Imperfect Story

7 September 2014
Kinutil, CDN

by Raymund L. Fenandez

for Kinutil CDN, published September 7, 2014

Two men are talking by a sidewalk. One puts thumb and index finger to his nostrils grasping an indeterminate number of nose hair. He gives it a vigorous and deliberate pull. The outcome of this act is painful. He winces, a small tear forming from his right eye. His companion laughs. Then both look closer counting the number of hair the fingers hold. Not for an instance do they break their collective mirth. They talk only after they regain their composure. There was a lesson to be learned here. One hair pulled from the nose will hardly be painful. Two is only slightly so. Three is probably near the threshold of impunity. But six?

The most pragmatic among us would have this for an analogy of why we should study history. Something about not repeating it. Or lessons of value, such as that you should rather use a pair of scissors to tame the length of nose hair. But somehow this rationale seems insufficient.

The better reason is really the fact of history being interesting. Indeed, being such a wonderful story to read through, to picture, to imagine, and to countenance. Here, the stuff from which some of the best tales may be drawn and told. And when this concerns the history of ourselves, then it is all the more all these. For this is a story we truly own. And we may tell it every which way we like.

It is true that Cebuano art history contains many blank spaces, many missing parts that must be filled up in the future. But we know where these blank spaces are. We can tell what and where they are because it is possible for us now to form the big picture of it. And if we know this big picture then it is possible for us to make permutations for what the blank spaces will most likely contain.

We know there are remaining objects of Philippine expressive culture from the pre-16th century. Some of these objects are of stone, bamboo, wood, fabric, terra-cotta and metal, including gold. We know we have to do away with the concept "art" to fully appreciate these artifacts. The term "expressive culture" is much more useful. There would be a whole transition of these objects of "expressive culture" that we can account for at a future time. The problem entails only to identify them with classifications and dates and notes of provenance. It would be a difficult task but not at all impossible. These artifacts would only lead us eventually to the objects which are easily accessible to us now.

We can make an educated conjecture of what these objects might be. We know how the period of colonization came hand in hand with Christianization. We know how members of the Katipunan subverted the tenets of the religion to serve their revolution at the end of the 1800s. We still have examples of the magical vestments Pantaleon "Leon Kilat" Villegas used to armor his troops against the superior arms of the Spanish. We know the story of how the revolution played out.

And yet, by the beginning of the 1900s Catholicism will still be the dominant force in the Philippine cultural life. The ceiling paintings of Raymundo "Rey" Francia, Canuto Avila and others tell us that even in the 1920s the Catholic church would still be the main patron for the production of Western-derived art in these islands. Only after the 1920s would secular art become more popular.

This period would be marked by the rise of a more affluent middle class. These would sponsor the production of other art. Photography would slowly become more popular as technology that could record and represent the story of a rising middle class. Photographs would also become a means for producing painted portraits such as would continue to be done by local artists after World War II. Of these, the most prominent in the post-war years was Martino Abellana. His style of modernist naturalism would become dominant for artists following after him, this style lasting even to this day.

Thus, we can make the educated conclusion that the art of the late Martino Abellana and his contemporaries rode on the crest of the rise of Modernism in Cebu. Generations after them would bring this modernism up to the present day when can be seen the first glimmers of a post-colonial manner of thinking and art production.

This is the story of our art. And it is of course an incomplete story unless we filled in its blank spaces with more names of artists and the pictures of their works. Every artist's name is a story in itself. So too, each of his or her works. Taken together, these would form for us the structure of a plot that would tell for us the story of where we have been and who we now truly are. It would be a lovely story even in its imperfection.
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