It’s a remix kind of world, now: dubbing, mixing, reinterpreting.
Borrowing and pilfering bits and snippets of this and that from here and there has become par for the course when it comes to music, art, eating, and what has come to be termed ‘lifestyle’.
We visit here, we drop in there, then we come home and continue doing what we do the rest of the time. We sample only as much as we need, and discard the rest, including the context.
The word sounds innocuous enough, and it takes its cues as part of the chill-out cool that grants us the easy grace of distancing. It’s part of an attitude that’s based on the idea that all doors should be open to all kinds of pathways; a kind of free-market entry and re-entry policy that is driven on the basis of a belief that it’s all fair game so long as the club keeps pumping. Just ask Girl talk (One word Lille?).
And possibly Santi might agree. He sure as hell loved a party himself. And, to all intents and purposes, he seemed totally committed to remixing, borrowing, appropriating and revising all kinds of images from all kinds of places.
It may well be, though, that there have been a range of shifts in the way that appropriation was used when Santi first started collaging, abridging and amending the images he purloined from a range of other places and elsewheres. He’d always used multiple ‘translations’ in his imagery. Right from the start he’d attempt to collide the languages in which different mediums are capable of speaking. He’d ‘dumb-down’ the high aestheticism of oil-painting with a creole of messy drawing and stick-ons and he’d have it jammed up against the yammering street-speak of contemporary parlance.
Or he’d take the pomp and ceremony of high Latin and conflate it within a psychobabble of visceral medium such as, for example, plaster. From the earliest work he’d force different languages to speak simultaneously. It was as if even in his artwork he strove towards debate, discourse, contradiction: the will towards criticality invaded every aspect of his life and work.
And that’s even before he started with processes of appropriation that took on specific aspects of history and began weaving them back into their ramifications in the everyday.
Right from the start Santi’s imagery was fundamentally iconoclastic. Even – perhaps mostly – when taking aims against his own principles. For if Santi was renowned as an at times scathing critic, then it should also be remembered that he reserved his most acute, sharpest incisions for himself. He’d cut his own aesthetic wrists time and time again on the finely honed blade of his razor-sharp wit. The examples are legion, like demons themselves: he could draw well, so he untied that skill with a deliberate cack-handedness that permitted the final image to speak more clearly, unimpeded by insistent reminders of the artist’s ‘skill’. Better that than become the darling of the artworld monied set. Santi perpetually and habitually bit the hands that fed him. It was his nature. And he reserved his snappiest bites for those he loved the most. He could paint well, so he untied those skills by bringing together materials and mediums and grounds that were unstable and mutually exclusive. An archivist’s nightmare. He was smart and informed and educated and urbane. So he’d often take pains to appear to be brusque and bone stupid and vulgar and abrupt.
But the problem was, he cared, perhaps too much.
All artists care. They are trained to care. They are trained to care about the relationship of a void to a shape, of an edge to a floating pool of colour, or the relationship of a line to a passage of tone or of the synergies between form and space. And then they’re trained to care about ideas and issues and contexts and audiences. And when they make that mistake of caring, they’re done for. Because everything – everything – matters.
Santi had been as well-trained in these matters as any artist is. But, like so many other things he undertook, he upped it a notch. And then a couple of notches more. He cared about the relationship of art to building and fostering communities. He cared about the relationship of those communities and their cultural heritage to the contemporary world. He cared about the ways in which traditions might be inculcated into the most positive aspects of cultural change. He cared about the way in which Philippine cultural identities might be expressed in ways that gave agency and power to those who inherited them. And then he began the long, arduous lifelong process of putting that list of what he cared about into action.
Like many artists, he paid dearly for this commitment. He paid in terms of his time and his welfare and his relationships. And he paid for it in terms of his health. Like I said, he cared too much.
Part of this process of caring involved a lifetime of research into Filipino history, seeking for those overlooked clues about what had persisted even after centuries of colonization. He looked in the dark places – the smudgy, not-so-heroic, less-well-traveled pathways and tracks. He gleaned various bits and pieces – scrawled invented notes of incendiaries on the battlefront with the American overlords; whispered prayers from the grimy pews of overcrowded churches; half-remembered folk-lore about magic mountains and impossible creatures; clunky, arcane talismans the value and meanings of which had been long forgotten – and he then re-contextualised them so that they sang songs capable of being heard clearly, hauntingly, in the present.
He looked at the far places of the Cordillera, and the familiar urban lint of his own pockets. He took in the ether and influences of New York and Madrid and Brisbane and a thousand other places simultaneously through long, slow legendary draw-backs, and sucked those influences down deep into his scarred, ratchetty lungs. Then, after what often seemed an impossibly long pause, he’d exhale them back out again: dreamily, sleepily, mesmerizingly concocted smoke clouds of his own invention. But in the centre of all those smoky apparitions, hovering, fluctuating, mutating and perpetually re-emerging, was always the spectre of home – of his home, of the Philippines. Context, for Santi, always mattered. Always. Where he’d pinched something from and who he’d pinched it from were always inferred within the quotation. And in this way he differed fundamentally and radically from your garden variety contemporary re-mixer. Despite his affectation of sloppiness, Santi’s historical and cultural references were impeccably visually annotated.
So Santi, unlike so many contemporary appropriators, never permitted himself the ‘easy grace of distancing’. He was immersed in it, and confessed to all through his actions, that he was involved up to the gills; well prepared to be implicated and assessed warts and all. He made his role as an artist a transparent and essential part of all aspects of his production: he loved words and he admired those who used them best. And at times, when he spoke most clearly about his own experience with passion and mediation, he wrote with the magic of poetry and the conviction of a visionary. This is not girl talk. This is not reminiscence. The evidence is demonstrable in the many tracts he has left us.
And he could speak, at other times, like an oracle. His deepest flaws were also the parameters of his greatest strengths, and his gravelly, guttural voice could carry the sweetest cajoling, the most seductive of messages in a way that always managed to side-step easy sentiment. There’s a passage of speech Egai Nararro and Rica Concepcion captured on film the day before he died, at a time when he was having trouble getting the muscles of his tongue to form the words. He speaks of his long time colleague, rival, friend Roberto Villanueva and of Roberto’s ultimate commitment to art, one that maintained a producer’s attention to detail even after his death. Santi’s admiration is palpable, and his delivery – however halting – of his final eulogy to Roberto is a flawless performance. All the better, as with so many of Santi’s performances and productions, because of those heart-on-his-sleeve flaws.
And, most importantly, Santi’s legacy is one of an artist who always was prepared to take action at times and places he felt it was appropriate to be involved with. He lead the Baguio Arts Guild in his own inimitable way and the internationally renowned BAG Festivals would never have the same kind of breathless magic without him. Yes, they may have been more orderly. And yes, there may have been less anarchy. And yes, there may have been less contentiousness. But when Santi left the building – any building – the atmosphere never seemed quite so electric.
He stood up to refute points of opinion whenever he disagreed strongly – no matter how international the conference or how foreboding or celebrated the protagonist. He lobbied tirelessly to city councils and senators and gallery directors and dealers and curators about the absolute necessity of contemporary art and artists. He organized soup kitchens and workshops when children were hungry after earthquakes and he organized speaking tours and group shows and books and exhibitions and engagements that celebrated and supported the works of others many of whom were unaware of the long tireless hours he would devote to such endeavors.
And that, finally, is the point at which ‘the easy grace of distancing’, the cool dispassion of so much of contemporary art’s disengagement can not be associated with the kind of appropriative practice he engaged in. Santi may be remembered as a re-mixer, but perhaps it should also be remembered that he mixed with a difference – Rizal’s spectre of comparisons was never far from his own pantheon of diablos, and he was always mindful of reinstating the resounding references of context.
And at this point, for the uninitiated, perhaps I should commit to similar transparencies and confess a little personal context: this is no attempt at masquerading as an academically distanced account of Santi’s legacy. My intimate involvement with him during the last ten years of his life puts any ambition in that area well and truly to bed. “Nevertheless” (as he would so often say) each of us masqueraded at ongoing attempts to maintain critical distance from each other. More often than not, these ran towards the ribald or the baldly disingenuous. Perhaps it was in this spirit that I invented a private joke when he died, partly as a way of consoling my own grief. From time I still remind myself that: if he hadn’t died I would have had to kill him myself. But he saved me from this potential messiness. He saved us all. And left us with a messiness of another kind: how do we fill that immeasurably vast void that his enormous creativity, energy, intelligence and deep caring has left us with, now that he is gone?
- Pat Hoffie, 01/02/10
Pat Hoffie is an artist based in Brisbane. She is engaged in full-time research at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University where she is Director of SECAP (Sustainable Environment through Culture, Asia-Pacific) and holds the UNESCO Orbicom Chair in Communications.
