Marian Pastor Roces:
Are Artists Still
the Vanguard?
This keynote address was delivered on June 14, 2001 at ISPA's International Congress in Sydney, Australia.
I worry about any possibility that any statements I may make as a list of ideas to take up with you this morning will be received as sweeping, generalized statements. I am quite frightened of monolithic positions. For if there is anything I wish to convey to you this morning, it is press for an emphasis on nuance, particularly in consideration of the political understanding of art practice. And to exercise nuance as we consider to topic posed as a question this morning, it may be best to frame my contribution in terms of the very specific complexities of specific locations - which locations, in any case, demand a global view. My location is of course the Philippines, where I live, but as you will see, that location of a life is by no means confined to the boundaries of that archipelago. It is for this reason that I decided to be a bit of a storyteller this morning. Indeed it is my conceit that I might attempt something of an epic chant - for about 15 minutes!
ONE
It happens that epic chants are on my mind because of news last night
on CNN that an American hostage may have been beheaded by the terrorist
group Abu Sayyaf in the southern flanks to the Philippine archipelago.
We are all hoping of course that this did not in fact come to pass. But:
this shift of the on-going story into the domain of pure terror reached
me through the TV in my hotel here in Sydney, as a dreadful reminder,
to myself, that my introduction of violence to these proceedings is not
gratuitous. It is a horribly confused situation there, impossible to even
begin to discuss here. But I do note that the difficulty for most people,
first of all for majority of Filipinos, is to differentiate between an
outright bandit group and a number of liberation fronts engaged in secessionist
movement because of wrongs inflicted by a Christian majority on a Muslim
minority. To too many Filipinos as well as to too many in the First World,
Muslim people are to be feared. Unfortunately for all of us.
I wondered last night what the epic chanters have to say. You see, that very same group of islands in Southern Philippines is home, not only to rabid bandits and migrant Christians who have taken over much of the land of non-Christians, but also to quite compelling epic traditions. Some of, which, as performed, are longer than the Mahabharata, and the Ramayana combined. These are living epics in that they are chanted today by practitioners who continue to elaborate on the archaic tales and performative skills, but more importantly, who comment on current events. However, as you may well imagine, hardly anyone hears, much less pays attention to epic chanters, if even the epic heroes or heroines possess the chanters to offer what might presumably be a different synthesis than that offered by, say, the military. Such cultural matters seem too esoteric to be considered in the political or strategic or economic calculations to resolve a hostage taking crisis.
Not the epic tradition but quite a different performance tradition has bearing on the sordid state of affairs in Southern Philippines at the moment. It is specifically a kind of musical theater form so-called moro-moro, from a Spanish word Moro, for Moor. For the last 400 years, in many, many Philippine towns, Filipino Christians have re-staged, re-enacted the fight between Muslims and Christians, as very popular street theatre, derived from Spanish romances. The Moro is of course demonized. The play visits upon us Filipinos, over and over, a contest that took place in the Iberian peninsula more than half a millennium ago; and in the earlier part of the second millennium, the Crusades. I assure you that it is not hyperbole to assert that the present war in the Philippine south has deep connections with a theater tradition. I beg you to consider that art is not innocent.
Cultural matters are not as distant from military or economic ones as we might wish. Vanguard, to begin with, is a word from military history - a word that conjures, for instance, the storming of the Bastille. To the vanguard, whether soldier or artist or philosopher or economist or scientist, the old necessarily gives way to the new; the presumably decayed to the presumably renewed; the purportedly bad to the purportedly better. To a vanguard formation, conquest is the urge, the imperative, the heroic act. It is specifically because of where I live that I fail to appreciate the use of the vanguard metaphor in art practice. I especially do not value the military connection. Still, the primary reason for my distance is a philosophical one: it is often illusory to think that the past is past. Certainly not if a country, such as mine, is playing out a brutal conflict where people are dying today because of the identity politics that shaped Castille so long ago. Apparently it is not too long ago. Time is flattened.
The sense that time does not exactly move forward like an arrow may be illustrated by what has been happening to a musical instrument called the kulintang, associated with Philippine Muslim societies. It is a set of eight bossed gongs made of brass. To augment ammunition, kulintangs have been melted down to be made into bullets. When war ceases temporarily, the bullet shells are melted down to be made into kulintangs. This reminds me to note that as the Spanish colonial administration sought to consolidate its Philippine territory against Muslim raids from the south, again in the last 400 years, the bells in the belfries were melted down to be made into cannons. And back again, whenever possible. [Trivia: the top bit of bells are, in fact, called cannons.]
While it may be specious for me to declare that these bell/cannons or kulintang/bullets conflate vanguard art and vanguard soldiery, I press on, nevertheless, to urge you to consider space, not just time, as conflated as well. Globalization, which has been ongoing since the Portuguese smelled the spices of the Moluccacs, has ensured that the experience of identity, or culture if you will, is displaced.
TWO
Displacement. Dis-location, perhaps. I was a child under the age of 10
during those nights my grandfather and I listed to records of Renata Tebaldi
in the large, airy spaces of our clan house of hardwood and limestone
and cut-openwork partitions that little rice birds flew right through.
In one window and out the other side, above the pig-sty and the rice mill
and the peddlers of grilled fish. Renata's arias wafted above the oinking
and hawking sounds outdoors, for the big house is a fine acoustic box
for mysterious reasons, seeing that the spaces were defined, not by walls,
but by open windows more than 15 meters wide. The voice must have been
deepened by contact with the red-gold floorboards, made out of thick,
very tall trees; wood that we understood to be special like that voice.
Wood and voice were both strong, handsome, and curiously enough, universal.
Wood and voice were neither dead nor alive. By the time I was growing
up in this house, it was already more than a century old, and it seemed
that I was a child not only to the generations I knew, but to improbably
ancestral figures named Renata, Monserrát, Enrico. My grandfather
switched off all fluorescent lights before the start of our concerts for
two, so our eyes adjusted to the dimness of old oil lamps fitted, in the
early 20th century, with incandescent bulbs. I observe now that the lamps
were traded into the Philippines in the same 19th century when, say, Un
bel di was composed - though I didn't know this then. One fine day: it
was always one fine day, never a series of days; never connections that
fix time to a calendar. Aria, lamp, wood, grandfather, breeze, were all
matters of imperceptible age. Again, history - a sense of history or historical
momentousness or historical flow - was extraneous to my experience then.
Today, nostalgia is extraneous to my recollection. The dimmed space was
a vacuum in which history - that is to say, all kinds of sequences or
chronologies - did not exist.
Instead of yet another generalized rehearsal of the evils of imperialism, I am pressing for us to consider the idea of art at the vanguard of, yes, that imperialism, but specifically in terms of the collapse of the spatial fixity of culture. This collapse or conflation is what makes possible the creation of an enlarged economic space: the space for unimpeded international traffic of the goods Marilyn Waring spoke about yesterday. As a child, I didn't think wonder about the origins and destinations of what wafted through the house. Why ask, really, whether the birds, for example, inhabited or came from inside or outside. Thus untroubled by the consequences of windows that are ever-open, it came to pass that I am possessed by something impossible to really possess in turn. Impossible for me to grasp, in fact; much less own. I never learned Italian, and my French is baby talk, but I know no other childhood music except sing-along versions of Puccini and Verdi arias. Even if I should finally figure the songs instead of reading translations, it cannot modify the underlying ludicrousness of a wonderful gift: a music that conquered our affections, but which has also numbered us to the displacement, or erasure, or violation of, among other matters, a local sound environment.
My description of my house is a description of privilege. In bringing up privilege, I bring up the matter of consumption. And consumption is to do with the concentration of generous amounts of resources to project and exercise power. Let us keep going with this line of thought, which allows us to a number of insights. The bipolar distinction between so-called high art and so-called popular art begins to fade in importance, because we are able to see that the real distinction is between art that requires incredible economic and political resources to sustain, and art that thrives on other orders of human investment. How wrong-headed it is, therefore, to think that so-called high art is high art because of esoteric levels of mastery and the rest is populist amateurism. The rarefied mastery wielded by any opera singer of note, cannot be seen as fundamentally greater than the mastery possessed by an epic chanter who can sing 11,000 stanzas of a tale over two or three weeks. But there is doubtless a difference, and it resides in the kind of economic power required to create an opera singer of note, or a prima ballerina; to produce the production vehicles for this artist; to disseminate the artistry across that collapsed space we call the global economy; and the massive infrastructure to project power.
But let's get back to that sense of the ludicrous, which I daresay is a vital register in any discussion of culture. Today, I still am elevated by, say, listening to Aida, despite my deep commitment to the ideas of the Palestinian critic Edward Said, who, among other compelling observations, wrote of the creation of Aida by Verdi in close association with the Champollion and other Egyptologists who engineered the appropriation of Egypt and its cultural resources to serve the project of projecting a France of extraordinary capacity. I've ventured this bit of an autobiographical indulgence to remark about the convoluted nature of things. There is something grotesque, farcical, preposterous about holding on to the pleasures while, simultaneously, trying to keep a sharp sense of the asymmetries of power in the political terrains we all negotiate. For me, what helps is to keep both pleasures and politics focused on the hope of human understanding. And a great part of human understanding may be available by releasing ourselves from the burdens of polar oppositions.
I will footnote this story by saying that it was only upon listening to the great Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, which as it happens was at the Womad event of one Adelaide Festival, that I, schooled by Irish Catholic nuns, could gain some understanding of the mystical core of Islam. Such an experience is not readily available to Filipinos of a Christian background, and such an experience is obviously the result of the tremendous resources necessary to organize a Festival. Such an experience, however, is great to have had, when considering the so-called Muslim problem in my country.
I hope you understand therefore, why I reside faith in the idea of non-linear routes, rather than the sequential construction of progress that is so fundamental to avant garde art practice.
THREE
Which is not to say that I dismiss the avant garde.
I'll take an example from the visual arts, where I have more familiarity. I have a friend, a performance and conceptual artist and presently she is undertaking a five-year performance. She wears a pouch, which she calls a scapular, daily. Rather, two pouches, one in front and one in back. This is her gallery. She is the gallery. She calls the work, Scapular Gallery Nomad, and she curates exhibitions very seriously in this - sometimes of this - pouch. The artist line-up is international. She undertakes all the usual work: negotiating with the individual artists, discussing the curatorial plan, documentation, the entire lot. As a professor in a university and a known artist, she does move around quite a bit, and she shows the art to people - this is whomever she meets in the course of a day, could be students, taxi drivers, the odd pedestrian, café habitués, relatives, and so on and so forth - by inviting them to extract the art from her pouch. The limits of the circulation of the art is the limits of her body movement. Scapular Gallery Nomad - this satire of the art market, this sustained comment or alternative to the expensive art infrastructure - has become a quite well known institution in the international avant garde circuit.
Again, the preposterous, farcical, playful, ludicrous. She is aware of the contradictions she is playing out. Anti-art market, she nonetheless can only exist as an artist within the international avant garde circuits that depend so much on spectacular and costly art events. As a person walking around the streets of the cities of the world, she is just a fool, not an artist. Critical of the international art infrastructure, she is nonetheless aware that hers is precisely the critical stance that is the nutritious fodder high art feeds on. Narrowing the domain of art practice to the size of her small, peripatetic body, she is nonetheless caught up in the high intensity exchange, for instance, as part of the gargantuan exhibition, Cities on the Move. Removing herself from the frenzy, she of course knows that she is allowing herself to be sucked in by the maelstrom of the international art world which is constantly hungry for wild creatures like herself.
The avant garde idea is a persistent one, and will continue to excite us, both for the intellectual engagement, the aesthetic pleasure, and the insights offered about the imprisoning structures that were built to ensure that the modern world appropriates all creativity. However, all the subsequent avant gardes of the 20th century were eaten up by the market. All extreme acts - including Dada, Baudelaire's l'art pour l'art which was a critique of the market, conceptual art which was a critique of the object-centredness or product-centredness of the art circuit - have subsequently, in turn, been folded back into what we might call the world art machine. Doubtless art continues to hothouse vanguard fronts. But precisely because the very idea of vanguard art is dependent on the idea of progress, of time as an arrow, of space as pierce-able by that arrow, of art as rarefied commodity… no vanguard, by the nature of the beast, stays vanguard for long. And the promise of liberation is usually stilled at the moment of breaching; at the moment the front is conquered.
To offer a direct response to the question posed to us this morning: Are artists still the vanguard? I'm sure the answer is still yes. But it is a yes that in the next breath has to be qualified by remarking that the global economy requires the existence of sequential vanguards simply because it is ever hungry for the next high to market. And while all of us are primed to need that next high, it is probably best to see that need in relation to the many other requirements of social justice.
On the first day of this conference, I heard a woman declare that the market drives innovation. The sentence has been ringing in my ears since, because there was something deeply disturbing about it that I could not immediately put my finger on. Again I will have to agree. But we must qualify that word innovation: it is product innovation, usually not the innovation on ways of being human or expressing humanness that can correct brutal asymmetries of power.
FOUR
I had opportunity to convene a Policy Conference and on Traditional Culture
for the Philippine situation, and brought together a number of scholars
to think tank on an extraordinary arts school situated at a mountaintop
rainforest. As you might well imagine, night times were times given over
to relaxing and cordial exchange. A woman, who has subsequently become
a dear friend of mine, started singing. I knew her to be an ethnomusicologist
but also an accomplished choir conductor and a madrigal singer. However,
that night her song, which wafted in the air together with the specific
sounds of that rainforest environment, sounded to me like an epic. But
the time I held this conference, I had already become quite a veteran
of journeys to deep and isolated places in island Southeast Asia, had
some familiarity with epic chanting. Approaching her, I thought to inquire
where she collected that quite compelling music. Firstly she responded
that she was not really singing it well, because she has had to undergo
professional training to alter her musical skills from madrigal singing
to this other physiognomy of performance. And then she told me that she
found this song in Batangas, which shocked me because this was where I
was born. It turns out that she has spent close to ten years doing research
on her doctoral dissertation practically in my backyard.
She found more than a hundred stanzas of archaic verse in my language, in a place that had taken the brunt of Spanish, American, and Japanese colonizations for more than 400 years. It is a place that we thought had no indigenous culture left. Those 100 plus stanzas of verse comprised a ritual that takes all night to perform. It is a ritual accepted in the Catholic Church but which has a musical structure related to that to be found in so-called tribal Philippines. The long song is danced by expert practitioners. It is highly elaborate. Studying the words, I was struck by how it seemed to be, at one level, a record of the trauma. When asked why they perform such a difficult and refined form, the practitioners have three words of explanation: gaan, lightness; panata, vow; and laro, play.
I bring up this humbling moment to make the following points. Firstly, many cultures exist on the same space. Secondly, performed cultures can be quite tenacious. Thirdly, indigenous culture is not quite the fragile thing that has to be pickled, or sustained by an elaborate life-support system, but on occasion at least can be the very instrument for absorbing and getting past shock. Fourthly, it is probably wise to begin to think, as Marilyn Waring suggests, that the capacity of modernity to totally overwrite all other cultures is grossly exaggerated. Fifth, it may often be the case that we can't perceive the existence of indigenous culture in our backyards, simply because, in this case for instance, I needed to educate my ear to this music. Sixth, innovation is not the exclusive province of the market. On the contrary, innovation that allows people to contend with violence may be innovation created outside market.
FIVE
The Scapular Gallery owning artist friend of mine was developing an idea
for yet another one of the big Biennales, and she wanted to work with
the idea of the viruses as intrusive. She asked to work with Nokia, exploring
the text-messaging capabilities of their cellular phones. The work was
not realized for a number of reasons. At about the same time, I was politically
involved in the fight to oust the previous President of the Philippines,
who is a criminal. It was the second night that about half a million Filipinos
poured into the streets for what we all knew was the final make or break
lap in the push to get rid of the unwanted President. My cohorts and I
who formed a loose group - one among many civil society associations lending
body to the insurrection - were informed through secret channels of course,
that the military establishment will shift to our side if they can have
empirical evidence that our anti-duly-constituted-authority side had the
numbers. The military wished to see numbers. That night we were exhausted,
and then we slid very close to despair as we thought the numbers out in
the streets were petering out. People were going home. We thought that
we were not going to make it. We tried calling Corazon Aquino to ask her
to make a call for civil disobedience. She declined, not wishing, said
she through emissary, to step over the line towards economic sabotage.
So we said to each other, let's just ask for a simple performance, something
for people to participate in. We decided to ask people to come to EDSA,
and to form a human chain. We asked people to bring candles, light them.
For verification as to the source of the message, we suggested that people
get their particulars from Radio Veritas, the Catholic radio station.
I was asked to write the text message, and within minutes, around a dozen
mobile phones let loose my words into the ether. Within 18 hours, there
was half a million people on EDSA with their candles, outlining this street
with their bodies in a human chain. It appears that during those five
days, Filipinos sent around 180 million text messages to each other. I
called a friend who failed to make it to the Biennale with her idea, and
we had a laugh, and we said, well such an initiative would have been wasted
anyway on art. But I must confess that as a writer, this was my moment.
I did ask myself: this coming together of people to oust a criminal head of state, and the coming together of people across vast spaces in an international art event, are these not similarly, the art of wielding power over a region via the careful wielding of spectacle? I answered myself: I daresay, No. The concentration of power and resources in an international art event, usually in the service of national projection, is a marketplace. The concentration of cultural expression, through the use of technology available in the global market, to demand a better life: this is not vanguard politics. This is something else, for which we probably have no pat name, which is probably all for the best.
BIOGRAPHY
Marian Pastor Roces is a critic and independent
curator living in the Philippines. Published internationally, her writing
is focused by her interest in clothes, cities, museums, the construction
of minorities, and contemporary art that exercises skepticism about art
and culture. She is currently working on 19th century universal expositions
in relation to 20th century international art events. Pastor Roces is
also principle partner of TAO Management Corporation, which provides curatorial,
cultural planning, design, and architectural services for museum, exhibition,
and urban design projects. TAO approaches its projects as engagements
in the politics of memory, and in re-shaping notions of community.
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