an essay by Roger B Rueda
For me, art is relative. It means what is good to one doesn’t mean it is good to another person. What is pleasing to one is not pleasing to another. It is a creation of beautiful or thought-provoking work. So, deference is much needed, or, else, reliance on our artists and reflexion of one’s incapability to judge well. For one, our artists have a lot to say, yet our nous misses the mark in recognising the intricacy of what we must see or appreciate, because not everyone is an artist.
For me, an artwork is produced through creative activity such as the one displayed in the CCP. It can draw our imaginings to create new accepted wisdom which can raise us above to appreciating the imperceptible and realising our extant ephemerality and what is more than it. It offers us chance to experience what others have found and delighted in or agonised or dreaded, for it has a message to tell. It is not measured by any religious body or concerned with religious or spiritual matters. For one, I don’t think that an artist is a radical or is subtly malevolent. He is sane and his art is more than what we think is rational; it is equivocal and not coarse, I think.
An artwork, I always accept as true, does not adhere strictly and concisely to the basic meaning of a medium. It is not simple in an unimaginative way that sticks solely to the facts. It is for people who are free from prejudice and amenable to new ideas and not for those who have or show a limited and often bigoted or fanatical outlook. It is for people who are able to appreciate the beauty and worth of something.
I think if we look at the contentious artwork by Mideo Cruz we can sense that it has a message, honest, essential awareness interconnected. How some intellectual sloths react on it is a test of how superficial many a Filipino in our time. They are no longer insightful, but so unseeing of what is beyond their circumstances or what they should be as a human beings or what they are away from this power which bashes to bend them the way they are and dictates their way of thinking.
This is a society where many a resident eludes to think about the things beyond what is here. Obviously, they tend to focus on the bodily, which to me is so paradoxical.
Who know art well, by the way, the artists themselves or the censors or the ignoramus? What do they know about art? What books or philosophies or how many of them have they read so that they can assess an opus flawlessly well? This is an incursion of one’s independence now because some groups of people in the society truly believe that they are what the truth is and all things are in the wrong just the way they want to perceive anything in this country. They denounce anyone as evil and immoral, sensing how unsettling and revolutionary these new ideas could be.
I loathe seeing people who pretend to be honourable, but the truth is they have superficial grasp of what they censure and seemingly they just want to uphold frivolity in this society, like them, frankly. They want to endorse mediocrity and conformity because this is what they can do. They want to preserve their prestige, as those who are virtuous and just, but paradoxically they are the nastiest and wickedest sometimes, if everyone goes out of the box and see it from the outside. Their masterworks are real run-through of what people cannot see in the CCP, but the ones despised by God. They are dissemblers who go to church, yet they treat their workers like slaves, because they have not learned how to be human, even vicariously. They are the people who cannot even share what they have to the poor. They are the people who speak bad words or who want people to esteem them as pious. They are the people who are only concerned about their reputation, so they find a good chance to evaluate an artwork as heretical without really bearing in mind that the artist must have spent a lot of time and sacrificed to come up with something germane or something which has a message for our people to incite what the artist believes all through a time when everything emerges and its connexions to one another are relatively amusing or hazardous sometimes. Thus, a well-adjusted insight is essential. For instance, to some parochial people, images of a Mickey Mouse and of a Christ the King seem very inappropriate. Recognisably, human society will reach a turning point in continuing explosions of unexpected diversity. Our concepts of what is known will continually change, so will art.
The penis image on a cross or the Christ as Mickey Mouse means a lot of things. It could be a juxtaposition of how people adulate sex and it seems that most people these days have substitute God for sex. It means that nowadays God seems to have lost its inevitability and many of these things found in Mr Cruz’s artwork have great part in today’s contemporary society. It could be viewed, too, as an assortment of things modern people cannot live without and that they amass what they think are indispensable without flouting another. It is all-inclusive, I think. For one, each person must be free to behave as he or she sees fit. Our society must provide flexibility and a relativistic presence of culpability as our political and religious leaders often leave followers with no sense of eventual purpose and no prospect for eternal hope. More and more of Filipinos are becoming electro-shamans and modern alchemists, and this is what the artwork wants to bring. Why is it considered as irreligious? I love God and the Jesus Christ, but I have found the artwork very ingenious rather than profane.
The artwork is for mature audience and how the people have reacted violently to it indicates how silly or senseless they are. The parallels between the culture of the religion and that of modern things these days are inescapable, I believe. It hypothesises an Alice-in-Wonderland universe in which everything is changing. It is a pictographic rundown of all possibilities, actuated for the purpose of foresight by juxtaposition and reciprocated influence. It is tells us that we can change and mutate and keep improving. The idea possibly is to keep ‘trading up’ to a ‘better’ philosophy-theology.
The artwork prompts us that this generation has been disenchanted by the religions, politics, and commercialisations in this country. The threat of overpopulation, AIDS and the refutation of RH Bill, religious fundamentalisms that fanatically scream animosity and narrow-mindedness, and uncomprehending disregard of reproductive health rights must cultivate a strong scepticism about solutions the government initiates or overlooks to disentangle and this is reflected in the artwork, which is so wonderful and striking, and perhaps honest or critical. It is not sexually explicit and intended to cause sexual arousal.
The artwork communicates a message that we live in a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits which cluster together in valid, transitory conformations. It can also be viewed as how the Jesus Christ competes with other icons, in terms of admiration, shamanism, or idolisation. Unquestionably, it is sad to know that ethical relativity is still the mortal sin of religious fundamentalists.
In our time, we need to form a sensibility of individual course plotting, that is, distinctiveness. For one, the basic idea must be self-responsibility, as we just can't depend on anyone else to resolve our teething troubles, even on the church which keeps meddling in authority, legislations, and the behaviour of private lives. In view of that, people should not just look at things the way our civilisation goes into a certain mechanism. This can lead us to come to be exasperated or lost. Only from the state of free selfhood can any truly compassionate signals be sent to others. We must have our own way of thinking, heading to a favourable stimulus on societies or a nation of brilliance. We should remember that not all Filipinos are Catholics, Christians, Moslems, or artists. Thus, high opinion is essential, and reproaching any artwork as blasphemous is just a judgement and not a point, art subjective and having no periphery. Every artist is special, every art is special. We should approach all artworks from many angles.
