lot of foreigners at the café. “I was naïve then: We all were. It was the sixties, a lot of things coming up, the miniskirt”—he laughed at this unintended pun—“marijuana, the Beatles. And Indios was the place to be then.”
It was at Indios that Bencab met his wife, a friend of Beatriz’s named Caroline Kennedy. Originally from London, Caroline had a blonde patrician beauty; in the eyes of Indios regulars she represented the desired Western sexual avatar, one completely different from those dusky women desired by American servicemen. She was very sixties —decked out in beads and paisley prints—and, because she was the new blonde in town, eagerly pursued.
At the end of the 1960s, the Indios gallery closed even though Bencab’s first one-man show there had been very successful. People simply weren’t buying. He and Caroline, already a pair, moved to London. There, for the sum of £3.50, they had a registry wedding. Bencab described those early years in London as “very exciting, very exotic.” By the following year, 1970, he had had his first show at a gallery in Greenwich. He soon developed a clientele that included the movie actress Glenda Jackson and Harold Pinter. But he also developed a pain in his stomach. Thinking it was appendicitis, he went to his wife’s family doctor. The diagnosis? Bencab was tense. He had had an overdose of Caroline’s family. They were friendly but patronizing, with that peculiar upper-class English mix of proper behavior and snotty derisiveness. He missed Mabini Street, familiar places, the friendliness of his own people.
Shortly after the birth of their first child, Eleazar, in 1971, Bencab and Caroline returned to Manila. A year later, Marcos declared martial law. Though they were a much sought-after couple socially, when Eleazar started reciting martial law slogans, they decided to return to London in 1974. This time, having begun to accept his life abroad, Bencab liked London.
But people there never quite knew how to react to him. And where there was prejudice, even if not overt, there was usually ignorance as well. “Once they found out I was from the Philippines,” Ben recalls, “people would say, ‘Oh the Philippines. It’s hot there, isn’t it?’ Talking about the weather is neutral, you don’t really offend anyone.” But feelings would slip through now and then. “The nanny of Caroline’s sister’s kids, when she saw Eleazar, exclaimed, ‘Oh, he’s so brown, isn’t he? But we love him anyway.’ She was South African.”
Sometimes it was funny. “We were in Majorca, and one day Eleazar was throwing a tantrum, refusing to eat his food. My motherin-law reprimanded him, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are compared to your Asian brothers!’”
In London, Bencab quickly realized that if he followed what was current in Western art, he would always be a second-rate artist, since the impulse for such art didn’t come from within, wasn’t part of his skin. He started to go over his collection of Filipiniana that he had slowly built up over the years, a lot of it from colonial-era texts written by the English and the Americans. He thought, “How come Japanese prints from the Edo period, works that were uniquely Japanese, came to be appreciated? There was a conscientious shift in me, to look to Filipino material.”
“The first piece I did was Portrait of a Servant Girl, which was based on a turn-of-the-century photo. I wanted to show both the servility of the Pinoy and the innate dignity. After all, it’s sheer economics that forces most domestics to be domestics.” Bencab himself had proletarian roots, having grown up in Bambang—a working-class district of Manila—where his ties were still very strong.
That was the beginning of a whole series of noncommissioned portraits of Filipinos in the diaspora. (I was the subject for one. Titled Greencard Holder, it shows me standing in the Soho kitchen of my old cold-water flat, bathtub in the background.) Since then, Bencab has become fascinated with what he terms “very Filipino gestures” expressed in such emotions as gratitude and jealousy. He talked about how traditional Cordilleran art, especially its sculptural aspects, had influenced him. The figures inhabiting Bencab’s canvasses are indeed sculptural, exhibiting distinctly Cordilleran features—broad faces, rounded limbs and torsos, heavy feet.
By 1983, Bencab’s marriage to Caroline had turned rocky. That same year, Marcos’s most well-known political foe, Benigno Aquino Jr., was assassinated as he stepped off the plane returning him to Manila after a three-year exile in Boston—a murder that spelled the beginning of the end for the Marcoses. Bencab was in Spain when the news broke. He felt left out by history. “I asked myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ I was isolated.” In 1985, he and Caroline were formally divorced, and he flew back to the Philippines shortly thereafter. Instead of resettling in Manila, he chose Baguio, where a small but vibrant artists’ community had formed. “In my mind I wanted to be in Baguio. The cool weather. Good friends, my interest in holistic health, in the holistic approach. I wanted to be quiet. Of course, once you live here, it isn’t as quiet as you might think.”
Within a month, he had purchased property in Baguio, financing the purchase by selling off his collection of antique Philippine maps. In a period of two to three years, he had built his home, made up of two modest but well-designed buildings separated by a Japanese garden. The Baguio Artists Guild, which he helped to found, was at the forefront of the regional art movements in the country, and proving to be much more dynamic than the art scene in Manila, which is still very much enthralled by the Western model. In 1993, he chaired perhaps the guild’s most successful festival, which, for the first time, had invited foreign artists to participate. Its theme was Salubungan Agos, or Cross Currents. Painters, writers, performance artists, photographers, and critics, mostly from the Asia Pacific region, gathered in Baguio. Baguio’s small-city atmosphere fostered an informality that enhanced the exchange of perspectives, not the least of which were the enjoyable all-night sessions at Café by the Ruins, a popular, open-air café near City Hall. There, well-known Philippine writers such as Alfred Yuson, Ricardo de Ungria, and José Dalisay Jr., read from their works. There, too, amidst impromptu jam sessions by musicians in the café’s garden, discussions quickly became festive, boisterous—and fun. I had been a participant, collaborating with two friends, Los Angeles-based visual artist Yong Soon Min and her husband, the writer Allan deSouza, on an installation entitled Geographies of Desire that explored the intersections between colonial history and the way that that history continued to exploit, through mass merchandising, the former subjects of empire.
The art up in Baguio had a raw quality and, unlike in Manila, a spiritual element that acknowledged the rituals and the animist traditions of the Cordilleras. The Baguio artists had become the new shamans, opening up in directions previously looked down on as “folk art,” claiming the freedom to utilize Philippine icons, mythology, popular images, and native materials as well, from handmade paper to bamboo and woven mats. In the process, they were able to recontextualize themselves and the native self. Here, Bencab had found his niche, his home.
Unlike Bencab, Santiago Bose, another founding member of the guild, is from Baguio. This is where, after living abroad for several years, he grew up, and where he has returned. Santi, as his friends call him, is a Baguio artist of imagination and wit; once, he set up a bamboo mock-radar dish on a hill facing a real radar installation that had been put up by the U.S. military on another hill. We had become friends in Manhattan, where he had been living, but shortly after Aquino came to power in 1986, Bose (an only child) returned to Baguio in order to attend to his father, who had a history of high blood presure and was very ill. His mother passed away unexpectedly, before his father subsequently did, and an aunt quickly followed. Immediately his clan became suspicious. Perhaps someone, a mangkukulam, or sorcerer, had cast an evil spell on the family. In a city known for its healers, ranging from tribal herbolarios and shamans to psychic surgeons, it was easy to engage a warlock to find out who was behind this deadly mischief. Reading the signs, the warlock said the unlucky spell had been cast by a former girlfriend of one of Santi’s cousins. Cherchez la femme. Fortunately, no retribution was necessary, only a counter spell, to break the hex.
BAG artists were somewhat like that warlock, engaged in break-ing
