Madder Gauguins
Over at the University of the Philippines, which I’m fortunate enough to call my home as well as my workplace, I was recently asked to share my thoughts about two different but somehow related concerns — artists’ awards and new campus writing. Since the comments I prepared will probably circulate within a very small academic circle, I thought I’d share them with you here.
The first is a brief contribution to a roundtable discussion that will be published by the UP Forum, an official university publication, on the recently contentious issue of awards given to artists. What purpose do they really serve? The second is an introduction to a forthcoming issue of the Literary Apprentice, published by the UP Writers Club with the assistance of the Vibal Foundation, whose praiseworthy and pioneering cultural work I’m going to feature here soon.
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Like most other people, Filipino artists need and seek recognition from their peers and from the public for their labors. With rare exceptions, a career in the arts brings few material rewards for the artist. His or her work will very likely remain obscure and unappreciated by most Filipinos.
Artists know this — or learn this lesson soon enough — when they embark on that career. As humans with material needs, they may complain about it from time to time, but it doesn’t stop them from persevering and producing wonderful new works that enliven the imagination of both their creators and audiences.
Awards for artistic achievement are an important form of recognition for the artist. In some cases, they bring a little monetary remuneration. But their greater value lies in delivering some affirmation and encouragement for the artist’s work. For new, young artists, an award is a spur to move on; for those in mid-career, an award is a welcome reminder that they still matter; for those approaching the end of a long life in art, it is a toast at sunset.
Problems may arise with these awards because of two things: one, if they are not credible, and two, if their givers and recipients take them too seriously. Awards are useful and meaningful only if they are given fairly and competently, with the integrity of the judges and of the selection process always above suspicion. Where people are involved, no competition or awards process can possibly be perfect, and mistakes or misjudgments may happen, but these should be the rare and acknowledged exceptions. Likewise, winners should take these awards as indicators rather than guarantees of talent; they would do better to look forward to their next work and to its new challenges than to linger in the fleeting celebrity an award might bring. An award is probably best used to promote a cause rather than just a person — the need for more publishing opportunities and promoting readership, for example.
I might also note that ours is a country of sore losers, and every award given to a person means its loss for many others, so we should be used to hearing a cacophony of complaints — some valid, some plain griping — come awards time.
Critics who say that artists shouldn’t ever think about awards or about recognition and compensation, who argue that all awards are tainted and compromised, and who insist that artists should just plod on in penury and obscurity for some imaginary public good must be living on another planet. Perhaps awards for criticism — which a few will archly disdain — will help turn that attitude around. Indeed, we might be less dependent on institutionalized awards if we had a more active, more accessible, and more receptive body of art criticism in this country — the way that the newspaper supplements in the UK carry substantial but readable articles on the latest books and movies — but we don’t. It seems that a lot of the art criticism here remains a snarky academic activity, often carried on in an impenetrable language even the artists can’t understand. Until that changes, awards will be the Filipino artist’s major albeit inadequate source of spiritual sustenance, beyond the intrinsic pleasure of creation and vision-sharing that art brings.
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I have a small collection of old issues of the Literary Apprentice from the 1950s — a period that we now look back to as a Golden Age for creative writing in the University of the Philippines, which had just moved its main campus from Padre Faura in Manila to Diliman in the new suburbs rising out of the postwar haze in Quezon City. In these issues can be found the names of writers who would soon form the veritable canon of modern Philippine literature, especially in English — among them, those of NVM Gonzalez, Francisco Arcellana, Amelia Lapeña, Virginia Moreno, Ricaredo Demetillo, Alejandrino Hufana, Edilberto Tiempo, Tita Lacambra-Ayala, Andres Cristobal Cruz, Adrian Cristobal, Rony Diaz, SV Epistola, and Elmer Ordoñez.
Most of these people were not yet the literary luminaries they would become; many were still students at the university, inflamed by the fire that had been lit three decades earlier by the founding of the UP Writers Club by the likes of Jose Garcia Villa and Angela Manalang-Gloria. Some of those students and UPWC members were not even English majors—such as the sculptor Napoleon Abueva, the economist Benito Lim, and the lawyer Alexander SyCip. But they were all — in the words of Virgie Moreno, in her foreword to the 1958 Apprentice — “madder Gauguins among the Tahitiennes,” unlike others whom the famously outspoken Moreno tartly likened to “safe cabbage hearts at home, fit only for soup.”
It was too bad that the Apprentice and the UPWC itself underwent a period of decline in the following decades, the understandable result of the decline of English as an area of academic interest at a time when the nation was swept in the 1960s and 1970s by a nationalist upsurge (in which, perhaps ironically, many UP English majors such as Jose Maria Sison, Epifanio San Juan Jr., and Elmer Ordoñez figured prominently). The UPWC staggered on through the ‘90s, and slowly rebuilt itself in an environment that had become more encouraging of English and literary studies, and also open to new writing of many different persuasions — and not only in English at that. (It’s interesting to note that while creative writing in Filipino had never been one of UP’s strong suits at least until the 1960s, the 1958 Apprentice does open with a short story in Filipino, “Matandang Balon,” by Andres Cristobal Cruz.)
This new, bilingual Literary Apprentice of 2009 comes more than 50 years after that particular issue, and it is the best proof yet of how strongly resurgent creative writing has become in UP over this first decade of the 21st century. At UP and at its Institute of Creative Writing, we keep hearing complaints and criticisms about how academicized and formalistic writing has become, and about how our young students can think and write of nothing but their own small lives and middle-class concerns.
But yet here we find stories and poems that go far afield in both form and content, displaying the great diversity (and yes, the inevitable confusion) of life and experience in this Age of the Blog. Older readers comfortable with old Apprentice may cock an eyebrow at words like “cosplay” and “fubu”, or be disturbed by a seeming penchant by some authors for dissection and decapitation; but these are the children of Dexter and CSI, of Gaiman and Murakami, of Linkin Park and the Eraserheads, of FHM and Wowowee. If they disturb, it is because they mean to. How well they succeed in communicating — thematically and stylistically — the anxieties and aspirations of their time will be for the critics to sort out, but certainly they will require an aesthetic more open to dysfunction and dislocation than, say, Edilberto Tiempo’s demand, in the 1952 Apprentice, that Manuel Arguilla hew to Aristotelian unities.
Only time will tell, as the cliché goes, if the names of this issue’s contributors — those, for example, of John Paul Abellera, Sarah Matias, Anne Lagamayo, Clara Buenconsejo, Pia Benosa, U Eliserio, and Mary Anne Umali, to name just a random few — will continue to be read 50 years from now. I don’t think they should care about that as much as they should want to be read now. The breadth and depth of talent in this volume tells us that they well deserve it.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.
