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Triumphant new moon (Part 1)
BY SYLVIA L. MAYUGA Far from commercial galleries and madding crowds in traffic agony, art lovers and students flowed through a well-lit Vargas Museum in UP Diliman on Nov. 13, 2012. New moon over the joint opening of Santi Bose’s “You Can’t Go Back Home Again” and Ronald Ventura’s “Watching the Watchmen” marked a milestone in Philippine art history. Bose’s iconoclasm is legend now. For nearly four decades, he challenged Western art canons, subjects, materials, shape, form and language, down to modernist rebellion in our country. Beyond its timeless gems, Santi saw through the nature of art itself like Marcel Duchamp. Duende had him drawing on the backs of old calendars as a boy, moving on to pointillist drawings of countryside idylls in the ‘60s. Chucking traditional canvas and frame altogether in his youthful lyrical phase, he gathered antique wooden windows in old Vigan painstakingly. His poet buddy Krip Yuson titled his “window art” exhibit, “Chameleon Years” in the ‘70s. 
Santi spent his 20s in martial law. Shape-shifting was a matter of survival for an artist loath to sell his soul to Madame Imelda’s “true, good and beautiful” syndrome. That tricky act pulled by someone in both the first CCP’s Thirteen Artist Awards and the AAP’s Twelve Emerging Artists is captured in “Self-Portrait,” 1976 – lean, bare-to-the-waist, blue-jeaned Santi staring at the future with thundercloud and lightning on his chest. By decade’s end, a giant wall painting of his window art rose on Quezon Avenue in Imee Marcos’s Kulay Anyo ng Lahi. Coeval were his satirical drawings of fraile and babaylan for Nonoy Marcelo’s animated indie film, Tadhana. But that was it for Bose and martial law on his narrow path between “fine art” and “social realism” spawning sloganeering posters and streamers of protesting workers and peasants in glaring reds, grays and black. Santi recognized: “Art is all about ideas” back in UP Fine Arts. Distancing from epic clash, he found the same unholy order of things 5000 feet above sea level in Baguio. His trajectory from lyricism to elegiac protest is traceable in the Vargas Museum in "Bury My Soul in Chico River." Duende at its best had Igorot warriors lifting a highway over their rice terraces in 1981 in mixed-media, protesting a cellophane mill poised to poison their mother river and unconquered way of life of untold age. His paintbrush honed after seven years of Marcos’s travel ban, Santi left for “the center of art,” New York City, in 1980, ready to strike fire. But an art market controlled by a “Yale mafia” confined him to obscure galleries, where he found a Cherokee artist-shaman and Hispanic and Asian artists at the visionary edge. He concluded: “The significant art now and in the near future—the next wave—will come from the minorities!” Baguio Boy wears loud reflector shades against a backdrop of urban grafitti in Avenue C, a near-Polaroid painting of his moment in America’s detritus. In contrast came a sharpened sense of origins in “Year of the Pig,” 1983 – a fine, lyric mixed media ouevre with a near-scientific etching on zinc, of roots, shaven tree trunks and a wild pig, black on a sacrificial pyre. Its surface was neither canvas nor window but handmade paper from Philippine grass, an ongoing experiment by fellow-artists and visionaries in creative ferment. Among them, was master printmaker Pandy Aviado, fresh from study and hands-on work in Madrid and “the Mecca of Printmaking," Paris. Santi learned etching in his printmaking workshop in Baguio in the summer of 1977, flowing to collaboration for (ITALS) Kulay Anyo ng Lahi with Nonoy Marcelo in Tadhana, an animated compendium of new Philippine art. Back to windows in Eyes of Gauze, Santi turned into a red-kerchiefed campesino, brush in hand beside a skull, crawling plants and truncated dolls in a dark forest below. From that inner world of muted light and shadows emerged “The Letter (Song for Manong Series),” 1988 – a white-haired immigrant alone in his room, with drawings of Hollywood actors chock-a-block with Cordillera tribesmen on the walls and windowsill. Tribal kin dance at his feet, his back turned on the glorious tropical sunset peeking through his window- a homecoming Ilocano retiree stranded in his dream. With fire in his belly stoked higher, Santi expanded his forays for old windows to centuries-old Hispanic churches, alive with the touch of long-gone folk artists, secret talismans in their hands, painting and sculpting Christian icons. Now he set a dialogue of Mystic Rose and Sta. Lucia’s “miraculous eyes” with anting-anting and oracion in sketches, paintings, murals and assemblages. Santi’s quest was clear. He told a TV interviewer in a Hong Kong group exhibit: “In our old way of life, art and life were together. Modernism and superstition coexist in my country. We turn everything into our own way of thinking.” That tension propelled him for the rest of his life. Like Shiva, Creator and Destroyer, brown boy danced from medium to medium--drawing, etching, painting, filling murals and assemblages with epigrams, oracles, sepia-ed historical photos, pots, mats and maps, anting-anting, bits of Ifugao hydrology, computer graphics, even real human bones. In between were performance installations with music, dance and chant. The unfinished look of nearly all his later art records hurry. Lines between past and future, art and otherworldly vision were blurring as Santi cries: Awake, my people, to who you were, and the justice we owe ourselves! From the Baguio Arts Guild he co-founded in the leaping energies of the ‘80s came artist cum shaman language, reaching the foreign ear. Santi exhibited in ASEAN, Hawaii, Chile, Cuba, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, San Francisco and West Germany. He did performance installations in Canada, California and Australia, like his Guild co-founder, Robert Villanueva with his “nature art.” Vargas was Santi’s third retrospective since his fatal heart attack in 2002, but no single venue has yet contained all his tracks. Magical new moon summoned a memory-–Santi in ninja black atop the Baguio Convention Center at the arts festival in 1989, with his “satellite radar” woven of bamboo by traditional Asin woodcarvers collaborating in performance installation with music and dance. That night, a single living symbol demolished “separate” realities–-art, space technology, rice terraces rising to the sky. Banaue’s rice terraces were declared a UNESCO World Heritage site two decades later. A decade since his death, the art world continues to mull Bose’s influence on the art of his time. Meanwhile fiery duende continues to warm the heart, urging a spirit army on. --KDM, GMA News To be concluded in PART 2.
Santi spent his 20s in martial law. Shape-shifting was a matter of survival for an artist loath to sell his soul to Madame Imelda’s “true, good and beautiful” syndrome. That tricky act pulled by someone in both the first CCP’s Thirteen Artist Awards and the AAP’s Twelve Emerging Artists is captured in “Self-Portrait,” 1976 – lean, bare-to-the-waist, blue-jeaned Santi staring at the future with thundercloud and lightning on his chest. By decade’s end, a giant wall painting of his window art rose on Quezon Avenue in Imee Marcos’s Kulay Anyo ng Lahi. Coeval were his satirical drawings of fraile and babaylan for Nonoy Marcelo’s animated indie film, Tadhana. But that was it for Bose and martial law on his narrow path between “fine art” and “social realism” spawning sloganeering posters and streamers of protesting workers and peasants in glaring reds, grays and black. Santi recognized: “Art is all about ideas” back in UP Fine Arts. Distancing from epic clash, he found the same unholy order of things 5000 feet above sea level in Baguio. His trajectory from lyricism to elegiac protest is traceable in the Vargas Museum in "Bury My Soul in Chico River." Duende at its best had Igorot warriors lifting a highway over their rice terraces in 1981 in mixed-media, protesting a cellophane mill poised to poison their mother river and unconquered way of life of untold age. His paintbrush honed after seven years of Marcos’s travel ban, Santi left for “the center of art,” New York City, in 1980, ready to strike fire. But an art market controlled by a “Yale mafia” confined him to obscure galleries, where he found a Cherokee artist-shaman and Hispanic and Asian artists at the visionary edge. He concluded: “The significant art now and in the near future—the next wave—will come from the minorities!” Baguio Boy wears loud reflector shades against a backdrop of urban grafitti in Avenue C, a near-Polaroid painting of his moment in America’s detritus. In contrast came a sharpened sense of origins in “Year of the Pig,” 1983 – a fine, lyric mixed media ouevre with a near-scientific etching on zinc, of roots, shaven tree trunks and a wild pig, black on a sacrificial pyre. Its surface was neither canvas nor window but handmade paper from Philippine grass, an ongoing experiment by fellow-artists and visionaries in creative ferment. Among them, was master printmaker Pandy Aviado, fresh from study and hands-on work in Madrid and “the Mecca of Printmaking," Paris. Santi learned etching in his printmaking workshop in Baguio in the summer of 1977, flowing to collaboration for (ITALS) Kulay Anyo ng Lahi with Nonoy Marcelo in Tadhana, an animated compendium of new Philippine art. Back to windows in Eyes of Gauze, Santi turned into a red-kerchiefed campesino, brush in hand beside a skull, crawling plants and truncated dolls in a dark forest below. From that inner world of muted light and shadows emerged “The Letter (Song for Manong Series),” 1988 – a white-haired immigrant alone in his room, with drawings of Hollywood actors chock-a-block with Cordillera tribesmen on the walls and windowsill. Tribal kin dance at his feet, his back turned on the glorious tropical sunset peeking through his window- a homecoming Ilocano retiree stranded in his dream. With fire in his belly stoked higher, Santi expanded his forays for old windows to centuries-old Hispanic churches, alive with the touch of long-gone folk artists, secret talismans in their hands, painting and sculpting Christian icons. Now he set a dialogue of Mystic Rose and Sta. Lucia’s “miraculous eyes” with anting-anting and oracion in sketches, paintings, murals and assemblages. Santi’s quest was clear. He told a TV interviewer in a Hong Kong group exhibit: “In our old way of life, art and life were together. Modernism and superstition coexist in my country. We turn everything into our own way of thinking.” That tension propelled him for the rest of his life. Like Shiva, Creator and Destroyer, brown boy danced from medium to medium--drawing, etching, painting, filling murals and assemblages with epigrams, oracles, sepia-ed historical photos, pots, mats and maps, anting-anting, bits of Ifugao hydrology, computer graphics, even real human bones. In between were performance installations with music, dance and chant. The unfinished look of nearly all his later art records hurry. Lines between past and future, art and otherworldly vision were blurring as Santi cries: Awake, my people, to who you were, and the justice we owe ourselves! From the Baguio Arts Guild he co-founded in the leaping energies of the ‘80s came artist cum shaman language, reaching the foreign ear. Santi exhibited in ASEAN, Hawaii, Chile, Cuba, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, San Francisco and West Germany. He did performance installations in Canada, California and Australia, like his Guild co-founder, Robert Villanueva with his “nature art.” Vargas was Santi’s third retrospective since his fatal heart attack in 2002, but no single venue has yet contained all his tracks. Magical new moon summoned a memory-–Santi in ninja black atop the Baguio Convention Center at the arts festival in 1989, with his “satellite radar” woven of bamboo by traditional Asin woodcarvers collaborating in performance installation with music and dance. That night, a single living symbol demolished “separate” realities–-art, space technology, rice terraces rising to the sky. Banaue’s rice terraces were declared a UNESCO World Heritage site two decades later. A decade since his death, the art world continues to mull Bose’s influence on the art of his time. Meanwhile fiery duende continues to warm the heart, urging a spirit army on. --KDM, GMA News To be concluded in PART 2. 
