The discourse about art: UPV MACH hosts Sulat Dahum-dahum

By John Anthony S. Estolloso

Last Saturday, I had the opportunity to attend and participate in art historian and critic Dr. Patrick Flores’ Sulat Dahum-dahum, a workshop on art criticism developed by the Lopez Museum and Library for aspiring art writers of the regions. It was an eclectic group that congregated at the conference hall of UPV’s Museum of Art and Cultural Heritage that day: journalists, teachers, curators, students, and practicing artistes – in essence, the people who partake in the local art scene.

Conventionally, the production of art necessitates curation and archiving. On exhibit, curation provides cohesiveness to the display, contextually or thematically. The archiving of art follows closely the structuring of exhibition. Going beyond photographs and logs, documentation of art may constitute a form of explication (e.g., exhibit notes) or response, something akin to a review or critique.

Hence, the need for someone to write about art.

Museum director and curator Prof. Martin Genodepa contextualized the day’s conversation with a comprehensive survey of art writing in Western Visayas. The situation: an absence of full-time critics, sustained art literature, and publishing pipelines, resulting to a blurry situation where artists themselves become writers for other artists. To that effect, they are adversaries in collusion. Conversely, he also pointed out that there were recent efforts to establish viable platforms for art writing, identifying the solitary issue of Iloilo Art Review and the online articles of Thrive Art Projects as initiatives to this end.

But what constitutes the nitty-gritty of criticism? Dr. Patrick Flores’ lecture examined the intermeshes that situate Filipino art criticism in history, its tensions, and the corpus and method with which constitute it. Harking back to the most informal – like the toasts of Rizal and Jaena to Luna’s Spoliarium ­– and progressing to the more incisive yet personal tone of contemporary critics, the range of art criticism directly mirrors the societal expectations and sensibilities of its time. To go through the experience, we had to peruse the artworks by Anita Magsaysay-Ho, Alfonso Ossorio, Nena Saguil, Juvenal Sansó, Macario Vitalis, and Fernando Zóbel, currently on display at the museum’s Main Hall. Tasked with writing an introductory paragraph and a structured flow, we subjected our critiques to the panelists and our colleagues’ criticism and feedback.

It was affirming to hear that one is somehow on the right path to approaching art: of course, one realizes that there is a myriad of ways to converse about and frame artworks through sundry lenses. Yet, the workshop also uncovered common pitfalls for the art critic, the tendency to objectify and to name set ‘identities’ in the artwork, among them. The invitation then is to write ‘with, through, and around art critically’, not prescribing any perspective or pontificating over aesthetics, but pointing out the rich liminalities in between and among the entanglements of the artworld. In short, dahúm-dáhum lang.

One thing is clear however: as important as the praxis of art is the discourse that surrounds and permeates it. The day’s conversation was picked up at ILOMOCA’s vernissage of an exhibition of works by Philippine Art Award laureates. In line with the exhibit’s theme, Dr. Flores and Mr. Cid Reyes, himself a critic and writer, discussed how art from the regions is represented and received in the national art scene (which would be the subject of another article). As such, the role and importance of the art critic in this scene, as chronicler, documenter, and commentator, resurfaced once again as a key talking point of the convo.

So, what is in store for art writing in the regions? While we recognize the flourishing number of art spaces and platforms that continue to sprout and blossom, we also celebrate the efforts of our writers who try to keep up with this. As if to echo this relation between locus and text, UPV Chancellor Clement Camposano pointed out in his dinner speech that more than being a space for the exhibition of art, UP’s museum must also become a location of discourse on art. Sulat Dahum-dahum was a good start and we hope to have more of these in our art spaces.

[The writer is a language and literature teacher in one of the private schools of the city. The photo is from Ted Aldwin Ong; the poster is from the Lopez Museum and Library’s FB page.]