Tag Archives: UP

Penman No. 138: On Wall and Paper

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IMG_7127Penman for Monday, March 2, 2015

 

OF ALLl the forms of art, nothing catches the public eye quite like a mural—a painting on a wall. It isn’t just that murals tend to be massively larger than your usual living room portrait or still life. They very often seek to capture and represent the spirit and experience of a community, voicing the concerns and celebrating the values of that community. Starting with cave paintings, murals are also the oldest human art form, but they’ve survived surprisingly well into the 21st century, creatively adapting—often literally—to their physical and social environment. (For some of the world’s best contemporary murals, see here: http://www.cartridgesave.co.uk/news/the-50-most-stunning-wall-murals-from-around-the-world/)

In the Philippines, muralists like the late National Artist Carlos “Botong” Francisco have defined the content, style, and temper of the form, much like Diego de Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco did in Mexico. Informed by history and politics, their work also incorporates ethnic and religious elements, presented in a sweeping visual montage.

Given our colorful history and the need to inflame our people with greater patriotic fervor, you’d think we should have more murals adorning our many walls—think of the kilometer-long mural that snakes through downtown Hanoi, for example—but sadly, we don’t. Good murals take time, resources, and of course artistic talent and vision to make, not to mention the large blank spaces that are the muralist’s work- and play-ground.

Thankfully, the University of the Philippines—in cooperation with the UP Alumni Association and the Araneta Center Complex—has taken a major step to redressing that shortage, by commissioning 28 of the university’s top alumni artists to produce murals depicting various periods and aspects of Philippine history.

This distinguished roster includes Adonai Artificio, Armand Bacaltos, Adi Baen-Santos, Grandier Bella, Benjie Cabangis, Ben Cabrera, Angel Cacnio, Romeo Carlos, Cris Cruz, Denes Dasco, Gig de Pio, Simkin de Pio, Vincent de Pio, Neil Doloricon, Norman Dreo, Amado Hidalgo, Abdul Asia Mari Imao, Ben Infante, Gigi Javier-Alfonso, Aileen Lanuza, Romeo Mananquil, Norlie Meimban, Julius Samson, Jonahmar Salvosa, Randy Solon, Michael Velasco, Jun Yee, and Janice Young. The resulting exhibit, titled “” or Philippine History in Art—opened at the Araneta Center’s Gateway Gallery last February 18.

The murals—all of a uniform 6’ x 12’ size—cover the full range of Philippine history from pre-Hispanic times to the present, under the guidance of historian Dr. Luisa Camagay and project director and artist Dr. Gigi Javier Alfonso. To UP President Alfredo Pascual, the project is UP’s way of helping to promote a keener historical consciousness among Filipinos, especially the young. The Araneta Center in Cubao, which is marking its 60th anniversary, graciously agreed to host the exhibit in its new 5th-floor gallery.

Coming from a science background, a senior UP official whom I was touring the exhibit with asked me for my critique of the murals on show. I told her that while I was of course pleased with the project as a whole, with its intentions and execution, I personally preferred those works that went a step beyond the literal in their treatment of history, and that dwelt less on the big and obvious historical figures and more on pedestrian realities. I do understand that murals can’t be too abstract, lest they fail to connect with their intended mass audience; in any case, the murals did what they were meant to do, which is to provoke more thought and talk among their viewers.

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On another front, and also in Quezon City which seems to be shaping up as the cultural center of the metropolis, a new exhibit of paper and paper-based art titled “Pumapapel” opened last week at the Erehwon Center for the Arts, probably the city’s most dynamic privately-operated art center.

This exhibition expands the possibilities of Filipino artistic expression by combining many fields of art making, from painting, drawing, printmaking, mix-media, sculpture and installation, to photography and book/graphic illustration by focusing on the unique qualities of paper as both ground and medium. Curated by UP professor Dr. Reuben R. Cañete, “Pumapapel” features the works of about 100 artists including those of National Artists Vicente Manansala and Benedicto Cabrera, as well as those of Philip Victor, Renato Villanueva, Ofelia Gelvezon-Tequi, Manuel Rodriguez Jr., Juvenal Sanso, and Manuel Ocampo. Also on the list are upcoming artists from the Cordillera, Cebu, Bacolod, and Mindanao, and photographers and graphic artists, among others.

“Pumapapel”’s focus on paper art brings us back, like murals do, to the earliest periods and forms of artistic human expression. From paintings to paper sculpture, this exhibit showcases the myriad possibilities of paper both as medium and material, and also not incidentally celebrates Erehwon’s third year as the upcoming place-to-be for QC-based artists.

Erehwon may not be the easiest place to get to (it’s located at 1 Don Francisco Street, Villa Beatriz Subdivision, Old Balara) but it’s served as a home not only for painters and sculptors but also for musicians, dancers, and writers, thanks to the generosity of its founder and president, Raffy Benitez, and the support of people like Erehwon Arts Foundation President Boysie Villavicencio. (I shouldn’t forget to mention my wife June, who serves as Boysie’s vice president and who has been spending many sleepless nights helping to put this exhibition together.) The Erehwon Center for the Arts’ new Dance Studio was also inaugurated last week.

Pay these exhibits a visit, and you’ll remember and understand how and why art means something to ordinary people, in extraordinary ways.

(Mural by Janice Young. Batik painting on paper by Maela Jose.)

 

Penman No. 118: To Teach Is to Persist

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To-teach-is-to-persist-Penman-Butch-DalisayPenman for Monday, October 13, 2014

 

SOMEONE REMINDED me that World Teachers’ Day was celebrated earlier this month, on October 5. I forgot about it because I was—I am—overseas, on sabbatical leave until mid-2015. In our department at the University of the Philippines, we normally get just one sabbatical leave over the course of our teaching career, and typically, professors take it a few years before retirement. I’m five years away from that crossroads, so this is a good time to be away from the classroom and to recharge, which is what the sabbatical leave was originally designed for.

Wikipedia tells us that “Sabbatical (from Latin sabbaticus, from Greek sabbatikos, from Hebrew shabbat, i.e., Sabbath, literally a ‘ceasing’) is a rest from work, or a break, often lasting from two months to a year. The concept of sabbatical has a source in shmita, described several places in the Bible (Leviticus 25, for example, where there is a commandment to desist from working the fields in the seventh year). In the strict sense, therefore, a sabbatical lasts a year.”

This sabbatical, however, is shaping up to be anything but a vacation, or a rest break. I may be cool and dry in an America turning pretty with the onset of autumn, but my workload is as tropically toxic as ever, with several books to complete, columns and articles to write, faculty advising duties to perform, and sundry interests—totally and thankfully unscholarly—to pursue.

I do get a respite from the classroom, but, perhaps ironically, that’s the part of teaching I miss the most. As we celebrated World Teachers Day, I also realized that I was marking my 30th year of teaching this November, and I asked myself what three decades of teaching have taught me. After some reflection, it came down to this: to teach is to persist in the perfection of our humanity and our citizenship. That sounds awfully grand to the point of being pompous and pretentious—don’t we, after all, just grab a book, drag our feet to class, and preach bunkum for an hour to a roomful of people with the pulse rate of zombies to earn our lunch and gas money?

There are, of course, many days just like that in a teaching career, days that blur one into the other until the end of yet another semester. And at some point, it’ll get to you: your speech starts slurring and your eyes get glassy, and you can’t wait until the bell rings or the hour hand moves; you had a long rough night, the car needs new tires, the bills are piling up, your thoughts keep drifting back to Paris or Palawan, and the last thing you or your students want to talk about is disease and social order in William Carlos Williams’ “The Use of Force.”

Maybe ten years ago, I had such a day at the very start of the semester, and without realizing it, I must have been so bleary-eyed that I gave off the impression of not quite being there. To my great shock and dismay, one student later blogged about her disappointment with what she had seen; she had expected a stirring performance from her professor on Day One. It was a wake-up call, and I woke up; I promised that student that I would do my best to live up to her expectations, and I hope I did; we’re good, and she’s since gone on to a promising career in writing.

What I became acutely aware of then was that every teaching day is a performance, not unlike a show a professional actor studies and rehearses for, with the additional challenge that one simply doesn’t repeat the previous show, but keeps adding to it, improvising when possible to adapt to changes in the composition and the mood of every audience. I mutter my first lines to myself on the steps up to my classroom, ticking off the day’s main points and questions in my head; I take a deep breath, step into the door, flash a brief smile, and the day begins. And like the pro I have to be, I’ve learned to take care of myself, so I can teach well—to stay healthy, to sleep well (especially before a class day), and to think of something new to say or to bring to the next class.

So we all have our bad days, but it’s precisely on days like these when we need to remind ourselves of what a tremendous opportunity we have to make this Tuesday or Wednesday one of the most memorable in our young charges’ lives, through something we say, an idea or an experience we share, that will turn a key and open a door in their minds. Only in teaching can an ordinary, even a boring, day suddenly become indelibly special, with nothing more than thoughts and words—and the teacher’s persistence and faith in every student’s potential for transformation into someone more aware, more human, more Filipino. Perfectability? It’s more about the effort than the goal—and I’m sure that whatever we do for our students, we teachers do for ourselves as well.

 

SPEAKING OF teaching, my department has asked me to invite all teachers and students interested or involved in translation issues to attend the 6th Asian Translation Traditions Conference (ATT6) to be held October 23-25, 2014 at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.

The official flyer says that “The rationale for the ATT series is to challenge the Eurocentric emphasis of Translation Studies, which is largely due to the “unavailability of reliable data and systematic analysis of translation activities in non-European cultures” (Hung and Wakabayashi 2005). The ATT series was initiated by Professor Eva Hung of Hong Kong in 2002. A small but successful workshop was held in London that same year, followed by well-attended international conferences in India, Turkey, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates. It is hoped that ATT6 will lead to theorizing on translation and developing methodologies on translation arising from the specific historical and contemporary contexts of Asia.”

Hmmm, I think that needs to be translated: this conference will explore the theory and practice of translation in an Asian context. For more details, please visit http://asiantranslation6.up.edu.ph/.

{Illustration by Igan D’Bayan of the Philippine Star.)

Penman No. 65: Tried and Tested

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Penman for Monday, Sept. 23, 2013

LAST WEEK’S piece on the kind of open-book exam I give my students reminded me of the toughest exams I myself had to take as a student. It’s been more than two decades since I last stepped into a classroom and sat opposite the professor’s table and chair, but the memory of those exams remains vivid—in some cases, distressingly so.

I have to declare, at the outset, that unlike most students, I liked exams, especially in subjects that I knew I would do well in. I got a thrill from being tried and literally tested; I saw the exam as a game of wits between me and my professor, and while my professor certainly knew much more than I did about the subject, I was always on the lookout for angles and insights that my professor might never have considered, and would therefore appreciate as something fresh. I disdained what professors call “spitback”—the rote regurgitation of points already discussed in class—knowing that many of my classmates were going to do just that.

I was, in other words, something of a smartass, and like all the annoying smartasses you remember and loved to hate from high school and college, I deserved and got my occasional comeuppance. Returning to college after a ten-year absence, I thought I could wing it in my Lit classes, but instead got the loudest wake-up calls I possibly could, from two professors known to be formidable “terrors” in the English department—Filonila Tupas and Damiana Eugenio—both of whom gave me a “5.0” in the objective quizzes that they began the semester with. Thankfully these were diagnostic quizzes, and the diagnosis was clear: I had to hit the books to do well, so I became a textual bloodhound, memorizing odd details and references (plants from Shakespeare: wild thyme, oxlips, woodbine, eglantine). I would not embarrass myself again—or so I thought.

Shakespeare and the Elizabethan age became a passion for me, a period fraught with dark political intrigue and steeped in grime yet also ennobled by some of the most sublime poetry ever written. It wasn’t even Shakespeare so much as the lesser poets and dramatists around him—Sidney, Wyatt, Webster, Middleton, Marlowe—who piqued my interest, thanks to a teacher who took kindly to an older student making up for lost time (I was 27 when I returned as a freshman to UP; my Paulinian colegiala classmate, Judy Ick—who would go on to become Dr. Ick, the real Shakespeare expert in the department—was just 17).

That teacher was the impeccably fashionable Prof. Sylvia Ventura, commended (as Shakespeare himself might have put it) by all the swains but feared by most of her students for the spot-passages exams she gave. (A spot-passage exam gives you nothing but an obscure passage drawn from the text of a play or a poem, for you to identify, contextualize, and discuss.) I thought I was doing pretty well in her class until the final exam, when I ran into a passage that might as well have been Greek. Knowing that I had absolutely no chance of identifying the passage correctly, I gathered my wits and used Shakespeare himself to explain my predicament, beginning my answer (whatever it was) with a quote from Act I, Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “So quick bright things come to confusion!” Apparently it worked, because I escaped with a 1.25.

The toughest teacher I had in UP, however, was the legendary Wilhelmina Ramas, whose final exam on “The Idea of Tragedy” took us five hours and several bluebooks to finish—a herculean effort rewarded, in my case, with a niggardly (and probably accurate) 1.75. Soon after, I flew off the US for graduate school, and it was only then that I appreciated the rigor that my UP “terror” profs had put me through. Their American incarnations were tweed-suited dons rather than coiffed matrons, but they were no less demanding. I had come well prepared.

In my Shakespeare class at Michigan, taught by the pipe-smoking Russell Fraser, I felt like I had orchids coming out of my ears when Dr. Fraser commended me for being the only one in class to be able to answer his question about differentiating “hypotaxis” from “parataxis” (no, it has nothing to do with paid transportation). That still didn’t save me from the pain of Fraser’s final exam: a spot-passage exam, employing two totally unheard-of quotations from Shakespeare’s plays, with one question to answer: “Which is early and which is late Shakespeare, and why?” This was also an open-book exam that we had one day to complete; we were free to roam the library and to read Shakespeare from end to end.

Now, mind you, this was 1986, well before the Internet and Google; students were still using 5.25” floppy disks, if they were using computers at all (I wasn’t; I’d dragged my Olympia portable with me across the Pacific). Today my students would take seconds to find the answer to “early” and “late”, and maybe an hour to cough up a reasonable “why.” Back in ’86, it was all intelligent guesswork, knowing that no amount of speed-reading and cramming could possibly turn up those passages, let alone contextualize them. And Fraser knew that; whether we had the “early/late” part of the question right or wrong, he wanted to see us reasoning our way through our answers, given what we knew from class of the younger and the older Shakespeare. (Only later, in the age of Google, would I discover that Fraser was then at work on two books: Young Shakespeare, and Shakespeare: The Later Years.) I can’t recall how I scored on that exam—I passed the course with an A-minus—but it was the kind of exam that was both gut-wrenching and exhilarating at the same time; I loved it.

Still later, now doing my PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I had a professor in Bibliography and Research named James Kuist. As mild-mannered as he was, Dr. Kuist had a fiendishly difficult task for us to complete. His exam question went like this: “The year is 1663 and I am a Fellow of the Royal Society. What books would be on my bookshelf?” So off we went to the library on a wild goose chase, and like an eager labrador retriever, I enjoyed the hunt, searching the stacks for the spoor of these antiquarian volumes.

Now that I’m the one giving the exams, I hope to come up with questions and problems that my students will remember 20 years from now, and still get a bit of a headache from—or let’s make that the pleasant buzz, the distant refrain, of an unusually agitated mind.

Penman No. 59: A Boon for UP Artists

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IMG_2770Penman for Monday, August 12, 2013

LAST WEDNESDAY, I had the privilege of being part of a special ceremony at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, this time for the UP Arts Productivity System or APS awards. Initiated under former UP President Emerlinda R. Roman in 2009, the APS provides substantial monetary incentives to artists within the UP System for work produced within a three-year period (or five, the first time you apply). Twenty-eight UP artists were honored, including 17 from the first batch in 2009. (A similar system had been earlier put in place for UP scientists.)

A committee of peers—themselves highly accomplished artists, including National Artists—receives and evaluates applications from Diliman and UP’s many other campuses. Points are assigned to specific works, such as books, productions, exhibitions, and major lectures; further points accrue from notable awards and distinctions, especially forms of international recognition. Within this committee, spirited discussions inevitably arise over the merits of an artist’s work. Since the award is given for new and continuing work, it isn’t a lifetime achievement award, and no matter how highly regarded an artist may be, only his or her sustained productivity will be recognized by the APS.

Not surprisingly, many questions and concerns come up in the APS. The proper and fair valuation of artistic work is one of the most difficult tasks anyone can assume, even and especially within an academic setting, which may not necessarily reflect what the market thinks say, of a painting or a commissioned biography. Academia is the bastion of theory, and an award-giving situation like this challenges and exercises every humanities professor’s notions of what is good and valuable.

The idea that art itself is of real value is, in the first place, something one can’t assume to be a general belief in our country, and even in our university. Painters have it easier in terms of establishing their worth, because people have gotten used to the spectacle of, say, a Van Gogh selling for many millions of dollars, even if they may not understand why. They can look at a painting or sculpture in their living room or in an office lobby and at least appreciate its decorative value (although modernist art will probably leave them deeply perplexed, especially when told that the piece was worth a lot of money).

The utility and practical value of a poem is far more ephemeral. Artistry in the form of a service—say, directing a play or curating an exhibit—is even harder to apprehend for many. This is why it takes another artist—or a scholar and academic—to seek out and to recognize these obscure but important triumphs of mind, spirit, and sensibility over matter.

There are awards enough in the Philippines for artistic endeavor, capped by the National Artist Award, which the Supreme Court found the good sense to rescue from pit of political patronage. Elsewhere there are the FAMAS, the Palancas, the Thirteen Artists, and any number of music-industry awards. What distinguishes the UPAPS is its recognition of artists who also teach, or teachers who also manage to produce good art despite the well-known rigors of teaching and that other great devourer of time and energy, administration.

This is particularly important in an institution like UP, which—not unlike many other Philippine universities today, for understandable reasons—seems to have reoriented itself toward more support for science, technology, and engineering. (One thing most people don’t realize is that, based on enrolment figures alone, UP Diliman is really basically an engineering school; those of us in a small minority in the humanities and the law just happen to be noisier than the typical engineer.)

I was told that the UP science complex—an impressive array of colleges and institutes geared toward establishing UP as a force to be reckoned with in regional S&T—has so far received some P3.5 billion in various forms of support and investments, chiefly from the government. Under President Alfredo E. Pascual, UP has asked Malacañang for a small fraction of that for what we might call cultural infrastructure—studios, laboratories, theaters, exhibition spaces, and equipment that our students and their teachers need to produce significant new work; so far I’ve yet to hear of a firm commitment for even this sliver of support given to S&T. (For the record, we shouldn’t be competing with S&T, but alongside S&T for our share of the national budget.)

Never mind, for now, our standing recommendation for the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Culture to oversee national cultural policy and arts promotion. Never mind that we hardly ever hear about arts and culture in the SONA, very likely because our high officials still see culture as entertainment, as an intermission number without any material contributions to make to the national good.

Last week, where someone could do something about the lot of the Filipino artist, they did, and on behalf of the UPAPS awardees, I’d like to thank President Pascual and his administration for this initiative, and can only hope that it is picked up by other visionary academic leaders elsewhere.

Herewith, the list of UPAPS awardees—including, immodestly, yours truly (who had to publish five books in three years to make the grade!):

MUSIC and DANCE: Maria Christine M. Muyco, La Verne C. de la Peña, Jonas Baes, Josefino J. Toledo; ARCHITECTURE: Gerard Rey A. Lico, Danilo A. Silvestre; FILM: Grace J. Alfonso, Sari Raissa L. Dalena; FINE ARTS: Patrick D. Flores, Jason B. Banal, Leonilo O. Doloricon, Ruben Fortunato M. De Jesus, Ma. Eileen L. Ramirez, Reuben R. Cañete; LITERARY WORKS: Jose Y. Dalisay Jr., Ricardo M. de Ungria, Eugene Y. Evasco, Jose Neil Carmelo C. Garcia, Roland B. Tolentino, Rosario T. Yu, Layeta P. Bucoy, Victor Emmanuel Carmelo D. Nadera Jr.; RADIO, TELEVISION and RELATED MEDIA: Fernando A. Austria, Jr., Danilo A. Arao; SCHOLARLY WORK: Priscelina P. Legasto; and THEATRE: Josefina F. Estrella, Dexter M. Santos, Alexander C. Cortez.