Hidalgo and Luna: Vexed Modernity (page 7 of 8) 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | Mention of photography is another cue worth following here. Clearly a tool that Hidalgo used for figuring light,42 nonetheless photography did not shift his decidedly painterly pictorial planes and vantage points; nor his penchant for floating people in a kind of timeless, sometimes space-less abyss; nor his disinterest in harsh picturings of urbanization. Hidalgo was not the artist who would grapple with the complications imposed by a technology of representation on the production of meaning in art. Because he did not regard art-making tools as loaded with the potential for shaping truth systems (and newfangled tools as particularly threatening to old shapes), Hidalgo practiced art as cultivation of heritage, not as a program of disassembling and reassembling reality. The heritage artist, whose genius exhibited descent from God, was a figure limned by their milieux with heavy intellectual and political investments in genealogy—which in turn facilitated the conflation of the auras of artistic and social pedigree, The artist of rupture, on the other hand, who eschewed genius and lineage, compelled interest in the fortuitous and unexpected; enthusiasms for illegitimate offshoots of history; and acknowledgement of the trauma of modernization. That an artist from the colonies could have a practice of any sort in Europe, particularly Paris, was a happy after-effect of rupture. For such an artist to then retreat into the secure precincts of heritage, pedigree and genealogy seems, to me, to be a kind of original sin. I mean original as in sui generis; originals of the dramatically divided modern indio self. Luna's and Hidalgo's shared desire for stature within the 19th century imperium would mean discordant self-creation. The unresolved internal contradictions linked them more profoundly to each other than they can ever be differentiated. (To his sister, Hidalgo wrote, on a melancholy timbre, of existence, "...that God has given us and which most of the time we make sad and miserable because we do not know how to make use of it; and because we do not know how to conserve life as God wills. Let us shape it as it is: let us acquire sufficient philosophy to suffer its contradictions and be strong enough in spirit and determination so as not to allow ourselves to be dismayed."43) Both were men committed to a reformist agenda who were nonetheless deeply enchanted by the changeless or unchanging. Critics of white supremacy, they nonetheless accepted the superiority of white history and culture. I made mention of Luna's tourist eye, which gazed upon and memorialized chula upon chula, not with the politically-charged empiricism of the Realist, but with an interest in "types. " Hidalgo did not veer too far from the same tipos del pais view in his life-long passion for visual cataloguing: The Amanuensis, Hilandera, La Gitana, Los Mendigos, Dutch GirJ, the early El Violinista, Filipino Beauty of Yesterday, Una india del campo, Parisiense, La vendedora de lanzones, and so forth, shared the punto de vista of travel literature. However consummately modeled in Hidalgo's hands (compared to the works of precursors rike Damian Domingo and Felix Martinez} and though seemingly informed by a greater erudition, it remains that these were images figured by the eye of the privileged wanderer/observer, the consumer of sights who assumed superiority over the seen. The white man's eye on the body of the indio. Even more troubling in hindsight: this indio artist would have to be strongly persuaded to take on the concrete conditions of the laborer, and was only persuaded twice, if E. Arsenio Manuel's source was correct in the paragraph below. If so, then the motley people otherwise recorded in Luna's canvases belonged to an aesthetic universe that was untouched by Realism's central concerns. Which also suggests that Luna (and, more clearly, Hidalgo) did not craft tight connections between his approach to art and his ideas of what art is, on one hand, and on the other, the strong pull on him of socialist politics.   "About the end of October [1893] Un sacrificio Romano was exhibited In the Equidazu Mansion at the Carrera de San Geronimo [Bilbao]. At the repeated requests of Messrs. Martinez de la Rivas and Senator Victor Chavarri he painted two canvasses which depict the working class. La Colada and El Interior de las Talleres de Acero Robert were inspired by factory scenes; so also Talleres de Laminacion (Clotet, post). These, together with several portraits and Una Boda en Pompeya, were shown in an open exhibition in the Matheu Gallery of Bilbao, January 1894." 44 [My emphasis]

Contradiction was so extreme that it was unlikely to have been comprehensible. The King of Spain's commission to Luna to paint the Batalla de Lepanto, to be paired with La Rendicion de Granada (commissioned to Spanish artist Pradilla) at the Spanish Senado may indeed have been unprecedented for a colonized subject. Yet the 15th century Castillian victory at the battle of Lepanto and the capitulation of the Moor Boabdil in Granada, marked, not just the foundational moment for the Spanish kingdom, not just the reversal of 758 years of Moro domination of the Iberian peninsula and the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews that launched their global diaspora—but most importantly for the student of irony, the inauguration of European imperialism. For a colonized man to ascend to the honor of painting an emblematic picture of precisely the mythology of power that imprisons him, is—if I may be permitted a raw response to this detail of history-heartbreaking. However, it is no less a sorry an event than the commission to the multi-awarded and dignified Hidalgo, by the United States Colonial Government, to produce a painting "depicting peace and liberty under American dispensation..." ⁴⁵ resulting in the unfortunate Per Pacem et Libertatem, exhibited at the Universal Exposition of St. Louis in 1904. As it happened, this was also the exposition that would bring global attention to the ilustrado-invented divide separating the educated "Filipino" from the dog-eating, be-feathered, loinclothed "natives" of the Philippines. This was the painting, matched in cloying imagery by Luna's España y Filipinas, that would seamlessly link art's ministerial relationship with the Old and New World colonizers of the Philippines.

Yet these contradictions pale in the light spilling through the fatal crack cleaving the two artists' integrity. I am referring to the liberties that were taken in the use of the word ilustrado by the self-named ilustrados from the Philippines. For the Enlightenment was certainly dimmed by this group of men whose longing for redemption by Reason was undermined by a loyalty to the logic of an aristocracy. Whose fight for equality on the global stage required the further crystallization of class divisions in the home country. And whose critique of racism would not extend to an auto-critique of their own contemptuous attitudes towards the primitive. In art, Hidalgo and Luna could only have been nominally ilustrado, because the Academic conventions they were devoted to, kept art hitched, perversely, to the antique worlds run by kings and queens that the early 19th century Spanish ilustrados decried. The persistence of a tipos del pais way of seeing in that part of their work that "freed" itself from the heavy-handed Academic manner, confined their nationalism to the Spanish costumbrismo, which was an anti-rational, folk-ish politics. And their efforts in the Academic tradition absorbed them into French official nationalism that appealed to the Enlightenment only to safeguard elite and bourgeoisie interests from the revolutionary dynamic of vernacular nationalism.