a closed-door, intensive round table discussion that brought together participants from overseas who were selected by Roces and dramaturg and cultural theorist Rustom Bharucha for "the respect they enjoy in the world’s cutting edge circles for the extraordinary nuance of their political/artistic/intellectual work."

According to the organizers, this project had been initiated "as a response to brutal global developments, which, in their view, might be analyzed in part by paying close attention to conflicting ideas of beauty." The site of the conference had in fact been specifically chosen to reflect on this idea, seeing that it would provide the delegates with a heightened awareness of the interstices wherein notions of the natural order, aesthetic pleasure and power structures were and continue to be played out.

I was more than happy to help Marian out in providing the participants with the opportunity to have a more in-depth interface with the contemporary Philippine art scene – to meet with academics and visual artists. I would imagine that similar conferences like these had been hosted before, which had delegates trapped by their hosts, cooped up in one place, quickly flying in and out without so much as getting the chance to see and learn more about the country.

I was not about to pass up the opportunity to show the overseas visitors just who the creative powerhouse of Asia really was.

Although I was a tad disappointed that most of the delegates had already opted to return to their home countries at the tail-end of the post-symposium period, my enthusiasm did not flag knowing that the people whose opinions I had really wanted to shape were still around.

I was particularly delighted to have the chance to spend an entire afternoon and evening with a highly important figure in the international art scene: Gerardo Mosquera, one of the founders of the Havana Biennale (part of its curatorial team in 1979, 1984, and 1986), who is now working as an adjunct curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. He was joined by Dr. Paul Willemen, a film theorist from the University of Ulster, Ireland, and his charming wife who enthused about the unexpected myriad of locally-produced shopping finds.

As part of the tour which I dubbed "Sites of Modern and Contemporary Philippine Art Practice," I quickly brought the group to the museum where I work to see the show "Analog/Playground: Extensions to the Graphic," before piling them into a van to visit Green Papaya Art Projects, where they were warmly met by its director, the visual artist Norberto "Peewee" Roldan, and his wife, the contemporary dance practitioner and choreographer Donna Miranda. Serendipitously, it was the last day of Peewee’s highly successful exhibition of fetchingly framed works inspired by ex-votos, which piqued the interest of the guests who had quite an earful to say about their views on Catholic imagery.

Peewee very generously arranged to have the group meet with some of our leading young visual art practitioners who gamely engaged, with Mosquera in particular, in a repartee – asking him questions about a lecture that he had given at the National Museum the day before.

For some, it was that rare and perfect opportunity to bring their works to the attention of a globe-trotting curator like Mosquera who, the very next day in fact, was scheduled to fly to Liverpool in order to curate another biennale!

The last stop on the tour was the artists-run space Future Prospects inside the Marikina Shoe Expo in Cubao, where they were met by co-founders Gary-Ross Pastrana and 2004 Ateneo Art Award winner Louie Cordero. On show was "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," which showed paintings with witty imagery and annotations, and dark, cartoon-inspired prints by brothers Jonathan and 2005 Ateneo Art Award nominee Mariano Ching. It was heartening to hear that a number of the works had also been sold, mostly to a Kuala Lumpur-based gallery, which only reinforced the view that Filipino artists are truly filling the creative void in the region.

As we concluded our time together over dinner amidst the lush Greenbelt oasis, our thoughts turned to the richness and variety of the Philippine contemporary art scene, and its continued struggle for relevance in a maddening, economically-depressed, socially-volatile landscape.

Once again, it had taken outsiders to reassure us, yet pose the quandary: How was it possible for a country that holds such promise to allow itself to wallow in ugliness and shunt the agenda of beauty to the periphery?

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