DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 8 Sept)—What kind of comfort can art afford us as we live through difficult times and harsher environments?
Ramon “Richie” E.S. Lerma, chairman and chief specialist of auction house Salcedo Auctions, said that art gives us a sense of order when everything else around us is out of place.
He was in Davao City for a rare art popup that featured pieces by National Artists Fernando Amorsolo, Ang Kiukok, BenCab, Jose Joya, Cesar Legaspi, Vicente Manansala, HR Ocampo, and J. Elizalde Navarro.a
“The exhibit’s theme about The Well-Appointed Life points to the role of art as one that presents an ideal. It takes us to a state of pleasure, joy, order within the confines of a canvas,” he said.
During difficult times, he said, people look for joy and try to recreate paradise. He referenced a COVID-19 pandemic situation where many of us were trying to be in control of the space that we have in our own homes.
He believes that the value of art lies in its ability to give hope amid uncertainty and quite literally, depending on the medium and material, bring light into one’s surroundings.
Ricardo Lagdameo, president of property developer Damosa Land, said that places for art learning and conversations can look like this: just an evolving blank space.
“I’m glad to see that people are starting to see that a blank space can transform into an art gallery,” he said. He explained that this is what an art experience could look like outside standard museum confines and the same idea can inspire people when they build their own houses or bring art pieces into their dwellings.
It is easy to take a look at art this way—that it is a medium that satisfies a need to escape or to take a breather from harsh realities. The air-conditioned art space supported that; the exhibit was mounted in the roof-deck of the Damosa Diamond Tower, an area that the purveyors endeavor to shape as a place for various community activities.
The venue is not as accessible as a gallery by the street or an art show in a mall, but the effort to bring art “closer to the public” is present alongside the business-as-usual agenda of the auction house which is to run a live and online auction mid-September.
The seemingly ivory tower setup highlighted one thing: art, which is made from natural materials and bits and pieces derived from Earth, is not invulnerable from its environment. It has to locate itself in some sort of a protective bubble.
Sarah Urist Green, curator, art educator, curator of The Art Assignment educational web series, said in one of her videos that art helps reveal the world around us and also highlights our precarious relationship with it.
“The world we live in and the objects we make to put into it are fragile,” she said in a video about how climate changes art. “Art can help us appreciate our planet and its climate, reveal to us its workings and visualize imminent futures. We devote considerable resources to keeping a selection of [art] secure at the perfect temperature and humidity so it has a fighting chance of outliving us mortals,” she said.
In another art experience, I found myself in the Locsin Dance Workshop in Quirino Avenue for Tunog ng Sayaw, an experimental dance theater performance. Dance was the medium and a bare stage was the canvas. Humidity was a negligible yet persistent force.
For dance National Artist Agnes Locsin, the creative practice of dance has always been a vessel—a way to educate and to pass on knowledge through generations.
“Everything that I do is about the Filipino experience,” she told the audience. Recalling previous productions that highlight her signature neo-ethnic vision, she said that Encantada, La Revolucion Filipina and Agila and Puno have always carried messages relevant to historical accounts and the current times.
Whether she is unpacking religion or the environment, she prompts the audience to reflect on the process of receiving these messages: “It’s how you read the work.”
The production opened with a piece that saw a dancer muffling in agony, moving around the space bathed by pins and fluorescent lights. This was followed by a menagerie of incongruent lines and movements that broke the fourth wall, with dancers in colorful t-shirts and denim shorts chanting and prancing with glee towards and away from the audience. The experience was fleeting but formed a good memory for personal introspections, much like other art forms and pieces.
In a way, appreciating art can also be a reminder of the good times that passed us by. Fernando Amorsolo’s impressionist depictions of an idyllic rural Filipino life, complete with detailed renditions of the light that bathed the subjects, can also be looked at as some kind of a recording of the planet’s observable climate back then. Sun rays can be observed gently kissing the skin of the Filipinos who were enjoying a carefree farm life—a situation that sits in striking contrast with the hectic life that we live today inundated with heatwaves, typhoons, floods, diseases, to name a few.
Art can still be a source of comfort for most of us but it takes a little extra effort to find one that hits the spot. (Jesse Pizarro Boga / MindaNews)