ANTITUSSIVE

Updated 07:23am (Mla time) Aug 16, 2004 By B. Carlo Tadiar Inquirer News Service IT WAS Paris-based Filipina artist Sandra Palomar who mapped this article, based on three cultural events of the past year. Though she lives halfway across the globe, she puts out a quarterly here to the exhibits of galleries and museums in Metro Manila. The guide is a single-leaf publication with maps locating the venues. At the same time that she was launching her guide/map, two major exhibits were mounted revolving around maps. The first was "Projections," a thoughtful presentation of rare, antique maps of the Philippines at the Lopez Museum. The second was an unfortunate retrospective on Daniel Burnham's dawn-of-the-century plans for the development of Manila at the Metropolitan Museum. "Projections" curator Yeyey Cruz notes a primary impulse of mapmakers is "to put one's locality in the center, an affirmation of self." Depending on their vintage, standard global maps of yore have centered on either Europe or the United States. (I think the current politically correct solution has been to put an ocean in the middle. That way no one gets offended.) The Lopez Museum collection is, almost needless to say, focused on the Philippines, from the earliest drawings in which this place we call home is but a nebulous and awkward fetus, almost grotesque in its rudimentariness. Yeyey says she avoided chronology in her exhibition of the maps, but a sense of evolution is simply inescapable. She reports that visitors tend to look for their hometown in the diversely varied maps of the Philippines, again affirming the self. The Lopez antique map collection is itself built on the desire for self-affirmation. It is a Third World, postcolonial elite's scrapbook of mentions of their locality by the imperial West. Yet there is a deliberately reflexive gaze going on here. The collection puts the observer in the place of the observed. In this context, it is the colonizing West that is put under anthropological scrutiny, that itself becomes an ethnicity and a locality rather than a universalized perspective. All their superstitions get drawn. Yeyey's presentation brings to the fore the shakability of what is sold as fact in mapmaking. The historical perspective afforded by the exhibit highlights the constant incompleteness of knowledge-or more accurately, the extreme particularity of knowledge to a place and time. On the one hand, the maps gathered here can be read as a growingly more correct comprehension of these islands. On the other, the gathering suggests that the map, i.e., any map, is, in the whole sense of the word, a fiction, a kind of truth, a kind of lie. Highlights The suggestion is made through the juxtaposition of art with the maps, which, to begin with, highlights the aesthetic quality of the latter, especially the antique ones, with all their charming drawings and beautiful calligraphy. There are echoes too between paintings and maps, like Alfonso Ossorio's "Faineants" (1945), an idyll of monsters, and nearby ancient maps teeming with the creatures that filled sailors' nightmares. Yeyey points out that mapmaking inevitably skirts with the unknown, the edge of the earth, the lair of demons. A sense of the void is also reiterated in a series of maps of oceans-charts dwelling on a vast emptiness intermittently margined by coastlines. Displayed together they achieve a poetry of the blank, of the gap, of istance, lostness and also longing. Themes like these are echoed in Roberto Chabet's "Four Directions" (1999), a quartet of canvases filled with swirling paint, each one centering a harmonica. The polyptych (an artwork made up of more than one panel) alludes to the mythic square into which the world has been divided (the four corners of the earth), and the winds of North, South, East and West which has filled fables. Artist Dormafe Baluyos' "Pulse" (1999), a gathering of a seismogram, bound charts and video, is a virtual send-up of the map. Baluyos joined a team of seismologists studying a volcano and rendered her own map of the site by training a video camera on the ground and taping the terrain as she walked over it. The artwork replays this "map" of the mountain on a video monitor; it's a geographical representation that unfolds in time, rather than on a two-dimensional surface, and that's also jarringly blurry, choppy and dizzying. The video is accompanied by a collection of seismographic charts of the location and by an actual seismogram displaying the earth's infinitesimal movement, its unstoppable evolution, at the very point where these things are on display. This absurd-ization of mapmaking reflects how abstractive cartography is and how reductive it is, how infinite any place is in relation to its representation. There is also Lena Cobangbang's "AAIMLN" (2002), a collection of feverish, map-like abstractions in pencil on tracing paper. The collection is presented in the form of a book, like an atlas, bound between ponderous copper covers. Yeyey says that as visitors leaf through the drawings, the pencil comes away with their fingers, slowly erasing these already hazy "maps." It reminds us of the frailty of knowledge, its susceptibility to obliteration, at the same time that it evokes a sense of the feebleness of knowing, its never-sureness. Some of the most affecting maps in this collection are not the precious ancient ones, but the maps produced by the American military during the last world war. They have an expansiveness of proportion and a very strict palette of girlish pastels; it's a show of scientific-ness, of detachment and objectivity. It's a vision of the world in which nothing really bad ever happens and everything can be fixed. The scariest map is a machine. It is a search engine into which you can type any address and it will not only locate it for you, it will profile the humans in that location. Yikes. The search engine uses the vast information accessible to billing operations of utility companies to create a map of the Philippines as an aggregate of consumers. Juxtaposed against the ancient maps with all their amphibian monsters, this map reiterates how all maps are informed by fear and desire, and how those fundamental drives are structured by history. Bayanmap is mapmaking at is most cutting edge because it is driven by the totally contemporary desire for infinite consumption and the very real fright of not turning in a profit. Bitterest point Perhaps the bitterest point in the exhibition is in a famous part of the permanent Lopez collection, Juan Luna's 1886 "Espana y Filipinas," a fine if sad Filipino take on that gorgeous 19th-century genre of painting, the allegory. A robust white woman in Hellenistic couture leads an india in baro't saya up a staircase towards some white heaven. Of course we know that relationship was never so amicable and, at the time of the painting, on the verge of a violent collapse. And so, if we are to follow the allegory, the staircase leads to nowhere, the opacity of the sky in the picture therefore highly appropriate. When the pair reaches the top, they will plummet... to The End. If there were a next frame, Filipinas would find herself, exasperatingly, like Sisyphus, back at the bottom of the staircase, but in the arms of another patronizing white woman, this one named America. In a sense, this next frame is the subject of the Metropolitan Museum exhibit on Daniel Burnham. As you know, the guy after whom the park in Baguio is named was, at the turn of the century, probably the most famous architect in America. He was commissioned by the US to design the capital of its newest acquisition, the Philippines, a country it unjustly established sovereignty over through war and subterfuge. The trouble with the Burnham exhibit is that it (dis)ingenuously skirts the political, racial, economic and-most egregiously-the cultural aspects of its subject, the American design for (one could also say "on") Manila. The plan was to forge in Manila the City Beautiful. This was the name of the movement which Burnham was a leading light of. Like Paris, Manila was to have a grandiose civic center, with imperial neo-classic buildings, from which would emanate grand, tree-lined boulevards. The core of this plan was executed and stands today as familiar landmarks: the Agriculture and Finance building at one end of Luneta Park, the Legislative Building, the Manila City Hall and the Post Office. The exhibit is a eulogy over the unfulfillment of the plan. The Manila we live in is such a catastrophe that the exhibition notes barely need even rue. By simply presenting the dream of Daniel, the viewer is swayed by the loss of those tree-lined avenues, that civic center. PERHAPS there's something instructive in a three-time failure? The exhibition notes recall that there were several Filipinos sent to the US to study architecture, and they came back and built the era's landmarks in the neo-classical style in which they had been instructed. They're all lovely buildings, like the germinal set at the Padre Faura campus of the University of the Philippines, soignee, finely proportioned. But perhaps something could be gained by scrutinizing the manner in which the architecture has been completely translated by local usage and in a manner entirely at odds with the original aesthetic intent. One only has to visit these buildings to witness the transformation of spaces meant to achieve grand effects into: mezzanines within mezzanines, alcoves within niches, labyrinthine enclosures within majestic halls meant to showcase amplitude and stateliness. Perhaps something could be gained by staring at the actual in relation to the fantasy of The Plan, or the nostalgia for it. "I, like most residents maneuver around [Manila] without a mental aerial map (without even a sense of North, South, East and West)," says Neferti Tadiar in "Manila's New Metropolitan Form" in the anthology of critical essays, "Discrepant Histories." "Instead I get around with images of seriality, that is, routes that I can trace by imagining a flow of adjoining objects on particular pathways." In this essay on the effusion of flyovers during the Aquino administration, Neferti is herself tracing a physical, political-economic as well as a cultural map of Manila, and she notes the city is devoid of a sense of transcendence, that mental overview which structures a place like Manhattan (the archetypal opposite of Manila), where one can, from almost any point and almost instantly, locate oneself. Indeed, in Manila it takes more than a few moments to get one's bearings on the rare occasions that we are hoisted to a high-rise view of the city. For Neferti, a more accurate "map" of Manila would be a representation of the infinite and harrowing density of the existential experience of the city, "its thickness... its crowds and traffic, its dirt and pollution, and its relentless assaults on one's senses." If there were a monument by which Manila could be identified, its Eiffel Tower, it would be that, the congestion and its ever-shifting, constant turmoil. Neferti says flyovers help produce the effect of subjecthood by raising those with automobiles (buses were supposed to take the low road) out of the morass of non-humanity that comprises the bulk of the city. It must be understood that in a city like Manila, many, if not the majority, fall outside the realm of personhood or subjecthood, like squatters or people without cellphones. They are not part of "us"; they are explicitly, clearly, incontrovertibly "them." In a symbolic and yet also very real sense, they are devoid of a life-because they have no money. Subjecthood The preciousness of subjecthood in this mortifying morass that we call our hometown is brilliantly expressed in the song "Ambulansya" by the band Rivermaya. Penned by the band's frontman Rico Blanco, the song is an extraordinary and important work of art. It has an operatic drama and a lyric voluptuousness; it's like a rocker's aria. And it's about the traffic. It's also about identification, about identifying with another under circumstances--such as Manila, such as traffic in Manila-where sanity is dependent on adeptness at dis-identifying, other-izing, dehumanizing. It begins with the subject of the song, the singer, getting stuck in traffic: hindi na tayo gagalaw hindi na tayo aabante ano kaya ang dahilan? construction ba o merong nagsalpukan? The subject is relieved to hear the siren of an ambulance. 'sang binatilyo and sakay akap ng nobya ngunit walang malay mahal niya ang magulang niya nais niya lamang sanang lumipad Ortigas, Sucat at Libis sing ang hari ng bilis? The subject, evidently driving, tailgates the ambulance: "hala, sige! tutukan mo!" he cheers himself on. "Kunwari'y kasama ka!" Finally, he's free from the traffic. Then just as he's congratulating himself, the ambulance swerves and he slams into a truck. parang wala kong nadama parang wala kong narinig halik ng bubog sa pisngi tuhog ng bakal sa bungo The song ends with a refrain of its first line: "hindi na tayo gagalaw/hindi na tayo gagalaw..." There's a marvelously clever mirroring and ambivalence in the narrative, a kind of Mobi?s strip circularity. The driver-subject winds up dead like the suicide he takes advantage of, but there is a sense that he is that self-same person in the ambulance, partly because of the loop of the story line, partly because, as we learn towards the end, the subject is singing through his own death, from a point beyond the existential. We have this impression also because the singer so thoroughly identifies with the youth he sees in the ambulance (and yet whose tragedy the driver must need take advantage of), whom he somehow knows loved his parents but simply wanted to soar. There is also a direct correlation in the kid's flight, his assumed sense of dominion over the metropolitan sprawl, and the driver's self-congratulation at his having outwitted traffic jams and those stuck back there. "Sino'ng hari ng bilis? Sino'ng hari?" is supposed to have been uttered by the suicide, but it could just as well have been boasted by the driver. Against others In psychoanalysis, this is a kind of utterance made from the point of the ego-ideal, that subject position from where we see ourselves from the point of view of others (or the Other), like those people stuck back there in traffic, whom we imagine to be envying us when we have the license of a siren, a "wang-wang," when we leave them to eat our dust (Sinong hari? Sinong hari?). This is what I mean when I observe the difficulty of achieving personhood or subjecthood in such a setting as Manila. One must transcend, fly over the morass of social contradiction, which, as a denizen, one is necessarily part of and, indeed, part-cause. The difficulty stems from the plenitude of that morass-the traffic-which is not just a physical gnarl but equally a political, economic and social one as well. "Ambulansya" captures the profundity of that gnarl, its overwhelming-ness, the sense that the only escape from it is death. The song also surprisingly echoes Neferti's "map" of Manila, an academic analysis. Despite the catastrophic conditions we live in, works of extraordinary imagination and intelligence continue to be produced. You just have to have the right map to get to them. http://news.inq7.net/lifestyle/index.php?index=1&story_id=4809 http://news.inq7.net/lifestyle/index.php?index=1&story_id=6279 ©2004 www.inq7.net all rights reserved