Botong did murals on historical events, myths, and national heroes – now safe subjects; what the Neo-Angono artists rendered in their now defiled mural is contemporary truth –the social and political reality largely attributable to the person the NPC board wanted to please.
BY ELMER ORDOÑEZ
The Other View / Sunday Times
Posted by Bulatlat
Vol. VII, No. 42, November 25-December 1, 2007
The broadsheet called it a painting and then a mural. Is there a difference? I asked my wife who taught art studies in Diliman. No difference, she said, if it is a large-scale painting whether executed directly on the wall or affixed to the mur. A mural can also be portable like the rolled canvas of the protest artists who always have to elude state censors.
Our talk inevitably led to Carlos “Botong” Francisco whose commissioned murals in public buildings are now icons in public art. Botong was one of the pioneering modernists (a student along with Galo Ocampo of Victorio Edades at UST) and may well be the patriarch of Angono artists – who together with Jose Blanco must have been looked up to by the younger ones who now belong to the Neo-Angono Artists Collective.
This may be conjecture but calling themselves Neo-Angono suggests a departure from the artistic practices of their elders and a desire to set their own norms. Like Botong the young artists have allowed themselves to do murals on commission. Nothing reprehensible here unless the artists accept work indiscriminately.
Commissioned by the National Press Club (NPC) to do a mural depicting the struggle for press freedom, the young artists finished their work and delivered the mural only to discover later that their mural had been defiled supposedly for “leftist marks.” A few of these “leftist marks” censored by brush, apparently to please the Palace occupant, involved figures who are by no means “leftist.”
The NPC board demanded that the mural should have no ideological leanings, left or right, but what they have done is an act of the ideological right, and also of a boor and a vandal.
Botong did murals on historical events, myths, and national heroes – now safe subjects; what the Neo-Angono artists rendered in their now defiled mural is contemporary truth –the social and political reality largely attributable to the person the NPC board wanted to please.
Alice Guillermo in her book Protest and Revolutionary Art in the Philippines 1970-1990 provides a history of muralism and progressive art, among other things, from the time of Juan Luna with his Spoliarium and paintings of workers in France, through the American occupation (the cartoon satirists), after the war (Botong, Hernando Ocampo, and Vicente Manansala), the sixties (Danny Dalena, Jaime de Guzman, Ben Cabrera), the First Quarter Storm (Nagkakaisang Progressibong Artista at Arkitekto or NPAA), martial law period (social realism and revolutionary art) to the present progressive artists.
Alice’s book has a section on the NPAA who participated in an art contest (sponsored by Shell) where the judges put a premium on abstractionism. The winners turned out to be NPAA members who made a ritual of burning their prize-winning paintings in protest against bourgeois art and oil companies raising gasoline prices. This was the time of street demonstrations against the “three evils” – U.S. imperialism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism.
I remember one NPAA event in 1971 (also written about by Alice) at a U.P. ROTC parade in review in honor of the Vanguard fraternity president Gerry Fernando and visiting Gen. Fabian Ver of Malacañang. As Fernando was trooping the line in a military jeep, hundreds of U.P. demonstrators, students and faculty alike, marched along the west end of the parade ground toward the grandstand where sat the VIPs stunned.
At this point the NPAA from the roof deck of the Library building unrolled down a huge protest mural in red and black covering the east wing of the building facing the parade ground. Many cadets fell out of ranks and joined the demonstrators. Pandemonium followed. Later the ROTC band marching back to barracks played the “Internationale,” the workers of the world anthem.
In these parlous times, watch for the painting on the wall. Sunday Times / Posted by (Bulatlat.com)
