and subsequently had a flawed sense of themselves as creators. With the founding of the guild, Santi now had another reason for staying. He had grown dissatisfied with working in New York where the art of countries like the Philippines had been routinely ignored. New York had numerous exhibition spaces, and Santi had had both group and solo shows in the early 1980s. But these were usually tagged as works by “minority” artists or by “people of color.” Such labels were deliberately misread by the cultural mavens with clout as implying tokenism rather than merit—a misreading that helped to justify their avoidance. It was a little different if you were a black artist or writer, where your work would be reacted to, noticed, or reviewed by the establishment, in part to assuage their collective guilt over the horrendous history of slavery and oppression. The art itself sometimes seemed secondary in these reviews, a perception that tainted even the most enthusiastic assessments.
As with so many Filipinos in the American diaspora, Santi felt that, as the ex-colonized, we were invisible. When acknowledged, which wasn’t often, we were seen as country cousins, asked, though politely, to remain in the kitchen, from where we could peek into the drawing- and living-rooms of the elite. If allowed in, it was only intermittently as transients or sojourners. Immensely complicating this process was the lack of historical awareness, and the often wilful ignorance of most Americans, of Westerners, about who we were and whence we came. (“The Philippines? Where is that?” “East of New Jersey.” “You speak English so well.” “I learned it on the plane coming over.”) Santi had had enough of that; he felt that creating a homegrown, largely self-taught aesthetic was crucial to moving away from what he termed an “overdependence on the West.”
Here in microcosm was the continuing, usually lopsided, dialectic between Third World assertions and First World dominance of resources and information. Here too was a dialectic between Baguio and Manila. Manila continued to be the breeding- and feeding-ground of artists whose mindset had been almost totally dominated by Western art history, and who produced work as though they were part of—rather than outside—that history. Their aesthetics, their works, were often emasculated to fit a so-called “international style,” which could then be placed on the global, i.e., Western, art market. Prettified eunuchs guarding the seraglio, they in effect reenforced, rather than deconstructed, the whole process of neocolonization. BAG would be an agent of decolonization, a raison d’etre that went hand in hand with the spirit of resistance that characterized the Cordilleras.
Switching to Tagalog, Santi states emphatically, “Kung Manila ang pipinta ng Igorot, iba. Kung Igorot ang pipinta sa Igorot, hindi ma-misrepresent.” (“When Manila portrays the Igorot, it’s different. When the Igorot portrays the Igorot, it’s accurate.”) The main issue was and would always be one of control. Bose’s efforts and those of Bencab and other fellow Baguio artists were related to the task of reclaiming both cultural and psychic territory from the invader, nowadays as likely to wear the glittery garb of pop culture as a military uniform.
In one of Bose’s installations, Pasyon at Rebolusyon, with its explicit reference to Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution (a seminal work on nineteenth-century Filipino peasant aspirations for independence contextualized through sacred texts on Christ’s sufferings), indigenous materials, local iconography including a revolutionary flag, inscriptions, and miniature figures make up an ironic and highly eloquent altar. The piece continues his often irreverent attempts to articulate the nationalist feelings of those whom Carlos Bulosan, a Filipino poet and prose writer who had died of tuberculosis in Seattle in 1956, termed “the nameless in history.”
If the works of Bose exuded the ambiguities of a postcolonial sit-uation, so too did the works of two other guild founders, filmmaker Eric De Guia and installation artist Roberto Villanueva. De Guia’s 1977 Perfumed Nightmare, his first film, had been a hit in international film festivals from Berlin to Tokyo. A wry and quietly funny commentary on the neocolonial condition, the film was a sustained laugh at ourselves, at Catholicism, at our infatuation with Western technology—all the absurdities of a postcolonial hangover. The works of Villanueva, on the other hand, clearly reiterated the importance of nearly forgotten highland ritual and symbol. He used such forms as the village dapay (a circle of stone seats surrounding a hearth, where tribal elders would gather to discuss important matters) as well as ritualistic offerings to animist spirits, such as the launching of mini-boats on lakes, as reminders of a center the displaced Filipino needed to retreat to. Villanueva often placed himself at the vortex of his installations, performing as both artist and shaman. And indeed he succeeded in being both, his works at once timeless in their transcendental simplicity and elegantly modern. His last installation before he passed away from leukemia was a series of giant slim cylinders, each eight meters long, symbolizing acupuncture needles with which to help heal a wounded earth. Villanueva had an acute sense of how the pain inflicted over the centuries by both colonized and colonizer had seeped into the very ground they stood on.
The efforts of the Baguio artists to shape their own creative destinies touched an ancient nerve. Their works resonated with the viewers by reminding them that beneath official history lay another history—one that might have been shoved aside but that was nevertheless ineradicable. Still, the Baguio art movement was not about atavistic impulses. It was more of a reckoning, a reconfiguration, even reassessment, of the modern Filipino as she/he is situated: influenced (some would say, burdened) by a geography and a history that is like no other, and by the ambivalent baggage of a colonial past side by side
with modernist sensibilities and a tribal, communal self.
This collective of artists had embarked on rediscovering—and reinterpreting—home, one of the more rewarding if difficult voyages at the end of the millennium. But first they had to reclaim themselves from the anonymous stew into which history had flung them. This could be and often was a tedious process. In the works of the Baguio artists, however, the process metamorphosed into a voyage that doubled back onto itself: by moving back, it moved forward. A voyage, then, of delicious irony.
IN VIGAN, A LOWLAND COASTAL CITY flanked by the South China Sea on the west and the Cordilleras on the east and less than two hours’ drive north of Baguio, the idea of history was palpably dif-ferent. Founded in the late sixteenth century by a twenty-two-year-old conquistador Juan de Salcedo, grandson of another conquistador, Miguel de Legazpi (who initiated the construction of Intramuros, the Walled City of Manila, from the ashes of the original Muslim settlement), Vigan quickly became an important entrepot; by the end of the eighteenth century, it was the ecclesiastical and political capital of Northern Luzon. With its plazas, cobblestoned streets, and Antillean homes, horse-drawn rigs, or calesas, still plying its streets, Vigan is even now the kind of place that has managed to keep its Spanish-era ghosts alive.
The last time I was in Vigan, parts of the Mestizo Quarter, where wealthy merchants and artisans from another era had built their pied à terres, had been retouched to look like the dusty streets of some Mexican village for Born on the Fourth of July, Oliver Stone’s film. With our jeans, shades, and pony-tailed hair, the local merchants on Crisologo Street had mistaken a friend and me for members of the film crew. The odors of New York must still have been on us, lending us a gringo aura. Here was the obvious irony of one Third World country being made to look like another. But in this particular transformation, history was also being revisited, for Spain had administered Las Islas Filipinas through Mexico.
There was no question that the homes in the quarter possessed a history. Constructed of hardwood, brick, stone, and plaster, they had a reassuring solidity and warmth. The family lived and entertained on the upper floor, and the kitchen usually opened up onto an azotea, a terrace at the rear that overlooked the garden. On the ground floor was space enough for a carriage and its horses to enter through wide portals, and where sacks of rice, sugar, flour, and salt were stored. A grand staircase connecting the two floors, the two worlds, had a mezzanine landing where visitors of inferior social status were made to wait before someone upstairs deigned to descend and talk to them.
The
