Crafting a pantheon

Nine awardees were belatedly conferred National Artist. Four of the awards (those of Alcuaz, Conde, Francisco and Santos) have been on hold, three of them posthumously, for seven years —the result of a T.R.O. on the conferments issued in 2009 and a mandatory three-year interval between conferments, among other things. Timing is particularly suspect as the awards were given two months before the end of the P-Noy’s term: proof that even in death, the state (or, more specifically, head of state) can — and will — make you wait for something you are never absolutely sure will come to fruition. The four join 62 others in the current pantheon of National Artists.

This year’s awarding prompts one to remember several recent (though there are older ones) events/disputes surrounding this curious marriage of art and bureaucracy: GMA and her dagdag-bawas maneuverings in 2009; the appeal for Dolphy to be given the award in 2012; the hasty vetoing of Nora Aunor two years after; and, just last year, an online campaign called #WangOdNationalArtist.

These ruptures of the art world in the public realm, albeit through a fraught state honoring mechanism, are noteworthy, both for the art community and the collective public they wish to engage with. For a fleeting moment, art is made to seem not so pointless and irrelevant. One can say that access to art and discourse on what constitutes as artistic is temporarily widened.

In the interim, one is reminded of the role of bureaucracy, popular media and class politics in artistic work. “Ito ang klase ng sining na popular sa masa. Hindi komo naiintindihan ng masa, hindi na sining, na para bang sila lang ang nakakintindi (This is the kind of art that’s popular with the masses. Just because the masses can understand it, doesn’t mean it’s not art, as if art is something that only they can understand),” Carlo J. Caparas once said.

One is also reminded of just how important and tenuous the mandate is: misplaced arguments on morality were central to P-Noy’s dismissal of Nora Aunor who was stripped of the award two weeks after it was announced. Meanwhile Dolphy, unlike Ate Guy, was never given the award (he was said to have been nominated already) but received full support from the president and was given, in its stead, “The Order of the Golden Heart” — earlier recipients of which include the Queen of Spain and Imelda Marcos. Supporters of the actor and actress remain vigilant to this day.   

#WangOdNationalArtist, which rallies for Wang Od (or Whang-Od) to be recognized as National Artist, recalls the old but extant opposition between art and craft as high and low forms of creative expression. The NCCA has clarified that the more appropriate award for the mambabatok would be the Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan, a prize for traditional art said to be of equal status to the National Artist award. But who, as Patrick Flores once asked our Art Studies class, could “name one Manlilikha ng Bayan, just one?” The GAMANABA, an award that “attempt(s) to correct the sins of the past” and allows for “craft” to enjoy the same prestige as fine art, remains peripheral and practically unknown despite being in existence for 24 years.

Meanwhile the idea of “craft” as “artisanal,” “handmade,” “raw,” “organic” and “sustainable” has been gleefully coopted by “farmer’s markets” without farmers, coffee shops without coffee-growers and other entrepreneurial masquerades (a.k.a tiangge ng mayayaman).

The National Artist award, as in any project of canon-making, carries with it problems of representation (Who are these artists and where did they come from? Which sectors of society do they represent?), nation (i.e. How can an imagined community build a canon that, as Resil Mojares posited, “inscribes a dream of glory as well as a desire for coherence”?), and ideology (Whose interests does the state represent?). It is a project that deifies and marginalizes, ensuring authority and immortality for a select few.

UNESCO defines “craft” as something produced “either completely by hand, or with the help of hand tools or even mechanical means, as long as the direct manual contribution of the artisan remains the most substantial component of the finished product.” Akin to these lists of living treasures and national artists, craft relies heavily on human knowledge and intervention.

We could say then that this pantheon is crafted: a manually-made product, constructed by human beings. Held in such high regard by the public that funds them, these lists propose a generative framework but leaves it to them — us —to make use of this blueprint and allow for its provocation and imagination.

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The author is the winner of the 2015 Ateneo Art Awards-Purita Kalaw-Ledesma Prize for Art Criticism.