Manila’s urbanism and Philippine visual cultures

We live in and after ‘The Shock of the New’. Shock as emotion is heightened surprise. It is what the modern is supposed to be, after all: an epoch of perpetual revolutionary change of new perceptions, new ideas, new things, and new worlds – blending science, technology, economy, politics, high culture, and social mores. Change is supposed to generate a field of tensions across collective imaginations. We are said to be in constant upheaval. This is the revolutionary imagining of modernity as Faustian or Promethean, as evoked by Marx and Engels, recalling Shakespeare’s The Tempest: ‘all that is solid melts …’. It is what Robert Hughes (1980) elucidates in his history of modernist art. As The Shock of the New modernist aesthetics is the body shock report of modernity as revolution.

That shock is more interesting to us here not as the effect of change itself or our reaction to change, but the fact that when we see something that evokes surprise we realize not only that we know it but that the re-cognition of it is a shock to our presuppositions and predispositions. We are forced to think again, look afresh, and sometimes to act differently. The force of the shock is something of an epiphany – it can be felt as wonder, but it is wonder that forces us to take stock – to re-cognize the situation and reconnoiter the people involved.

This shock of recognition is one that frequently happens between strangers and across cultures in the ever-more intensely globalized set of world-relations that is the back-drop of our existence. This involves greater and more frequent opportunities to encounter other-ness, including in our own cultural and regional backyard. What commenced as European imperialisms – European horizons, cultures and visions confronting alien New World cultures and Old World non-occidental civilizations and contexts – is happening afresh across and between Asia-Pacific cultures. These encounters, and the accompanying trades and trade-offs, occur today in an era of heightened economic and technological globalizations.

This special thematic issue focuses on one set of those encounters, exchanges and collaborations. The cumulative effect of all of them is to provoke us into new senses of wonder about the world. We do so with new recognitions of each other and new possibilities of thinking about our own world with renewed vigour and curiosity. This is an intellectual ambition that is approximated in small and modest ways through the traditional media of the modern university system – its workshops, exchanges, and small collaborative projects. Most of the articles in this issue were presented at a workshop hosted by the Philippines Australia Studies Network and Ateneo de Manila University in June 2011. The larger context of this work has been meetings and travels between Australia and the Philippines for over a decade. The June 2011 workshop theme was: ‘Visual Cultures, Modernity and Society’. Some of the presenters at this workshop were guests at Thesis Eleven’s global festival of ideas held at La Trobe University the week before, at which there was a workshop on ‘Popular Print and Visual Cultures’.

Peter Murphy and Trevor Hogan posit a central question for thinking about the nature of the Asian-Pacific mega-urban regions in the 21st century: how can we discern the organizing logic and order of these extraordinarily dynamic and large social and built forms? The particular case study of the authors is that of Manila – arguably the world’s most privatized city – an extreme example of a neo-patrimonial social order but also therefore part of a continuum of cities that share many similar characteristics of this type with Manila. The authors ask why is Manila so privatized? They explore the antinomies and rhythms of its privatism and its privatized public order. This is a focus of the accompanying photo-essay by Trevor Hogan and Caleb Hogan , the title of which highlights its themes: ‘Gates and Borders, Malls and Moats’. It is the in/visible barriers and fences between spaces that point to the private nature and assumptions of the social imaginary of a city. Cities like Manila show that public life – things, spaces, and orders held in common – is made out of and in resistance to private interests and problems and not the other way round, as commonly presumed in modern social theory. As such, the commons are modern artefacts and imaginaries that are fragile achievements and easily undermined (Hogan et al. 2012). `Here, the authors offer a historical sociology, a genealogy that traces an emblematic pattern across the colonizing periods of its emergent urban forms into the contemporary patterns of gated zones and impassive inward-looking territories: the enduring legacy of patrimonial power for Manila is to be found in the households and on the streets that undermine and devalue public forms of social power in favour of the patriarch and his householders (now relabeled as “shareholders” in “public companies”) at the cost of harmonious, peaceable and just public order. Such a state of affairs is not only destructive of the historic built environment of the city, especially its public parks and plazas and heritage districts, its streets, footpaths, public transport and utilities, but is directly injurious to its citizens. These are not simply academic issues, for to address the question of Manila’s private order and public chaos is to reopen the quest for the good city as the just polis. It also takes us beyond arguments of indigenous versus colonial forms of urbanism that are mired in nationalist and modernization ideologies respectively, and it is to reject the reductive logics of globalization arguments that Asian mega-cities are but variations of American logics of urbanism' (Murphy and Hogan, this issue).

The social scientific study of cities – of social order and built form – habitually and un-reflexively uses visual metaphors and generally assumes the centrality and dominance of the eye, even though the ancient divine admonition to downcast our eyes has been observed in the modern print culture of the university, which privileges the word over the image (see Jay 1993). Murphy and Hogan deploy the musical metaphors of harmony, rhythm, and melody instead. They argue that Manila is a polyphonous and polyrhythmic city, but one that is also discordant in its ordering. In this context, they offer musicological images as a heuristic. Nonetheless, the musical rather than the visual metaphor promises a larger socio-aesthetics of city design and social imagination and the potential to harvest further critical insights for urban studies. Murphy in his writings on musical philosophy (1999) has done some of this conceptual composing, but there is much more that can be done.

Gary Devilles accepts the dominance of the eye in viewing the modern city. He points to the dialectic of vision and blindness in the work of three modern Manileno artists – Caparaz, Rosario and Aligaen. Devilles uses visual impairment or blindness as a trope of modern aesthetics to study the contradictions of Manila’s urbanism as depicted in the work of these artists. Whereas Devilles focuses on three artists to understand their particular visualizations of Manila, Gina Fairley in her article takes Manila as the canvas on which to paint an overview of its contemporary art scenes, markets, and industries. Her survey is a self-conscious movement from Sydney to Manila and back out across the emergent art worlds of the Asia-Pacific region. As curator, critic and advocate she provides us with both a geography of the contemporary visual culture industry and a sociology of knowledge in the process. As a snapshot of the contemporary scene in Manila, Fairley is also revealing about the nature of the hyper-intensive globalization of the multi-layering of art worlds – local, national, regional and inter-regional (trans-Pacific; trans-Atlantic) and how the new generation of Filipino artists is managing these challenges. As Fairley notes in passing, she is not the only outsider; these days not only are Pinoy artists to be found living and working in the metropolitan centres of the old art worlds, West and East, but there are now expatriate Australian artists such as David Griggs living in Manila. Fairley’s own work both promotes and exemplifies the thickening and intensification of cultural traffic within East and Southeast Asia. A typical pattern of movement in her line of work involves shifting artists and their works between Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Manila, Singapore, Shanghai and Tokyo. The small sample of photos provided here by Fairley does not do justice to the art on display, but neither do the limits of such a format succeed in suppressing the vitality, intensity, humour and seriousness of the young artists’ work.

Of course the story is not only about taste scenes and markets and global flows. For every Leeroy New, who was commissioned in 2010 to do the body painting, dressing and photographing of Lady Gaga for her single ‘Marry the Night’ (2011), there are thousands of anonymous street artists at work and play in Manila. Gustafson, a Canadian expatriate Manileno, reports on his philosophical ethnographic investigations into the art work of jeepneys. The samples show that the rococo imagination of Leeroy New can be sourced to a long-standing social imaginary in Manila that effortlessly synthesizes popular and high cultures, the baroque and the gothic, kitsch and the sublime, the sacred and the profane, and the tragic and the comic.

Where Gustafson focuses on the body work of metal machines, Calano recovers the body work of indigenous Kalinga peoples of the Northern Cordillera. Deploying the ethnographic studies of anthropologists to philosophical ends, Calano works with the proposition that where a society lacks documentary archives, the human body becomes a key repository of life passages, social rituals and beliefs, and of cultural memory. In this sense, the tattoo is a memory trace of a collective culture. But what happens to the tattoo when a culture is transmogrified by new technologies, both print and visual, and by migration?

‘Geography is destiny’ has certainly been the case for the Philippines, an archipelago of over 7100 islands at the maritime crossroads of the Asia-Pacific region. Its many different peoples have always been on the move, and no less so this generation. Population growth is robust, but so too are the outflows of Filipinos to live and work across the world. So significant are the numbers of overseas workers that they have been a major export industry crucial to the Philippine national economy. In Thesis Eleven 98 (2009), Filomeno Aguilar explored the impacts of migration on local towns and family households vis-à-vis diasporic notions of home, loyalty and memory. In this issue, Dr Tan looks at the meaning of the mother-child dyad in family structures that are attenuated and dissimulated by migration and separation in a global economy of carework involving a series of maternal surrogates. What to make of an endemic pattern of family structures that are both structured by labour migration and class and status stratifications? One contemporary type might be the poor provincial woman leaving behind her own children in the care of relatives and migrating to the metropolitan city to look after the rich woman’s children, with the rich woman also absent, working overseas. Another pattern is for women – rural or urban poor – to work overseas as nannies for foreign rich women. For Tan, the challenge is to re-think the meanings of the mother-child dyad in such settings – here she makes several suggestions. First, to move from images of motherhood dominated by intra-uterine bonding to a longitudinal reading of the stages of maternity that not only include gestation, birthing, and the care for young children but also, just as importantly, the mutual recognition and respect of mothers and adult children as autonomous individuals. Mothering, Tan argues, is not only about bonding, but it paradoxically demands growth, separation and surrogacy. Tan then explores what intimacy and recognition and development mean in situations of migration and the experiences of multiple mothering and maternal surrogacy across the longer time span. The answer is necessarily complex and dialectical and attuned to the limits of the ideology of mothering that has been imported to sustain the unequal gendered division of labour that is now trans-national. The demands of an unequal and feminized globalized economy of careworkers imposes unfair burdens on women and their young children – their absence and separation cannot be adequately compensated for by mobile technologies or by an ideology of maternal love and sacrifice.

The intricate patterning of our bodies and familial relations across cultures, space and time are also mapped out in our kitchens and on our plates, wherever we eat. This is the focus of Joseph Salazar’s article. Like Tan before him, Salazar recognizes that our most intimate, private needs and behaviours have public expression. Salazar shows how the American colonizers’ imposition of a simpler, rationalized and planned modernity on Philippine cultures has fed into local circuits of food production and consumption. On the one hand, the rise of mass production in the food industry via cash-crop plantation and importation from America of canned and frozen foods have threatened the sustainability of local regional traditions of craft food production. On the other, the poor have responded by developing an ethic of creative integration of American and local foods through recycling of leftovers and mass-produced fast foods. These have become the public kitchens of the new informal settlements in the provincial and metropolitan cities of the archipelago. To Salazar, the contemporary appropriation of these innovations in food types by rich Philippine nationalists seeking to proclaim and sell a ‘national cuisine’ to global markets represents a retrograde step in Philippine modernity. Nationalism is not his starting point, but rather a project and a discourse that in itself needs to be explained (cf. Hogan 2006). For Salazar, always the struggle is to champion local slow foods and local initiative by the poor in making and consuming their foods in public settings. In this article, which is part of a larger doctoral research project on Philippine food cultures, Salazar focuses on the ways the American colonial project involved a reconstruction of domestic space in the name of modern hygiene and domestic science. Public kitchens of the poor were marginalized and suppressed in the name of science, cleanliness and progress and replaced by the elaborate restaurants that sell something labeled ‘Philippine national cuisine’ back to rich elites creating new taste markets. We are back to the central theme articulated in the paper by Murphy and Hogan: that of the hardy perennial struggle of public life and the ongoing re-privatization of public domains, institutions, and traditions.

To conclude our reflections on Philippine visual cultures and more specifically the new metropolitan urban visions of contemporary Philippine independent filmmaking, we have included some reflections by academics, critics and filmmakers Alvin Yapan and Jema Pamintuan on their recent film Ang Panggagahasa Kay Fe (The Rapture of Fe). As scriptwriter, director and fundraiser, Professor Yapan is well placed to offer a critical overview (that is paradoxically also an insider’s view) of the contemporary scene. His colleague, Dr Pamintuan, reports on the making of the soundtrack to the movie and the self-reflexive use of the tambuleleng, which is a modern adaptation of three traditional indigenous instruments from Bukidnon, Southern Philippines, to evoke a national (and nationalist) sense of the ethical, social and political issues raised in the film’s storyline. The contemporary recycling and reinvention of old traditions – some artisanal and pre-colonial such as the tambuleleng; others modern and mass-produced commodities recycled as custom-made public utilities (the jeepney) – reminds us again of the vitality of cultural traffic and syncretic creativity of culture in this mega-urban region at the crossroads of a 21st-century Asia-Pacific maritime ecumene.