TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 168
14th June 2022
Dear friends and colleagues
The intriguing exhibition by Pio Abad in the three rooms at the top of the Ateneo Art gallery that I mentioned last week may be termed an election special as it was all about the collection of art, silver and jewellery made by Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos with money that, it is to be assumed, was siphoned off from what should be the sovereign wealth of the Philippines.
But what was the exhibition? Its purpose or function? An analysis of the collection or a denouncement of it? A satire or a celebration?
Perhaps, I am, for reasons that will become clear, the worst or best of reviewers.
The first of the three rooms – they are all large and darkened – had nothing in it but a small photograph and a dramatically lit sculpture:
The photograph was taken by his Abad’s mother and of his father in his youth when they with other protesters on 25th Feb. 1986 following the Marcoses flight, broke into the Marcos’s palace and saw the full range of their acquisitions. The cheesy painting that the young man stands in front of portrays Marcos emerging like some mythical figure from a bamboo stalk. The sculpture is of the same subject. Though Abad did not know it when he bought it, it is a fake. But that is strangely appropriate because many of the works bought by Imelda were fakes – bought either through ignorance or else to launder money.
Compared to the emptiness of the first room the second room was richly stuffed: a wall of color photographs of silver vessels, mainly ornate, a wall of drawings of other objects and between them a stand with stacks of ninety postcards that you were invited to take. On each postcard was a painting once owned by the Marcos or, using the fake name they collected under: Jane Ryan and William Saunders. You started to get a sense of just how large the collection was. And how disparate. (In a foyer outside a blown-up photo of one room in a Marcos palace is enough to show that however wonderful individual objects may have been they had been installed amidst much kitsch and vulgarity.)
The third room had a row of what we might call ghosts of Imelda’s jewelry and a new series of paintings by Abad.
The jewellery are resin duplicates of ones once owned by Imelda and meant to be sold for the State’s benefit at Christies. The sale was cancelled by Duterte. They appear here above texts in Tagalog here saying how much they were equivalent to in terms of how much poor people needed to live on, or how many people were tortured under Marcos. Devoid of colour, they were like those albino salamanders that live hidden away in caves where being devoid of any sunlight have lost any pigment.[1] The paintings, for me the least effective works here, though I liked the way each left-hand side was painted and exposed just like a book. The paintings parrot the designs of books or manifestos published by Marcos.
But it is the postcards in the previous room that really fascinate me. Now, I really like postcards. In fact, I have a collection of twenty-three shoe boxes nearly filled with postcards. Most of them of art, filed alphabetically by name of the artist. like my brother, whose collection I inherited, every time I go to a museum I have to buy some, as mementos, as part of a pictorial archive, as a (please note use of word) part of a “collection”. To see ninety postcards, free to take was like a bonus Christmas present to me! But I was enormously frustrated when I picked each of them up and find that there was a lot of text on the back, but normally no information about the actual painting:
What I want to see on the back is, for example, this for Postcard 2:
Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-1664) David with the head of Goliath, 1650s, 190.5 x 105.4cm Sold Christies 11.1.91 for $825,000 (GBP432,390)
Is this frustrating lack of attributions to artists deliberate on Abad’s part? I have to assume so. That he wants us to think about the history of the collection, the way it has been bought and hidden away from the pursuers from US and Philippines government, rather than questions of historical. This is not about connoisseurship.
What does this and the other series do? How do they work? As a trenchant critique or merely as elegant filigrees of discontent? Does this do more than talk to the already converted? What else can one do? Formally, it is a very sophisticated variation on the poster and sweet works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. But in ideological function I think what it does do is, above all else, remind us, keeps us talking about something that the Marcoses want us to forget. It makes us ask again why the Marcoses collected so much stuff, why they hid it, and why so many people have colluded with them in its concealment. Keeping memory alive and working is essential. To emphasise, as Abad says, that, “this assortment of objects served as a cloak that naked rampant criminality”.
It also goes without saying that mounting this exhibition is not only a necessary act, but also a brave act, both on the museum and the artist’s part.
Finally, can I raise a very different point? The overwhelming instinct back in 1986 when so many were desperately poor was, I am sure, to sell these ill-gotten treasures. What however if the paintings at least had been kept and used as the basis for an international collection in the National Museum? The Zurbaran looks like good example of his work – or his studio’s work. Other Marcos paintings sold at the same sale – the Titian portrait of Giulio Romano, an El Greco of the coronation of the Virgin for example – are excellent.[2] The Philippines is the most European of Asian countries. This was part of their heritage – they should have had ownership of it, not Imelda. A collection of European art other than those few seventeenth Spanish paintings still kept in churches would have had a function similar to the Museo de San Carlos in Mexico City.
Speak again next month
Tony
- These works can be seen at www.janeryanandwilliamsaunders.com. More rekated works can be see at Abad’s own website. ↑
- I do not have access to the full list and results of that sale, only the highlights listed in Christies Review of the Season 1991. ↑