Asian Studies Review

September 2005, Vol. 29, pp. 287– 300

Indigenism, Painting and Identity:

Mixing Media under Philippine
Dictatorship

CHERUBIM A. QUIZON
Seton Hall University

Introduction
Filipinos themselves do not readily agree on what constitutes nationalism but, from time to
time, put up a united front. Surely, the modes by which “nation” is expressed are poly-
phonic and contentious within any country. In the Philippine case, nation and community
have been imagined and re-imagined any which way, and expressed with particular violence
under Ferdinand Marcos’s later rule. I suggest that the fission and fusion of thinking about
one’s nation can be understood as a form of well entrenched late twentieth-century scepti-
cism borne of the disappointments that come after the dismantling of dictatorship. Never-
theless, the deep mistrust of grand political and cultural narratives, whether homegrown or
coming from abroad, creates tension with a much older and more longstanding yearning
for an unconflicted “Filipino identity”.
In this paper, I attempt to explore these tensions by looking at the theme of national
identity in contemporary Philippine art. In particular, I try to locate a broad class of
postwar paintings widely looked upon as expressive of “Filipino-ness” in relation to a
group of more recent mixed-media art works thought of as focusing on indigenous or
“ethnic” themes (Benesa, 2002). These paintings and not-paintings are customarily
sorted by writers into mutually exclusive stylistic-ideological piles, implicitly following
the individual artist’s political or apolitical views, which were polarised by fourteen
years of authoritarian rule under Marcos. In bringing these paintings and not-paintings
into a more general consideration of late modern identity projects, I will revisit
assumptions about subject matter, materials and artistic practice. I would also like to
approach the impact of dictatorship on artistic practice not as the monolithic, totalitarian
brutality with which it has often been described. Instead I would like to view the
experience as a series of incomplete overlays, parts of lived experience characterised by


Corresponding Address: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Seton Hall University, 400 S Orange Ave,
South Orange, NJ 07079, USA. E-mail: quizonch@shu.edu

ISSN 1035-7823 print=ISSN 1467-8403 online=05=030287-14 # 2005 Asian Studies Association of Australia
DOI: 10.1080=10357820500270169
288 Cherubim A. Quizon

contradiction: terrifying violence interspersed with an irrational quotidian normalcy, con-

spicuous consumption juxtaposed with conspicuous deprivation, a fundamental loss of
faith in the written word in the face of shaky but persistent master narratives invoking
origin myths for a New Society.
The works I refer to as not-paintings do not primarily use canvas and conventional paint,
but are nevertheless made by artists – individuals who have been formally trained or
present themselves to be so, whose works are promoted within the fine arts domain, and
are ultimately exhibited and sold as such. Indeed, differences in style or the outward
appearances of paintings and not-paintings reflect the dissimilar artistic and political ideo-
logies of the artists themselves. It is a schism reinforced not only by disparities in age,
professional status and ease of access to an elite art market, but also by the more explicit
role of the gallery owners and the kinds of art, artist and clientele they seek to promote.
Although it might seem counter-intuitive, I suggest that a shared ideological project
ultimately joins them, one that is rooted in the idea of indigenism as a basis for nation.
I draw on George Kubler’s (1985) use of the term indigenismo to describe an ideological
and stylistic perspective in twentieth-century Latin American art; he underscores the
modern nature of this concept as a particular historical mindset and, less strictly, as an
artistic style. It signifies a contemporary attitude in modern Latin American art that con-
cerns itself with the “retention of pre-conquest styles”, as in the murals of Mexican painter
Diego Rivera. More importantly, it draws impetus from a twentieth-century expansion of
exact knowledge about antiquity in the Americas and seeks to restore Preconquest civilis-
ations to “symbolic authority” (Bakewell, 1995, p. 24; Kubler, 1985, pp. 75 – 76; Ramos,
1998, pp. 5 – 7). It reflects a desire in modern or modernised societies to be deeply moved
by an “unremembered past” (Cameron and Gatewood, 2003, pp. 55 –56).
Three defining aspects of indigenism interest me here: that it is a postcolonial twentieth-
century phenomenon; that it is fuelled by increased knowledge of a pre-colonial past
which, in the Latin American case, is archaeological in nature, and that its ultimate objec-
tive is to reorder the project of representation, in effect seeking to reify what is known or
believed to be known of that pre-colonial past.1
I use indigenism in Philippine art, then, to refer to a rhetorical position, a way of repre-
senting and thinking about an ancestral “past” for markedly contemporary ideological
concerns. I use this idea to frame a set of phenomena found in an important segment of
Philippine modernist art and related writings – the same segment that lately is being
grandfathered into a lineage of a Southeast Asian style.

Art-region Retrofit
The place of the Philippines in the art and culture discourse of Southeast Asia has been
ambiguous. On one extreme, it is viewed as an Asian country so Latinised by Spanish
colonial rule that its art shares more with Central and South America than with its
neighbours, and even then only as a poor derivative (Kelemen, 1969). Alternatively,
it is seen from within by its upper and middle classes as an irretrievably Americanised
country with a “damaged culture”, a view not necessarily shared by the majority
(Mangahas, 1988). In the 1970s, Marcos and others thought the solution could be
found in prehistory, and proceeded to shore up the argument by a vigorous pursuit
of quasi-government-led research in archaeology and anthropology. The Tasaday con-
troversy was an indirect product of this policy (see Headland, 1991). On the other hand,
 Indigenism, Painting and Identity in the Philippines 289

Marcos’s wife Imelda sought the answer in world-class art, and went about building
museums and cultural institutions endowed by income from newly constructed govern-
ment-owned hotels and casinos (Herrera, 1994). The overheated Manila art market of
the 1980s was a direct result of this policy. Under this regime, Philippine art
and culture derived legitimacy both from an ancient past and from participation in
a Western/cosmopolitan global present. Then, sometime in the 1990s, much of
Philippine visual art, whether falling under the rubric of traditional or contemporary,
became referred to as part of a Southeast Asian culture sweep or, more broadly, a
late-modern Asia-Pacific continuum (Torres, 1993).
The shift was undoubtedly influenced by changes in the region’s political and economic
outlook. The belief in an already shared regional identity and the kind of cordial exchanges
this condition requires did bring to light similarities in the postwar, post-independence
visual arts and diplomatic culture (Carroll, 1993; Haacke, 2002). But the project of retro-
fitting art into a preconceived notion of a coherent regional identity must be forged by poli-
tical will. Art, in all the forms embraced by various government cultural agencies in
ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), has been deployed as a key ingredient
in a regional goodwill soup, described by Poshyananda (1993, p. 5) as “slippery lubri-
cants” in energetic but unstable political and economic machineries. These regional
initiatives foster what it is hoped are the generic benefits of international cultural exchange
but, ironically, also tend to emphasise nationalism, albeit a slicker and strangely contra-
dictory one.
The suggestion of an art-region is helped along by the development of strategic collect-
ing policies, some more recent than others, in well-endowed museums of contemporary art
in Singapore, in Fukuoka, Japan, and in competing anchor cities in Australia (Japan
Foundation, 1995; Torres, 1997, pp. 14– 15; Turner, 1993). The partnering of broad
institutional initiatives for cultural exchange in the public and private sectors and a well
developed Southeast Asian regional network of private art collectors and dealers brings
the economic boom home to contemporary artists.
The teaming-up of art and commerce with a pan-regional ASEAN political correctness
has also encouraged a loose but persistent discourse of the “indigenous” and the “tra-
ditional”, referring to a putative agreement in theme, materials or form in contemporary
art. It is a puzzling assertion because it reports a style cluster, even an “ASEAN aesthetics”
when the remarkable diversity of the region’s contemporary art expressions is only begin-
ning to be understood (ASEAN, 1994; Javelosa, 1997; Zafaralla, 1997).
Instead of looking at a Southeast Asian-ness in Philippine contemporary art as an
emergent quality, it may be fruitful to regard its tenuous alliances with separate ideas
underlying national identity discourses. The specific notion of an “authentic” and “indi-
genous” cultural identity has been discussed in the Philippines and its art for much of the
twentieth century (Coseteng, 1972; Cruz, 1944; Zialcita, 1990). Some of these discourses
are now firmly retro-fitted within the newer rubric of a modern, regional Southeast Asian
art. It is a troubling development because it suggests a Southeast Asian-ness in Philippine
art that supposedly has always been there. Southeast Asian-ness in Philippine visual art is
a relatively recent and explicitly self-conscious idea that has been applied to art of dis-
parate subject matter, style and, more recently, the use of “indigenous” materials (Mayo,
1993). I suggest that this reflects a systemically revisionist perspective, what Roland
Barthes (1988, pp. 141 –49) calls “bourgeois ex-nomination”. It is an approach to
history and heritage that is often selective or manipulative, but at the same time belies
290 Cherubim A. Quizon

the possibility of any intervention. Thus, received knowledge may be seen as natural,
absolute and unchanging.
In the case of this segment of Philippine contemporary art, it makes inchoate connec-
tions between the perceived Southeast Asian-ness of a class of Philippine folk and indigen-
ous art forms, framed as such, but often approached from the perspective of a very urban-
and gallery-oriented artistic practice. It is not within the bounds of this paper to fully
explore the existence of shared aesthetic motifs and technical repertoires that Philippine
traditional art forms share with those of its insular Southeast Asian neighbours. It is
known to archaeologists and anthropologists of material culture, for instance, that okir
motifs in sculpture and architecture found in western Mindanao and Sulu, or ikat-patterned
textiles in the Cordillera or in Davao and Cotabato have analogues that may be found in
Borneo/Kalimantan or Sumatra. I have presented elsewhere on the inequalities that
Filipino modern visual artists impute in their relationship with their very own Filipino
ethnic “others” (Quizon, 1998, pp. 31, 39). What I am arguing here, however, is that the
cultural connections being made between these mixed-media paintings and a purportedly
self-evident “Southeast Asian-ness” is often disingenuous, not because of longstanding
artistic practices that are immersed in or actively embrace a regional Asian identity, but
because of a particular point in time when it was politically and economically compelling
to re-discover the Southeast Asian in the Filipino. I argue that this particular form of
ex-nomination lies at the heart of indigenism as a thoroughly modern mindset.

A Brief Look at Painting before and after the War

Scholarship characterising the relationship between national identity and the visual arts
points out the differences in approaches taken by writers and critics, often in relation to
a well-defined time period (George, 1997; Taylor, 1999). In the years of the Philippine
revolution against Spain, scholars saw the relationship between art and national identity
as a heroic allegory of the suffering motherland, as in Spoliarium, by Juan Luna, a
work painted for competition in Madrid that won the grand prize and much praise from
Jose Rizal, but was never seen in the Philippines and made no direct impact until later
in the twentieth century (Pilar, 1980). In the uproarious early decades of American colo-
nialism (1898 – 1946), writers saw this relationship played out in art works that sought
escape in rural idylls of estuarine landscapes and peasants in the paddies, in marked con-
trast to the rapidly growing cities in which most of these painters lived and worked (Cruz,
1944; Smith, 1958). The return of architect-painter Victorio Edades from a period of study
in the United States in the 1930s and his subsequent collaboration with Galo Ocampo
and Carlos Francisco is viewed as one of many important starting points for modernist
Philippine art, a legacy that embraced a Post Impressionist style coupled with a concern
for explicitly mediated content (Paras-Perez, 1995; Reyes, 1989).
Despite the oft-noted anti-idyllic temperament of the modernist painters, who included
in their work the rancour of urban life, both as scenes of the crumbling postwar slums of
Manila and in brutal vignettes of the Japanese Occupation, it was style, especially in the
use of abstraction and expressionist devices, more than subject matter, that explicitly
divided the moderns from their more conservative peers, especially in the relative prosper-
ity of the 1960s. Nevertheless, this opposition of “conservatives” and “moderns”, one that
peaked in the early 1950s, frames a basic premise of Philippine art history as written, when
the moderns were viewed as riding the wave of post-independence sensibility.
 Indigenism, Painting and Identity in the Philippines 291

Less than a decade after Philippine independence in 1946, the art that was deemed rele-
vant, subsequently shown in the newly emerged art galleries in Manila, and written about
by the literary set in the print media, was often of the modernist school. The conservatives
withdrew from a previously united artists’ association, and continued a brisk commerce in
already-popular easel paintings of accessible style and untroubled, often rustic subject
matter. These were sold mostly to the tourist and expatriate markets, and subsequently
characterised as commercialised art (Castaneda, 1964; Ledesma and Guerrero, 1974;
Torres, 1972).
The usual repertoire of rural landscapes and fruit sellers offered by the storefront
conservative art establishments was also joined by works that can be described as
“ethnic kitsch”. Scintillatingly clad exotic women, such as “Moslem” maidens from
Mindanao or their male counterparts, portraits or “heads” of anonymous indigenous
Igorot, Bagobo and Mangyan men depicted in what are believed to be their ethnic
attire, were also to be found around Mabini Street in the old tourist district of
Manila. These works were particularly saleable during the period immediately follow-
ing independence (Castaneda, 1964, p. 134). The “pot boiling” commercial Mabini
paintings made after the 1950s have only recently been seriously studied as a key
part of Philippine art history (Tan, 1993). It can be argued that the exoticist sub-
genre of Mabini painting that I frame as ethnic kitsch, and its uni-dimensional treat-
ment of cultural minority-as-type, should be seen as indicative of a more general
and still poorly informed fascination of the postwar urban population with what they
perceived to be the exotic and non-Christian members of their new nation (cf.
Ramos, 1996; Roces, 1993; Roces, 1994).2
The trope of ethnic kitsch is not confined to conservative art. Consider, for instance,
arch-modern and Edades collaborator Carlos Francisco, who has become most famous
for his large-scale historical paintings and murals. His commissioned murals, usually
of key historical events thoroughly incorporated into popular understandings of
Philippine national history, are remarkable for their visual and didactic impact. A fantas-
tic, sometimes cartoon-like quality pervades representations of archetypes, such as the
Spanish conquistador, or pre-Hispanic ancestors. Historic works such as those depicting
Magellan’s first encounter with the central Philippine Visayan chieftains were rendered
with an unconflicted and didactic quality that resonated with the stories learned by every
child in primary school. Today, this event is acknowledged as one of many longstanding
problems of representation in Philippine historiography. These events and their interpret-
ation, however, were not so problematic at the time Francisco painted them. The painter
was known to have a strong personal interest in pre-Spanish history and folklore, and
was concerned with the narrative content and emotional appeal of his works (Benesa,
1969, p. 10).
I suggest that these elements of exoticist and folkloric Filipiniana shared by the
ostensibly polarised modernist and conservative camps come from the same postwar,
post-independence interest in an authentic national culture, an idea that seized the
cultural and political imagination of the emergent elite. This may account for why
these pictures are soberly and compellingly regarded as bearers of a Filipino cultural
identity (Ledesma and Guerrero, 1974); they tap into the larger idea of making a
brand new nation-state with a pre-colonial pedigree. This mythologising imperative
is an important part of the indigenist discourse, whether concerning indios in
the Mexican revolution, kilts and Scottish highlanders, or, in the Philippine case,
292 Cherubim A. Quizon

noble Malays in an unconflicted pre-conquest past – images that are worked over,
sometimes soberly, sometimes wryly, by a younger generation of artists (Boudreau,
1996; Trevor-Roper, 1983).

“New Society” Style and Historicism

In 1972, Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines. Peace and order in the
countryside were tenuous at best and every large city boasted two or more private armies.
By the time Marcos’s rule ended in 1986, violence had become so normative that family-
oriented establishments such as restaurants posted signs asking customers to check their
guns at the door. Meanwhile, the Philippine contemporary art scene of the 1970s remained
vibrant, having weathered World War II in the 1940s and the proxy Cold War of the 1950s
and 1960s, and was awash in money from the hotel-building boom sponsored by the gov-
ernment to push the look, if not the feel, of rampant economic development. Active state
patronage of the arts personified by Marcos’s high-profile wife, Imelda, and the inaugura-
tion of her flagship project in the late 1960s, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, had set
the tone of the Marcos years for the contemporary art scene. Art critic and historian Alice
Guillermo describes the market boom as producing “lucrative partnerships between
interior designer and artist . . . [these were] heady days for the art market with bonanzas
for painters and a vigorous trade in old masters” (1993, p. 75).
Ironically, the dizzyingly heroic patriotism put forth as part of the Marcos-era ideology
would be expressed in the same fantastic pictorial language that had been used in the past
for mythic romantic themes. The art that adorned the Marcoses’ private living spaces is
now known to have featured paintings of the couple done in the mythological style pio-
neered by Francisco. A well-known example depicted the Marcoses as “Malakas” and
“Maganda”, Strength and Beauty, startling portraits of the couple presented as the first
man and first woman to emerge from the mother of all bamboo nodes (cf. Rafael, 2000,
p. 123). One way to understand the importance of myth, in all its forms, to Marcos’s
political philosophy may be found in Tadhana, a multi-volume work on Philippine pre-
history, ethnography, nation and destiny, ostensibly written by Marcos, and published
in portions in the late 1970s (Marcos, 1976 –80).
Marcos’s work, bristling with cross references, obscures the existence of surrogate
authors for texts that range from late Quaternary, post-Pleistocene archaeology to pre-
viously unpublished creation myths collected from members of a highland ethnolinguistic
group in Western Mindanao. In the preface to the second volume, Marcos links his dicta-
torship, or what he calls “constitutional authoritarianism”, to an indigenist program writ
large: “The New Society constructed at this time serves to strengthen the [pre-Spanish]
baranganic culture and retrieve its cultural elements which, at bottom, are composed of
ethno-linguistic cultural communities” (Marcos, 1976 –80, p. vii). Marcos wilfully con-
flated pre-colonial ancestors with present-day cultural minority groups, a common and
confusing rhetoric still heard today. He also suggests that his authoritarian regime was ulti-
mately a way to find the lost Filipino self and society, in a sense, locating the dictator as
national shaman. Thus, by the time Imelda inaugurated the Philippine Heart Center for
Asia as a Valentine’s Day present to the president in the early 1980s, it no longer surprised
many observers to see the First Lady’s portrait in the lobby’s mural, where she was
featured centrally as an allegory of Woman, rendered in warm tropical hues, embodying
maternal compassion, healing and solace. The mural by Vicente Manansala was executed
 Indigenism, Painting and Identity in the Philippines 293

in the modernist monumental-allegorical style that had by then become de rigueur in every
landmark government building. As a visual idiom, a popular modernist painting style had
been effectively coopted by the state by the time that government fell in 1986.

Not-paintings
From the late 1970s through much of the 1980s, an influential class of artworks, often
referred to as “mixed-media” or “experimental” works, started to have a relatively
stable presence in key exhibition spaces in Metro Manila. These works, some site-specific
installations, some mixed-media paintings or assemblages, made use of local or vernacular
materials and often defied prior stylistic and thematic categories commonly used by critics
and art historians. Materials and techniques used are often more syncretic than the word
“indigenous” would suggest; more importantly, the successful incorporation of the
found object occurs in ways that cannot be easily regarded as Duchampian or post-
Dada. The works themselves might suggest that they belong to a global family of postmo-
dern works that refuse to narrate or provide a referent (Foster, 1996). However, there is no
self-referential closure or exhaustion of meaning in art. These works are instead loaded
with stories, bursting at the seams with “referentiality”, and the narratives directly or
indirectly point back to the questions of self and roots, identity, community and coherence.
Perhaps it is this quality that led an influential art critic, Leonidas Benesa, writing on the
resurgence of historical and precolonial themes in 1970s – 1980s printmaking, to invoke
the concept of “racial memory”, a startling contention with which many important
artists working within indigenist parameters seem to agree (Benesa, 1982, p. 15).
A new generation of visual artists coming of age in the late 1970s turned away from
well-established literary-thematic approaches as well as the didactic-narrative painting
style in exploring the “Filipino” in Philippine art. Instead, there emerged among them a
new historicism, a grounding of knowledge in information obtained from sources as
diverse as archaeological site reports, conversations with antiquarians, scientists and
cult followers, extensive personal travels, prosaic reports by government agencies and,
of course, many important public and private libraries and museums replete with
images, texts and original artworks. This historicism was initially most evident among
printmakers whose works were invaded by images as visual “quotes” from the few
well-provenanced manuscripts dating from the early part of Spanish conquest. There
was a subtle shift from a preoccupation with prehistory to one with history, from a
search for a pristine purity to an interest in the syncretism resulting from historical pro-
cesses. Instead of pursuing psychoanalytic allusions to racial memory, it can be reasonably
argued that the vintage flavours pervading artists’ works were a result of active self-
education as well as an inquiring and transformative aesthetic attitude. The influential
works of painter-printmakers such as Manuel Rodriguez, Ofelia Gelvezon-Tequi,
Imelda Cajipe-Endaya, Ben Cabrera and Brenda Fajardo, among others, opened up
textually rich horizons of meaning, vast new possibilities for rethinking history not as
received wisdom but as a politicised project that someone, somewhere, had written
(Pilar and Cajipe-Endaya, 1993).3
By the beginning of the 1980s, important mixed-media paintings and assemblages were
being produced. Painting with paint was coming to an end for those who had begun to
doubt its semantic power. Thus, where the historicist printmakers would “quote” an
image, the mixed-media painters would carve, glue and screw actual objects onto the
294 Cherubim A. Quizon

paintings, the frame, or the wall itself – using many, many objects, and other meaningful
“stuff”. The semantic field of the painting surface literally spilled over and became a mini
theatre of little things, both well known and cryptic, that may present or deliberately
obscure narratives, word play or scathing satire. This development, the use of unconven-
tional art materials coupled with a subtle craft ethic, has often been subsumed under
another discourse, such as style derived from a geopolitically significant somewhere
else, or a broad political cause.
The economic reasons for using vernacular materials, as well as the way of thinking that
this strategy supports, need to be foregrounded. The prohibitive costs of using imported art
materials during the oil crises, and the staggering devaluations of the Philippine peso
under the dictatorship, limited the ability of young, lesser-known painters to paint with
paint. Moreover, they were effectively shut out from, or at least not yet allowed to
become a part of, an overheated art market devoted to the output of established artists.
It was a serious problem that needed radical solutions.

“Who can afford Grumbacher?”

First to go was canvas, replaced by primed plywood panels used for house interiors. Next
went conventional paint; one of the most popular alternatives was to remove excess
solvent and rescue pigment from household enamel, latex and acrylic. Sculptors toyed
with resin and quarry dust used by building contractors to make faux marble. Bamboo,
animal skin, raffia, abaca, reeds, sawdust and glue compounds, burlap, fibreglass,
epoxy, recycled wood, anything that was plentiful, affordable and signalled many ideas
and possibilities, was considered. Similar experiments were done with paper pulp and
vegetable fibre both by artists and small-scale entrepreneurs, especially in regions such
as Baguio City, many parts of the Visayas, and Davao. Indeed, fascinating effects, textures
and techniques were developed, but the experiments were, at the outset, propelled not only
by a search for nature idioms and symbolic roots, or by a need for a more promising
alternative to the formulaic modern high art filling the galleries; of equal importance,
artists were searching for something ephemeral and cheap.
In a small but well-lit second floor apartment just off the main highway, in a bustling
working-class district of Kalookan City in metropolitan Manila, Bayani Leon showed
me how he made his paintings of painted plywood. With intricate cutout work using a
jigsaw, he constructed his layered pictures using simple carpentry techniques. At the
time, I was a young instructor at the University of the Philippines, moonlighting as an
art writer for a small magazine. I had just viewed Leon’s first one-man show at the down-
town Manila gallery that I will call Magdiwang. The gallery’s curator arranged this studio
visit. Leon, which is not his real name, was in his twenties, of quiet demeanour and very
much a believer in the well-made object. He used ordinary materials for his works:
plywood, wood glue, nails and screws, floor sealants and concentrated house paint. He
explained that it was very liberating to be able to use materials that were cheap and
readily available, but also framed this choice as a conscious rejection of a certain kabur-
gisan, or bourgeois quality, in oil and watercolour painting. Leon studied fine arts at the
Philippine Women’s University, and he believed that he benefited from that school’s
rather peripheral position in the art scene, especially in the relative absence of hype
from its faculty.
 Indigenism, Painting and Identity in the Philippines 295

His good friend and former classmate, whom I will refer to as Nap, explained their
position in a more argumentative manner: “Now really, who can afford Grumbacher?”
Nap and I briefly became colleagues at the University of the Philippines around the
time that I met Leon. Nap was moonlighting as a humanities instructor to support his
art. Nap is a sculptor, and at the time of our conversation he was working on a series of
small, identical three-dimensional works using fibreglass resin and faux marble, works
that made explicit their repetitive, anti-original quality. Despite his claims to a very pro-
letarian, anti-art ethic, his works tapped into the idea of art-as-closure, art that had no refer-
ent except itself, a movement that was supported and promoted by American critics like
Rosalind Krauss in the 1980s. The principal difference is that when Nap and his peers
made statements against the “originality” or the class cachet of mainstream fine art,
they did not declare the death of art per se. Instead, the art of Leon, Nap and many
others is bursting with referentiality, full of little images, historical or political narratives,
and often dripping with sarcastic wit.
Like Leon, Nap went on to exhibit at Magdiwang Gallery, an exhibition space that made
a name for itself as an outlet for social realist art. In the mid 1980s, it started a series of
one-person exhibits of mixed-media artists, many of whom, like Leon and Nap, were exhi-
biting on their own for the first time. Social realist art looks very different from that using
mixed media. For one thing, social realists painted large works in oil or acrylic with very
naturalistic, although decidedly emotional, representations of the working poor, migrant
workers, sharecroppers and related themes (Guillermo, 1987). The social realists, then,
made paintings; the mixed-media artists shown in the same gallery made not-paintings.
The curator of Magdiwang, whom I will call Ben, insisted that the gallery space should
be as un-intimidating and un-elitist as possible. Ben passionately explained this position to
any and all visitors as he congenially offered a cup of coffee in the little attic office above
the storefront gallery space. Ben did not own Magdiwang, which was a rare arrangement in
Metro Manila. Oftentimes, the gallery owner is also the curator, but the owner, whom I
will call Dory, recognised Ben’s value in bringing in artists, buyers, students, scholars
and the curious on a regular basis. When asked why he supported mixed-media art,
which seemed counter-intuitive to what the general public expected to see in an art
gallery, Ben pointed to the commitment of new artists to a new way of making
meaning. Always enthusiastic and quite didactic, Ben thought that the new materials
carried a fresh vision and, even more importantly, were executed so beautifully as to be
undeniably art, but in media that had no burden of pedigree.
Magdiwang Gallery continued as a powerhouse outlet of mixed-media art in the late
1980s and 1990s. When the Marcos regime fell in 1986, Ben, and many others in the
arts who had disagreed with the dictatorship, found themselves in very influential positions
as jurors or principal consultants for landmark arts competitions that had until then been
the domain of large arts institutions strongly associated with Imelda Marcos and her
appointees. Understandably, they supported new artists, both painters and not-painters,
whose works often presented challenging subject matter. It was a time of optimism,
post-EDSA, post-Marcos, and around the same time a significant number of ASEAN-
sponsored international conferences, exhibits and publications made the rounds of South-
east Asian capitals. It was in the context of these regional conferences and subsequent
publications that mixed-media not-paintings ceased to be called experimental
and slowly came to be called by other names: ecological, ethnic, Southeast Asian, or
“belonging to the Pacific Rim”.
296 Cherubim A. Quizon

Coping with Unevenness

A number of key points have to be made concerning government art patronage under the
Marcos dictatorship and the kind of controlled havoc it unleashed on artists and private
galleries within an artificially overheated market. The first is well known: the aggressive
building of landmark edifices with newly created high-profile cultural institutions heavily
subsidised by tax breaks and income from quasi-government corporations, the Cultural
Center of the Philippines being an early example. A second point is less apparent to art
critics, historians and commentators who generally over-represent the impact of such
heavy-handed Marcos era arts programming on artistic production, but is very clear to
artists themselves: that the largesse of this sleekly packaged patronage was unevenly
and erratically distributed. Consider Jose Tence Ruiz’s (1999, p. 14) discussion of this
dilemma both for highly politicised artists of the social realist school to which he
belongs, and for the relatively apolitical conceptualist/avant-garde, regarded as its polar
opposite:

[There was] an unevenness in the application of institutional backing . . . particularly

Imelda Marcos’s visions of a miraculous . . . parity with . . . the then-industrialised
centres of power . . . Recalling that both [apolitical] conceptualists and [activist]
social realists had been cultivated in peripheral spaces . . . one would unilaterally
be privileged to a venue of cathedral proportions . . . like the Cultural Center of
the Philippines [but instead] would result in a loss of sympathy . . . The two
camps, and sympathizers hovering in the interstices, would now be ping-ponging
charges of propagandism and leftist manipulation versus state co-optation and
opportunism at each other.

The reference to “camps” is worth noting because a feature not confined to the period of
dictatorship but which nevertheless shaped how artists worked, built support relationships,
and nurtured style groups or movements was the role of the gallery system itself
(cf. Ledesma, 1987). Art historical discussions of ideologies or styles in the postwar
decades often mention the substantial role of art galleries and the temperament of their
proprietors. By the 1980s and early 1990s, the art market had matured to such an extent
that different galleries had different kinds of audiences, sorted out by the art style they pro-
moted, the spending power of their clientele, the location of the venue itself, the school or
alma mater of the artists, both established and new, that the gallery tended to exhibit, and,
of course, the unique personality of the gallery owner or curator (AIA, 1984). Magdiwang
Gallery in the Ermita district of Manila, discussed above, was a well-known purveyor and
supporter of established social realist oil painting, as well as of the mixed-media/exper-
imental works of newcomers to the art scene. In contrast, another gallery in the Makati
business district was a well-known supporter of pure abstraction in conventional painting
media. In both cases, the proprietor or curator had a presence that went above and beyond
the role of selecting and selling art.
These galleries also served as informal venues for artists, their friends, art writers and
even patrons to congregate. Even if a gallery is a well-known bastion of some particular
school or style, artists can be counted on to show up at other artists’ shows, regardless of
style and ideological lines. The movement of artists across even explicitly feuding cohorts
is extensive and quite fluid.4 Because of this, I would suggest that the idea of a camp or
 Indigenism, Painting and Identity in the Philippines 297

clique determined by style or artistic ideology, such as “moderns” and “conservatives” in

the past, or social realists and conceptualists, among others, can be better construed as
forms of voluntary groupings that may be linked to the Tagalog concept of barkada, or
groupings of friends brought together by common interests or backgrounds (Zorc and
San Miguel, 1991). I do not wish to imply that the substance of style and artistic politics
can be so easily sidestepped by such a lighthearted concept as that of a voluntary group.
What I am suggesting instead is that the notion of barkada among artists may be better
understood as a type of kindred or hearth-group, a flexible economic and social resource
pool that for artists and their cohorts more or less revolves around the gallery as safe venue
or gathering place (see also Carsten, 1995).

Conclusion
Consider then Leon’s ponderous garment of mud called Taong Lupa (1994), literally
“human being of the earth”, suspended on a wooden hanger and peppered with metal
medallions, folk Christian amulets against evil, misfortune, death and disease.5 Not a
painting, nor a freestanding sculpture, nor an installation, it is a garment that cannot be
worn and was built from a T-shirt layer by layer with sawdust and glue. The work is
about widely practised Filipino folk beliefs and the sources of magic that must be
tapped to restore balance and order; it is a subject that has received a great deal of attention
in academe and, oddly enough, the mass media, as part of a hard-selling state-sponsored
tourism industry. At the same time, this work is also about the body, its decay or its coher-
ence, a garment swinging ambivalently between the image of protective armour and burial
shroud.
I end this paper by quoting Leon, who wrote about the sources of his work while
participating in the Third Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia in 1993:

Audiences in Manila tend to call [my] work sculptural installation or simply instal-
lation. I prefer that the work be called Tao-Tau, a term which puts it within the
context of Philippine tradition. Tao-Tau is the secondary vessel the dead is believed
to occupy to make himself available to his kin when they need to consult him for
solutions to their problems . . . The Tao-Taus I work on are made out of a sawdust
and glue mixture. Clay is the ideal material, being a primeval medium, but it is
too heavy and expensive. Thus the choice of sawdust and glue . . . It allows my stu-
dents to work in large scale without spending as much as they would on traditional
art materials . . . Sawdust and glue was used by old Filipino architects to seal gaps in
woodwork; by folk artists for making dolls during the war years; and in fairly recent
times . . . I think that my decision to work with sawdust and glue has been brought on
by, as a writer puts it, “collective memory”.

While dealers and appraisers were indexing the staples of the trade, Filipino modern and
old master paintings by the hundreds or thousands of pesos per square inch, a younger gen-
eration of not-painters had raided the hardware supply store, devising ways to afford the
luxury of thinking in as large or as small a format as they pleased, with picture-object
works that brimmed with narrative, little stories that carried important statements about
Filipino-ness and connected-ness, but did so with many little pieces of verifiable truth.
298 Cherubim A. Quizon

Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Imelda Cajipe-Endaya, Bernardita Churchill, Maria Mangahas and Lynne
Milgram for providing feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. This paper was presented at
the 15th Berkeley Southeast Asian Studies Conference (1998) as well as the Association
for Asian Studies annual meeting (2002).

Notes
1. The term is distinguished from indianismo, which deals with preconquest culture and life, and from mes-
tizaje, which looks at the syncretism of colonial experience.
2. From the 1930s to the decade immediately following World War II, a number of now-controversial
quasi-historical works, at the time believed to be factual accounts, came to prominence. See Scott’s
(1984) classic study of the Maragtas forgery and Ramos’ (1996) discussion of modern myth-making
in English-language fiction, especially the usefulness of the racial or ethnic “other” as a literary device.
3. Similar shifts in the social sciences and humanities could be observed in theses and dissertations with an
explicitly Filipinist stance, such as historians advocating pantayong pananaw [perspectives for “us”]; the
emergence of a “Sikolohiyang Pilipino” or Filipino Psychology movement; and the expansion of anthro-
pological studies on the millenarian cults and indigenist religions found in many parts of the country. The
use of oral and written Filipino for scholarly discourse is also paramount, reflecting a strategic explora-
tion of an inner discourse and mode of existence or “loob”.
4. Discussions among artists revolve around common grievances, such as the high commissions exacted by
galleries (30 to 35 per cent in the mid 1990s), the practice of making the artist pay for the cost of framing
and mounting but to the curator’s specifications, and the increasing reluctance of gallery owners to cover
catering costs at opening receptions and, in some cases, even the cost of posters, invitations and publicity.
5. My conversation with Leon in his studio in the context of an interview for an article is a unique case.
After I wrote about his work, I did not regularly review the works of any individual artist for publication.
Since I taught humanities at the university, however, the artists I interacted with did value the fact that I
could send my students to view their exhibitions and write about their works. Despite the fact that there
were no sales to be expected from an undergraduate audience, artists and curators alike welcomed all
warm bodies in the gallery space. It was exceedingly difficult to get people to go gallery-hopping,
despite the fine hospitality of those such as Ben. I would meet artists and discuss works while
bumping into them as they were installing or taking down exhibits in private galleries, publicly acces-
sible institutional spaces, or the various converted exhibition spaces in universities, cafes and, more
recently, in the midst of boutique shopping at the cavernous SM Mega Mall. Many artists have
become colleagues and friends, perhaps because academics and visual artists in Manila find themselves
in similar economic niches for finding supplemental income. Hence, my observations were never in the
explicit context of fieldwork, but were part of many conversations, discussions while hanging out in
artists’ homes or converted studio spaces, organised from old notes and from written exchanges.

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