THE SOIL IN WHICH WE ROOT: SOURCES OF TRADITION FOR

CONTEMPORARY FILIPINO ARTISTS

In the 21st Century, the Philippines will have attained the status of a Newly
Industrialized Country (NIC), or so hope Government’s economic planners. Such
status entails certain costs, for it fast tracks economic development to win
membership in the elite club of capitalist economies for our country, which to date
remains enshrouded in the cultural heritage of semi-feudalism and
semi-colonialism. There is danger, however, that in the rush to NIChood, the
country might be shedding its cultural identity , perceiving this as disposal cultural
baggage to be exchanged for material prosperity. In a country that has suffered all
kinds of setback in the quest for economic self-sufficiency since the 1960’s the
temptation to barter soul for bread is very real.

The urgency of identifying sources of tradition for contemporary Filipino

artists, must, therefore, be addressed by government before the new century dawns
upon the Republic. The task of identifying sources of tradition ought to begin with
confronting the problem of Filipino artist’s alienation from the indigenous soil in
which his art should sink roots. The alienation was the consequence of two
successive colonial regimes that forced the artist into a historical framework that
allowed him to grow away from the traditional culture of his forbears. It might be
asserted that the concept of “art” that Filipinos assimilated through formal
education was introduced during the Spanish colonial period, and this was
elaborated upon by the educational system under American colonial culture. The
language in which the rudiments of art and its evaluation were conveyed to young
Filipinos was, of course, the language of colonial masters. It is significant to note
the medium of instruction because the culture behind the language carried
assumptions and valuations of Europeans and Americans, installing in the minds
of young Filipinos who were in time going to be creative artists producing their
own art works, norms established by the practice, within their respective cultures,
of Western artists.

There was art-making in the Philippines when Western colonial art came. This
much we can glean from the accounts of the life-ways of the people by early
missionary chroniclers. It was art-making bound up with the life of the
community , in songs sung while rowing out to sea to fish, in pots in which food
and drink were kept were cooking and eating in the house took place, in poetry
that accompanied religious rituals and commemorations. The people did not see
these items as art, and neither could the colonial masters whose concept of art did
not extend to such forms of expression by a populace considered to be uncivilized.
Art was understood by the Europeans who made the Philippines a colony of Spain
in 1565 as the expression of a mercantilist society where, in the words of Arnold
Hauser the “beautiful” was seen as “the logical conformity of the individual parts
to a whole, the arithmetically definable harmony of the relationships and the
calculable rhythm of a composition, the exclusion of discords in the relations of
figures to the space they occupy and in the mutual relationships of the various
parts of the space itself”.

The rationality of the art of Renaissance Europe attests to the sophisticated

socio-political development of the society from which the Legazpi expedition
came. Thus in addition to superior arms, the Spanish colonizers could wield the
culture of an advanced society to effect the subjugation of a people still in the
communal stage of economic development. Late in the 16th century, with the
policy of resettling natives in towns established by the missionaries, the process of
colonial acculturation of the early Filipinos began in the earnest. Farmers and
fisherfolk living in widely scattered communities were persuaded and coerced into
living near and around in the church so that, ostensibly, the priests could watch
over the spiritual life of their converts. Christianization meant colonization, with
the natives who converted to Christianity moving into towns where consequently
they lived as subjects of the King of Spain or as the documents of the colonial
administration where in the habit of putting it, in “the service of both
majesties”(the majesty of the King and the majesty of God). It might be said that
the Filipinos’ internalization of the artistic norms of the colonizing power began at
this historical juncture when relocation from the isolation of rural communities
initiated the urbanization / colonization / hispanization of the brutos salvajes.

In a society that, close to the beginning of the 21st century has yet to eradicate
the remaining vestiges of its feudal and colonial past, the necessary task of
formulating aesthetic norms markedly “Filipino” has to consider factors other than
artistic if it is to achieve its objective. When we speak of “Filipino” norms, we are
talking about criteria that will allow audiences in the Philippines to appreciate and
validate all artistic expression even as these are now marginalized by Western
standards. In view of the 400 years of Spanish colonialism, 40 years of U.S.
domination and 50 years as a U.. neo-colony controlled through the IMF and the
World Bank, undoing the distortions and perversions visited by foreign rule on the
culture of the Filipinos is not an easy task.

The students of the arts has to look beyond plain artistic production. It is
imperative that one investigate the society in which artistic production takes place,
noting how social, political and economic forces contend for hegemony within that
society. The student ought to take into account the multifarious factors that
influence the production of any art work, because he needs an all-around
understanding of what the Filipino artists want when he understands creative work
and what the Filipino audiences expect from a given work of art. Admittedly, the
project of discovering the motivations that attend the creation and the reception of
art will require assistance from other experts. Fortunately, in the Philippine
academe, interdisciplinary research and teaching have begun to make things easier
for the student engaged in the search for “Filipino” norms.

With every passing year, the problem of norms becomes doubly problematic.
The flood of media products coming from the West foretells a time when
art-making by Filipinos will have been subsumed by the internationalized popular
culture made available daily by video and cable television.