ENJOY DIVISION

Adeline Ooi, a Malaysian curator, was recently in the country to sit as a panelist for an officious portfolio review at Silverlens gallery in Pasong Tamo. In an email interview with a local daily about her soft spot for Philippine art, she wrote of her weariness with art that tackled national political issues, saying, We already know you were conquered by the Spanish, sold to the Americans, raped by the Japanese and totally fucked over by Marcoses. With this blithe dismissal, five hundred years of colonial history and national struggle as well as their lingering structures and effects were proclaimed dclass, boring, even petty. Taking this debasement as an opportunity for promotional work, Ooi added that Philippine contemporary art of her generation transcended (and still transcend) the whole Pinoy clich. Ooi then went on to list artists that gave her a hard on, all of whom were touched by the influence of Roberto Chabet. Now, to speak of art, especially from a position of authority afforded by cultural forms of capital (panelist, international curator, British art educated, without which Ooi would simply have been a tourist with an opinion), is to seek to produce effects in the field of artto seek to influence the ways with which we view, produce, and value art. What occurs with the abovementioned pronouncements is three-fold: it is at once a negation of a whole region of Philippine art historical terrain, the inauguration of a figure and his followers as the central movers of Philippine art, and lastly, the cementing of several careers (Oois included) by way of association with the edifice they consecrate. If we were to follow the logic of Oois sophisticated boredom, we would almost definitely devolve to limiting the qualifying criteria of art to entertainment value. But thats hardly it. What is at stake here is the ability to regard the contemporary of Philippine art in its precisely Philippine context. To unilaterally dismiss such currents as Social Realism or protest art is to dismiss the effort of representing, opposing, reframing, and otherwise coming to terms with our history of colonial/imperial subjugation, bondage, and tutelage. In short, to subscribe to Oois sweeping negation is to forget the grounding of Philippine art in its historical context and to perhaps try very very hard to be British instead. To displace this historical current with the cult of Roberto Chabet is to add insult to injury insofar as Oois own representations signify a tendency of importing artistic fads from global centers of art with scarce regard for the contexts of Philippine, and even South East Asian, art historya neoliberal tendency made all the more coherent with the Marcoses programme of cultural catching-up wherein Chabet figured as the first curator of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. If this is indeed the height and sole measure of validity of Philippine contemporary art, then it becomes all the more cogent that we, in treading a similar path to the Social Realists, must acknowledge the pervasive influence of the neoliberal capitalist establishment on contemporary art, of which the legacy of Chabet as represented by supplicants such as Ooi is just a symptom.

This exhibition is organized around our collective opposition to the influence of such distortive currents in Philippine contemporary artdistortions that are self-aggrandizing, callous, and altogether uninformed. Any reckoning of the contemporary must necessarily account for the realities and conditions in which it is situated. Without this regard for the nuance and sprawl of networks, structures and mechanisms that interpenetrate with those of art, the contemporary much like the uncritical attitudes towards the modern of a previous age, may as well just mean hip. Antares Gomez Bartolome