The jeepney, the 'King of the Road' in the Philippines
Blogger’s note: This article was first published in the opinion pages, August 27 edition of the daily Manila Standard Today.
In 2003, the Brisbane-based artist duo Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan presented at the Venice Biennale’s Zone of Urgency programme the Pinoy jeepney for a limited pasada, a quick stop in one of Europe’s prominent art events. I missed the event by a few months, and regretted having scheduled my visit at the wrong time.
Photos of the Aquilizans’ “In God We Trust” jeepney in Venice show this vehicle in all its chrome-silver splendor, not unlike the splashy versions we find on Manila’s streets or in a neighbor’s garage who nurtures a love for Sarao’s custom-made variants. But the Aquilizans’ jeep is not the kind of art that was totally appropriated such as the urinal in Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, where only the artist’s famed name or signature endows the object its formal status of art. In the Aquilizans’ art, strategy the signature is absent. What is conspicuously captured or embraced is the Pinoy’s love for embellishment and bling.
The Aquilizans equipped their jeepney with a load of Philippine souvenirs and did the same in succeeding exhibits in Australia where aside from the exaggerated shine of the original, the duo freighted the two-ton jeepney with chrome objects such as shovels and steamers. Their work speaks more of intervention where the jeepney’s exterior wrappings are cleverly peeled to show its social and historical layers, and where the viewer gets more than the trashy edge of a typical ragged and hard-working jeepney racing down Manila’s congested streets.
In Amsterdam, I was also surprised with an unexpected reunion some years ago with the jeepney at the Tropenmuseum, an institutional museum of anthropology, where the jeepney is displayed not as art, but as an unadorned object to illustrate the decay of urban centers and their impact on city dwellers. It looked like a carcass of metal with a dingy interior, with an air of being out of place and lost in the Tropemuseum’s cathedral-like space.
While the Aquilizan’s jeepney in Venice was brash and brazen with a polished and shining chrome skin, the Amsterdam specimen is like a whale out of water, beached in some alien shore whose passengers are nowhere to be found in the rainy chill of Dutch autumn. While the jeepney in Venice was regarded as art, the one in Amsterdam was pure object, divested of art’s clever and inspiring interventions.
In Venice, the jeepney was re-created and re-imagined to reflect the Pinoy humor and joie de vivre, the exultant spirit that triggered the jeepney’s creation during the post-War years. In Amsterdam, the original was simply transported, complete with a tattered cardboard “Baclaran-Pasay Taft-Quiapo” signage. Never had I seen a jeepney as bare and tired-looking as the one in Amsterdam, reminding me that facts, when confronted with little context can be depressingly banal than creative fiction.
I could imagine the pleasant surprise of Filipinos who might have unexpectedly encountered the Aquilizan jeepney in the Venice and Brisbane exhibits, reunited with this four-wheeled tarnished King of the Road often scorned by car-owners for its arrogant swagger and notorious propensity to hog the road and choke cities with tar-filled fumes.
But it is the Aquilizans’ singular achievement that a Philippine icon associated with the Philippine hoi polloi proudly represented Philippine art in an international event. The jeepney is often dubbed as “bakya” by the Philippine bourgeois, a mode of transport for the masses who are packed like sardines in the jeepney’s claustrophobic space.
The past weeks the Philippine press was saddled with a raging debate over another art work. Mideo Cruz’s Poleteismo has the same art strategy as the Aquilizans’ and Duchamp’s appropriative approach, common in conceptual art and a standard avant-gardist’s tactic to uproot objects from their usual contexts.
Marcel Duchamp's readymade art 'The Fountain,' Photo by the Beat Museum
In furious Facebooks posts I even encountered pseudo-clever opinions that Cruz simply transported a barong-barong wall stuck with news clipping and Jesus Christ posters and used the CCP’s walls as context to his risqué and recycled art. Like the Aquilizans’ Venice jeepney, I have only seen Cruz’s installation from photos. But looking beyond the penile accoutrements, the hostile and dismissive reactions have a bourgeois sneer to it, a hasty indictment that does not examine the work’s lineage.
I wouldn’t go into the inadequacies that the avant-garde art movement is saddled with in terms of art’s emphatic capacities —that would require another column. Let me just note, that beyond art various guises and effects, it would be helpful to remember that we look at art not because its expensive, famous, great or scandalous, but because it has the power to celebrate, to inspire and to hold a mirror before our noses.
Art does unlock memories (good and bad) nudging us to take a second look, freeze us in our tracks to look closely at the ground we are stepping on. In that sense we don’t need a hysterical Senate or a furious Church to tell us where and how to look. We ourselves are required by art to use our own eyes critically for there could be big gaping holes ahead where we might just fall into.
