Asian Art Museum, Thursday Talks May 21 2015 7:00-8:30 P.M.
After a decade of not following the Filipino-American “art scene” (I was busy completing a doctorate), I was treated along with some 200 people, to a visual feast of works by five Filipino/American artists presented by the Asian Art Museum Thursday Series. It was a wonderful palette of inspired creativity and frankly quite refreshing. The talk, titled: The State of the State: Cpntemporary Filipino/American Art in the Bay Area, reviewed the recent and past works of Michael Arceaga, Eliza Barrios, Jennifer Wofford, Cece Carpio, Lordy Rodriguez. It would have been wonderful if the other artists would have made it but were either traveling or exhibiting out of town. Three of these artists I have witnessed: Jennifer Wofford and Eliza Barrios, were part of the trio M.ail O.rder B.ride who presented at the Stanford Annenburg Auditorium in the early 2000’s and brought down the house with their hilarious, witty, brilliant, and sometimes sarcastic representation of the mail-order-bride trade that gripped Filipino news media about its business illegality, domestic abuse and exploitation of Filipino women during the explosion of the Internet dating websites. The slides shown of their current works, most of them with markedly Filipino art memes, exhibitted the same wittiness and the punch-in-the-gut-without-you-knowing-it effect that characterize the M.O.B. performance art and visual media. I must confess, pieces by Cece Carpio and Eliza Barrios until this moment were unfamiliar to me, but their works were visual reminders of what most Filipinos experience as they go about their daily lives in San Francisco: the Tuloy Po Kayo Filipino Education Center Mural, a Parol poster featuring the Kularts and Arkipelago founders are among the memorable ones.
Michael Arceaga and Lordy Rodriguez, I knew well. I “curated” a presentation for Filipino/American artists who were in Stanford at that time. Both were doing their MFA’s in the Department of Art & Art History where I was assigned as the technology specialist. As a historian and anthropologist, I was intrigued by Michael’s interpretation of the Filipino’s history, convoluted and confused by colonialism, saddled with inept political leadership, and saddened by the globalized exploitation of its human resources. The earlier works of Michael showed the incongruity of Philippine history (events) with common sensibilities. For example, sailing a cardboard galleon-like boat in the Berkeley marina knowing too well it will soon be water-soaked and sink. Well, the galleon trade, a.k.a. the Manila-Acapulco trade lasted for over two hundred years not only brought immense wealth to the Spanish colonizers but also plenty of misery to the native Filipinos. He toys with technology with video piece of a Caucasian looking soprano singing the Philippine national anthem from a Google translated Tagalog-to-English lyrics. (By the way, I loved Wofford’s take on Google too: what she calls manananggoogle, e.g. a homophone to mananangal which in Tagalog, translates to shape-shifting underworld character in Filipino mythology). Michael’s “historical’ pieces do not show the brutality (as do a majority of Filipino nationalist art) of European and U.S. colonialism heaped upon the Filipinos. They are more subtle, like the piece War Clubs, where warship replicas substituted for the club axe heads ! For students of Philippine history, this is far more memorable than the staid facts of the U.S. v Spain Battle of Manila Bay, an event that is glorified in San Francisco’s Union Square. In Philippine and in Filipino/American history, Michael will not be without inspiration for long time.
Lordy’s take on Filipino history is more abstract- yet plays on the factuallity of topography and geography. Maps, in other words. It’s hard sometimes to know whether Lordy is representing a factual geography- real names, e.g. “Chinatown”, “Quezon” or if he was creating an “imagined” community. There are no people in his maps, only names, some factual, some imagined. We know people live there within its imagined geography but are they really who they are? What would you call them? Over these years, as I followed Lordy, he has consistently stayed within this genre. I compare him with great map makers of the known and ancient world as a modern Ptolemy or Muhammad al-Idrisi or Luo Hongxian who, before the modern sextant and GPS was invented, created a geography that drove seafarers and explorers to risk life and limb on basis on another person’s imagination. I would like to see Lordy make this form into an interesting game for future voyagers.
To the question what is Filipino/American art’s identity, I much prefer Thea Tagle’s, who moderated the talk, working definition of Filipino/American art as “method” and much less as an ideology or philosophy. You are what you do- a Filipino artist in America, or as an American artists in a Filipino skin. Like Filipino/American literature, it is a work-in-progress that will continue to be defined as Filipino/American-nish ideas mature. Filipinos in America, Filipinos in the homeland, are a young people living amongst a widely diversity ecology of languages (70), geographies (over a thousand islands), and histories (Asian, Spanish, American, Japanese influences). compared to the homogenous cultures of Western Europe, and the Great Traditions of China, Japan, India. The lack of ossifying and stultifying tendencies of tradition is perhaps a benefit and makes for flexibility and nimbleness, specially amidst the rapidly accelerating global changes all peoples now face.
The artists presented that day were laudable, not so much in terms of Filipino/American “role models” as someone in the audience aspired for during Q&A, but as cultural creatives who document, reflectively and honestly, the liminal yet dynamic transitions of the Filipino/American consciousness throughout its diaspora from San Francisco, Manila and around the world.
