TEACHING/LEARNING THE HUMANITIES IN OTHER WORDS/WORLDS
Patrick D. Flores
The Institutions of the Art World
The institutional theory of art[13] forwards some answers. Arthur Danto asserts that an object will be admitted to be
art if it can be related to already acknowledged objects or by way of a theoretical justification. Danto requires that
a theory must validate the existence of the object (e.g. a painting, a poem, a dance performance, a film, a musical
composition), a theory "testifying" that the said object and, let us say, Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa share
common features which are both aesthetically legitimate.
George Dicke, on the other hand, advances the view that artistic distinction can be conferred by anyone who can conceive
of himself or herself as an agent of the art world and operates within the appropriate institutional contexts. Thus, a
soup can become art if an acknowledged artist puts it up for sale, a curator displays it in a museum, an art critic
gives it a review, an art historian includes it in a book, an art teacher discusses its aesthetic merits in school, and
so on.
An ordinary urinal in an ordinary public toilet is not art. But Marcel Duchamp's 1917 urinals[14], mostly entitled Fountain,
which were exhibited in various museums and are now in the possession of State and private collections, are. In the
same vein, the kala, a bracelet, is just one of those daily fashion accessories worn by T'boli women. When a
curator hangs it on the wall of a museum, it "becomes" a work of art. Also, a street play performed amid a protest
rally or a hunger strike cannot be art. But when it is staged within the context of the so-called legitimate theater,
its value changes. The urinal is not just for urine anymore but for the aesthetic sensibility. The kala is no
longer part of everyday wear; it has become an artifact, an ethnographic evidence to be looked at and observed. The
street play ceases to be "propaganda," it has transformed into drama.
Simply put, the agencies of the art world--academe, media, the gallery/museum network, the art market, State cultural
bureaucracies, connoisseurs and collectors, publicists and dealers, culture industries--send off to their publics the
"signals" of art, locating them within the proper institutional scheme, and ingraining in them the appropriate aesthetic
reception, disposition, or attitude to accept and include some things as art and reject and exclude others as anything
but art.
It is in this context that our notions of art are constructed, validated, reproduced, and disseminated to "others" whom
we think must be guided by the same principles. The art world has taught us since our kindergarten drawing-and-music-
lesson days, for example, how to render line, space, and color correctly, or how to reach the correct pitch of a tone.
An art critic points out that some people are in touch with and "know" such particular art concepts as musical patterns
(e.g. the diatonic scale and the major triad) "because anyone who has grown up in any Western country, lived as a child
there, and, especially, gone to its schools, will know them. From our earliest days in a culture which uses scales and
harmonies, we hear songs--lullabies, nursery rhymes, and, later, popular songs of all kinds--based on these ubiquitous
conventional building blocks of Western music. When we enter school, we learn the names of those notes (in the conventional
do-re-mi notation and in conventional notation on the staff, with the letter names C, D, E, and so forth), and
learn to sing them on cue when we see the notes."[15]
In short, this education has made us part of an art world that privileges specific norms governing and regulating the
production of art. This is why it has become almost second nature for us to judge the artistic credence of something
as if that something were "naturally" artistic or non-artistic. What we have forgotten or what has been hidden from our
"sight" is that these judgements are just constructions of a particular culture and of an industry of culture. And
there are other cultures that would construe art in different terms, in different scales and harmonies. Who is to say
that their standards are any less valid?
It is not only the concept of art that must be analyzed, however, but also that of artist. A critic relates that deeply
embedded in the mindsets of many people is the Romantic myth of the artist as the superstar who is driven to make art
by torture and inspiration, a heroic soul or genius who "agonized to produce a masterpiece,"[16] very much like "Edgar
Allan Poe drinking his way to greatness, or Byron, the aristocratic individualist riding his horse and declaring
rebellion against tyranny."[17] This imaging of the artist elides the political process which leads a person to take on
the position of artist, who definitely is not born as such but is rather turned into one by society: Jackson Pollock
who spills and splashes paint onto his canvas is an artist, but a San Fernando lantern-maker is not. The contrivances
that make people artists--the hype, the awards, the publicity, the reputation, the cult adulation, the artistic license,
the hocus-pocus of self-expression--are simply that, devices, which we must dismantle in order to understand and explain
the reasons by which artists are "recognized," "assessed," and gain the credibility and credentials of artistry, in
other words, how they are able to appropriate the competence to practice art and make sure that their art is made
available to the public.
These problems cannot but confront politics and power, or to be more specific, the economic and cultural capital that
mediate our responses towards matters involving art.
The French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu points out that "consumption is... an act of deciphering, decoding, which
presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code... the capacity to see is the function of knowledge, or
concepts, that is, the words, that are available to name visible things, and which are, as it were, programmes for
perception. A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the
code into which it is encoded. The conscious or unconscious implementation of explicit or implicit schemes of
perception which constitute pictorial or musical culture is the hidden condition for recognizing styles characteristic
of a period, a school or an author, and, more generally, for the familiarity with the internal logic of works that
aesthetic enjoyment presupposes."[18] Bourdieu theorizes that the ability to appreciate and enjoy and even to simply
recognize is not borne out of natural intelligence, but rather is learned and is in fact a function of pedagogy: "The
encounter of a work of art is not 'love at first sight'... and the act of empathy, which is the art-lover's pleasure,
presupposes an act of cognition, a decoding operation, which implies the implementation of a cognitive acquirement...
the 'eye' is a product of history reproduced by education."[19]
The activity of consuming art is therefore determined by the distribution of knowledge in an economically and intellectually
uneven social organization. While many of our cultural technocrats bandy about the idea of "art for all" and "democratization
of culture," we cannot remain oblivious to the real constraints of access to cultural goods, which can only be availed
of within the system of unequal distribution of capital/power across social groups and through the pressures that the
artworld, as an ideological state apparatus, exerts on its audiences to acquiesce to forms of valuations which have been
virtually canonized by the cultural establishment. Can we really hope that the poor people of a squatter colony would
learn to appreciate the aesthetics of ballet after watching a prima ballerina dance sacrificingly on the basketball
court? And what if indeed they manage to "like" ballet, can they afford to subsidize--not only under the auspices of
economic but also of cultural power--this newly acquired taste for something supposedly superior to Tinikling and
disco dancing?
We must realize that art forms are inscribed in conventions and not everyone is "free" to become privy to these, no
matter how the manufacturing sector insists that the consumer has the option to choose and the market is all that liberal.
The very definitions of art and even the specificity of art to form reality are suffused through and through with matters
that have to do with how power circulates in society--a power that overdetermines the production of art, artists, the art
world, and certain commonsensical notions of art.
Bourdieu writes that the "sacralizing of culture and art fulfills a vital function by contributing to the consecration
of the social order: to enable educated men to believe in barbarism and persuade their barbarians within the gates of
their own barbarity, all they must and need do is to manage to conceal themselves and to conceal the social conditions
which render possible... the legitimized predominance of a particular definition of culture."[20]
As a visitor in Versailles had once remarked: "This chateau was not made for the people, and it has not changed."[21]
In the same way that the SM Megamall Art Walk, while it cohabits with upscale sari-sari stores and high-class
carinderia within the sprawling postmodern complex, was meant for those who can buy paintings, those who can
pretend to be au courant with antiques, those who can see potential investment value through the canvas, and
those who can during glittering exhibit openings blurt out lines like: "That looks like Chagall... that's derivative
of the worst elements of Abstract Expressionism..."
And we say that the market is free? In order to reposition ourselves away from the contemporary ethos of making and
consuming art, it is imperative to be skeptical and suspicious about how we regard art, always keeping in mind that the
term is mainly a construct, a category of social activity not justified by essence--that is, an object like a urinal
does not become art because there is something inherently artistic about it--but by the status which is arbitrarily
conferred by the institutions. And so, taste or predisposition for and towards practices and productions deemed as
art is an inculcated norm conditioned by conventions and nourished by the consensus entered into by a community of
artists and audiences, a symptom in fact of certain assumptions about how reality must unfold, how things must look,
how texts must be read, how their effects in society must be calculated.
Moreover, we must continually be wary of the manner in which hegemonic discourses attempt to totalize experience and
universalize taste, as if contradictions and disparities did not exist in this world. As part of its objectives, the
canon, for instance, foregrounds such artificial categories as fine, folk, and popular, as well as a range of differentiations
as in high, serious, avant-garde art which is distinguished against low/illegitimate/bad art, artisanal craft, kitsch,
entertainment, commercial, mass, and pulp. Wedded into these boundaries are hierarchies that, according to Bourdieu,
valuate some works as "worthy of being admired" and treat the rest as outside the domain of critical reception, and so
not part of the "cultural wealth" of a particular history.
Between Nick Joaquin's Cave and Shadows and Nerissa Cabral's Bukas Luluhod ang Mga Tala, which work is
more legitimate and has the right to be taken up in "literature" classes and published in anthologies? Between Puccini's
Madama Butterfly and the Pasyon, which of the two contains "better" music? Between film superstar Nora
Aunor and architect Leandro Locsin, who deserves to be declared National Artist? And between abstractionist Jose Joya
and Mabini painter Peck Piñon, who is more eligible for a retrospective grant from the Main Gallery of the Cultural
Center of the Philippines? Why? Why not? Why cannot the study of painting, the technique of putting pigments on two-dimensional
surfaces, accommodate movie billboard-making in its perspective? Why cannot the business of literature deal with the
underground poetry of the New Peoples Army cadres or the daily "narratives" of tabloids?
The canon sets up parameters beyond which we cannot see and know. It charts histories and sanctifies paradigms against
which others are but mere aspirations. And, of course, it cogently enforces particular social configurations: "Taste
classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves
by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their
position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed... The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal,
servile--in a word, natural--enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the
superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures
forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately
or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimizing social differences."[22]
The process of consolidating a canon needs to be rendered problematic because it is a political project. The canon does
not operate by whim. Its practice is never idiosyncratic; it is always ideological. Ideological because when the canon
insists on Art with a capital A, it posits a universal view of the world, a mystification that obscures the power behind
the so-called universal unity. When a white middle-class Republican professor and his student, a third world woman of
color, confront a Vietnam film, the dominant institutions and traditions of interpretations generally expect, or better
yet, interpellate the latter to assume and subscribe to the canonical reading of the former by virtue of power
relations: the yuppie of an Ivy leaguer is more authoritative to judge the text in the "right" way than the illegal
alien of a Chinese is. The construal of the former in effect invalidates or weakens that of the latter in an attempt
by the regulating agencies of reading to totalize experience and speak for someone else, or, why not, for everyone; in
an attempt to situate all of us within a frame of reference as realized through "reading habits" and representational
strategies outside of which we cannot speak, write, read and within which we become coherent, represented, knowing
subjects. It is always an imperative of those in power to assume the position of correctness, of proposing the most
feasible truth in order to prove once and for all that, indeed, life must be lived this way and certain things
will have to prevail. By re-viewing how the canon is constructed, we become aware of how it is arbitrarily put together,
why it has been produced in the first place, how it disseminates its effects in society, how it impinges expectations
on how people must make sense of the world through art. And how we must labor to transform the kind of society that
sustains it.
The term art has a naturalizing premise. We refer to some things as art because those things have always been considered
to be such. But says who? We have the tendency to take the term art as if it were "natural" (already there) and "neutral"
(just there). We must learn to demolish the basis on which it achieves efficacy as a term and derail the "bottom line"
with which we conveniently formulate it.
Furthermore, the homogenizing politics of the canon occludes the multiple spaces people inhabit in their relations with
society, positions that either seize the aegis of dominance or ache under the trauma of powerlessness. We are not
people, solely; we are also "named" in terms of an "immense discontinuous network" of class, race, gender, sexuality,
language, religion, ideology, historical experience, and other more "different knottings of these strands, determined by
heterogenous determinations which are themselves dependent upon myriad circumstances."[23] In other words, people are
irreducibly different and therefore cannot be governed by a singular culture, as this would deny the specificities with
which people encounter power and wage struggles in the name of interlocking, shifting differences and strategic alliances.
George Yudice reminds us that "the member of an oppressed marginal group cannot escape the repercussions attached by a
society to his/her skin, sex, speech, and other marginalizing marks of distinction: a black in a white world, a woman in
a patriarchal culture, an unskilled worker in a (post)industrial economy."[24]
But nevertheless, we must strive for total, not totalitarian, transformation: to regain not a universal humanity but
those human particularities and subjectivities and the conditions under which they could flourish--something that can
only and truly be realized if we confront the oppressive structures which "wound" and "refuse" them, if we "try somehow
to go right through those estranging definitions to emerge somewhere on the other side,"[25] and if we think of how
others might be able to coalesce with us in transforming our, their, and hopefully everyone's situations progressively
and rigorously. As Terry Eagleton puts it: "The feminist, nationalist or trade unionist might now come to recognize that
in the long run none of their desires is realizable without the fulfillment of the others's."[26]
The canon though is not to be regarded as a non-changing, all-powerful empire, a solid grand monolith that overwhelms
thoroughly, massively, completely, and therefore resistant to challenge. For it is part of the liberative practice to
read against the grain, to recuperate, rearticulate, and reappropriate the potentially subversive stirrings repressed
in canonical texts and realign them along revolutionary interests. The canon's fabric of power is not seamless. Therein
are fissures, disruptions, disjunctures, ruptures, and cracks through which radical intervention by way of strong and
committed interpretations is very much possible and real-izable. Historian Ranajit Guha, conducting emancipatory and
redemptive critical practice, secures the gains of a tactical re-reading of colonial historiography: "It is of course
true that the reports, dispatches, minutes, judgements, laws, letters, etc. in which policemen, soldiers, bureaucrats,
landlords, usurers and others hostile to insurgency register their sentiments, amount to a representation of their will.
But these documents do not get their content from that will alone, for the latter is predicated on another will, that of
the insurgent. It should be possible therefore to read the presence of a rebel consciousness as a necessary and pervasive
element within that body of evidence."[27]
The story of art, culture, and civilization is said to be the story of the white, heterosexual, Christian man of property.
It is also a story of benevolence and beauty. History tells us, however, that repressed in this story is the story of
violence, deracination, cultural pillage, exploitation, underdevelopment, poverty, slavery, obscurantism, imperialism,
genocide. Repressed, still, are the other ways of reading, writing, looking, seeing, living, making art; the other
experiences of women, people of color, peasants, workers, sexual dissidents; the other realities of Third World
revolutions, socialist alternatives, ethnic societies, nationalist movements, indigenous science and technology, folk
and other popular philosophies; other desires, other voices, other knowledges, other worlds, other truths, other gods.
Homi Bhabha enjoins us to retell these struggles and the narratives of our histories in our own gatherings, indeed in this
classroom: "Gatherings of exiles and emigrés and refugees, gathering on the edge of 'foreign' cultures; gathering at
the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos or cafés of city centres; gathering in the half-life half-light of foreign
tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another's language; gathering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees,
discourses, disciplines; gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of other worlds lived retroactively; gathering the
past in a ritual of revival; gathering the present. Also the gathering of the people in diaspora: indentured, migrant,
interned; the gathering of incriminatory statistics, educational performance, legal statutes, immigration status--the
genealogy of the lonely figure that John Berger named the seventh man. The gathering of clouds from which the Palestinian
poet Mahmoud Darwish asks 'where should the birds fly after the last sky?'"[28]
It becomes a daily revolution to foreground and empower all these other tales, retrieve them from the periphery, and
purge them of the stigma of otherness. This necessarily entails the struggle of enlisting the people in support of
ideological agenda, configuring an exchange of power and meaning that does not, because cannot, degenerate into playful
pluralism and bourgeois tolerance, but one steeled by a politics of transgression and transformation.
As Indian feminist thinker Gayatri Spivak states: "Tolerance doesn't work both ways. The rich and the poor are not equally
free to sleep under the bridges of Paris. Tolerance is a loaded virtue because you have to have a base of power to practice
it. You cannot ask certain people to 'tolerate' a culture that has historically ignored them at the same time that their
children are being indoctrinated into it."[29] What is at hand, hence, is the passionate clash of discourses, a purposive
battle of positions on how society must be arranged, and not just a celebration of diversity. And what is at stake is
no less than the invalidation of totalitarian systems and the transformation of society, a transformation that involves
not merely the reversal of roles (from oppressed to oppressor, from slave to master), but a vehement refusal to extol
anything as absolute and at the same time a joyful commitment to a complex, creative humanity and a life of struggle and
solidarity.
This rethinking must, for instance, inform the feminist practice of reappropriating texts and practices from the margins.
Nerissa Cabral and a Cordillera weaver are to be recovered not only for the sake of gender or racial pride, but also
for the purpose of reclaiming the term "art" to encompass productions subjected to the epistemic violence of canonical
discrimination and of blasting away the ideological binarisms of art/not-art, fine art/folk art, literary/commercial, and
so on. This demands that the reading and making of the aforementioned productions transcend the conservative limitations
of normative classifications and instead grapple with the intricacies of signification and mode of production. It is not
enough to invoke basketry as testimony to women's creativity; it is important to examine the processes by which baskets
are transformed from, let us say, communal expressions into commodities inserted into the marketplaces of capitalism,
critique the exploitative moments rankling in the imbalances brought about by the dislocation, and map out positive potentialities
within a new locus of activity that is at once displaced and reconstituted.
Reading and writing alternative texts and practices must then be no less than strategies of empowerment, in which women[30]
are able to locate themselves and redefine according to their politics more liberating foci of art and culture, explore
the cracks and gaps of the field through which they can pursue their struggles, and so ultimately resist the resistances
of patriarchy.
Cultures are terrains of contestation and sites of struggle. Cultures must compete in the ideological arena, continually
deconstruct the monopoly of the canon, construct new possibilities of meaning, and prefigure conditions of visibility
for more human futures. It is only in this way--this recuperation of the specific struggles within society's heterogenous
constituencies and permeating life with freedom--that art and the "Humanities" shall finally become meaningful and urgent
for all those who work to conceive a life that "obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves,"[31] so that
there would emerge "a new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die,
where love will prove true and happiness be possible."[32] (BACK TO FIRST PART | HOME)
Endnotes