A gallery in Manila has employed in several instances the term "post-local" to emphasize its investments in participating in or organizing non-Philippine events in Asia, Europe or the US. A lifetime ago these events would have been called "international" events in their sense of importance, but that smells too much of cultural diplomacy. The word "global" is too risqué even now, and no self-respecting writer will use this overloaded, fast-food staple to be used in catalogues and brochures and other exhibition paraphernalia. Thus the need for some pizzaz in the marquee-blinking lights of post-local. You can't risk using "post-Philippine" though, as that will rile up a lot of sentiments. Better to be diplomatic, although ambiguous, to learn to curse between clenched teeth. But then again, such neologisms are necessary, to appeal to something the activists of the previous generation are so apt to rile at. It is neocolonialism, or at least a symptom of it. Enter marketing intervention: you can re-present anything, even vile and objectionable, with brand-new wrapping. It shines like tinsel on Christmas Day though it stinks like Araw ng Patay.
The way I read terms like "post-local" make me realize how much marketing lingo is employed now in current-day art practice. Even I dread to use "contemporary" (note I used current) because that is again also, loaded and contentious, not to mention problematic. Gone are the old days when art writers were purists, academics who wrote for their own ken and hot for some honorarium. The art market in Asia has employed the services of very good pen-pushers, neologists, critics and curators to a certain degree they do shape the way art is bought, sold and trafficked. "Post-local" is a euphemistic way to say that this art "doesn't really give a f&$k to the question of Philippine identity anymore." In certain ways I agree to this and any other form of interjection.
The question of Philippine identity in art practice has been asked by Leo Benesa as a provocation to artists living in his time. And that was post-war, when we were suddenly inundated by Filipino grantees who studied Modern Art, mostly in the US. Certainly, after decades of vernacularizing Cubism, Surrealism, Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and then striking forward with our own Social Realism, so vogue in the 70's to the 90's, we can see where Benesa's provocation has been proven, not by argument, but by praxis. To be certain, people who talk of post-local are also provocateurs who can very well say "O ano na pagkatapos ng Philippine identity?" (What's next after Philippine identity) Yet, I even dare to ask "Talaga bang kailangan talaga pag-usapan pa ang identity?" (Is talking about identity even relevant?)
The situation is that art and its practice in the Philippines as well as in Asia is a plagued by a problem of articulation. We have not found the best way to define our uniqueness in terms of environment, context and concerns so that we have to, by contingency, use the terms, references and notes of "Contemporary art" of the Biennials, the Documentas, The art fairs and so on. Anyway using terms articulated so smartly by the British, the French and the Americans are simply far too cool to ignore and far too foolish not to adopt, especially in the marketing sense. I used to find soundbytes and quotations as a preamble to an art essay quite stylish ten years ago. But writers of the post-local persuasion have found quoting an increasingly annoying habit. They read like Bible passages to me, when recited like that at the beginning of exhibition texts. What follows after that soundbyte is a heuristic sermon on how the artist has fulfilled or violated some law of perception, or movement or whatever. I mean why the evangelization style? Why preach? And why, for the love of Rosalind Kraus, do they refer to such obscure Modernist texts? Does anyone want to quote Robert Hughes, who said of Damien Hirst as a marvelous product of "big money and no talent"? Or Suzi Gablik even, who said modernism has failed.
And why the ongoing debate on Duchampian notions of "art as idea" or "art as intention"? His urinal is in a museum, the debate is over. But why press it further? Why the gung ho? The nervous whistling in the dark? Someone's slip is showing. Someone's insecurity is showing. Well, we don't want to be heard with a thick accent maybe? Oh, forget it. When we fail to articulate, we use slang. That's gotta do it, man. Or the King's English. Talk Imperial. Post-kolokoy. Post-coitus.
Speaking of post, I have to admit, concede even, that I once saw my practice as a contention versus what I call "an excess of conceptual/capitalist intoxication" in present-day art making in Manila. I came to New York with my head buried in my shoulders: I was trained to think anti-Imperialist slogans for many years and I was preparing myself for a mental battle. My work as a wood carver is located, contextualized and rooted in local traditions, however they are dismissed by scapular-wearing professors. I thought I needed to defend myself, my roots, and so, my identity. It can happen and it has happened, when artists coming off a tour of the US come back with "imported" thoughts. Its like corned beef in post-war Manila: you gotta have it in your luggage to prove you have been indoctrinated.
But as I came to speak to, work alongside with and even rankle with artists living in Paris and in New York, I saw past the forms, the practice, the theory and the history - I encountered the same problems of having to contend with limits to access to space, lack of materials, scarcity of resources, difficulties in articulation versus an overabundance of creative plans, projects and dreams. I came to understand that the use of what I used to consider detritus in the work of art is not something to fulfill some textbook, philosophical or aesthetic point (as would the post-local thinkers would have us believe) but as a matter of contingency and expediency. With a city like New York teeming with surplus and rejected stuff, how can you, as an artist not have a feel to exploit the loaded meaning of a used chair? Or the fecundity of performative actions? That is what is available in their environs. And therefore material, substance to their work. I learned the hard way to understand their conditions when I had to source material for my wood carvings from online stores and spend big funds because it was way too expensive, and way too scarce. Somehow I felt that working in the subtractive mode, as did the ancients, were due to an abundance of material. In conditions of lack, the practice of assemblage in sculpture is a natural outcome. It is what it is: the artist contends with the material and the modes of production that is most accessible, if not often most convenient.
In other words, I came to the conclusion that I was wrong in my prejudices, due to bad information. Even if my intentions were to highlight my identity, which again proved to be nothing more than an assertion in a city of immigrants speaking 200 languages.
There is nothing intrinsically objectionable in the way art is made ANYWHERE in the world. Art is a construct of hope, that any expression is possible, not simply permissible. That is, it is not a finished artifact, but a series of projects that seek to create that conceptual space in the public as well as in private, that at certain times, everything can be expressed and seen and heard and experienced, sans the fear of censorship and the anger of being severely dismissed, or the despair of being inchoate or without means. Thus, art is, the final bastion and the beacon of human freedom. Art that thrives in a society means that such society has learned to listen and to tolerate and to respect the dangerous motions of choice and freedom. The more censorship and unjust intolerance there is, well, the more art will try to struggle. And art will always even critique itself when it becomes institutionalized. It is, in a sense, a wonderful, perpetual rebellion. A very human, all-too-human, story.
What is objectionable therefore is how marketing language is indeed a form of censorship. By using cultural politics and "diplomacy" to re-present art-making with pitches, posturing and obscurantists' language is to propose that certain practices have a hierarchy of increasing sophistication and decreasing kitschiness. The Philippine public - being so used to centuries of archaic but deepseated notions of feudalism - have their sense of insecurity exploited when these agents of "high culture", these "bohemian bourgeoisie" create a sense of mystery and cordon sanitaire around art. Ironically contemporary conceptual art was formed as a foil versus such machinations of "high culture" in the tradition of object-based work. Yet it is marketed in the local as something vogue, chic and even post-whatever. By considering art as a finished and established institution, with all its histories, texts, canons and saints, these guys are in fact trying to build a Church. But instead of issuing anathemas, they resort to dismissiveness.
The same can be said of course, with those who exploit native patriotism, with assertions of Philippine identity or social relevance. I have learned long ago that cultural identity is not a given or determining fact. To believe and insist on such is a form of tyranny and limitation. This I think is what the post-local really wants to address and in a way I agree with the sentiment. Identity is asserted by motions and acts and not established nor justified by some form of genealogical lineage or community tax record. Also, being social or community-based does not take away from the artist to CHOOSE his or her community, even if that means, leaving the country, his place of birth to find those who understand and support his practice. Country or place of origin is what Sartre calls facticity - it is something you were born with, like the distance between your eyes. It is not your location as much as it is a point of DEPARTURE. Lethargy considered, it is a form of insularity when one finds many reasons not to try exploring other places. I was, at one point, a victim of this. Insularity says: you are Filipino first before you are an artist. Of course that is not true, and is as objectionable as any censorship. We are HUMAN first, before we become conscipts of any nation, faith or community.
And being human is the starting point of all artistic urges.
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