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The modern experience of subjectivity
The main factor to help us understand the radical shift from Fernando Amorsolo's smiling Dalagang Bukid (1937) to Anita Magsaysay-Ho's
still bandana-ed, bent but no longer smiling peasant women (Sheaves, 1957) is the idea of modernity and with it, subjectivity.
Introduced by René Descartes (1596-1650) "the father of modernity" in the history of Western philosophy, this experience of human
subjectivity has also undergone various interpretations. In the context in which it is being used here in painting, modernity or
modernism refers to an approach to art which is different from simply reproducing in an objective way pretty pictures of modern subject
matter and life. To grasp what is "modern" is to realize that there is a new experience of being a subject, a new consciousness of
being a self, an I.
What is this new experience of being a subject? It is to think as a human being. I am thinking as a human being when I go beyond
calculation and representation. Neither the computer nor the animal thinks. What is unique to the thinking person? Feeling. Only feeling
constitutes what is unique to the human being. Neither the animal nor the computer fee1s. Feeling presupposes that I feel not only the
felt but the feeling itself—that I am aware that I am feeling it, that I am affected by it. And being affected demands that I express
what I experience and how I experience it. Thus I also express the "I" who experiences. Only feeling allows me to think as a human being.
Feeling can not be reduced to registering the stimuli transmitted by the five senses. It has to be accompanied by good sense. Good
sense gives us access not only to what feeling gives but above all to what it can not show. To think as a human being is to practice a
way of thinking which neither calculates nor represents but feels what it is feeling. It is a way of thinking which allows itself to be
affected and respond to what comes to it. Thinking as a human being is thinking in the mode of feeling. To be a thinking feeling human
being is to be modern.
To present, not re-present a new reality
The modern artist (in Europe, around the middle of the nineteenth century; in the Philippines, just after World War II for
the "Neo-Realists" who sought to go beyond Victorlo C. Edades, the Father of Philippine Modern Art") became alert to a special form
of self-consciousness. The modern painter finally grasped that the task was no longer to re-present but to present an experience—to
get the viewer involved in an experience in which s/he, as artist, was participating.
The important distinction of re-presenting / presenting or making present can be clarified by Martin Heidegger's insight on language
as logos. For Heidegger, a word or a name is not merely a superfluous label pasted on an already constituted object. The name shapes the
reality. It "creates" or brings about the reality. With the pronouncing of the name, the reality comes to presence. In the same way;
the modern painting makes us present to the unique reality experienced by the artist.
In this kind of perspective, the painting is considered as a text, an expression of the artist's subjectivity. Understanding a
painting then does not consist in grasping the intention of the painter. Neither is it coinciding with the mind or genius of the artist.
To do so would be to fall into Romantic hermeneutics—an interpretation which holds that the key to understanding the painting is going
back to the creative spirit of the artist. This is a psychologistic interpretation for it strives to explain the painting in terms of
the psychology, the mind of the artist.
Understanding modernity in painting is not only shifting attention from the painter to the painting, moving from a painter-centered
interpretation to a painting-centered interpretation. Although painted more than fifty years ago, Manansala's Jeepneys (wherein the
jeepneys look far more colorful than they are today) has a way of making us experience—feel the sensation, sense what it is like to be
trapped inside a jeepney—inhaling the fumes, hearing the running motor, feeling the beads of perspiration sliding down our backs.
Magsaysay-Ho's peasant women make us feel the cramp and fatigue from bending under the burden of sheaves of rice and make us cringe
from the glare and scorch of the noonday sun. Paradoxically, these paintings accomplish this by making us conscious that they are
paintings. Wouldn't this be the reason why Fernando Zóbel simply entitles his painting Painting (1956)? These paintings are "unreal"
in the sense that they show merely lines, colors, shapes and texture on a flat surface. But it is their "unreality" which makes the
actual jeepneys and peasant women-folk even more "real." We may speak here of the paintings re-creating reality if we mean by that the
"creation of a new reality."
The Neo-Realists
The "creation of a new reality"—this was the battle cry of the original group of painters that called themselves "Neo-Realists"
—Hernando R. Ocampo (1911-1978), Ramon Estella (1911-1991), Vicente Manansala (1913-1981), Victor Oteyza (1913-1979), Cesar Legaspi
(1917-1994) and Romeo Tabuena (born 1926). (Except for Estella, all these original members have paintings in this exhibit). The
Neo-Realists (who were also called "modernists" or Philippine Art Gallery (PAG) artists because they exhibited in Lyd Arguilla's "biggest
little room" on Arquiza St.) desired to look at reality "with new eyes." They soon expanded into a bigger group which included Manuel
Rodriguez Sr., Nena Saguil, Anita Magsaysay-Ho, Fernando Zóbel, Arturo Rogerio Luz, J. Elizalde Navarro, Jose Joya, Lee Aguinaldo and
David Cortez Medalla (all of whom have works in this exhibit).
To be called a "modern" or "Neo-Realist" painter then is not to re-present, depict or illustrate scenes of modern life. It is to
present reality in a new way, to create it anew in such a way that the lived presence of the artist is felt in the painting itself. There
is no other access to the painter except through his painting which is his expression or text.
Paradoxically again, this vivid presence is more strongly felt in modern nonfigurative or abstract painting. Nowhere are the traces of
the artist more palpable than in the gestures with which he applies paint on the canvas-with a brush, a knife, a syringe, even with his
bare hands. One can follow with the eye the movement and the rhythm of the artist's hands and body. It is not then surprising that
H. R. Ocampo should speak of his paintings as "visual melodies" or that Lee Aguinaldo's Purple Zing on Green (1962) and Explosion No. 141
(1957) can be enjoyed as visual improvisations of jazz, perhaps even intimate the "music of the spheres."
Indeed, all modern paintings (both figurative and nonfigurative, representational and nonrepresentational) are abstract in the sense
that they do not depict real objects in the world. In a more positive sense, they are abstract in that they draw out what is essential
in a modern painting—the lived relationship or link of the painting to the painter's subjectivity which is expressed in painterly
gestures and expressions. They present and pardon the pun—gift—us, with the "presence of an absence" of the artist, to speak like
Gabriel Marcel.
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Lopez Memorial Museum » Artscene: Zero-In: Private Art, Public Lives: Refiguring Modern Philippine Art
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