Ferdinand Blumentritt (1853-1913) Photo: Lucien Spittael/Munting Nayon

Blogger’s Note: This article was first published in both the online and print editions of the Manila Standard Today newspaper, September 29, 2011 edition.

I first visited Prague in the late autumn of 2004 when the whole city seemed bathed in gold—from the last leaves of the season to the famous Charles Bridge with its load of visitors, the honey-tinted sunset lingered from the spires of the Gothic St. Vitus down to the narrow medieval streets that reminded me of the maze and blind alleys described in the novels of Kafka and Milan Kundera.

But aside from Kafka or Kundera, Prague for me also has a Philippine connection through Ferdinand Blumentritt (born in Prague in 1853), one of the ardent supporters of Jose Rizal, German translator of Noli Me Tangere and a prolific contributor to La Solidaridad, the Barcelona-published newspaper of the Filipino organization of the same name that propagandised for reform and assimilation of the Philippines as a Spanish province.

This chain of connections from Prague to Blumentritt to La Solidaridad has brought to mind another association, that of the Solidaridad bookstore owned by the multi-awarded novelist and essayist F. Sionil Jose.  This is not a haphazard link to me since I spent many blissful hours at the Solidaridad bookshop, one of the few if not the only respectable and true bookstore in Manila when I was a novice news reporter in the early 1980s. 

It was only at the Solidaridad bookshop that I convinced myself to part with my hard-earned pesos for a book that I could not find elsewhere in Manila. This was before Internet shopping and when mail orders for books printed overseas in those days would cost an arm and a leg. I even dreamed that if I win a million pesos in the lottery I would be content to run a Solidaridad-styled bookstore for the rest of my life, imaging the pleasures of reading while earning one’s income.

Back to Blumentritt whose legacy in Philippine history, already known to many, was his unrelenting defence of Philippine interests. Solidaridad or solidarity itself implies bonding and mutual trust, truly remarkable in the case of Blumentritt who had never set foot on Philippine soil, and yet has written expansively about the Philippines.

The last few weeks anyone who has read the major Philippine dailies or surf the social media will know the fallout from F. Sionil Jose’s two articles which confronted the reader with his description of the contemporary Filipino as being “shallow” or “mababaw.” Though one can take this unfortunate statement as a polemic perhaps aimed to prompt self-criticism, the intention has not only misfired but has been read as a whining, disparaging remark. 

Curiously, by spitting out this accusing tag it has squarely placed Mr. Jose in the same dubious corner that former First Lady Imelda Marcos found herself decades ago. Jose’s claim provides validation to the Warholian worldview reflected in Marcos’s assessment of the Filipino poor, and to quote: “Filipinos want beauty. I have to look beautiful so that the poor Filipinos will have a star to look at from their slums.” 

Marcos’s political strategy, however, was refuted years later in the words of assassinated former Sen. Benigno Aquino, whose “The Filipino is worth dying for…” inspired a peaceful revolution—six words that echoed beyond Aquino’s own life, and which exposed a barefaced lie foisted by the political elite.

Two views on the Filipino, one a disparaging and cynical dismissal, the other a hopeful and yet uncompromising opinion that overlooked the faults hounding a race, culture and a nation still grappling with the challenges and pitfalls of modern democracy. To be shallow suggests lack of empathy, already exposed as fiction by the lives of thousands of migrant Filipino workers toiling for their families abroad.

Clearly our perspectives are colored by our origins, class, education, status and belief systems—forces that elevate our person to that high horse from where we will utter an approving, or at the other end, a damning judgment. I wouldn’t want to be in Mr. Jose or Mrs. Marcos’ place, realizing, among other reasons, that being shallow is a trait that all men share or can fall into, regardless of culture, race, education or monthly income.   

More importantly, it is best to nurture Aquino’s optimism, precisely because it is this optimism that informs the spirit not to despair. From that lack of frustration we can move and continue plodding on to the next bend and uphill climb. 

Blumentritt was on the right track. He has never set foot on our land and yet he stubbornly nurtured the belief that we as a people will pull through regardless of our petty faults and spectacular failures. His, I believe, is a legacy that could yet last and find confirmation beyond our own lifetime.

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.

Tinikling, a popular Filipino folkoric dance that requires stamina and agility,

Last year I launched and completed a daily blog project called “365 GPS,” GPS being an acronym for “Great Pinoy Stuff.” Of course the word “great” is subjective but what I basically did is to make a modest, random list of experiences, places, objects and other sundry elements from Pinoy life.

My only criteria was not to list the famous or celebrities to stay clear off “hero-worship” or the cult of personalities. And most of what I listed I myself have experienced first-hand and was convinced of their place in Pinoy life, however tangential that place may seem to be. The list included the most mundane in Philippine life from the beloved jeepney, halo-halo to “sundot-kulangot,” the latter which endlessly intrigued the curiosity of some of my Dutch friends. 

The blog was a hit. I was amazed by the response, which came fast or at least two weeks after the launch in January 1, 2010. Both Filipinos and non-Filipinos posted their enthusiastic comments, observations, tips and even asked where to buy a souvenir or how to visit a mountain resort. By March the visitor’s hits and page views were averaging to 600 a day, a figure which surpassed another and older blog I still maintain.

I was particularly interested on the responses from Filipinos who were born outside the Philippines and grew up as expatriates, but with a heart ready to immerse in the old country culture of their parents. One young woman in the US was enthusiastic in her gratitude as she finally found some more additional clues as to why her mother would laboriously cooked  champorado for her breakfast. She didn’t know it was actually Spanish in origin. An Austrian military historian wrote back about an entry on the war waged in Leyte Gulf and thanked me for the evocative description, while an Indian herbalist inquired about our own pito-pito concoction.

What started for me as a whim to relive in words the pleasures of eating “halo-halo,” or see the sunrise in Bohol’s Chocolate Hills, found resonance in someone living in downtown Chicago or in the suburbs of Mumbai. My entry on tinikling elicited a heartfelt response from a former folkloric dancer now living in Germany. Her response, which I did not make public in the blog, was rife with poignancy and a yearning for home. I learned more about the pitfalls of migration in a few lines form her than from a well-researched socio-cultural treatise on the Filipino diaspora.

Screenshot of my blog 365 Great Pinoy Stuff, also on WordPress

The blog ended at exactly midnight of December 31, 2010, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I posted the last entry, after I realised I underestimated the work behind the daily updates. But I was proud to have done it on my own with very little delays, and doubly rewarded with the insights and honesty of complete strangers.

The blog also reminded me of the artifice that separates so-called “high” and “low” culture, an artifice often built on prejudice, privilege and power structures. I know nothing or very little about the blog readers who posted their comments, not even their educational background. Based on their use of language, the responses could have come from high school students, professionals, graduate students, potential tourists, artists – a wide and motley set of readers.

But what gathered our individual voices into a small digital space was our interest and enthusiasm for experiences and places to be found exclusively or genuinely experienced in a cluster of islands called the Philippines. In that digital space the agenda was not one’s titles, academic degrees, achievements or place on society but the simple pleasures provided by the mundane, the taken-for-granted and sometimes the misunderstood.

Not to forget, the most read entry in the blog’s overall statistics was—you’ve guessed it–  the halo-halo. What can be a more fitting item to reflect an eclectic culture?

Halo-halo, the hugely popular ice-based Pinoy dessert, is a yummy concoction of fruit, beans, candied preserves, cream and other delicious tidbits

LINK to 365 Great Pinoy Stuff:  http://365greatpinoystuff.wordpress.com/

Image from Financial Post

Marking my one-year stay at the Facebook cafe with seven handy tips for the optimal use of Facebook.  Read on!

1.  Never ‘unfriend’ someone in your list. Names that you grow to detest? Just let them dry like unwanted grapes hanging at the stem of your heart. The wind blows hard and they will drop. To the ground. Eventually.

2.  It’s bad form to post banal statements about your dental works and state of boredom. No one cares. You don’t rush to the nearest café  announcing the decay of your wisdom tooth, do you?

3.  Practice restraint. Much better–  show wisdom. You may think no one is reading. But in the digital world every pixel counts. And some posts are like mushrooms. They never die (unless deleted). They just return and haunt you, lingering like early morning breath.

4.  Since “sharing” is an active verb in Facebook, share what is meaningful, truly inspiring and genuinely funny. Spare your readers from the cliché, the pseudo-religious, and the outright creepy. Unless its Halloween and the creepiness is justified by the wisdom it contains.

5.  Remember Facebook is a social circuit, a dry-run for decency. It’s not a debating club, a corner in the ladies room or the confessional at St. Peter’s. If your thoughts and words fall in any of these categories it’s time to see your hairdresser. Or write a novel.

6.  Thoroughly read the privacy/security functions and tools. It would help to “target post” or tag only the names you’d think would have the slightest hint of interest in what you’re up to.

7.  Take a Facebook break once in a while. It pays to be missed even in your favorite café. Taking a day-off also means returning with a vengeance. If you’re always hanging around, waiting at tables with a lukewarm beer, chances are you’re reducing yourself to the status of a fixture.

 Only a few people can get away with the tag ‘café habitué.’ One has to earn that title either by exceptional brilliance and spectacular presence. If you have both, stay plug to your mobile broadband and tell the café waiter to serve that espresso. Pronto!

Giorgione's "The Tempest" (circa 1508) Photo: Wikipedia

In 2002 I visited Venice for the first time and although this city has a wealth of postcard pretty locations I looked forward to visit the Gallerie dell’Accademia known for its vast collection of some of Italy’s finest Renaissance paintings.

Resisting the allures of the graceful gondolas, I went straight to the Accademia and by chance stood in the long queue behind a kababayan, a Filipina working in Venice’s Mestre district. We had a spirited chat about our Pinoy quirks and eventually asked ourselves why we were spending almost an hour waiting for the Accademia doors to open. She has been living in Maestre for 10 years and has never been to the Accademia. She then asked me and I said I’d like to see a painting called “La Tempesta” (The Tempest) by the Renaissance painter Giorgione.

“Maganda ba yon, kuya? (Is it beautiful?),” she asked and I fumbled for a reply. I said I would rather see the painting for myself after all the things I read about it. The doors were opened and we bid goodbye.

The question on beauty and art is a valid one but over the years there are other questions foisted on art. But first, why waste a good three hours at the Accademia and why Giorgione’s more than 500-year-old painting? Obviously I didn’t go to Venice just to give credence to John Keat’s “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

This small oil painting (83 cm × 73 cm) on wood shows on the foreground two figures: a man who looks like a wealthy soldier or nobleman is painted on the left corner and across a meandering creek a woman nursing a baby sits near a tree in a garden. The background or half of the painting is dominated by a landscape of towers, a bridge, a portal and a broken pillar. Of importance is the glow of a threatening grey sky with a bolt of thunder, that gave the painting its title.

I wouldn’t go into a close reading of  The Tempest since it is precisely known for its elusive meaning and “mystery.” But I would note here that this painting is considered by art historians as the first landscape painting in Western art history. The sombre threatening landscape is equally matched by the mysterious figures.

Detail of "The Tempest"

Giorgione portrayed the woman with an exposed breast, her legs slightly open, clearly showing her pubic area. What more she stares directly into the viewer with an open look as if to declare “Here I am. Read me.” Or understand me. This work clearly throws a challenge.

Many have theories about The Tempest, but art historians and experts are clueless as to the possible story behind it. In Giorgione’s time, nudes were already portrayed as mythical goddesses so the nakedness in The Tempest is not new. Besides, the woman in The Tempest is not a goddess nor is she looking away despite her nakedness. She stares straight into the viewer’s eye.

Detail "The Tempest" Wikipedia photo

In Renaissance Italy this work would certainly have raised eyebrows for its risque elements, perhaps, in the same way that Mideo Cruz’s work has offended the conservatives in the Philippines. The question from our kababayan in Mestre was: is The Tempest beautiful? Yes, many would agree, including expert viewers. But The Tempest hangs in the Accademia not for its beauty alone. Despite Giorgione’s ability to paint the human body, there were other artists of his time who were as capable.

So why is The Tempest fascinating? Art’s beauty, for me, is its capacity to reflect both private and public worlds, which requires a fine balance that is a challenge to many artists. When I stood before Giorgione’s The Tempest for the first time it conveyed something of the world he lived in however elusive that story might be. Had Giorgione followed the Church’s dictum of decency and had remained indifferent to human concerns The Tempest would have lost its potent power. Fortunately the Italians of Giorgione’s time did not cast his painting to the stake, and that its owners embraced the work for what it is.

Another question poised on the arts, which we often encounter in the CCP-Kulo debate was: is this art “respectful?” In Giorgione’s The Tempest, the answers would widely deviate, with “No” claiming a pyrrhic victory since it depicted the female in a “disrespectful” manner. Ask the vandals that raided the CCP they would not hesitate to tar The Tempest and censor what Hollywood would call the “beaver shot.” I am being slightly casual here, but the woman’s pose in Giorgione’s painting could have been viewed by some as similar to Sharon Stone’s interrogation scene in Basic Instinct.

Another seductive opinion says that the best art thrives in a climate of repression. This is a fallacy and an untested romantic notion. Caravaggio’s output diminished when he was hounded by the police and lawsuits. There are other examples where the artistic spirit shrunk in the face of repression such as the case of writers Oscar Wilde and Paul Verlaine. Perhaps, repression does inspire, but certainly not to all artists with spirits less resistant to persecution.

While the Kulo debate continues it will also help to remember that art is not produced only as a luxury, but also as a human need for many artists who also own the right to thrive in an open and rational society.

We now live in a monetized art world, all the more that we need art that challenges our prejudices. But such art requires a perceptive audience either to examine its claims or celebrate its insights. As the more enlightened Rev. Charles Caleb Colton once wrote:

“There are three difficulties in authorship– to write anything worth the publishing – to find honest men to publish it – and to get sensible men to read it.”

The controversial installation art by Mideo Cruz, part of the CCP's Kulo exhibit last month. Photo courtesy of Mideo Cruz/ArtInfo

The ongoing furor over the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ (CCP) ‘Kulo’ art exhibit which is now being played out in congressional chambers of the Philippine Senate has exposed the culture of complacency that thrives in our midst.

Complacency not in the sense of comfort or satisfaction when things are on track and we are in stride and fully hitting our goals, but complacency in the sense of being lulled into unquestioning acceptance of dogmas, institutional truths and perceived realities created by power holders. We have here a case of bishops and artists, of doctrine versus creative thinking, of creed versus viewpoint.

Art is not a terrain for the complacent but rather a venue for creative expression. Art has no business to lull the mind or laud the establishment. At its best and most liberating form art does not glorify but deepens the experience, betraying prejudices and pricking the balloon of mindsets trapped in clichés and spoon-fed with credo.

Art breaks the glass. The church, by comparison, seeks to preserve the soothing aura of assurance, and justifies its position through prestige. That is why millions of Catholics are dismayed and betrayed in the wake of scandalous publicity detailing the Church’s involvement in child molestation cases, when one of the world’s biggest self-proclaimed bastions of spirituality can only grasp at the tailwinds of prestige.

Prestige does not occupy the minds of the true artist. Rather the true artist places his concerns on the authentic voice, the ephemeral experience and the unique— just a few of the conditions that fertilise his work and fire his imagination. Imagination is not for the weak, nor is feverish imagination for the complacent and prejudiced.

Creative imagination does not stop at the doors of the “sacred,” for it seeks to embrace and examine the whole gamut of human experience from the mundane, the revered to the profane. Imagination therefore is not juvenile navel-staring but is a challenge to active re-engagement, and those who cannot handle it can only lag behind and watch, with respect, from the sidelines.

More than the big words and big issues of freedom and democracy, beyond the claims of aesthetic beauty and charm, of patronage or the lack of it, of demons and the demonic, what we, as Filipinos, are dealing here are issues of culture. And there are no demons to fight or surrender to except our own.

But what culture can we be proud of if we, as a nation, stay contented with the scraps of blind faith advocated by institutions? Today when information is mostly pre-packaged, endlessly ‘spinned’ by modern media or digitalised for easy digestion, many are succumbing to the ease and mindless chatter of the breaking news, the sleek editorial and the naïveté of talking heads. Convenience, not critical thinking, permeates this culture of 24-hour TV.

In the clash of cultures what often gets sidelined is reason. And when we lose reason, we also lose the key to civilisation. We cannot let culture, individual or collective, be held hostage by suspicion or by those with vested interests trying to reinforce their prestige.

The biggest victim in this drama of Kulo or counter-Kulo is not presumptuous faith or prescribed decency, but the decency of an inquiring mind, that spirit that looks forward to what is possible even under the flames of prejudice.

'RELAPSE' by Mattijn Franssen, winner of the 2011 Vierkante Ei Art Prize

In January this year while riding the train for home I saw in ‘de Volkskrant,’ one of the Netherlands’ respected newspaper dailies, a call for amateur artists to join a nationwide art contest called Het Vierkante Ei (Dutch for ‘The Square Egg’).

Organised by the Volkskrant every two years I did not hesitate to join as I have a few pieces (ranging from clay sculptures, drawings to photo collages) I had been working on the last few months.

Facade of the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven

The decision to join was made in a split-second but little did I know that the following weeks would be a roller-coaster ride, not physically, but in terms of how I view so-called amateur art, or why we enjoy or create art in the first place particularly to those of us who are non-professionals.

Vierkante Ei exhibit at the Van Abbe Museum

‘Amateur art’ has a derogatory tone to it, and people react to the phrase in various manners, with some directing their patrician noses north-northeast, some stare with widening pupils as if the amateur artist has just confessed that he had nothing better else to do, while others have befuddled, confused faces with a tinge of wariness in their eyes like when one faces a familiar abyss.

Textile and embroidered work by Ms. P.J.M. Van der Steen

No wonder that the Dutch have coined a more politically-correct term or substitute for ‘amateur artists,’ which is “vrijetijdskunstenaars,” literally ‘free time artists.’ With that kinder phrase the conversation can proceed less awkwardly, oiled by a gentler coinage.

Back to the contest. Around 2,200 artists submitted to the Volkskrant by email photos and a brief description of their work. By mid-February January I received an email from the Volkskrant that I made it to the first round or long-list of 1,000 “selected” participants, a cut-off rate of around 50 percent.

By mid-March I submitted my work at the Central Utrecht Museum, the oldest city museum in the Netherlands. The Utrecht Museum is one of six art museums participating, with the others located in Leeuwarden, Middleburg, Schiedam, Eindhoven and Amsterdam. I survived the Utrecht round– participated by 200 artists in four rounds– with 10 others to proceed to the semi-finals. The works chosen ranged from paintings, photos, drawings to collages.

The museum rounds were actually more fun since the selection and jury reporting or evaluation (six jury members composed of art critics and professional artists) were made on the same day. Fortunately, this wasn’t my first art contest otherwise the careful examination of both jury and public may turn out to be too ‘grating’ to the nerves of jumpy and more sensitive participants. One has to developed, by instinct, elephant or rhinoceros skin to withstand this experience.

Making it to the last 60 was by itself a consolation prize to most of the participants since our works are on display at the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven from April 14 to 29. A free ‘plug’: to those who can make it to Eindhoven this is your last week to make that art pilgrimage.

Semi-finalist photo titled 'Father and Child' by Ms. E.M. Kreugel-Thijssen

I did not make it to the last six finalists who went through the added ‘torture’ of waiting for another week, and attending a live TV broadcast held last April 17 where the first-prize winner, Mattijn Franssen, was finally announced in an art programme called ‘Kunstof TV.’ Franssen’s Photoshopped collage of animals ‘descending’ in a tsunami-like flood is a carefully crafted work, impressive with its Baroque-like atmosphere and minute details. I am posting in this blog some photos of the finalists and semi-finalists.

Semi-finalist painting by Mr. G. J. Knoll

So why create art and why this biennial contest that pays attention to the amateur? In the art world there is a gap between the world of the professional and the amateur. In the Netherlands, a country which may lay a claim to having the most number of visual artists (both pro and amateurs) in Western Europe per square kilometer, there is a trend to close this gap and provide a venue where both groups can effectively interact.

Beside my clay sculpture at the Van Abbe Museum

In the words of the organizers, while amateur art is associated with authenticity and originality, and the professional artist or art for “quality and reflection,” this gap can be bridge with events like the Square Egg, an opportunity that opens up one community to the other. Incidentally, the Volkskrant called the event the ‘Square Egg’ as homage to the amateur artist as, essentially, being a maverick in his approach to art and art-making.

People don’t often ask why I create art. The questions often focus on the prize or what can be won or earned after a rigorous process. Perhaps it’s better that people don’t query; at least it would spare me from offering some circuitous explanation or putting a finger to a sore and sorry place.

Exhibit Vierkante Ei 2011 at the Van Abbe Museum

In my opinion, there are two distinct things that happen when one creates art. Art challenges or prompts our capacity to sublimate, an act meant to transform and re-charge; our minds have that surprising and nimble ability to soak into the creative process, perhaps best described by the feeling of having lost track of time when one is engaged in art-making.

The other is the sublime satisfaction of creating something or having assigned effective visual, verbal or audi0tory clues to an otherwise amorphous mass of ideas, associations and emotions. Not wanting to reduce this to simple aphorisms, perhaps it is still best to quote one of the most prolific artists of the modern era, Pablo Picasso, who once said, and here I quote: “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”

To those interested, below are the links to the Van Abbe Museum and the Vierkante Ei websites.

Enjoy art!

http://www.vierkanteei.nl/Home.aspx

http://www.vanabbemuseum.nl/en/?no_cache=1&cHash=6bca090a07

In Bruges, Belgium

Bruges (Brugge in Dutch) is only a few train stops from where I live in the Netherlands but it’s not often that I visit this city which just shows that those in close proximity to our lives and habits sometimes don’t enjoy the pleasure of our careful attention or scrutiny.

Medieaval houses near Bruges fish market

Time to change my lapses of indifference to Brugge, which I visited several years ago- a hurried whistle-stop that only took a little over 24 hours. This time I picked the tail-end of February which turned out to be one of the greyest and wettest in weeks.

Despite the rains and clouds, Brugge retains its mediaeval charms, and in fact the soggy, misty weather must have enhanced the ghostliness that one often associates or imagine with the 13th and 14th centuries of the Lage Landen (Low Lands or the Netherlands). Besides, Brugge’s real attractions for me have something to do with the Flemish Primitives, that period or painting school associated with the southern Netherlands (now Belgium), iconically represented by the painter Jan van Eyck with his masterful and hyper-realistic ‘The Madonna with Canon Joris van der Paele,’ painted in 1436.

Jan van Eyck's hyper-detailed 'The Madonna with Canon Joris van der Paele'

Setback Number 1: the Groeninge Museum which has this masterpiece on permanent display is close for renovations until June! I actually saw the painting a decade ago, but it is the kind of masterpiece that one needs to see again. And again. The Groeninge Museum’s door was inscrutable to the disappointed, shut to the outside world that was blanketed by wet, wintry winds. 

Staircase pointed gables of houses in Bruges

Back for a walk on Brugge’s cobble-stone streets, with its maze of small alleys, glimpses of Gothic-facades, staircase gables, brick stone house-fronts, and somnolent canals winding through the heart of a city which looks like an elegant ageing mistress in the rain, with her store offerings of quaint laces, detailed embroidery and handmade praline chocolates.

Belgium's famous export- yummy chocolates!

Intricate lace and embroidery are among Bruges traditional craft products

It is often said or assumed that one travels to find the exotic, the opposite of what we call home. Brugge is not too distant from the Dutch city where I live and yet there is something unfamiliar in the way the geometric tops of 500-year-old brick houses huddle in the dead of winter, or the tongues of light flickering from small bars and cafes curtained in fine and floral lace. In the dim light of the early winter sun, cosy may not be the most apt word especially when the visitor is escorted by the assertive, proprietary cold of Northern Europe.

But there is a glimmer of deadpan, guileless humour in this Belgian town. A neo-classical façade gilded or garlanded in intricate sandstone and worthy of a treasured art collection announces the unexpected: Frietmuseum. Translation: French Fries Museum! Or a sign that reads “Urinoir, 50m” with the visitor’s gaze running straight to a bronze trio of the Holy Family, complete with the suffering Christ on the cross. Belgian humour at its most absurd.

But why do we really travel? Why do I leave the comforts of home for a stroll on the rained out streets of a mediaeval Belgian town?

Frietmuseum (Potato Chips Museum) in Bruges. Note the neo-classical brickwork decoration

Undoubtedly, the answers are as manifold as my justifications for creating or insisting on the beautiful. To get out of the norm and the routine, exchange the familiar with the unfamiliar, and entertain the feeling of possibilities, or perhaps to articulate my partial understanding of what life must be about outside the reach of tedious, routine work.

Perhaps, the exotic for me lies on exactly what Brugge has to offer: lace-curtained bars, intricate mediaeval masonry, bucolic, winding canals and the melting goodness of pure, 100 percent handmade Belgian chocolates.

Signage to a place of comfort. Humourously absurd!

Bruges' elegant City Hall

Just when Filipinos across the globe are ecstatically rejoicing over another win of superstar boxer Manny Pacquiao, two of the Philippines most exciting contemporary artists quietly opened their joint show titled “Mano-Mano” at the Blanc Compound in Mandaluyong City. Pacquiao’s victory is high-profile, dramatic and expected, the very anti-thesis of the Blanc exhibit by artists Iggy Rodriguez and Mike Adrao at Blanc which is low-key but well-observed and surreally unexpected.

Boxing is a literal “mano-mano” (fistfight) and Filipinos seem to have developed a taste for  knuckle-hard confrontations. Undoubtedly Pacquiao embodies contemporary Filipino aspirations, the rise-up-to-the-challenge celebrity kind of status. His name will linger on, but like so many legendary boxing names the marquee of fame will inevitably dim to another.

Mekanismo 1, charcoal on paper, 48 X 48 inches Mike Adrao, Photo courtesy of Blanc Compound

Back to Blanc. There is no fist fight, even in the metaphorical sense, between Rodriguez and Adrao. But of all the visual arts, drawing perhaps is the most ‘manual,’ the most ‘direct’ creation issuing forth from the artist’s hands. The hand, a piece of charcoal on paper or the surface of a cave wall, and you have the beginnings of human artistic creation- the blueprint and kern of the creative idea.

For their joint show, Adrao and Rodriguez return to the human condition and explore existential states where the personal intersects with collective fate, and where power-holders make their stubborn claims in a world of degradation, opportunism and quasi-religious faith. In a carnavalesque tableau, Rodriguez power-seekers either wore monstrous masks or show bloated faces with the reins of control fully in their hands, but ignorant of their catastrophic and limited environments.

'Coming of Age,' Iggy Rodriguez, pen and ink on paper, Photo courtesy of Blanc Compound

Whilst Rodriguez tackles the larger social stage and the peripheries of power, Adrao examines both physical and spiritual cores. In his DeMakina series of ballpen drawings, the human body unravels, splinters and breaks into maggots and barbwire spirals, revealing interiors of cogs, wheels and ticking mechanisms. Slithering snakes and headless bodies in passive poses inhabit the spheres of Mekanismo 1 and 2, minutely precise in their depiction of a world imprisoned by existential traps and detours.

Much can be said about this current Blanc show. But one thing stands out: Rodriguez and Adrao are two artists in the current crop that are doing the most original and compelling work that bridges the private to larger social issues and ills that continue to plague Philippine life and society. Theirs is a social critique that delivers double-punches, a knock-out worthy of the ringside tickets bought by their audience.

I wouldn’t be surprised if these two artists(although they’re still in their 20s and 30s) inspire their younger colleagues as they have raised the bar in this genre of the visual arts that is often underrated by the more in-demand paintings, sculpture and so-called new media.  

Rodriguez has previously exhibited at Blanc exactly a year ago with KIMI-IMIK,  right on the heels of his CCP 13 Artists Award in 2009.  A graduate of  the UST College of Fine Arts he won two awards from the Art Association of the Philippines (AAP) for his pen-and-ink drawings. Adrao is a graduate of UP College of Fine Arts and finished residencies at NEAR Dangsang in Seoul, Korea in 2009 and Project Space Pilipinas in 2008.

Catch this show when you can. I will at November 30, just before the closing hour strikes and Blanc resumes with another year-end treat.

Venue: Blanc Compound Mandaluyong, 359 Shaw Boulevard Interior, Mandaluyong City, Metro Manila, Philippines; November 16 to 30, 2010.

Tree-lined Pere Lachaise Cemetery

This time though the fickle weather alternated between dark sombre clouds to sudden bursts of sunshine. The sun made a playful hide and seek that I constantly had to reset my camera’s settings to adapt to the weather’s playful mood.

Jim Morrisson's grave

What’s the big deal with Père-Lachaise? This could be one of the few cemeteries in the world that boast of (dead) celebrity names, the once great-and-has-beens and from almost all fields of human endeavour, ranging form literature, science, pop music, dance, theatre, etcetera.

A fan scribbles a note on Wilde's tomb

For those visiting Père-Lachaise with little time my golden tip goes to the graves of Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrisson. If you’re lucky, you can witness how fans pay their respects to Wilde’s literary genius. Last weekend Wilde’s grave attracted the most number of visitors and this time I saw some of his fans in action when a young woman in a wheelchair and her friend scribbled love notes on the side of Wilde’s tomb.

Oscar Wilde's tomb is pockmarked with lipstick kisses and love notes

Some would even knelt and kissed the marble and granite tomb. Proof of that are the dozen smacks of lipstick marks on the cold stone that would make Max Factor go green with envy.

The Columbarium with its graceful columns

Advice? Bring a lipstick shade of electric blue to stand out from the fawning crowd! Seriously, though, it is forbidden to write graffiti on the tomb and a warning is now attached to the tomb discouraging Wilde’s avid fans to restrain their overheated emotions.

Monument at Pere Lachaise

Another obvious tip is the more modest grave of rock star Jim Morrison. In contrast to Wilde’s lipstick-covered tomb, Jim’s grave is a showcase of baffling curio. Some samples: cigarette lighter with naked blonde girl sticker, a greasy armband, used Paris Metro tickets with Chinese characters, dried green leaves that looks like herbal tea, a framed pencil portrait of Morrison, plastic flowers, small amber-colored bottle with liquid inside (don’t ask me what it is).

I almost expect to step on a Norman Bates wig. All these paraphernalia must have special esoteric meanings to diehard Morrison fans. And Jim had one over Oscar. Perhaps to control hysteria or put a lid to suspicious activity, there are reports that the park’s administration randomly deploys uniformed guards to take turns guarding the tomb.

At Marcel Proust's family grave

It’s not easy to locate some of the celebrity graves, but thankfully the park provides a free route map and brochure where the graves of the celebrity dead are marked. Still one has to figure out the location, although on busy days following guided tours or other visitors would save time.

In my 2000 visit I missed the tombs of French dramatist Moliere and writers Collete and Gertrude Stein. This time I again failed to locate the tombs of Stein and her friend Alice Toklas. And 10 years ago I didn’t take some photos, but last weekend I couldn’t resist a souvenir shot on the grave of Marcel Proust. And at the columbarium where ashes are stored, we didn’t have time to locate the ashes of Maria Callas. The columbarium building itself is worth a visit with its graceful columns and the pleasant adjoining garden. 

If checking out cemeteries is not your favourite activity in Paris, the park is worth the visit if only for the peace and quiet. If, however, you’re not really inclined to dead celebrity hunting you can still gawk at the challenging, after-life architecture built for the famous dead.

19th Century tombs at Pere Lachaise