The arts and the museums that preserve them

Kirsi Crowley of Finland Radio dropped by the other week and one of the questions she asked is, as a cultural worker, how do I rate myself in relation to my countrymen. A very interesting question which I have attempted to fathom from way, way back. I told her how often I feel so futile, so useless; it is like shouting in the wilderness where nobody listens, where nobody cares.

For this is the harsh truth about us: not only do Filipinos ignore books, literature — we do not understand how important the arts are not just to those of us who work at it, but to the nation as a whole.

Why does art, culture matter? What can culture do for a nation, a people?

First, without people being fully aware, culture binds a nation together, gives its people indelible identity and, in the process, energizes them, inspires them. Music by itself lifts up the spirit, as does poetry, the theater.

As Lenin said, all art is propaganda. It is such a frayed cliché but cultural communication brings about understanding which is so crucial in the forging of the disparate communities and ethnic groups that we are.

Not many are aware of how art also promotes economic development — a factor that should be obvious to our tourism people. Tourists as well as natives want to see cultural achievements — whether it’s the Banaue Terraces, the old churches or museums.

And finally, it is with art that we pride in showing the world — what we have done as artists, our music, our literature, dance — all aspects of our creative genius. Countries like ours, without awesome economic and military power, are not without the means to present to the world our sterling qualities. While thousands of OFWs all over the globe represent us as individuals, and are in themselves windows to our country, it is what we have created that impacts deeper in the global consciousness. The recent exhibition of our ancient artifacts at the Musee du quai Branly in Paris, for instance, impinges upon the European mind a particular place and people they can experience and understand.

Not many among us realize these cultural imperatives because in the nauseating consumerist milieu of our society, such meaningful perspectives are submerged by gross entertainment appetites as promoted by media.

Loren’s legacy

Fortunately for us, we have a few leaders who understand the primal function of the arts, particularly folk arts that spring from native soil. Such leaders do not associate the folk with crudity, the baduy, bakya. They realize that folk crafts constitute the very basis for a people’s renaissance.

One such leader is Senator Loren Legarda. She is now in the process of institutionalizing the appreciation of folk crafts. In a recent meeting with her, she asked why I had not gotten in touch with her earlier about this interest. She said that when she is in the provinces, even in her campaign sorties, she always finds time to go to the public market, to the sources of folk crafts in particular.

I told her I have always been interested in folk culture, in what the masa do when they are not engaged in fishing or agriculture, the drudgery of planting and harvesting. She has thought this over — a program of establishing folk art museums all over the country — institutions we should have set up a long time ago. When she is back in the Senate in May, she said this will be the first on her agenda. Our appreciation of folk art will strengthen our identities, our pride in belonging to a community. People trained in the creative use of their hands soon acquire skills, excellent craftsmanship which will be the most important measure of how well we can industrialize.

A cue from Japan

When I visited Japan for the first time in 1955, one of my first discoveries was their folk arts and the folk artists themselves showing their skills and wares in the department stores. Paperwork (origami) is one of them. I recall the Japanese toys, artifacts which we imported before World War II — the paper balloons, the bamboo and oil paper umbrellas.

In mulling over such high and ghostly matters like roots, folk culture, tradition and modernity, I often bring to mind the Japanese experience. After all, Japan — like us — is an island nation, but without the insular attitudes that island nations are sometimes burdened with. Japan is very cosmopolitan — it values its origins, but a world view hovers above this narrow perspective. The interest of the Japanese in their folk culture is transcendental. They are also vastly interested in the cultures of others. For instance, my own translator, Matsuyo Yamamoto has, through much of her life, collected folk craft from the Philippines, the weaving in cloth, rattan and bamboo, Cordillera basketry. She exhibited these to a wide audience and had her collection published in a major newspaper.

Folk art museums in Japan come in all sizes — some privately owned, and modest, some superb examples of modernity and scope like the ethnographic museum in Osaka. The Japanese pride in them, particularly those that are unique to a place. It was not only pride in a place — the folk crafts nurtured craftsmanship, and above all, the excellence that characterized their work — carried on into modern industry, assuring the high quality of Japanese exports for all the world to appreciate.

When I operated Solidaridad Galleries from 1967 to 1977, a section managed by Gilda Cordero Fernando was devoted to folk crafts. It included Igorot handicrafts, weaving, metal craft from Mindanao, papier mache from Laguna, and whatever else Gilda could scrounge from folk artists all over the country. It was a very popular section of the gallery and it attracted a lot of attention. At one time, Solidaridad also exhibited for a month the Luis Araneta antique collection of furniture, book and church liturgical art.

Folk art is not static. It is often a response to the need of the times. For instance, during the Japanese Occupation when there was a shortage of leather for footwear, some of the most beautiful bakya for both men and women were carved and painted by artisans. One may ask, for instance, why fine piña cloth weaving and embroidery continues to this very day, but I see no more of the fine buntal weaving from Batangas and Laguna. Yes, Batangaueños continue to make those beautiful fan knives, but that kind of black smithery seems to have died among our Moros who, in the past, created those beautiful krises and other bladed weapons.

Bamboo weaving skills among Ilokano farmers — I don’t see them anymore. And carved wooden plates in the Cordilleras — why should the locals continue making them? Plates, kitchen implements are so cheap and widely available now in plastic.

A museum for Bulosan

Last fortnight, Mayor Ramon Guico III of Binalonan (Pangasinan) inaugurated his museum devoted to the town personalities — the writer Carlos Bulosan who wrote America is in the Heart and The Laughter of My Father, his own Mayor Guico’s grandfather, and the grandfather, too, of Margie Moran, former Miss Universe and cultural activist in her own right. She opened the museum. Mayor Guico also invited the founder of Gumil that giant association of Ilokano writers, Jun Hidalgo and his wife, the librarian, Namnama, and my wife and I. Also present was the Binalonan teacher-expat, Cecilia Beltran Daranciang; she brought her book, Defending Bulosan. A few detractors had criticized Bulosan for fictionalizing his experiences as an immigrant worker on the US West Coast.

It is true, of course, that Bulosan was not all that contextual. I read his The Laughter of My Father in college and having a rural background like him, I was not impressed at all by some of the incidents in the book. Bulosan was idolized by the Left, not because of his writing but because of his perceived politics. But even so, the man evoked in America is in the Heart embodies all that heroic endurance, suffering, as lived by him and his generation. Whether fictionalized or not, it is so moving, it negates all the objections leveled against his writing.

Mayor Guico’s museum has a section devoted to folk crafts and this section is destined to grow as it will include the quality indigenous crafts of the region. It may even be self supporting as it develops marketable folk craft.

The new national museum

I must confess to being a museum addict in my younger days up to my late 70s when I was finally crippled by museum-fatigue. Being a college dropout, I found museums like great libraries to be the ultimate storehouse of so much knowledge of human thought and civilization. It’s all there, brightly laid out, arranged, annotated — all that the doctorates, the scholar, the dilettante, the ordinary searcher covets.

I may be boasting, but I recall, it’s only the fabulous Uffizi which I haven’t entered because in the few times that I visited Florence, the long lines before its gates dismayed me.

Meanwhile, the National Museum is no longer the raggedy and forlorn institution that it was; it has undergone important changes, and improved its collections, thanks to its executives, Jeremy Barns and Ana Labrador, supported by a very active board. There are collectors who wouldn’t lend their collections to the museum before, or donate them. They may do so now as more stringent security measures are in place to stop pilferage.

So much has yet to be done, among these, the beautification of its environs. I have relayed this information to so many power holders in the past. At the Smithsonian in Washington are crates and crates — unopened and not catalogued — of Filipino artifacts from the Philippine-American War in 1898. A Smithsonian official showed them to me in 1955. Why didn’t our government ask for their return?

It does not speak well of us that every day, buses filled with school children visit the malls, but not the museums.

What the National Museum must do now is get people, the very young, the masa. On Sundays entrance should be free.

The anthropological museum in Mexico City is a wonderful repository of that country’s pre-Columbian past. I first saw it in 1976. What impressed me most were the many children gazing at the artifacts of their ancient civilization. I could only imagine what must be going on in their young minds, as they were being introduced to their own noble history.

So then, museums must not just be the repository of mummies and the works of dead artists. It must be a throbbing, thumping venue for social interaction, visited by plebeian and aristocrat alike, and most of all by the very young.

The officials of all our public museums must now open their doors, create exhibitions, mind-widening lectures, presentations that will attract people the way museums elsewhere draw long lines of patrons, mostly natives.

If Loren succeeds in setting up folk art museums, she will assist employment in the provinces, bring forth better appreciation of Filipino craftsmanship and instaling in us a pride of place and, hopefully a patriotic fervor which is piteously wanting. These will then be her diamond legacy.

Museums merit public support. It is with them that the cultural core — the very soul of our people — will be revealed to us. From this enlivening process, the marmoreal sense of a Filipino nation will then be born.