“We must think
outside the (aguatint) box!”
–Virgilio Aviado, one of the
country’s pioneer printmakers
The
Philippine Association of Printmakers marks its 40th year in
2013. As such, we celebrate this with an
exhibition entitled “
Press On: Guhit +
Kutkot + Limbag = Sugod.”
Describing
the process and the mindset of the printmakers, this theme showcases the
vitality of the medium in contemporary expression. Though with vast and grand history it
entails, printmaking still manifests itself in the currency of the now as the
works in the exhibit embody.
Celebrating
40 years of vision and education, the PAP has asked its members to engage their
works beyond their noted comfort zones, be it material, size, topic and render
a print beyond a print and make it installative and scultptural. However innovative the work may be, we
strongly urge that printmaking is still the primary focus of such works. This is such to give credence and gravitas to
the tradition of printmaking in humanity’s articulations across the centuries.
“Press
On” is three-pronged. First, it is to
engage printmaking in a different avenue as if turning on the medium into
various states and dynamisms. Secondly,
to “Press On” is indeed to move printmaking away from being confined at the
coffers of history and into the contemporary.
The third aspect is the very notion of printmaking that employs pressing
onto a surface in which an image is transferred and thus remaking not just that
surface but changing the identity of the material where the image now “rests.”
Vitality
is the quality that is conferred to those that can keep up with the dizzying
pace of technological changes. In this
show, printmaking offers its vitality not just to materials and renderings but
of the topics the printmakers endeavor in their expressions. There is with no doubt of the cultural
significance of printmaking in world history.
As A. Hyatt Mayor, Curator Emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s
Department of Prints put it, printmaking has enabled China to have “produced
the world’s most elaborately educated civil service, unified a multiphonal
empire through a nationalism based on one nonphonetic script, and helped to
chronicle man’s longest continuous history.”
From the East to the West’s eventual domination and thus propagation of their
brand of knowledge through massive printing industries have shaped humanity’s
various identities and varied mindsets.
As
Edward Said noted in his notion that civilization is not a stable and
unchanging thing, printmaking has undergone several changes wherever it has
caused catalysts for visual articulations.
Said’s notion of a travelling identity has afforded the members of PAP
to incorporate their own brands of concerns and making sense of localized
issues in an art form not indigenous to the Philippines. And yet, through this very art form has
Filipino printmakers engaged in notion of identity.
This
exhibit shows select members of the PAP and their works that incorporate video,
photography, sculpture, and installation art.
The works engage themselves in concerns as varied as the supremacy of
the image to the tenuous nature of image, to the mythmaking narratives
indoctrinated in our lives, to questioning the meaning of permanence and
monumentality, to delving into the postcolonial gender issues and agitation for
social change.
Ultimately,
this exhibit shows that printmaking does not merely stand still and is just relegated
to the past. It simply presses on
PRESS ON runs from November 6, 2013 - February 2, 2014 at the CCP Small Gallery and Pasilyo Victorio Edades, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Pasay City, Manila
Jose
Santos P. Ardivilla
Political
Cartoonist
PRO,
PAP
Lecturer,
Department of Theory, UP College of Fine Arts
