Brave new world

Unless one is old enough, he or she will not see the difference. Now is not yet the best of times for artists. In fact, these are still hard times. But when the Maker graduated college in the early 1980s, there was hardly any employment opportunity available for artists. Now at least, his students can find work.

Thus, when in the 1980s his own mother, Consuelo, expressed her desire to see if her young-artist-son could hold on to a job, the job her artist-son found for himself was as a writer doing beats for the Union of Catholic Asia News (UCAN), a Catholic news service ran by Jesuits and based in Hong Kong. Besides this, he also worked as news feature writer for the string of weekend magazines that grew here in Cebu only to fade away eventually. In the meantime, he still did paintings, did artwork freelance and eventually found himself working part-time as a lecturer in the school where he now teaches. Those had been good times. He did not work nine-to-five for anyone. And as he was yet an active bachelor without children, he did quite well with his modest income. By now, the young artist-son has proven to himself and to his late mother that he can keep a job. He can survive and do well.

Still, he perceives the world has changed drastically since then. He wonders if his past still works as a model for survival for his students. He knows there’s a brave new world out there. And he is almost sure the constructs for surviving as an artist have changed almost entirely.

In his time, the way to go was to produce paintings and sculpture on a large scale and exhibit regularly. Getting spaces for exhibition was not as expensive as it is now. And even then, the young-artist-son always wondered if the returns were worth the cost. Not too many people viewed exhibits and still less really appreciated the works. Fewer still actually bought. But this was the period of martial law and the works were more often than not an expression of the artist’s rebellion against conditions back then. And so the artist-son felt a huge sense of fulfillment from his art. And if he needed money he could always do some writing, do advertisements and teach. Were he young today, would he do things differently? How differently?

What was not present back then was social networking and the wealth of opportunities this now offers those who need to expose their art to the public. “The public” has become planetary. Some young artists can sell works anywhere in the globe. Quite certainly, this potential has yet to be tapped for maximum returns. The once-young-artist-son now wonders what he can do with his art given the radical changes he sees all about him. He intends to give his own students fair competition.

He sees now the benefits of being a writer. Contemporary theories of art now point out that absolutely everything is text. The painting is visual stimuli but only to the person actually seeing it. As soon as people exchange notes on an artwork, it is immediately transformed into text either in written or oral form. As soon as the painting enters the web, it becomes information-object and behaves as any other information object. In the old days, artists always prefigured how the artwork might look in the gallery or museum, or if they were anti-gallery, they always designed how it would look like in the final site. These days, it is good to wonder how the artwork will look in a computer monitor. Photography and text layout have become once again essential and so with video.

In summarizing his plan for the future, the once-young-artist-son has decided to fragment the fields of future artistic activities. He continues doing performance art with “XO?” an experimental performance art group that includes fellow artists Russ Ligtas, Roylu, Chai Fonacier, Doogie Panagduan, Nino Baring, Pradiip del Mar and Oliver Seville. Wherever they perform, they always carry with them the memory of the late drummer Winston Velez. They are currently doing a pilgrimage chronicle of “Leon Kilat and His Sigbin.” They will perform in the late afternoon of July 4 at Bacong, near Dumaguete. The performances always look good live and in video. In the pragmatic sense, they help the artists gain recognition especially in the web.

But there is also the problem of funding the performances. After giving it much thought the once-young-artist-son recalls a book that became a cult-classic of the seventies, “Small Is Beautiful.” His problem with large works in oil or wood is that they are very expensive and so can be bought only by the current market for regular art. If art and artists must progress from here on, he believes the art themselves must be transformed. One does art for recognition with the public. The larger and more remarkable this art is, the better for the artist even if these might be as unsellable as performance art. If one must do art to sell, they might as well be small and low-priced or affordable even by young collectors such as those who now work at the call centers. They must be something easy to mail to anyone in the world who might want to buy. In this way, the market of art will expand. “Small Is Beautiful.” The better life artist now only dream of may yet happen in this lifetime.