Material Conceptualisms: Philippine Art under Authoritarianism, 1968-1986

Abstract

Material Conceptualisms: Philippine Art under Authoritarianism, 1968–1986 explores the subversive connotations of artists who experimented with organic, mundane, and/or vulgar materials at the state-supported Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) under Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos through four case studies: Jose Maceda, Roberto Chabet, artist collective Shop 6, and Luis “Junyee” Yee, Jr. While Ferdinand Marcos’ declaration of martial law resulted in the elimination of independent press, the limitation of assembly, and covert instances of violence, coinciding with nearly a decade of control was a flourishing art scene largely due to the efforts of First Lady Imelda Marcos. Yet under the conjugal dictatorship, more than half of all presidential issuances from 1972 to Ferdinand Marcos’ deposition in 1986 affected the relationship between the arts and the state in the Philippines.

While artists exhibiting at the state-supported CCP were censured due to their presumed elitism and collusion with the Marcoses, close examination of their works reveals how art performed or displayed at the CCP was not necessarily beholden to the ideology of the regime. These artists proved that art made under surveillance could still refuse to adhere to, and even preclude, the instrumental desires of an oppressive dictatorship. In fact, the artists’ manipulation of vulgar or banal materials such as toilet paper, stockings, rubber tires, panty liners, banana leaves, and acacia pods resulted in indecorous displays that frustrated rather than upheld the administration’s program of beautification and progressive modernism. Thus instead of taking an explicit stance against the Marcoses, these artists provide a model of a more ambivalent form of resistance grounded in the implicit critique of Imelda’s pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness, which at times bordered on self-parody. Combining textual analysis of artist interviews, archival documents, artist essays, and art criticism with sustained formal analysis of conceptual performances, installations, and objects, the dissertation argues that seemingly politically innocuous artworks by Maceda, Chabet, Shop 6, and Junyee proposes resistance under Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos not in binaristic terms, but as elastic and unequivocal processes.