June 2002. Documenta 11 opens in Kassel, Germany. This edition, under the artistic direction of Okwui Enwezor, secures the legitimacy of the politics of multiple modernities. That Enwezor is the first non-European to curate Documenta is understood as the principal sign of shift. 'His' Documenta—for which he deputized eight co-curators with complex personal and professional links to Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia—is a consistently elegant argument for resistance to be construed globally. In fact, for resistance as fine art. One makes out that the elegance is political strategy: no appeals here to a Third World purity or righteousness that is constructed out of scruffiness. This show will have to be critiqued hard, of course, to rescue it from the auto-aggrandizing bent of the art system. But it is no hyperbole to reassert that Documenta 11 culminates at least a century of work to repudiate eurocentricity. And, reasserting so, is to also recall hundreds of places called "back home," which are also times past, where (and when) the peripheral artist-who-would-be-modern played politics with no wherewithal whatsoever to determine the shape of the arena. In curious cases, thoughts of "back home" quickly return to Europe—or to a kind of Europe, that of the indio out to learn white tricks—where, despite proper matriculation, modernity remained a vexed thing. Documenta 11 is most poignant, and most chilling, and most effective, as a vast mnemonic device for conjuring the necessary but false starts for innumerable demands for equality. False starts, as well as surprise twists and appalling continuities: modernity's at once liberating and imprisoning logics and effects mess up beginnings and endings; and the erstwhile native can have an unsteady grasp indeed of the relation of art, power, and emancipation.

The work of Felix Resurreci6n Hidalgo and Juan Luna may be richly considered from a position that is critical of nationalism, skeptical of the rhetoric of heroism, and aloof from the universal claims of art and modernity. (It is also an attitude of mistrust towards the hagiographic disposition of Philippine art history.) This seems impossible to do in the Philippines without being provocative—the least useful tack, unfortunately, for pressing for a re-think. Yet it is precisely because nationalism and heroism are dogma in the ideological infrastructure of the Philippine public sphere, that Hidalgo and Luna have not been fully yielded to analysis. And it is precisely analysis that becomes sclerotic when histories of ideas are obscured—indeed obscured in masterful ways by and with art, wherever art is regarded, as it is in the mainstream of Philippine letters throughout the 20th century, as quasi-divine act. Provocative or not, therefore, I urge analyses that bring an agnostic spirit to bear on the favorite focal point of nationalist-heroic discursos: the relation of art, power and emancipation, as modernity was, and is, transacted.

My own agnosticism does not require denigrating the heroes—nor to yet again recuperate and celebrate their genius—for the spurious program of retrospectively harnessing them to current debates. But I do have the overtly political agenda in stating the obvious: Filipinos have harnessed Hidalgo and Luna thus, in ways and for reasons that bear examination. Detractors as much as devotees—hitched together because they frame their arguments polemically—have in equal measure availed of Hidalgo and Luna (and national heroes Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio, et.al.) to create their own Hidalgos and Lunas. This multiplication makes it worthwhile to be inquisitive about the intellectual spaces inhabited by their myriad interpreters, not only those identified by the two 19th century artists in question. I believe it pays to be curious, not only about the opinions of the experts and recondite Filipino bon vivants, but also of magazine features journalists and press release hacks. It pays in coinage, in fact: a greater purchase on the circumstances when certain terms were coined and circulated.

This is not, so to speak, small change. The gains in interpretation, following an accurate grasp of, say, how variously the word ilustrado (or the word liberal) has been used by different peoples at different times and places—in itself constitutes a liberation from a too-simple pro or con discussion. The point is not to be "objective;" on the contrary, anything short of a committed thesis on the part of any commentator is probably criminal in a country like the Philippines, so locked in deadly double-speak. The nation for which Hidalgo and Luna provided epiphany is surviving miserably, if not self-destructing. The two artists and their interpreters figure in this disintegration, simply for having envisioned the nation. Or so it is possible to think, given an interest in sharp definition, as we shall see. With this interest and a bias for nuance, a bladed edginess is acquired by, questions such as: what in fact was the nature and impact of their epiphany? And in asking this question, one shifts from the habit of viewing the Philippines as untrue to her founders' vision, to considering if there was something fatal in the vision.