Homegrown aesthetics
     The group of artists most responsible for this emergence is the Baguio Arts Guild, or BAG. The city’s present role as a catalyst for Cordillera artists, and as a center, through BAG’s bi-annual festival of art activity began shortly after the Marcoses fled Manila, involuntarily ending their twenty-year tyrannical rule. The subsequent mood of euphoria saw a lot of windows thrown open to get rid of the musty air. By that time, the artists soon to found BAG had all returned to Baguio, or had Baguio chosen as their base. One of them was Santiago Bose, a painter and an installation artist. In a piece written for an Australian journal, Bose says his return from New York to the city of his birth came about due to several factors, not the least of which was his dissatisfaction "with working from an international cultural center which had, to a large extent, marginalized the cultural production of a country like mine. When I returned, it was evident that art practice in the country had flourished, and many of the more established artists and intellectuals were also beginning to return from overseas endeavors."
      Back too were Ben Cabrera, after thirteen years of being based in London; filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik; and Roberto Villanueva, a performance and installation artist, returning from a two-year stint in Europe. The assemblage was fortuitous and after several meetings among the aforementioned and with other Baguio-based artists such as Willy Magtibay, performance artist Rene Aquitania and photographer Wig Tysmans, the guild was born with Bose as its president.
      In November 1989 BAG held its first arts festival which ran for ten days. Fittingly, the theme of the first festival was "Rediscovering the Watering Hole of Our Creativity."  Featuring visual arts and the crafts, installations, video, photography, music, dance, theatre and poetry, the Festival drew sizable crowds, and attracted a sprinkling of international performers, including Kulintang Arts, an Asian American dance group from San Francisco, and a traditional Japanese ensemble.
      So far, the Guild has had four festivals. With the last one, the theme being Salubungang Agos (Cross Currents), the festival decided to formally go international, inviting artists, photographers, performance groups and critics from Australia, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and the United States. (The U.S. - based artists included myself and two media artists, Yong Soon Min and Allan de Sousa working on a collaboration multimedia installation entitled Geography of Desire where the intent was to explore through personal and historical narratives the impact of colonialism on desire.) The consensus of local and foreign artists was that the festival was a huge success, in spite of logistic limitations and the barely adequate funding.
     The acclaim reaped by the Festival has led to many offers for outside groups to manage future events, but guild members stress that their commitment to an artist based organization is, as Bose puts it, "an integral aspect of the Festival’s rationale." BAG’s success, with its stress on homegrown aesthetics has been essential to creating an alternative movement, away from an overdependence from the West. And Manila. The guild has thus emerged as a vehicle for empowerment, a way of controlling and creating their own images rather than letting those from the outside take primacy. Here in a microcosm is the continuing dialectic between Third World assertions and First World control of information. Here too lies a dialectic between Baguio and Manila, in many ways an extension of the First World. In terms of cultural production, and in its exhibition in galleries and museums, Manila has been largely the feeding-and breeding-ground of those artists who, as critic Marian Pastor Roces put it in a recent essay Ethos Bathos Pathos, "are fully committed to Euro-American art history, and who produce work precisely calibrated vis a vis that history," with the caveat that "this person will likely remain shunted out of all existing centers of art-cum-political power." True enough: of the large contingent of artists, who have ventured abroad over the decades, only a handful have made their mark. I don’t mean having exhibitions, and distribution deals with galleries, but getting the critic to sit up and take notice. Part of the problem of course is the ever-pervasive bias against people of color. In this regard, it will be interesting to follow the career of Los Angeles-based Manuel Ocampo, the current hot Filipino star. His remaining an object of desire for the critics depends not just on his talent (quite formidable) but on such non-aesthetic matters as the politics of race, and who notices and who buys him. Ocampo has shrewdly displayed his Filipinoness commendably, whereas a number of previous artists who have made an impact on the Western world - Ossorio comes to mind - did not. Whether or not Ocampo continues to do so will depend on how deep his commitment is to his own visions, and his resistance to market forces.

Cultural Autonomy

       However imperfect, efforts of the Baguio based artists and BAG must be related to the context of the ongoing struggle to reclaim both cultural and psychic territory from the invader, nowadays more likely to wear the mask of pop culture and the glittery garb of the so-called "international" style than a military uniform.  In a larger context, Baguio’s eclipse of Manila parallels the demand for more autonomy from Malacanang by local governments, the growing insistence among cultural workers and creators on reevaluating whom and what exactly they look to for ideas and inspiration, echoing the rethinking of political alliances to suit regional aspirations.
     The domestic shift in political and cultural emphasis is manifested globally by the resurgence of ethnic-based nationalism and the revival everywhere of homegrown art, that is, art more evidently reflective of the artist’s own history.  In its extreme it leads to repugnant phenomena such as ethnic cleansing that must be condemned unequivocally: an irrational, fratricidal attempt to turn the clock back and reinvent both peoples and cultures.
      Though at times it may appear that way, the Baguio art movement is not about atavistic impulses.  As Bose states, " It isn’t a question of wearing a G-string again.  It’s more of a conceptual thing."  More of a reckoning then, a reconfiguration, even reassessment, of the modern Filipino as he/she is situated: influenced (some would say burdened) by a geography and a history that is like no other, with the ambivalent baggage of a colonial past side by side with modernist sensibilities and the tribal, communal self.
      The parallels between attempts at cultural autonomy and an emphasis on regional government, are no mere coincidence.  In this sense BAG is one of thousands nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, that have come about during the past decade in response to the endemic faults and inequities of the socio-political-cultural system.  Of course, in the everyday world of the Filipino, faced with the increasingly difficult task of survival, history and geography tend to faed into the background, but never entirely.  The efforts of the Bguio artists to rule their own destinies and not rely on some outside force, whether residing in Manila or in the tonier confines of Europe and North America, or Tokyo, has touched an ancient nerve.
 In one of Bose’s installations, Pasyon at Rebolusyon, with its explicit reference to Reynaldo Ileto’s book Payson and Revolution (a seminal work on the peasant aspirations for independence contextualized through sacred texts on Christ’s sufferings), indigenous materials, local iconography including a Katipunan flag, inscriptions and miniature figures make up an ironic and highly eloquent altar.  In many ways it continues his often humorous (I call him the gangsta/pranksta of Baguio arts0 attemts to articulate the feelings of those whom Bulosan terms "the nameless in history".
      For Ben Cabrera, the last festival’s chairman, what has been crucial is the interaction between these mountains and the Baguio artists: "The Cordilleras have ahd a strong influence on the Baguio artists, over those with international stature.  The culture here is still very Philippine."  In his own work, he has been influenced by the sense of form the Cordillera artists have, evident in the sculptural elements of his paintings.  "There’s also a strong sense of function here.  A farmer can carve a beautiful stool or a bulol.  There’s a raw quality to the art here.  In Manila, the art is fine, smooth, very sellable."
      That rawness is one of the essential differences between artmaking in Manila and artmaking in Baguio, evidenced in the presence of both a communal and spiritual element in the latter.  What happened for a very long time in Manila art was the creation of works based on aesthetics that were often divested of culture, so that they would have what is termed an "international style", and couyld then be placed on a global, i.e. Western art market.  Any time you divorce art from the culture from which it springs, you emasculate it, and in effect reinforce, rather than deconstruct, the whole process of colonization.
      In contrast, BAG artists acknowledge the shamanistic, the rituals, the tradtions.  If Bose is the movements gangsta/pranksta, then Roberto Villanueva, Willie Magtibay and John Frank Sabado are among its neo-shamans.  Villanueva’s installations clearly reiterate the importance of traditional ritual and symbol, often with him at the center, using such forms as the dap-ay-a circle of stone seats and a hearth at the center, where village elders gathered to discuss important matters- and ritualistic offerings, like the spirit boat, to animist spirits, as reminders of a center we all need to retreat to.  One of his best known and loved works was his 1989 gigantic installation of bamboo and rono reeds, The Labyrinth.  Built around a dap-ay, the construction was playful, meditative, a lyrical homage to a past still viewed as nourishing matrix.  Magtibay too has used the dap-ay both as icon to be contemplated and as functional space.  Sabado uses dreamscapes and imagrey to express both individual and ancestral memories.
      Indeed, in the witty video installations of Kidlat Tahimik, in Aquitania’s performances and, last December, those of Singaporean Chandrasekaran, Manila’s Enrico Labayen and his Lab Projekt and groups such as Australia’s Gong House and Mindanao’s Kaliwat, the focus has been on the reassertion of the native self and on the recontextualization of traditional iconography.  It has meant an opening up in directions previously looked down on as "folk art", the freedom to utilize Philippine icons, mythology, popular images and to utilize as well native material, from handmade paper to bamboo,  woven mats, reeds.
 The bi-annual festival has encouraged other regional art groups to honk their horns: artists from Pampanga, the Bicol region, Bacolod, and Davao have exhibited in Baguio and some have had festivals of their own.  The Guild, however, if it is to continue growing must endeavor to expand the role of women within its ranks.  Maybe there are few women artists in Baguio but that should be reason enough to spur rather than hinder the Guild.
     In one sense, it is quite easy to misread the Baguio artists so that it is possible, in the fever of elevating our "ethnicity" that the works be consumed for the wrong reasons.  In a culture where the critical mass (that is, the premises and language of criticism) has been largely shaped by Western culture, such a danger is omnipresent.  Again Roces puts it succinctly: "...there is obviously a parallex problem.  It deserves reiterating that the perception machine imposes its own parameters.  Those parameters, hegemonically constituted, do not allow for the possibility that many Filipinos are not quite "readable" within those self same parameters."  To which it must be added that the Cordilleras are not homogenous.  Its many ethnic groups and languages mean a diversity at least as rich as other areas of the archipelago.

     In deed the Baguio artists are fortunate enough to sit on top of deep artistic traditions and resources, from the coastal Ilocos region to the remoter parts of the cordilleras.  Like the gold miners of Benguet, these artists have begun tapping the different lodes, going into the recesses of a communal psyche to show the rest of us what treasures lie buried there.  That this is part of a worldwide phenomenon has been noted frequently:  the rediscovery of the small, the communal, has been a gut reaction to the global corporate, MTV-like slickness of much of contemporary representation.  As BAG has shown, along with their kindred spirits in other countries, rediscovering- and reinterpreting- home is one of the more rewarding voyages at the end of this millenium.