Today,as I was searching the Guardian's website for a review on a novel with a strange plot on migration/cultural displacement, I stumbled on an obit for Tillie Olsen:'feminist author famous for inspiring aspiring women writers to find a voice'. I just learned she died on New Year this year. The book I forgot, by the way, is The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi.
Today, I also read that this year's Orange Prize is won by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun.
Today, just knowing someone's death and someone's large triumph.
And today, Diyoskopo, someone is selling copies of the old 'Storya book, through Amazon in UK for the outrageous and odious price of $162.6 a copy.
I had just posted a new entry (after more than a year of silence!), an old essay on women artists in Mindanao which first appeared in a catalog for a travelling exhibit. A new art show -- works by women artists -- to debut in July at the University of Cagayan de Oro is said to have found its basis from this little piece. Kelly Ramos-Palaganas , the curator for the art exhibit, blogs on the forthcoming exhibit.
And also, I thank Ron Dayoc, a filmmaker with whom I worked on a project for Lumah Ma Di Laut: Center for Living Traditions and Progressio, for volunteering to help me post entries in this blog so that I can (hopefully and finally) finish encoding and posting the old reportage and continue to write new ones.
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Monday, June 04, 2007
Of desaparacidos and disappearing acts: Rendering the Mindanawon as Woman Artists
The problem lies in how to transform a culture where women artists continue to be rendered as absent.
Katy Deepwell, “Questioning stereotypes of feminism in the visual arts,” in n.paradoxa
One out of 14. Only one woman out of the 14 artists at the art exhibition, Sungduan 2003,Mindanao Phase.
In a earlier report prior to the launching of the exhibit, the roving curator had these numbers:
West Mindanao, five female artists out of 46
North Mindanao, eight out of 49
South Mindanao, 12 out of 70
Twenty -five out of 62. For every 6.5 male visual artists in Mindanao, there is but one female.
Ours is a longer tally, Mindanawon women visual artists:42.
In Sungduan, instead of the women’s works themselves, a woman’s (textual) crafting on their works.
A shortlist, a few descriptives, a brief reportage, as if by recording their absence(s), we further make their absence(s) obvious and palpable, and they and their works could somehow appear and sprout before us.
Instead of the texture, the text; instead of the images, words. (And we could, would have afforded both).
And we, in doing so, are one and part of the complicity, in rationalizing the afterthought, the banal matter of thoughtlessness. (“Oh, the women! How come we have forgotten our female species?”)
Maybe at this point, for now, this has to be enough. We delete the absence, substituting the real thing with a simulacrum, a harried pastiche. But this must confront us why the wide blank, the huge gap? What brought us to this dystopic stage when women are but once again nominal, a token?
Eight years ago, in April 1997, there was Tagbuan, also in Cagayan de Oro, when the first attempts to gather artists and their works in Mindanao. At that first Mindanawon Artists Congress, under the auspices of the once fledgling Oro Art Guild, at least 11 women came from all over, their voices heard, their work exhibited, claiming space, appearing along with those done by men. Eight yeas after, still in Cagayan de Oro, still under the auspices of the Oro Art Guild, and one spare, meager, token work by Eudeza Gonzales Laput, someone who was not even in the original list of Dipolog’s “Padayonay” artist collective.
How could the women have disappeared this art event? Have they gone underground? Why? How much of this accident or incident?
We heard someone utter, sayang. She said the nuances of the theme lokal, and the sub-theme lambigit, are rife with possibilities, images and metaphor, narratives and concepts closest to the women artists as Bangsamoro, as Mindanawon(i.e., the local as domesticas in domestic violence, domestic bliss and blues; the vernaculars of peace building and reconstruction efforts, as refugee, as aid worker, not as victims but as survivors; also of the feminist buzz “to think globally, act locally”)
We were told the exhibition was to showcase emerging talents. And among Mindanao’s females of the species, the emerging talents capable of fresh, innovative ideas and concepts were either too busy teaching or nonchalant or complacent about joining the exhibition.
By saying so, the stewardship of the exhibit foretold of the relegation of the female vision/perspective of what is “her local/e” to the outermost fringes, (dis)locating to the marginal once more the interiors and inner lives central to Mindawomen, their distinct interpretations of the lokal and lambigit.
Tita Lacambra Ayala, painter and poet; Maria Virginia Yap, painter and poet; Leah Padilla, painter, gallery manager, and art teacher; Bada Torralba, installation art/painter, art teacher; Emilie Jontilano, painter and art teacher; Lorna Fernandez, painter; Miyen Lim, painter, abstractionist, graphic designer; Jean Claire Dy, graphic designer, poet, essayist, journalist; Rosie Aradanas, painter; Amihan, painter, poet, fictionist; Janah Fernandez, painter; Delsa Mortola, photographer; Iris Tamparong, photographer; Geejay Arriola, performance and theater artist, cyberweaver….
Bada Torralba’s kamagong totem poles were interesting and authentic, but they are site-specific and won’t have as much responsive power outside of the garden of a congregation of madres in remote San Luis town in Agusan del Sur and therefore cannot be transported into a claustrophobic mall.
Out Emilie Jontilano, an art teacher and entrepreneur, also considered earlier as a possible entrant. She waited to be called so she could give time to her own flowering. Only to learn the process had been changed and the curator, running out of time, diverted from an earlier map of the process.
We have to credit the exhibit though for its keen sensitivity to ethnic representation, taking pains to include a Maguindanaoan and a Tausug and a Talaandig; but surely it sorely missed out on gender equity. And say, the engagement with relevant sociopolitical issues, which in strife-sodden Mindanao was identified by the exhibit managers as the site of conflict/conflict transformation and peace building (a.k.a “culture of peace”). The troubling reality in the Mindanawon art scene as represented by Sungduan mirrors the same sad politics of women’s marginalization.
As in peace processes, so too in exhibits. So say Women Building Peace: “from Dayton to Rambouillet, East Timor to Tajikistan, despite the peace building work of women at community and grassroots levels, women continue to be absent or poorly represented at peace negotiations.
”Despite the enormous step that women have taken, most approaches to conflict resolution and peace building have either ignored, marginalized or failed to address the unique needs of women in conflict situations. Women consistently remain minority among participants in peace building projects, negotiations and policies.
Overall the absence of women in Sungduan sa Mindanao, like other major shows
without the women, bring up questions about “notions of quality, of critical judgment that had wittingly or unwittingly been used to exclude certain groups of arts makers and their subject matters” even as these were within the ambit of the theme of lokal and the sub-theme of lambigit. These exclusion has kept out and missed out on artists’ works addressing the very issues of the lokal extant to being woman: ranging from domestic bliss and blues to domestic violence to displacement and dislocations of women bakwits.
The curatorial judgment, notwithstanding the progressive rhetoric of its supposed framework, still adhered to traditional (nothing crafty about it; largely unconscious, hugely un-confronted, we would like to think) models of visual culture in favor of largely male and formalist concepts of visual arts.
It is not our only intention to bash and blame the stewards for making “desaparecidos” out of Mindanawon woman artists. We suggest that to some extent we had it coming: by default.
We have, as a novelist tells her sister in the craft, “ all participated in the daily ambush of our lives”(in our case, of our art, our works) by refusing to get involved and to engage in the politics of representation, agenda setting, and decision-making.
And we are told even the women themselves said opted out, eliminated themselves voluntarily. That this is not only a case of the disappeared (“desaparecidos”) women but also of those who had performed disappearing acts. Was it because they summarily have renounced the exhibit as inhospitable locale for their works, so they move away from the gallery and the market? But to where?
No woman in the Oro Art Guild, the sponsoring organization; no woman in the NCCA subcommittee; no woman among the organizers.
Two other groups, that of the Visayas and the National Capital Region, did not have to deal with a wide blank and a huge gap like this because, in the first place, the curators and coordinators are women.
How to deal now with such absence and silencing if one is a woman and a Mindanawon, and feel it essential to engage in the arts or engage the world through the visual arts?
Katy Deepwell, in n.paradoxa, a webzine for women artists, tells the other women (as artist, viewer, critic, and curator) have elsewhere dealt with such acts of deletions and erasures.
Deepwell tells of Lyn Malcolm who in 1985 made a piece called “Why Have There Been So Few Great Women Artists?”
Deepwell describes the piece as “an installation of a corner of a room with a table laid out with tea things. All the stereotypical signs of civilized, middle-class, bourgeois femininity are present: Laura Ashley wallpaper, an embroidery hanging in a glass frame, a tablecloth, crocheted knickknacks, the cooking of sweet cakes, but the work asks as troubling question while pointing to an answer in this context. The energy, devotion and excess lavished on the domestic environment is suggested by the work itself as why women do not achieve “greatness” as artists.
Deepwell continues to describe another strategy: in “The Subversive Stitch,” Rosika Parker draws attention to the messages about the bind of femininity which reinforces the separation of creativity between public and private, between conforming to models of feminine achievement and the limited scope for transgressing them.
We could, if we would, do what Ute Meta Bauer, Tina Geissler and Sandra Hastenteufel did in the mid-90s: present evidence. Deepwell tells us that a traveling exhibit in Germany developed because of a protest at the absence of women at the last Documenta in Kassel curated by Joel Hoet is a good example of this. The project called Informationsdients/Information Service was produced by file upon file of information, catalogues, press cuttings on women who Jan Hoet might have selected.
For the moment, we only got names: Phebe Simbajon-Pena, Emmie Nazareth, Feba Laplana, Luz Salahog, Bai Noraida Abu, Maritess Samson, Bada Torralba, Bulan Timpangco, Amihan, Dyana, Flodeliza Dador, Daisy Jamasali, Rorie Aradanas, Juanita Amatong, Lea Padilla, Sandra Jamiro, Carlota de Pio, Rowena Egargo, Laura Mindaro, Emelie Jontilano, Rosalie Zerrudo, Mucha Jurwina, Rachel Holazo, Tosie Tionko, Mary Ann Guinoo, Miyen Lim.
Again, Deepwell suggests that there remains the troubling question, when it is not hard to accumulate more and more information on women and their work, to prove visibly and repeatedly that women are not absent, just routinely ignored and devalued: How do you change a culture in which women disappear? She suggests: “Perhaps, we need more than facts, more than tributes, more than celebration, greater attention to reasons behind the arguments raised against women.”
Patrick Flores in his essay, “Birthing Women Artists,” admonishes women in the arts “[that they must] learn to talk about their art in relation of critical issues. They must become art critics, art historians and curators…. [They must] find ways of doing and making art, and articulating its political underpinnings and team up with non-fine artists (or crafters).”
Flores further suggests that women build and nurture communities. In Mindanao, there is no all-women collective like NCR’s Kasibulan. Though we have the Mebuyan Peace Project and the Mindanao Women Writers (Min-WoW), there is no collective or community to speak of, although the possibility of nurturing one has been there all this time.
Hear this: a few days after Sungduan was launched in November 2003, seven women artists showed their works at Gallery J in Davao’s SM City. The show, Visual Poetry, included mostly paintings of the decorative and domestic types, but the catch was that part of its proceeds would be shared with a project combating abuse against women. It was also in Davao’s milieu in the late of ‘90s that the nine-woman group masterminded an all-women art show. The possibility therefore of a collective is ripe there in Davao. And so too in Zamboanga, where the women seem to have rooted in clusters. However, with the Internet, a cyber-collective/community is all the more possible.
For women artists have long been engaged in much serious braiding and plaiting, in pakiglambigit/networking not by making collectives of artists,, with it risks of in breeding, but in being women-in-(creative)communities, as creative development workers in nongovernment organizations, as volunteers donning other responsibilities and using the various art forms (murals, installations, etc.) in facilitation and in negotiations.
Again the troubling question, paraphrasing Deepwell, how do you change a Mindanawon culture in which women are present but disappear from the field of vision?
In Davao and the south, 8:42
In Zamboanga and the west, 6:46
In Cagayan de Oro and the north, 13:49
In Sungduan, 1 out of 14
Katy Deepwell, “Questioning stereotypes of feminism in the visual arts,” in n.paradoxa
One out of 14. Only one woman out of the 14 artists at the art exhibition, Sungduan 2003,Mindanao Phase.
In a earlier report prior to the launching of the exhibit, the roving curator had these numbers:
West Mindanao, five female artists out of 46
North Mindanao, eight out of 49
South Mindanao, 12 out of 70
Twenty -five out of 62. For every 6.5 male visual artists in Mindanao, there is but one female.
Ours is a longer tally, Mindanawon women visual artists:42.
In Sungduan, instead of the women’s works themselves, a woman’s (textual) crafting on their works.
A shortlist, a few descriptives, a brief reportage, as if by recording their absence(s), we further make their absence(s) obvious and palpable, and they and their works could somehow appear and sprout before us.
Instead of the texture, the text; instead of the images, words. (And we could, would have afforded both).
And we, in doing so, are one and part of the complicity, in rationalizing the afterthought, the banal matter of thoughtlessness. (“Oh, the women! How come we have forgotten our female species?”)
Maybe at this point, for now, this has to be enough. We delete the absence, substituting the real thing with a simulacrum, a harried pastiche. But this must confront us why the wide blank, the huge gap? What brought us to this dystopic stage when women are but once again nominal, a token?
Eight years ago, in April 1997, there was Tagbuan, also in Cagayan de Oro, when the first attempts to gather artists and their works in Mindanao. At that first Mindanawon Artists Congress, under the auspices of the once fledgling Oro Art Guild, at least 11 women came from all over, their voices heard, their work exhibited, claiming space, appearing along with those done by men. Eight yeas after, still in Cagayan de Oro, still under the auspices of the Oro Art Guild, and one spare, meager, token work by Eudeza Gonzales Laput, someone who was not even in the original list of Dipolog’s “Padayonay” artist collective.
How could the women have disappeared this art event? Have they gone underground? Why? How much of this accident or incident?
We heard someone utter, sayang. She said the nuances of the theme lokal, and the sub-theme lambigit, are rife with possibilities, images and metaphor, narratives and concepts closest to the women artists as Bangsamoro, as Mindanawon(i.e., the local as domesticas in domestic violence, domestic bliss and blues; the vernaculars of peace building and reconstruction efforts, as refugee, as aid worker, not as victims but as survivors; also of the feminist buzz “to think globally, act locally”)
We were told the exhibition was to showcase emerging talents. And among Mindanao’s females of the species, the emerging talents capable of fresh, innovative ideas and concepts were either too busy teaching or nonchalant or complacent about joining the exhibition.
By saying so, the stewardship of the exhibit foretold of the relegation of the female vision/perspective of what is “her local/e” to the outermost fringes, (dis)locating to the marginal once more the interiors and inner lives central to Mindawomen, their distinct interpretations of the lokal and lambigit.
Tita Lacambra Ayala, painter and poet; Maria Virginia Yap, painter and poet; Leah Padilla, painter, gallery manager, and art teacher; Bada Torralba, installation art/painter, art teacher; Emilie Jontilano, painter and art teacher; Lorna Fernandez, painter; Miyen Lim, painter, abstractionist, graphic designer; Jean Claire Dy, graphic designer, poet, essayist, journalist; Rosie Aradanas, painter; Amihan, painter, poet, fictionist; Janah Fernandez, painter; Delsa Mortola, photographer; Iris Tamparong, photographer; Geejay Arriola, performance and theater artist, cyberweaver….
Bada Torralba’s kamagong totem poles were interesting and authentic, but they are site-specific and won’t have as much responsive power outside of the garden of a congregation of madres in remote San Luis town in Agusan del Sur and therefore cannot be transported into a claustrophobic mall.
Out Emilie Jontilano, an art teacher and entrepreneur, also considered earlier as a possible entrant. She waited to be called so she could give time to her own flowering. Only to learn the process had been changed and the curator, running out of time, diverted from an earlier map of the process.
We have to credit the exhibit though for its keen sensitivity to ethnic representation, taking pains to include a Maguindanaoan and a Tausug and a Talaandig; but surely it sorely missed out on gender equity. And say, the engagement with relevant sociopolitical issues, which in strife-sodden Mindanao was identified by the exhibit managers as the site of conflict/conflict transformation and peace building (a.k.a “culture of peace”). The troubling reality in the Mindanawon art scene as represented by Sungduan mirrors the same sad politics of women’s marginalization.
As in peace processes, so too in exhibits. So say Women Building Peace: “from Dayton to Rambouillet, East Timor to Tajikistan, despite the peace building work of women at community and grassroots levels, women continue to be absent or poorly represented at peace negotiations.
”Despite the enormous step that women have taken, most approaches to conflict resolution and peace building have either ignored, marginalized or failed to address the unique needs of women in conflict situations. Women consistently remain minority among participants in peace building projects, negotiations and policies.
Overall the absence of women in Sungduan sa Mindanao, like other major shows
without the women, bring up questions about “notions of quality, of critical judgment that had wittingly or unwittingly been used to exclude certain groups of arts makers and their subject matters” even as these were within the ambit of the theme of lokal and the sub-theme of lambigit. These exclusion has kept out and missed out on artists’ works addressing the very issues of the lokal extant to being woman: ranging from domestic bliss and blues to domestic violence to displacement and dislocations of women bakwits.
The curatorial judgment, notwithstanding the progressive rhetoric of its supposed framework, still adhered to traditional (nothing crafty about it; largely unconscious, hugely un-confronted, we would like to think) models of visual culture in favor of largely male and formalist concepts of visual arts.
It is not our only intention to bash and blame the stewards for making “desaparecidos” out of Mindanawon woman artists. We suggest that to some extent we had it coming: by default.
We have, as a novelist tells her sister in the craft, “ all participated in the daily ambush of our lives”(in our case, of our art, our works) by refusing to get involved and to engage in the politics of representation, agenda setting, and decision-making.
And we are told even the women themselves said opted out, eliminated themselves voluntarily. That this is not only a case of the disappeared (“desaparecidos”) women but also of those who had performed disappearing acts. Was it because they summarily have renounced the exhibit as inhospitable locale for their works, so they move away from the gallery and the market? But to where?
No woman in the Oro Art Guild, the sponsoring organization; no woman in the NCCA subcommittee; no woman among the organizers.
Two other groups, that of the Visayas and the National Capital Region, did not have to deal with a wide blank and a huge gap like this because, in the first place, the curators and coordinators are women.
How to deal now with such absence and silencing if one is a woman and a Mindanawon, and feel it essential to engage in the arts or engage the world through the visual arts?
Katy Deepwell, in n.paradoxa, a webzine for women artists, tells the other women (as artist, viewer, critic, and curator) have elsewhere dealt with such acts of deletions and erasures.
Deepwell tells of Lyn Malcolm who in 1985 made a piece called “Why Have There Been So Few Great Women Artists?”
Deepwell describes the piece as “an installation of a corner of a room with a table laid out with tea things. All the stereotypical signs of civilized, middle-class, bourgeois femininity are present: Laura Ashley wallpaper, an embroidery hanging in a glass frame, a tablecloth, crocheted knickknacks, the cooking of sweet cakes, but the work asks as troubling question while pointing to an answer in this context. The energy, devotion and excess lavished on the domestic environment is suggested by the work itself as why women do not achieve “greatness” as artists.
Deepwell continues to describe another strategy: in “The Subversive Stitch,” Rosika Parker draws attention to the messages about the bind of femininity which reinforces the separation of creativity between public and private, between conforming to models of feminine achievement and the limited scope for transgressing them.
We could, if we would, do what Ute Meta Bauer, Tina Geissler and Sandra Hastenteufel did in the mid-90s: present evidence. Deepwell tells us that a traveling exhibit in Germany developed because of a protest at the absence of women at the last Documenta in Kassel curated by Joel Hoet is a good example of this. The project called Informationsdients/Information Service was produced by file upon file of information, catalogues, press cuttings on women who Jan Hoet might have selected.
For the moment, we only got names: Phebe Simbajon-Pena, Emmie Nazareth, Feba Laplana, Luz Salahog, Bai Noraida Abu, Maritess Samson, Bada Torralba, Bulan Timpangco, Amihan, Dyana, Flodeliza Dador, Daisy Jamasali, Rorie Aradanas, Juanita Amatong, Lea Padilla, Sandra Jamiro, Carlota de Pio, Rowena Egargo, Laura Mindaro, Emelie Jontilano, Rosalie Zerrudo, Mucha Jurwina, Rachel Holazo, Tosie Tionko, Mary Ann Guinoo, Miyen Lim.
Again, Deepwell suggests that there remains the troubling question, when it is not hard to accumulate more and more information on women and their work, to prove visibly and repeatedly that women are not absent, just routinely ignored and devalued: How do you change a culture in which women disappear? She suggests: “Perhaps, we need more than facts, more than tributes, more than celebration, greater attention to reasons behind the arguments raised against women.”
Patrick Flores in his essay, “Birthing Women Artists,” admonishes women in the arts “[that they must] learn to talk about their art in relation of critical issues. They must become art critics, art historians and curators…. [They must] find ways of doing and making art, and articulating its political underpinnings and team up with non-fine artists (or crafters).”
Flores further suggests that women build and nurture communities. In Mindanao, there is no all-women collective like NCR’s Kasibulan. Though we have the Mebuyan Peace Project and the Mindanao Women Writers (Min-WoW), there is no collective or community to speak of, although the possibility of nurturing one has been there all this time.
Hear this: a few days after Sungduan was launched in November 2003, seven women artists showed their works at Gallery J in Davao’s SM City. The show, Visual Poetry, included mostly paintings of the decorative and domestic types, but the catch was that part of its proceeds would be shared with a project combating abuse against women. It was also in Davao’s milieu in the late of ‘90s that the nine-woman group masterminded an all-women art show. The possibility therefore of a collective is ripe there in Davao. And so too in Zamboanga, where the women seem to have rooted in clusters. However, with the Internet, a cyber-collective/community is all the more possible.
For women artists have long been engaged in much serious braiding and plaiting, in pakiglambigit/networking not by making collectives of artists,, with it risks of in breeding, but in being women-in-(creative)communities, as creative development workers in nongovernment organizations, as volunteers donning other responsibilities and using the various art forms (murals, installations, etc.) in facilitation and in negotiations.
Again the troubling question, paraphrasing Deepwell, how do you change a Mindanawon culture in which women are present but disappear from the field of vision?
In Davao and the south, 8:42
In Zamboanga and the west, 6:46
In Cagayan de Oro and the north, 13:49
In Sungduan, 1 out of 14
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