Featuring the works of:
Marius Black | JL Burgos | Benjie Belgica | Rustom Casia | Xander Calceta | Jeff Carnay
Ceej Gomera | Sarah Geneblazo |
Racquel de Loyola | J.Luna | Kim Oliveros
Kirby Roxas | Noel Pocot | Mark Villanueva | Louella Suque | Chen Breva
Paolo Castro | Menk Cruzat | Cherry Hilao | Irish Flores | Jehan Manansala | Niel Marcelino
Macoy Bacay |
George Barrios | Janice Cortez | Leo Dilay | Dan Duran | Pepper Hernandez
Monique Laurel | Krisette Lacuesta |
Diana Clara Mendoza | Cha "Cherry Red" Roque
Noel Jordan Racca | Jepren Solis
Organized by Recci Bacolor
Art Is Not A Crime
By Noel N. Pocot
There are two functions of Art, one is to mirror society in all its beauty and glory, the other is to mirror it in all its ugly and grotesque decay.
The former encourages society to do even better and surpass itself as if to say there is decay in complacency. The latter challenges society to confront reality in its rawest most basic form that it may be corrected at all cost to save it from its own downfall. It is in this aspect that an artist by virtue of his art is often labeled wrongly as a heretic or worse a criminal and his art comparable only to a crime so heinous it should be banned from public exhibition halls if not the artist himself from the general psyche.
Caravaggio suffered the same faith in the hands of the clergy in his depiction of Mary with dirty feet mirroring the prevalence of a corrupted society he was in that gave rise to a lot of prostitution and prostituted mentalities, which was to say it literally and metaphorically. It didn't help that the clergy found out the model was a dead prostitute or so it was rumored.
As the term implies, Fine Art as it is called calls for the artist to be refined, well informed and able to articulate with a high level of sophistication to defend his artistic views that his visual commentary may be heard and read the way he wanted it to be. Case in point is the present misunderstanding and general apathy of the Filipinos to the work of one of its most brilliant and promising young artists, Mideo Cruz.
People lashed out at the way the artist has literally defiled a religious icon with a wooden phallus and the unseemly reference to people's preoccupation with idolatry. In a place and religion that puts religiosity and icon worship way beyond true spirituality these perceived idolatries, riling not a few nerves and outright condemnation from the clergy, the general public and the body politic- most of whom have issues with their own credibility, was not a question of when but how. If the bodily harm and threats were anything, that summed it all.
The clergy mostly, from their obstinate snub of the RH Bill when they themselves do not reproduce to put it rather bluntly, cried blasphemy and sacrilege- that after they were caught red handed owning SUV's from a former president whose term was generally perceived as detrimental to the people by cheating on the vote and going into anomalous deals as alleged that disadvantaged the government to the depths of unfathomable financial hell condemning the next generations to a life of "financially compounded" miseries.
Mirroring the corrupted mentalities of a society may come at a price for the artist and his art but that is the purpose of it all, the effect of which will be read by succeeding generations who would learn and rise from such downfalls. In retrospect, only Carvaggio's message matters now, the clergy who mattered most in his time and held sway the reigns of power are but mere footnotes of a storied past.
Mideo's wooden phallus is not his but that of the obnoxious resistance of the clergy to the RH Bill that aims to strengthen families (the core of any society, through planned births so children may have a better shot at the future and that government's burden on social services will not tax it to the breaking point) bluntly put on the face of Jesus and his church-the people. The Phallus is the ego of the Bishops who demand that they have the last say in a topic that they do not know about or engage in imposed on the face of the church, ramming it on the throats of the faithful by using God to get the message across, akin to the clergy saying "condoms don't work, we've tried it look!" and proceeding to put it in their middle finger and flashing it up for all the flock to see.
This online gallery was made on the premise that Art mirroring the corrupt and other corrupted mentalities is not a crime, it only becomes so in the mind of the beholder who either misread it or those who are just plain venal as art has done its purpose and have forced them to see themselves in the mirror.
