The ritual power of art

As a young boy in the mid-Seventies, I didn’t spend much time in the playground, nor did I cavort with the neighborhood kids. Who needed that? When I had my very own lair where I could run amuck, tumbling over the baskets, hiding under the colorful, geometric patterned weavings, and tinkering with the wood and brass thingamajigs my parents purveyed at their now-defunct Lahi Crafts bric-a-brac shop on 1418 A. Mabini St. in Ermita.

Most of the shop’s habitués were foreigners trawling around what I recall then to be a spanking tourist strip – a far cry from the malodorous muck and hussy-oriented sleaze that it has devolved into. My mouth still waters when I remember the ladyfingers that I would have my mom’s assistant Loida purchase from the nearby El Sombrero – its melt-in-your mouth, buttery decadence the stuff of sweet dreams that, to this day, has yet to be found anywhere else.

There were, of course, the curious locals who would putter into Lahi. Being at an age where names simply did not stick, I cannot recall the gaggle of personalities who shared my parents’ interest in Filipiniana. What remains etched in my memory, though, is that these people had very distinctive personal qualities, not so much in the way they were attired, which even then I found to be extraordinary, but more so in the manner in which they comported themselves. I can still hear the engaging questions, intelligent retorts, rollicked banter and hearty chuckles that emanated from that artsy group.

I cannot emphasize enough what a great impact those anonymous early encounters made on my person. How wonderful it must have seemed to me back then to lead that kind of existence – where sheer happiness could be found by simply being in the presence of kindred spirits and, of course, beautiful things.

Having grown up, it sounds really corny to look back and say that this is why I have come to believe in the magical power of art – in the way that it serves as a catalyst that makes us go beyond ourselves, moving us to forge existing relationships and create new ones.

Art inspires us to hazard the status quo and eschew the mundane in order to discover new and perhaps even better ways of being ourselves. In a sense, proof of its power, art engenders rituals, which transport us to new realities.

And so, it was perhaps not by happenstance when I received an invitation earlier this month from one of the ladies who, I would learn later on, belonged to that circle of friends who visited my parents’ place decades ago.

Gilda Cordero Fernando’s Junque was located in the same area as Lahi. My parents recall that she usually came around with her bosom buddy Cora Alvina, now director of the National Museum, and that she stocked old baro’t sayas in her store.

I had not made that connection yet – although I knew about Tita Cora, since my folks fondly sent to her their greetings when I started doing volunteer work at the Met – when Gilda very graciously wrote, saying that she would be delighted to have my wife and I join her at her Quezon City home as she unveiled her own, as well as her son and daughter-in-law’s, most recent art acquisitions – a reliquary, and a wall-sized sapin-sapin assemblage painting – by the celebrated visual artist Roberto Feleo.

I have nothing but admiration for Feleo, who I first discovered in 1998, through his jocular "sink or swim" aquarium installation, which I thought, together with two or three other pieces, saved the Alab ng Puso centennial exhibit from turning into a KKK flag fest. The next time I beheld his work was the following year, at the APT in Brisbane, where his tau-tao sculpture hovered over the heads of Queensland Art Gallery visitors. Gilda’s new addition to her sterling art collection (which includes, among others, seminal terracotta works by Julie Lluch, and more recently, a most amusing series of portraits of her household help painted on closet doors by Olan Ventura, so that – with tongue-in-cheek breaking into a guffaw – "they would always be around, serving her") is from Feleo’s 2003 Unanan exhibition at The Drawing Room.

"Ang Bakunawang Naipako" is a mixed media marvel: Glass, copper and the artist’s signature narra, yakal and roasted lauaan sawdust and glue concoction applied onto Manila paper, which is then attached to a support made out of formed aluminum expander sheets to form the vessel. The technical skill involved in creating this piece, coupled with the research that went behind the fabrication of such a fantastical vessel, with a bakunawa (Philippine dragon) perched on its lid – a hybrid object that combines functionality with echoes of traditional burial/maritime lore – indubitably shows off Feleo at his creative apogee.

The second work, which now graces the sitting room of Mol and Lilli-Ann Fernando, is "The Basi Revolt," recalling Esteban Villanueva’s similarly titled 1821 painting "consisting of fourteen panels which depict the failed rebellion in Northern Philippines against the Spanish government’s regulation of a sugarcane wine called basi." Inspired by what Patrick Flores ascribes to as "contradictory catechisms in light of (Villanueva’s) portrayal of the spectacle of execution in which the rebels are finally hanged and decapitated: to preserve the colonial order from its own violence, on the one hand, and to "save" the body politic through the collective redemption the colonial faithful aspires to through the Passion," Feleo’s caricature of officialdom gleefully skewers the status quo (the faces of certain individuals currently poisoning our political and economic landscape appearing as soldiers are spot on), in as much as it presents the palimpsest complexity of Philippine society through its many-layered format.

Mol and Lilli-Ann, together with the artist, began the unveiling ritual, their heads crowned with mid-summery garlands, with a toast sans basi – sake was determined to be the best alternative – followed by a well-received gamelan performance by a young member of the Fernando family.

The Fernando couple also expertly prepared our sumptuous full-course Japanese dinner, which was served in their mother’s paradisiacal garden. Amidst the exchange of stories, punctuated as always by hoots and cackles, about the goings on in the Philippine art scene – trust me, even the telenovelas can’t come up with these story lines – I could not help but feel how art seemed to have conjured up this occasion: Bringing us together, having sustained us and kept our lives in perfect synch through all these years.

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