The life
The good thing about artists parties is that they very quickly take on a heady optimistic “atmosphere”. It is a particular mindset. The music starts, the beer gets passed around. The conversations rise above the din of amplified music and then everybody just has fun for the rest of the night and well into morning.
The Visayan Islands Visual Arts Exhibits and Conference was held this week at the quaint romantic city of Dumaguete. There, artists from all over the Visayas, and by extension from all over the country, gathered for 3 days of conferencing, exhibiting and renewing bonds. It is a ritual event held every two years. This year was its 12th, which translates to a total run of over 24 years. It is the oldest such activity in the country.
VIVA Excon began in Bacolod from where comes Charlie Co, Dennis Ascalon, Manny Montelibano, Dr. Cecille Nava and Maurice “Peque” Gallaga. It is a traveling event. It has been held a total of three times in Cebu, twice in Dumaguete and once in Iloilo, Calbayog, Tacloban and Tagbilaran. It returns to Bacolod for a fourth time two years from now.
It is an important artistic event. Here is where artists consolidate their collective vision for themselves in the coming years. And it all happens entirely casually. The artists see each other’s works, talk, have fun, play or listen to music, dance and at the end of it all walk away with a somewhat hazy view of where their world is going at least for the next two years. And they think what new art work to produce next. And you might immediately find all these strange if you are not an artist. But that is the way things are. It is the mindset, the life.
This casual manner of looking at life has its good and bad sides. People who are not artists are excused to look at all these and ask: What, after 24 years has been achieved?
But the artists themselves might react to that question with wide-eyed surprise. Such is the innocence of art. What were they trying to achieve in the first place? You give an artist a venue for presenting work, a forum for talking shop and then one big party and all is well.
Few realize that those 24 years of hard difficult work organizing and presenting the VIVA Excon leaves behind an indelible historical mark as well it should whether the artists realize it or not. And it might take someone slightly removed from everything to see what that mark is.
At the very least, there is an inter-island network of artists that might be unprecedented for other places in the country. One cannot know exactly the state of artist communities elsewhere but definitely one can see that the people who go to VIVA have become over the years familiar with each other. And these bonds of familiarity have not at all been tapped for concrete results. And it might easily be done if the artists get their acts together a little more than they already have. By so doing to empower themselves.
But even so, there have been concrete developments. In a sense, VIVA has something to do with the rise of art schools in the Visayas Islands. Now we have art schools in Dumaguete and Bacolod as well as in Cebu. They are all linked in some way to the growth of VIVA and in more profound ways than that VIVA provides the opportunity for young artists to interact with art teachers outside the oftentimes artificial environment of a classroom. This opportunity does much to encourage young people to think about the possibilities of pursuing the art-making and art-teaching profession. Besides this, artists realize that the discipline of art requires a brisk exchange of artistic ideas across generations.
And this is important because artists are ordinarily “isolated”. They live a difficult life. They make personal investments whose returns are not often guaranteed or even well defined. They love making art that absolutely can not be “sold”. And they will do this as often as they can in between finding ways to survive and doing the “regular stuff”. And they mostly work by themselves. Which might partly be why they party hard once every 2 years when VIVA comes around. And this year at El Amigo, party they did!
This year, the VIVA was presented by the community of artists of Dumaguete. Special congratulations go to Babbu and June Wenceslao, Elena Lim, Toto Matula, Marq Bologa and Yvette Kim and others. Patrick Flores of the University of the Philippines Art Studies served as main consultant and curator for the project. They did an excellent job.
