Art review: The Met Museum and the pains of metamorphosis

The Metropolitan Museum is speaking of itself as a cultural institution that is in the process of METamorphosis. It sounds exciting. It looks exciting, too.   Over lunch, the ladies of The Met talked about their major project for National Arts Month and beyond, which involves a new strategic direction for the museum.   The mission-vision sounds like it should, talking about doing educational programs for exhibits and the need to build a sustainable financial foundation for the space. What is new is what it calls a “heightened focus on Philippine Contemporary Art and Design.”   Now this didn’t come as a surprise. This interest in contemporary art seems to have been long in coming for The Met, considering an art market that has been created around these artistic projects labeled “current” or “contemporary” or “new.”   Other spaces like the Lopez Museum and Yuchengco Museum have been able to engage with younger art and artists, putting together exhibits that meld together form and content across history to the present. The Met’s finally getting on that bus. And it’s about this current project, yes, but it seems there is more to it than art.   Careful curation   Probably the biggest project The Met has embarked on in recent years, “The Philippine Contemporary: Scaling the Past and the Possible,” is a first of its kind exhibit that historicizes Philippine contemporary art from Fernando Amorsolo to the present.

Curated by Dr. Patrick Flores, there is of course every reason to be critical of an exhibit that attempts to do a survey of Philippine contemporary art, no matter how grand the scale, and how it fills all of the museum’s second floor. After all, this is a claim on that label, and is a necessary process of exclusion given curatorial subjectivity.   It is something that Dr. Flores admits to, and while it is easy to go through this exhibit and glean which artists he prefers – where everything must boil down to that – there are many pieces and installations here that are a surprise.   Looking at the breadth and scope of works and artists that is gathered by “The Philippine Contemporary” one is hard put to even be contentious.   There is of course just being overwhelmed, and I don’t mean just the great number of works here. There is too, the fact of works by artists familiar, which are rarely exhibited if at all, but particularly wonderful for me – and here is my own bias for forms that are rarely viewed as “art” – is Dr. Flores’ inclusion of graffiti and komiks, printmaking and photography.   Art across forms, space, time   On the stairs that lead to the second floor of The Met, Mark Salvatus’ “Boy Agimat” and Louie Cordero’s “Nardong Tae” are on opposing walls. In the room filled with modernist paintings were framed prints of the Father of Printmaking Manuel Rodriguez, as there were covers of Francisco Coching comic books, and photographs by Teodulo Protomartin. Outside of this room, one of the museum’s pillars holds framed work by Nonoy Marcelo of “Ikabod Bubwit” fame.   To see these forms as part of any exhibit at all of Philippine art is rare enough; to see them on The Met’s walls, is a feat in itself   As such there is a sense that every work included here – and not just each artist – is a choice that is painfully deliberate and thoughtfully placed. It also seems to cut across artist groups and movements, and dares go in the direction of possibility. And so Jerry Araos’ “Bartolina” is a choice replete with the work’s politics. Junyee’s “Wood Things” as the biggest installation is a statement in itself, based as he is in Los Baños and away from Manila’s art scene.   More than this part of the exhibit that is about historicizing Philippine contemporary art, two changing exhibits fall under the sections: “Sphere” and “Direction.” The former is envisioned as a way of focusing on a particular aspect of art history, be it an artist, movement or work; the latter is space for new art by young artists.   For the inaugural show of “Sphere” the focus is on artists from Bacolod and its environs, including work by Brenda Fajardo, Charlie Co, and Alfonso Ossorio among others. More interesting to me was the exhibit under “Direction,” if only because of its diversity in forms and media. There is a Catalina Africa installation, a video by Kiri Dalena, paintings by Buen Calubayan and Ian Carlo Jaucian.   Here is where you spend time staring at art, and drinking it in. Here is where you wish The Met had seats that would allow you to do exactly that.   Problematic popularization   Because too, the task for this METamorphosis, it seems, is to engage a bigger public and get them to go to the museum, and appreciate the art that is here.   Certainly the art is here – it might be said it’s always been at The Met – but it takes more than just having something to look at, to get people to come. And come back, or as often as we’d like them to.   There is The Met’s P100 peso entrance fee which, even for me, is a big price to pay for any museum. Even more so since The Met doesn’t allow us to take photos of the art it carries. The fear is that of art forgery, and yet the easy answer to that is: who’s afraid exactly? I don’t know that in the age of the internet and social media, digital cameras and cameraphones, what we should be fearing are forgeries.   Neither is it clear to me that bringing in the sponsors and giving them the microphone for Gala Night, excluding pretty much everyone, including the artists (they’ve got their own artist night), is any way to engage a bigger public.   Yes, I take issue with the huge Belo logo stamped all over, not just the program, but also the press releases that came out. For a museum afraid of fakes, here is a beauty clinic that celebrates precisely that. I would be laughing at the irony were it not so problematic.   Where's the art?   And I get it. The Met needs sponsors, but why give them that microphone?   If in the end, and ultimately, popularization of the museum will depend on the voice of Tim Yap hosting the event and hamming it up for cameras in front of Junyee’s work, and if in the end a Google search about this exhibit yields a gallery filled with beauty clinic-whitened endorsers going to the exhibit’s Gala Night, what happens to art then? It becomes mere backdrop, it is secondary, it is ultimately not in those photos about this exhibit.   As such, in the process of bringing it closer to the public, The Met disenfranchises that public further – after all, the photos of the gala only solidified the museum as a space for the elite, the official site of The Met carries but one photo of the exhibit.   A sad thing really, since “The Philippine Contemporary: Scaling the Past and the Possible” is an exhibit far bigger than mainstream showbiz and elite coolness can even imagine, it is bigger than any of its sponsors; it is also the one exhibit that is worth seeing this year – and it opened in February.   It also ultimately has everything it needs to get us to walk through those museum doors, it just needs to be more imaginative than simply bringing in celebrities and socialites. – KDM, GMA News   "The Philippine Contemporary: Scaling the Past and the Present" is a permanent exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum Manila, located at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Complex, Roxas Boulevard, Malate, Manila. The Met is open from Monday to Saturday 10:00AM to 5:30PM. Entrance fee is P100 pesos with prices varying for group tours.   Katrina Stuart Santiago writes the essay in its various permutations, from pop culture criticism to art reviews, scholarly papers to creative non-fiction, all always and necessarily bound by Third World Philippines, its tragedies and successes, even more so its silences. She blogs at http://www.radikalchick.com. The views expressed in this article are solely her own.