Hidalgo and Luna: Vexed Modernity (page 4 of 8) 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | Spoiled, spoils   "If nationalness has about it an aura of fatality, it is nonetheless a fatality embedded in history."25 In Benedict Anderson's extended discussion on the form, a nation is that which is imagined, necessarily, as a given; fated, made inevitable by force of history. In Rizal's brindis, the universal reach of the artist also has about it an aura of fatality embedded in history. Homeland determines the artist's possibilities, according to Rizal's art theory. El Spoliarium, said he, exhibits "such vigor and realism" that one experiences in the Philippines' thunderous cataracts and earthquake-generated tremors. The home environment controls the artist's hand: "The same nature that engenders such phenomena intervenes also in those strokes."26 (Earlier, I have cited Rizal's causal framing of Hidalgo's work.) Rlzal furthermore posited a deep commonality, perhaps racially-determined in his view, that cuts through dissimilarity: "And both, despite being so distinct in themselves, in appearance at least, coincide at bottom, as all our hearts do in spite of notable differences."27 Finally, Rizal let loose no less than an aria, sliding quickly from environmental and cultural determinism to some kind of intellectua1 fatality or fore-ordination:   "In reflecting on their palette the splendiferous rays of unfolding glory with which they surround their Native Land, both express the spirit of our social, moral, and political life; mankind subjected to harsh tests; unredeemed mankind; reason and aspiration in an open struggle with preoccupations, fanaticisms, injustices. .."28 The artist seems predestined for the role of witness to the human condition in the home country. That sense of inevitability aligns surprisingly well with the 19th century realist attitude of curiosity about and commitment to quotidian experience. That inevitability squares, as well, with the shape of the positivist sciences of that period. Nonetheless, it is also in this determinist sense that art was thought, within the reformist group, to have an instrumental relationship with that capitalized Native Land—a fatal instrumentality that apparently overwrote intra-art concerns. Both Hidalgo and Luna expressed what may have been a substantially Realist attitude, convolutedly enough, in Neoclassical terms; not in the Realist approach to pictorial space. For if the Hidalgo and Luna interpreters are correct in supposing that Spoliarium and Las Virgenes Cristianas Expuestas al Populacho are images of the artists' abject countrymen, these are then allegories of a strange sort. Allegory in Neoclassicism gestured toward elevated or elevating, not abject, states. On the other hand, the Realism that perhaps compelled the choice of images for both these works, was an ideology that refused allegory all together.

I suggest that this convolution-the displacements and mixings-up of the European order of periods, ideas, imaginaries and pictorial techniques—was possible in part because neoclassicism after the French Revolution moved along a forked trajectory. The service of royalty by providing insignia of power was one tine of the fork; the other, the artist's persona offered as model of individual emancipation to a public that came to view art expressly to seek models of virtue. (Significantly, this Public did not exist in the ancien regime.) Along this latter track, there were indeed some 19th century European artists who intended the constant, conventional quoting of Greek and Roman imagery as proposals for an ideal republicanism, hence as their critique of the disappointments and excesses of their times. Again along this latter track, a link (let's say, figured around the word emancipation) between Neoclassicism and Realism can be vivified, as Hidalgo and Luna arguably did; but, as longshots go, incongruously. The Neoclassical eternal verities do not mix well with Realism's philosophy of the fleeting moment. Still, the idea of presenting human spoilage (Spoliarium) and spoils (Virgenes) to exposition juries and audiences did satisfy the erudition-quotient required by the retrograde academic Neoclassicism of Hidalgo's and Luna's time in Europe; and also the reformist stratagem of illustrating the sorrow of the colonized, at a suitably operatic level. But in sum, these conceptual twists, wired to competition savvy, did not make for artworks that stand up to rigorous measures of philosophical integrity.

The two works exist only in the affection of a national community that continues to be grateful for a brush with glory; in the narratives supporting the dubious ambitions of that nation's leadership; as footnotes in the obscure archives of universal expositions that were spectacularly successful at kicking modernity into high gear, but were philosophically, ethically and aesthetically bankrupt at the end of the 19th century.²⁹ Spoliarium and Virgenes cannot be retrieved from their own spoliarium at the nether end of the history of modern art, for reasons that should be enumerated. The expositions were imperial spectacles that will not be regarded uncritically by any ethical commentator. The Neoclassical pictorial convention aligns artists with the bloody history of monarchic and aristocratic ambition, because, unfortunately, the libertarian credentials of that same Neoclassicism were anemic. The possibility that a Realist stance (in Neoclassical drag) lurks in these paintings will elude most art scholars, except Filipinos and specialists in exotic modernities, because such a reading requires a detailed grasp of the reform movement and the species of nationalism that created the Philippines. And because, as art historian John Clark observes of works that deign to represent the national in Asia and elsewhere:

"Such works often manifest an unconsidered assertion of identity, or sympathy, or they eulogize lifestyles and values in a way that denies interrogation of the content or formal discourse of the representation. The national, if not exactly holy, is regarded as value-enhancing or value-bearing in its own right, and it becomes the expressive task of the artist to represent these values through subject matters and stylistics that do not call those values into question."30

The hope held by Filipino critics and culturatti for the recuperation in the future of an un-ironic Neoclassical, "style," infused by a "romantic spirit," will not come to pass. It is now well past the time when any serious intellectual will regard aesthetic style, trend, manner, visual vocabulary or even affectation, as anything but imbricated in the structuring principles of vast philosophical orders with their concomitant political economies. The obscurity to which the French and Spanish Salon fell was not merely the effect of a shift in fickle tastes. Consignment to that obscurity reflects the final and irrevocable rejection of dynastic rule by Western modernity of the 20th century. Unfortunately, that rejection did not include the "official nationalisms" that have continued to vest power in erudite and monied elites throughout the 20th century; and which cunning nationalisms, during their early consolidation in the late 19th century, purloined Enlightenment ideas to cobble together into workable libertarian credentials. More importantly with reference to the Philippines, that rejection did not include the residual variant of creole nationalism operating within the culture of the ilustrados (roughly a century after creoles created the American nations). Indeed, among the vexations this nationalism visited upon the Phillppines, was rendering the Neoclassically-inclined, aristocratic ilustrado system of meanings invisible and beyond criticism.

But such is the mythic power of the notion of nation. To return to Anderson's gist: a nation is its own raison d'etre. A nation is a nation because it seen as fated to be so, by logic of history. A history, ironically, that draws its mythic seamlessness from the opacity of its construction of itself. Within this circular logic, no one is inclined to draw distinctions between one nationalism and another; nor to even imagine nationalisms in the plural. All of which is even more paradoxical in the Philippine case, in that this opacity is secured by the metaphor of light.