Conversations with Manny Garibay

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By John Anthony S. Estolloso

I first encountered Sir Manny’s name back in 2017, when DepEd welcomed the first batch of Grade 12 students and I was assigned to teach Contemporary Philippine Arts. The course was new, the curriculum a nebulous idea and ideal, and truly yours plucked from teaching junior high literary classics. So I set out on a digital quest for visual aids that would best represent the concepts of the course. I typed ‘Contemporary Filipino Art’ in the search bar and among the first results were the artworks of Emmanuel Garibay.

What further ingrained his name to memory was one art critique written by a former student. For her artwork, she chose one of Sir Manny’s paintings. It was titled ‘Kaganapan’, a mélange of figures in a crowded jeepney, one of which is standing in the midst of them all with arms outstretched, akin to Christ crucified. She noted the obvious juxtaposition of the sacred and the secular in the canvas: the ordinariness of the Filipinos’ daily traverse elevated to a religious ‘experience’ without romanticizing the sordidness of it all.

I finally got to meet Sir Manny in person at the culminating exhibit of Linangan Art Residency’s Iloilo iteration (a first for the program) last month at ILOMOCA. Truly yours attended the vernissage, never expecting to converse with him. Local artist Orland Espinosa introduced me to him and that started a rolling conversation about the Sacred in and as Art. Upon learning that I teach art, Sir Manny gave me a copy of his recently released book, a compendium of interviews and lectures exploring the relationships between art, belief and religion, ideology, and the movements of history.

Last Tuesday, he was back here in Iloilo City to continue that conversation. Arranged by Iloilo Art Life and hosted by Thrive Art Gallery, that evening’s symposium delved further into the historical and religious interstices and tensions which produced the artistic canon.

Admittedly, we are taught about history and art as separately compartmentalized subjects in our basic education (or even in college). Add religion and spirituality to that. Our syllabi for history resemble a political narrative of a certain state, relegating the painters, the musicians, the writers, the storytellers of the national story to the side, let alone, a different course altogether.

Sir Manny offers a different perspective. There are no demarcations between the aesthetic and the spiritual: Belief – religion, spirituality, politics, ideology, even economics – is projected on the representational aspect where archetype and metaphor become visible manifestations of the abstract and the immaterial. Hence, Art becomes both commentary and (dare I add?) critique of the contemporary spirit.

As such, it reconfigures our conventional understandings about art. The Parthenon and other familiar edifices of history are highlighted as both religious and aesthetic artifacts, with cultural traditions and mores resonant in styles and techniques. Ideology and spirituality are melded in visual hagiography: how Christ is depicted through history mirrors the politics of the times. The movements of art are understood as movements of the soul and thus, an attempt to visualize belief in the spiritual, whether as renascent depiction, classical projection, romantic intensity, or modernist reconstruction.

In this understanding of the aesthetic, Sir Manny identifies three historical phases: the pre-modern with its theological tendencies, the modern with its ideological nuances, and the post-modern with its idolatrous temerity. Idolatrous, you ask? Sir Manny was blunt in pointing out the egocentricity of the instant and the popular, matters that the contemporary artist must navigate through. In an artworld operating in the interstices and tensions of economics, politics, and religion, appreciation becomes adoration, not only of the aesthetic but also of personalities.

So where does this situate the Filipino art scene, especially from a lens which views Western sensibilities through religiosity, colonialism, imperialism, and the pervasive penchant for things ‘stateside’?

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Writing this, I had to reread my student’s critique. Looking intently at Sir Manny’s Kaganapan, one senses the ordinariness of the narrative: I, too, ride a jeepney to work every day. Yet, there is also the persistence of the religious in it – in the crowded, sweating bodies, and amidst the imagined smells and sounds is something humanely spiritual. The outstretched arms of the central figure consecrates the canvas. The act of creating art becomes a communion between artist and the Divine.

(The writer is a language and literature teacher from one of the private schools of the city. The photos are from Shas Hobilla and Thrive Art Gallery.)