Sometimes I wonder, using myself as an example, since I am not writing on art for the money, whether I am doing it as an ego trip, or as a compulsion. In a very special sense, what one does when he writes on art is to critically examine his own responses to it; it is his mind or himself that he is presenting to the reader as much as the subject of his thinking and feeling.
Leonidas Benesa

Asserting its power and presence, art at its best resists strategies of containment and co-optation, not allowing its value to be measured by the mechanical yardstick of the market. Indeed, a great thinker once warned of the alienation of all things and human phenomena, including love itself, into mere commodities. Doubtless, among the first things to be rescued from this chilling alienation is art itself.
Alice Guillermo

Founding president of the Art Association of the Philippines (AAP) Purita Kalaw-Ledesma chronicles that writers and critics performed a key role in the emergence of modern art in the late 40s through the 50s: “Alternately criticizing, defending and guiding them, writers broadened the vision of the painters and instilled a socio-political awareness among them.”¹ Kalaw-Ledesma recognizes the influence of such names as E. Aguilar Cruz, Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, and I.P. Soliongco. In 1952, the AAP initiated its art criticism competition that honored Francisco Arcellana as the year’s “art critic”. This event must have prepared the ground for the likes of Ricaredo Demetillo, Armando Manalo, Ernesto del Rosario, and Hilario Francia to take up the challenge of writing criticism and for books on art to be published.

The 60s witnessed a flourishing of criticism, with the bench of writers on art becoming deeper. Alice Coseteng edited in 1972 Philippine Modern Art and its Critics, an anthology of texts produced in the decade by Jolico Cuadra, Juan Gatbonton, Jesus Peralta, Emmanuel Torres, Carlos Quirino, and Alfredo Roces, among others.² In this same heady season for Philippine modernism, the Art Critics Association of the Philippines was formed, with Galo Ocampo, then Director of the National Museum as president. The organization listed in its final roster in 1993 the following: Arcellana, Coseteng, Cuadra, Julian Dacanay, Felipe de Leon, Jr., Demetillo, Salvador Fanega, Francia, Alice Guillermo, Jeannie Javelosa, Kalaw-Ledesma, Manalo, Ambeth Ocampo, Peralta, Rodolfo Paras-Perez, Santiago Pilar, Cid Reyes, Roces, Marian Pastor Roces, Cesare Syjuco, Torres, and Paul Zafaralla.³Indeed, if one seeks a pedigree or tradition of art criticism in the Philippines, one has only to go through the texts of these writers.

We can make the argument that criticism addresses the need for evaluation—a modality of review in which the critic reflects on creative practice within a duration of an exhibition of art, a historical analysis of an oeuvre, or a theory of what it is that an artist or art does across coordinates of time and context. It is, therefore, an instance of self-consciousness, a modernity that underwrites retrospection. Through overt or occult criteria, the critic serves as a privileged audience who judges art and disseminates it to a hopefully responsive and responsible public. As such, criticism has an intricate relationship with reception, or the ways in which art is sensed by an interpretive community of a subjective aptitude that labors under a range of values and dispositions: enchantment with whatever is perceived, the commodification of the market, an expression of sentiment, or an advocacy of political agenda. Perhaps, if we are in quest of incipience in Philippine art criticism, we can point to the tributes lavished by the ilustrado (the enlightened and illustrious Filipino exiles in Europe working for reforms for the country) on Juan Luna and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo in 1884 when they garnered prizes at the Madrid Exposition as embryonic. In these speeches and toasts of national hero Jose Rizal and Graciano Lopez Jaena, in the register of inflated oratory, paintings are invested with allegorical meaning, political potency, and post-colonial achievement that all transfigure into an entitlement to the “aesthetic” by way of the “sublime”. Rizal and Jaena, indeed, were laying the groundwork of art’s signifying power, its explanatory and emancipatory capacity.

But we can also contend that criticism is not merely a function of modernity. It, in fact, makes it possible. We say this because criticism as a discipline of forming critique is an index of reflexivity, of creating a distance between object and subject so that reflection could take place, of professing critical intimacy as well so that engagement could transpire. In other words, criticality, which encompasses the activity of critique, attests to a specific kind of self-consciousness that is possessed by a personage called the critic who translates or, better still, articulates the performance of art in discourse, on behalf of others. This constitutes an incontrovertible aspect of modernity: the insistence on the rationality of discrimination and the sort of representation that speaking for others accrues.

Philippine modern art was significantly wrought by a critical intelligence—and an intelligentsia that advanced its cause. Leonidas Benesa’s career as a critic emerged from this woodwork. Benesa attended the art lectures of the artist Fernando Zóbel at the Ateneo de Manila University around 1957, with colleague Emmanuel Torres and avant-garde stalwart David Cortez Medalla. A segment of this coterie inevitably staked out the field of modernism through critical thought and writing as the infrastructure of art in the form of the gallery system, private and institutional collections, and competitions gained momentum. It was also around this time that the Luz Gallery and the Lopez Memorial Museum opened. Years earlier, the Philippine Art Gallery (PAG) organized “The First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala” curated by Aurelio Alvero who presented himself under the pseudonym Magtanggul Asa. Alvero wrote a catalogue for this event, which could be considered one of the first texts of both criticism and curation produced for an exhibition of Philippine art.

Benesa’s position in the hierarchy of the Philippine art world of his time was secure. According to the historian Rodolfo Paras-Perez: “(Fernando) Zóbel, (Arturo) Luz, (Lee) Aguinaldo, Benesa, Torres and Leandro Locsin readily constituted the hermetic circle which became the taste maker of the sixties and seventies. Their vision received official sanction and became the official culture for almost two decades.”⁴

Benesa was well within the hectic consolidating phases of modernism as a critic who wrote for mass-circulation newspapers, catalogues, monographs, and books. To a substantial extent, therefore, he was able to set certain parameters not only of the criteria of appraising art, but also of the style of critical writing suited to particular constituencies; and this might have been the prevailing form of criticism for two decades. But at the onset of the 70s, certain shifts in artistic practice began to surface. Amid the unease with and later the outrage against the Martial Law regime of Ferdinand Marcos and the cultural affectations fostered by the First Lady Imelda Marcos, a different will and form steeled an art of protest directed toward the government and the structures that entrenched inequity. Modernism, which was envisaged as opposed to conservatism, was increasingly assimilated into the internationalist pretensions of the Marcos dictatorship and the variety of abstractions encouraged by the American policy during the Cold War as a foil to the putative rigidity of Soviet socialist realism. Stirrings were felt in the first half of the 70s and were already ascendant five years hence, terracing until the fall of Marcos in 1986.

This was the milieu into which the critic Alice Guillermo forayed when her first art review on an exhibition titled Salpukan! held at the Red Gallery in Cubao, was published in 1972 on the eve of the declaration of Martial Law. Like Benesa, Guillermo also imbibed western modernism as a horizon of interest in art and how it offers a modernity. This could be the motivation of her first published piece of art writing, done upon the invitation of Petronilo Daroy who asked for an essay on Cezanne for the Philippine Collegian, the activist organ of the University of the Philippines.⁵

We discern here two trajectories within Philippine modern art and the form of criticism it provoked. The first is Benesa (b 1928), who explored a post-Impressionist modernist vocabulary to respond to the post-Triumvirate, neorealist, PAG-period repertoire, which ran the gamut from cubism to art brut. The second is Guillermo (b 1938), who probed what might have been a post-abstraction idiom that defined the terms of an emergent figuration keen on social commentary, which she would theorize as “social realism”. This analysis does not insinuate a sequence with tidy demarcations from one point to the next. Surely, there were intervals and pauses, lapses and intersections among other utterances of criticism. Of these, we could identify a conceptualist parlance that germinated from the work and statements of artists and writers who looked to late modernism, with the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) and Shop 6 as theater of operations, as some variety of avant-garde; a compendium of texts could also be investigated in this regard. That said, it is worth observing that this pretension to avant-garde might actually be in the long haul misplaced. It could be speculated that it was this late modernism that aborted a prospectively robust avant-garde intimated by the precocious experiments of David Cortez Medalla before he left for Europe. In an interview, Medalla would confide that when the art scene moved from Manila to Makati in the mid-60s, the landscape altered altogether, and a pivotal agent here was Benesa’s mentor, Zóbel. The kind of modernism that throve here and beyond, from Zóbel to Roberto Chabet, was shorn of the texture and rondure that old Manila held out, with artists settling into a formulae of refabricated concepts quite derivative of Euro-American vogues, insulated by the fortress of the CCP and its satellites.

Zóbel was also a patron of modernists and his family developed a cosmopolitan center outside the old city. Makati, which would become the new financial district, was to be an exemplar of modern urbanism and to some extent hewn from the type of abstraction that Zóbel espoused. This set novel standards of a middle-class, nouveau riche lifestyle that responded to an internationalist taste for design, an appetite fed by formalist modernism. It was thus not incidental that Luz moved his gallery to Makati in 1966 and that the family of Zóbel built its Ayala Museum here as well, with Locsin as architect.

This is only a facet of the picture, because we could also hazard that it was the post-abstraction vernacular of social realism that harbored the avant-garde sensibility as it confronted the social condition through refunctioned means, from traditional media like painting to ephemeral agit-prop materials. This was waged against a dispensation that promoted abstraction and conceptualism, heralded as the ultimate demonstration of freedom from the burden of existing reality, but repressed speech, suspended habeas corpus, and tortured and killed its dissenting body politic. Needless to say, both these strains of avant-garde aspirations flourished as well under the patronage of the market.

The criticism of Benesa and Guillermo are most productively reckoned within this

constellation of forces, critics who have over the years collected an appreciable mass of critical texts that has merited much-deserved anthologies: What is Philippine About Philippine Art? (2000) by the former and Image to Meaning (2001) by the latter. Their sustained vocation as writers, their interventions in defining the art of their time, and their legacy to succeeding generations of critics help us understand how art criticism in the country has shaped the very habit of making art and making art sensible. Lastly, both are writers, students of literature, and artists of the word. Criticism is, after all, a distinct species of writing; and the critical essay is literary and writerly.

Benesa

Benesa’s essays in his tome are short remarks largely about exhibitions in commercial galleries and museums. Even retrospectives by well-known modernists like Cesar Legaspi are not afforded extensive discussion. This kind of art writing could be characterized as the “review” of about 600 words, per his own confession, that is produced within a journalistic framework. The brevity could be attributed to the space of his writing, the newspaper, which usually constrains the tenor and extent of analysis but nevertheless permits the critic to survey the scene regularly. This is not to say, of course, that Benesa is not capable of expansive analysis. He has, in fact, authored full-length books such as Joya Drawings (1973), Okir: The Epiphany of Philippine Graphic Art (1982), and The Amon Art Foundation Collection (1988), aside from monographs of the retrospectives of Hernando R. Ocampo and Galo Ocampo. From 1975 until his death in 1983, he wrote for the Philippine Daily Express. He obtained two master’s degrees, one in literature from the Ateneo de Manila University around 1955, and another from the University of California at Berkeley. Benesa was a poet. He was involved with the Art Association of the Philippines, which elected him president four times and was the first secretary of the Art Critics Association of the Philippines. The AAP awarded him a prize for Best Art Criticism; in 1993, a competition for art criticism eventually re-named in his honor. He was also managing editor of the magazine on culture Archipelago, which published valuable texts on art history.

Benesa’s prose is inflected with the rhetoric of canon making, prone to phrases like “master painter,” “underrated artist,” and “major expressionist.” We detect no effort to rethink the predicate of the valorized subject of art and artist, which are regarded as axiomatic, verities requiring no cavil. But he strongly addresses two salient issues: identity and the distinction between form and content in which the former transcends the latter so that both could integrate.

The matter of identity preoccupied writers in the 50s through the 70s, abetted by the anxiety of post-war reconstruction, the republican transition and, later, the Marcos scheme of nation building and the nationalism upheld by the Marxist liberation movement. The predicament of being Filipino was, therefore, fraught and freighted with ideological commitments and, oftentimes, with prejudice. Benesa asks: “What makes Philippine art Filipino? To what extent is Philippine art derivative of Western art? Is there anything Filipino about, for example, the Manila Wyeth school, the so-called magical realists? How about the paintings of Fernando Amorsolo, Carlos Francisco, and Hernando R. Ocampo, all of whom have been identified in a big way with the native sensibility?”⁶ This may well be a polemical ruse, but Benesa answers it without equivocation by singling out works that exemplify the idealization of the Filipino: “The paintings of Antonio Austria are definitely Filipino in flavor and sentiment, probably more so than any other Filipino painter…Austria is a folk artist, a people’s artist. His images and icons are imaginative constructs that the people at large can identify with and relate to.”⁷

Benesa seems to make distinctions between the cultural and the social in terms of how Filipinos, or “the people”, constitute these processes. His thoughts on the work of Pablo Baens Santos are telling, prompting him to declare that “art does not have its social uses” and warns against “its vulnerability to propaganda”.⁸ As an art critic, he stages pieces of art and concepts in tension and then holds out a formulation. He does it with Filipino identity and the paintings of Austria and he does it with social effect and the paintings of Santos. According to Benesa:

In two of Baens-Santos works, Human Rights Policy and Dalawang Lider

Obrero – the first exhibiting Carter’s famous toothy smile and the second two labor leader types, the good and the bad – the artist fails to transcend. The result is not illumination, but magazine illustration for Ramparts.

It is in the other, bigger pieces, however, in which the artist is able to give his artistic powers ample play, as in Doon Tayo Patutungo, Mga Mulat na Magsasaka, and Puwersa ng Produksyon. And it is not the dialectic that gives these works a certain vibrant force but a very skillful orchestration of color and formal values.⁹

And so, while Benesa believes that form and content must not be governed by a

dichotomy, he does not elaborate on how formal values could solely convey something that is not dialectically compromised by that which exists outside it and yet is immanent to its formation. For him, fealty to form is paramount; to breach it is to traduce art, an inclination he assigns to Santos: “His kind of limited commitment…can easily lend itself to melodrama or overacting, if not propaganda. This he has to continually guard against, if he is not to turn traitor to art itself.”¹⁰

Guillermo

Compared with Benesa’s, Guillermo’s criticism has wider academic reference, and the essays included in her anthology benefit from adequate elaboration and a perspective that is rooted in art history and theory. Originally published in newspapers and international magazines specializing in Asian art, they are accorded generous space, which gives the critic the opportunity to substantiate claims. Guillermo graduated from the College of the Holy Spirit in 1957 and took a master’s degree in Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines (UP) at Diliman. She was a French government scholar of French art history and literature at the Universite d’Aix-Marseille in Aix-en-Provence in 1967 and completed her doctorate in Philippine Studies at the UP. She started to actively write in the middle of the 70s for Archipelago; she won the Art Criticism award of the AAP in 1976. She describes the 80s as a time of “intense weekly practice”, contributing to Observer, Who, New Day (later, Business Day), We Forum, New Progressive Review, and Manila Times. In the 90s, she wrote for Daily Globe and in the current decade for Today, Business Mirror, Asian Art News and World Sculpture News. Between these writing assignments, she edited the visual arts volume of the CCP Encyclopedia of the Philippines and wrote prodigiously for monographs, textbooks, and exhibit notes. Among the books she has written are Images of Change (1988) and The Covert Presence (1989), compilations of her essays; Social Realism in the Philippines (1987); and Protest/Revolutionary Art in the Philippines, 1970-1990 (2001). She taught for some nine years at the University of the East and from 1979 (initially at the College of Fine Arts) to 2003 at the UP, where she once chaired the Department of Art Studies and was conferred the title of Professor Emerita. Her experience in the humanities within an academic setting has disposed her to cultivate a wide array of sympathies, from cinema to theater, literature to popular culture. Guillermo continues to write sharp and searing art criticism, sustaining one of the most enduring interdisciplinary careers in the field of art writing in the Philippines.

Like Benesa, Guillermo’s writing was molded by western modernism to the degree that her interest in art “was awakened not by Amorsolo and his rural genre…but by the artists of the School of Paris, the impressionists, the surrealists, the expressionists, and the cubists, who offered new and fascinating imagery”.¹¹ This reception to modernism is nuanced; she believes that art is perspectival, tangled within the “coordinates of society and history”,¹² resistive of containment and alienation. She professes:

I have discarded the form-and-content model where one goes over the formal elements and then proceeds to explicate the meaning or content of the work, because the model cannot sufficiently demonstrate the bridge between form and content nor show the internal relationship between the two…Also, I have discarded the concept of the ‘historical background’ of art and culture for the idea that art/culture is situated within its sociohistorical context and that an active and continuous interaction takes place between art and its content through numerous forms of mediation.¹³

For Guillermo, therefore, art is not only politicized; it is political because it is positioned, it struggles for values, and it recovers humanity from reification, or the mode by which our ties to the world are falsified. And since it is so, it is also necessarily sensitive, moving, enchanting, truly imaginative, virtues that are commensurately equaled by the affective, evocative language of the critic:

My political view of art has always been interlinked from the beginning with a deeply hedonistic feeling for art. Thus, art criticism for me is not purely discursive but has always been infused with the pleasure of discovering the serendipitous insight or the calm felicities of contemplation, quickened on occasion by the frisson esthétique.¹⁴

It is at this point that the paths of Benesa and Guillermo diverge, in the manner in which their critical methods explain the complex constitution of art. We glean in the texts of Guillermo the intricate dialogue between facture and meaning as well as the materialist imperative in the intuiting of art; this is also well detailed in the essay “Reading the Image” that introduces the collection. It might be useful to juxtapose Benesa’s opinion on the paintings of Santos with Guillermo’s own of Jose Tence Ruiz:

Erding Erdrayb at ang Kanyang Palasyong Agaw-Tanaw (Driving Erding and his Now-You-See-It-Now-You-Don’t-Palace) (1980) is a highly original work bristling with semiotic signifiers where the driver’s torso is based on an antique upright telephone integrated within the human figure molded in resin. The inner side panels beside the windshield display a veritable hodgepodge of the holy and the secular: icons of saints, emblazoned names of family members, calendar pages, and diverse street erotica. From the visual clues, one gathers that Driver Erding bought his jeepney out of the earnings of his overseas stint, a popular expression for such substantial purchases being katas ng Saudi, the concentrated extract of blood, sweat, and tears wrung out of the experience of the migrant worker.¹⁵

From this exposition of a “production”, the critic theorizes on what it seeks to achieve as social form and sense of society:

In his iconic field, he plays micro with macro; the details of his paintings proliferate in semiotic swarms in which significations, like the word-games in which he revels, are continually fluid and shifting, albeit still within a horizon of meaning. Each stroke and modulation of hue and tone is a motivated sign; the very medium he uses with its distinctive properties and techniques bears a semantic potential that, interacting with the other elements, become realized in the totality of the work. His oeuvre, breaking down the artificial dichotomy of form and content, proves that form in all its concrete aspects actively and vitally produces meaning. As for the macro side of his work, it is in the large unfolding of history, the social conditions and contradictions of contemporary life – the large view which the artist does not just passively regard as exterior spectacle but which he examined from a critical perspective through which his art participates in the process of change.¹⁶

This is a preliminary revisit to the work of two critics with the view of tracking vectors and tracing channels and circuits in Philippine art criticism as well as the social and intellectual biographies of critics. Art criticism, as it trains its keen attention on specific works of art, configures both history and theory and, therefore, makes us aware of the intricate transformations within the contentious practice of art. Moreover, it proposes categories of analysis through which art is embodied, made to belong to lived life, and becomes meaningful. This retrospection is finally inspirational because it buoys the spirit of potential critics to pursue the discipline at a time when broadsheets refuse its rightful presence. Scanning art pages today, one realizes that these are nearly exclusively dedicated to the market and that for the most part writing is, to put it most politely, vacuous. If it is not the latter, then it is vicious as the worst of masquerading practitioners who write about art, and who are nothing more than minions and hirelings of art world vendors. It is, therefore, with a mixture of wistfulness and hope that we look back and hurtle further with Benesa and Guillermo in mind.

This mindfulness is critical because it prompts us to understand more fully the ties between modernity and the contemporary, unnerving problematics that underlie much of what we take as art. The intercession of the critic and criticism was germane at a time when Philippine “culture” pretended to a modern state; at the same time, this posture inevitably steered a transfer of mediating authority from the critic to the curator, from criticism to curation, in the waning years of internationalist abstraction in the 60s when a strain of conceptual art, which was also an extension of a failed avant-garde, was permeating art practice, cultural policy, and taste setting. The critic would become either a nostalgic vestige of modernism, or a reconstructed arbiter of a possible contemporary art (or critical modernism) that became increasingly garnished by curatorial interest. The critic would either cease to be the favored instrument of reflexivity, or persist as its melancholic advocate within the haunted “democratic space” after Marcos.

This essay appears in Pananaw 6 under the Replay cluster.