Monday, January 28, 2008

"Material Fool"


"Material Fool" is a pen and ink drawing on Pinoy mall culture. The artwork focuses on the Pinoy's sometimes excessive predilection for malls: sale, entertainment, shopping, etc., as represented by a fool dancing mechanically to the motion graphics in a video monitor and the beat of loud music. It was adjudged Best Entry during the 57th Art Association of the Philippines (AAP) Annual Art Competition in 2004, held at the GSIS Museum, Pasay City.

"Material Fool," 2004
18" x 24"
pen and ink on watercolor paper
Artist's Collection

Adamson University Historical Marker


One of the highlights of Adamson University’s Diamond Jubilee celebration last year was its being declared a historic site on February 8, 2007 by the National Historical Institute. NHI Executive Director Ludovico Badoy and Deputy Executive Director Emelita Almosara attended the formal unveiling of the official marker in front of the SV building. With this distinct honor, AdU joins its historic site neighbors - the Manila City Hall, the old Congress building, the former Agriculture and Finance buildings, Sta. Isabel College, the adjacent St. Vincent de Paul parish church, the Casino Español, and Paco Park among others - in the list of “must-see” for a historic tourism itinerary.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Culture Interrupted: The DWU Museum In Retrospect

by Raul Agner (9/07)
Twelve years ago, the Eastern Visayas saw the lamented closure of its largest university, the Divine Word University of Tacloban, an institution run by the SVD congregation. With it inevitably came the locking up of the Leyte-Samar Museum and Library, an integral part of the university, a helpful educational tool and an important repository of East Visayan heritage. Attempts to keep it open to the public in spite of the university's closure hit a snag. Budget for personnel and upkeep was simply hard to come by.
Unofficial sources say that today the collection remains intact and in fact could still be viewed albeit by appointment only. Which is good news, if true, for enthusiasts, students and serious researchers of local history and culture alike although nothing can be more ideal than a restoration of its regular or daily accessibility. With no solution in sight, crossing one's fingers appears to be the only alternative for the eventual full reopening of this painstakingly assembled labor of love also known as the DWU Museum.

Birth and Growth
The museum, which would have been 41 years old this year had it continued operating, opened on November 26, 1966 to fill up a cultural vacuum. Fr. Anthony Buchcik, SVD, a German priest assigned at the university's Graduate School had challenged his students to gather artifacts that, if pieced together, would tell the story of their culture. As if mortified that they were more conversant with Longfellow and Shakespeare than local writers or that they knew more about the Taj Mahal or the pyramids than their own past material culture, the students responded with an encouraging initial salvo. One came up with an antique stoneware jar. Several lugged along different old wooden santos to school. Still others presented Chinese ceramic wares, rare traditional household implements like a sandstone water filter, yellowing manuscripts of poems and short stories by vernacular authors and an array of gold thread-embroidered church vestments and vessels. In a few months, the pieces were numerous enough to be exhibited in their entire quaintness and historical richness in a one-room museum.
After the formal opening, more items kept coming in as news of the museum's acceptance of donations spread. A huge hardwood door panel depicting in high relief a purgatory scene was turned over, ushering in the arrival of two wheel bells that further increased the cache of religious items. Wartime artifacts like Gen. Carlos P. Romulo's flare gun, Pres. Sergio Osmeña's leather shoes, a Japanese bayonet and machine gun found their niches in the exhibition room. But the more significant acquisition was a portion of the archaeological finds from the Sohoton caves complex in nearby Basey, Samar. Karl Hutterer, SVD, head of the excavation team that conducted research in that area around 1968 generously donated funerary materials that included a calcified skull and another one with a flattened forehead. Also in that inventory were stone tools (adzes, flake tools), rust-eaten iron blades, personal ornaments made of shell, glass beads and metal, and gold-plated teeth. The whole package was a veritable gold mine of the region's pre-colonial practices. Animistic belief, for instance, was apparent in the phallus-shaped shell pendant worn by women to induce fertility. Personal ornaments and heirloom pieces like large bowls lying side by side with human bones were clues to the widespread custom of having the dead buried with their wealth to ensure comfort beyond the grave. Just how artistic the so-called Pintados (the ancient tattooed inhabitants of Leyte and Samar) appeared was indicated by the abundance of personal ornaments recovered from the diggings: rings, earrings, pendants, bracelets.

Literature Round-up
The gathering of literature about the region for the library section hauled in a slew of rare pieces. Among these were the original manuscripts of local literary luminaries of the '40s and '50s like Iluminado Lucente, Eduardo Makabenta, Francisco Alvarado, Casiano Trinchera, Jaime C. de Veyra and Vicente de Veyra, to name a few. Copies of rare publications were a prize catch: Eco de Samar y Leyte, the Philippine Commission Reports, the Henry Allen Papers and old Waray-Spanish dictionaries. Entrusted to the museum was the voluminous Daniel Z. Romualdez (DZR) memorabilia, a compilation of speeches, correspondence, legal documents, news clippings, photographs, cards and various items about this former Speaker of the House of Representatives from Leyte. One highly valued manuscript was the "Las Islas e Indios de Bisaya…1668" written by Spanish Jesuit missionary Francisco Ignacio Alcina. It is a lengthy and richly detailed description of the local flora, fauna and way of life of pre-Spanish inhabitants of Leyte and Samar supplemented with drawings the author himself made. A typewritten English translation by Cantius Kobak, OFM was donated by the translator himself, a Franciscan missionary who worked for some time at the Christ the King College in Calbayog City, Samar during the '70s.
Fr. Raymund Quetchenbach, SVD, an American, was the second curator of the Leyte-Samar Museum and Library. Growing by leaps and bounds under his care, it was allotted a special place in the main building. Fr. Quetch collected vintage photographs. He also edited the Leyte-Samar Studies journal and other university publications. It was during his stewardship that the DWU Museum Foundation, Inc. was established. Prof. Marlu Vilches took over Fr. Ray's responsibilities and came up with her own accomplishments, including the editing and publication of the book "Readings in Leyte-Samar History." This writer became the next curator in 1979 when Ms. Vilches left. In a year's time, the museum relocated to its new home at the third floor of the VOR Hall, a new building named after the university's first law dean Vicente Orestes Romualdez. Wide, airy and well lighted, the third floor had more than enough space for the office, library, main exhibit hall, temporary exhibit hall, memorabilia section, museum shop and storeroom.

Makeover
After some time, the museum had to take on a different tack. New approaches began ditching the idea of museums as mere repositories or showcases, adopting instead the view of a museum as a living extension and affirmation of a community's culture, identity and memory. Along that more culturally correct line, the DWU Museum underwent a makeover in 1991. Tapped to do the redesign were Bobi Valenzuela, writer and then curator of Hiraya Gallery in Manila and Manny Chaves, graphic designer and then assistant curator of Hiraya. Later, the artist Mario de Rivera lent his fine touch in the arrangement of objects. Several brainstorming sessions later, "Sungdu-an" materialized as a working theme and title. A Waray term that refers to "the meeting point of two rivers," it can as well be the equivalent of the more abstract "confluence." The designers capitalized on the richness of its meaning, design possibilities and its aptness as a metaphor. First, the flat whiteness or usually drab interior of museums was avoided. To breathe color into the DWU Museum, the local banig (mat), which symbolizes folk artistry, cultural resilience and confluence, was extensively used as a design motif. One sees them as timeline markers and wall accents. Utilizing the banig (a local craft that even the chronicler Pigafetta took notice of during Magellan's Homonhon Island landfall in 1521) created a light atmosphere redolent of a Pinoy fiesta. Secondly, several small platforms (painted with the colors of the banig together with the boxes and pedestals) were joined together to form a wide central platform on which the various artifacts were displayed chronologically and in a clockwise direction. Around the platform were the narrative texts. The entire layout allowed for a smooth segue from one historical period to the next and a visual crossover to the opposite side, thus, like the local mat, hinting at the "sungdu-an" or interweaving of historical periods, indigenous elements and foreign influences in the local culture.

Users and Researchers
Many people looking for cultural and historical information about the Eastern Visayas found them at the museum's library. Part of historian Rolly Borrinaga's background info on the "Balangiga Massacre" in Samar was researched in that library, (in the process stumbling upon his potentially controversial hypothesis that the redoubtable Lapu-lapu was possibly a Waray!) Poet-writers Vic Sugbo and Nino de Veyra extensively explored the nooks and crannies of vernacular writing in the works of Lucente, Makabenta and other Waray writers. Marlu Vilches used the Waray riddles collection for her University of Leeds M.A. in Literature thesis, later published in 1981 as "A Collection of Visayan Riddles from Leyte and Samar." Prof. Nenita Tamayo made the museum's collection of Waray proverbs the subject of her master's thesis. Gregg Luangco edited "Waray Literature: An Anthology of Leyte-Samar Writings" and "Kandabao: Essays on Waray Language, Literature, and Culture" both in 1982, two books sourced largely from the library's compilation. Local artists like the Atitipalo Art Group, whose artmaking sought inspirations from local history and culture, thankfully found the museum a rich source of texts and images. Leo Villaflor, known for his tuba paintings, used the file photos of Leyte's past governors for his oil portrait series. When the Pintados Foundation was planning the first Pintados Festival of Tacloban in 1987, the museum library's source materials on the early pintados proved very helpful. Countless other people did research in the museum's library.

Save the Heritage
Today one wonders where those who want to take a glimpse of Leyte-Samar's past (and its connection with the present) or those who need information on East Visayan history and culture go. Sure there are other museums in Leyte and Samar but none compares to the DWU Museum and Library collection's quantity and quality. U.P. College-Tacloban's Leyte-Samar Heritage Center has local literature and traditional implements in its collection. Imelda's expensive objet d'art are what the Sto. Niño Shrine and Heritage Museum in Tacloban keeps (or shows off). The Zaldivar Museum in Albuera town in Leyte is a family collection of heirlooms, travel souvenirs, antiques, ceramic wares and curiosities. In Calbayog City, Samar, the Christ the King College Museum has archaeological pieces, church articles, ceramic wares and various items from Samar but doesn’t have a library section that made the DWU Museum truly informational. Biliran town in the island province of Biliran is just starting a museum with a few artifacts gathered so far.
It's bad enough that people of Leyte, Samar and Biliran can't have ready access to their own heritage. Allowing that same heritage to deteriorate would be even worse. No one knows if the DWU Museum collection, since its closure in 1995, has been cleaned up or checked for damages or given preservation treatment. If not, then the materials are in danger of disintegrating due to intrinsic and extrinsic factors and eventually lost. It is high time that concerned individuals, cultural organizations, academic institutions, the provincial and city governments and government agencies in the region join hands and take action. Among the things they can work on are the museum's possible reopening to the public, making a digital version for easier access, having the status of the collection examined and even moving the collection to a better location. They can coordinate with the SVD congregation that legally still owns the collection.
It's the people though who are the real stakeholders. If the Waray people wake up one day and find their heritage missing, they will have no one to blame but themselves.

_________
The author is former curator of the DWU Museum of Tacloban from 1979 until its closure in 1995, current archivist at Adamson University and co-authored the coffee table book "Adamson University: 75 Touchstones at Year 75."



Friday, January 18, 2008

"Pag-ahon" (Ascendancy), 2005

This is my 2005 drawing entitled "Pag-Ahon" (Ascendancy), a pen and ink drawing on paper using a pilot V-5 sign pen with Rotring ink on watercolor paper. The artwork is about choosing and going for the more important and substantial things in life as a key to our personal and national progress. If you remember the old coins that feature a Filipina holding a hammer beside an anvil as a symbol for industry, the image here is lifted from that. Here she is forging implements that have a practical use like long knives, plows, sickles, etc. At the same time, she is fashioning abstract geometric shapes that soar above to form a stylized star. This represents ideas, dreams, aspirations which are equally important. The figure she is stepping on is bubbleman, a symbol of futility and senselessness. The banig pattern is my personal motif taken from the colorful mats (banig) that Leyte and Samar, the region I come from, is known for.

"Pag-ahon" (Ascendancy), 24" x 18," Artist's Collection

Fishballs For The Adamsonian Soul



Raul Agner (11/2/2006)

"The Best Things In Life Are Free" is the title of a 1956 musical film and a 1992 Janet Jackson-Luther Vandross hit song.
But most especially, it's an enduring catchword, a wise reminder that even without shelling out cash, many good things come our way or that money can't buy many of life's essentials.
Free Things Around
That slogan rings true in Adamson University, a veritable grab bag of "freebies" that appear to have been dropped from above though no one asked for them. By some measure they may not be the best but they are free nonetheless for everyone to savor. Not that the university enjoys a special treatment from heaven's dispensers of graces, because many of these can also be found in other places. It's only a matter discovering and realizing that they've been there all these years and appreciating their real value.
Such as the trees inside the campus that play their roles quietly: as giver of cool shade, as recycler of San Marcelino's toxic emissions into breathable oxygen or as pliant sculptural forms adding pleasant aesthetics to the campus landscape (that’s multi-tasking long before humans adopted it in the workplace!). Often, they would send a short message, in the shedding of a leaf, that life is a cycle of endings and beginnings, of change and renewal.
Imposing and postcard-perfect, the SV building is another free thing we enjoy. One can simply feel good in its hallowed halls or one's sagging spirits can find solace in the beauty and strength of its neoclassical architecture that at the same time evokes endurance and tenacity. Its rich history gives the Adamsonian a sense of pride and lets him bask in an inherited glory. It would be nice to wrap the building like a gift, because it is, (the way the installation artist-couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude did with the Reichstag in Berlin and other structures), if only to dramatize its significance.
Other good things are found in the campus. Tinted glass doors can double as instant mirrors for walk-by grooming. Those craving for mental nourishment have the numerous journals and magazines in the library to pig out on. The throbbing dynamism of student activities fires up anyone's passion for life. In corridors and walkways, the congenial smile people flash makes your day a tad bearable. The big-crowd anonymity gives one a kind of psychological security cloak; and in the ethereal serenity of the chapel, one can feel the reassuring presence of the Maker …and Freegiver.

Person- Gifts
But more important are people who make a difference in your quotidian living. And they are for free at all times. There’s the kind classmate who helps out with your problems. There's the restroom cleaner that makes our answering to nature's calls a pleasant trip to an almost clinically sterile spot. Not to mention the roving security person who gets out of his way to maintain order or help people locate a classroom or office. Of course no one can ignore the traffic aide who risks health, life and limb so Adamsonians can reach the other side of the street intact.
This inventory and hundreds of other examples, enough to fill a book, point out only one fact: in our university, free gifts - big or small things and nice people - abound. No need to be extraordinarily perspicacious to sense their presence; only those in hopelessly irreversible “eyes-wide-shut” mode won't notice. A line in a song says, “you don’t know what you got till it’s gone." Knowing and valuing the free things and people around us lessens the chance of losing them.
In reality, when we come to think of it, each one of us is a gift. Every person can give or share himself or his gifts with others, a "person-gift." A community made up of mutually and freely giving “person-gifts" is an ideal groundwork for a socially oriented institution like Adamson.
In whatever form and quantity the free gift comes, it nourishes our souls to some degree, the way fishballs, a snack staple for many Adamsonians, succeeds in sustaining an empty stomach up until the next full meal, or even if none, comes.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

AdU @ 75


AdU @ 75: Passage and Transition
Raul Agner

Forbidding and ugly, the massive wall in front of the SV building has been finally demolished, replaced with a grill fence that allows for appreciation of the SV building façade's full neoclassical glory. The inspiring view should awaken a sense of pride in every Adamsonian who takes his Alma Mater seriously.
To the unfamiliar, its fresh coat of paint makes the structure look so new and recently built it seems to belie a storied past. Its colonial period architecture helps to correct this wrong impression and establishes the SV building's true historical age. But it's not only the building that can boast of a history, for the whole university itself can.
At 75, Adamson University is one humongous storybook about passage, transition, and transformation. Over time, it has changed location, physical facilities, administration, institutional vision, and educational orientation. In the process, it has reinvented itself; more importantly, it has transformed lives and hopes to do so for as long as it lives.

An Itinerant School
1932 is the year of the one-room beginning in Sta. Cruz, Manila - captured in an extant sepia picture with all of 42 pioneering enrollees and the Adamsons packed together with a handful of chem lab equipment. Very seminal, a world removed from the numerous air-conditioned rooms and spacious labs available to the modern-day Adamsonian.
A month past its first founding anniversary, it moved to a better location in 1933, the first in a series of three nomadic transfers. Along General Solano St., San Miguel, Manila stood the baroque three-story building where students enjoyed more elbowroom for doing experiments and schoolwork. The place, though, couldn’t be big enough just yet. In 1939, a larger building in Intramuros became the school's third stop, where it attained university status in 1941. The new university found a permanent home along San Marcelino Street in 1946, re-opening in the SV building after a war that left a wake of destruction. From thereon, AdU was on a roll, crossing San Marcelino to acquire the Meralco building and its annexes and the whole St. Theresa's College - Manila campus.

Physical Facilities
Several buildings stand in the campus, with the iconic SV getting stellar billing. But while other schools erected buildings cumulatively on a sprawling field, Adamson did not. Except for the Ozanam (Engineering) and Francis Regis Clet (High School and Elementary), the rest are hand-me-downs - having had previous owners and uses but reused for educational purposes. The long one-story structure, old chem lab to many, that is now used for classrooms, offices, carpentry shop, university store and computer labs was the tranvia's pre-war Manila depot, the street railway system operated by Meralco. In the 60's, Meralco put up a main office building in front of it. That is now the CS or Cardinal Santos building. What also used to be a seminary and central house of the Congregation of the Mission (C.M.) is now the SV building. Except for some minor makeover, the STC-M cluster was the easiest to reuse because it was previously also a school.

Administration
From the Greeks to the Spaniards to the Filipinos - the ownership-administration succession follows that order. George Lucas Adamson, a chemist from Athens was the sole founder, some sort of reverse OCW who found the proverbial greener pastures in our land. He later invited his cousins, the brothers Alexander Athos Adamson and George Athos Adamson, to work in the school. Had the Filipinos heeded that line from the classics about fearing the Greeks even if they're bearing gifts, Adamson University wouldn’t be around today. When the C.M. assumed ownership, the Spanish Vincentians became the next set of administrators, with some Filipino confreres as understudy. Expectedly, the institution shifted from being a secular to a Catholic-Vincentian one. Upon the Spanish Vincentians' gradual return to Spain, the Filipinos became the new administrators.

Institutional Vision
To teach Filipinos how to make soap, salt, sugar and other products through a short training in industrial chemistry and to help the country manufacture local raw materials-based products was the goal of the Adamsons when they opened a school. Later they would have the broader vision of offering especially engineering and a mainly technical college education.
That of the Vincentians didn’t come from any hip advocacy but was anchored on their motto: the evangelization of the poor. To offer affordable quality education especially to the socially disadvantaged was the school's new vision, a war cry if you will, because providing education is a way of waging war on poverty. Consequently, Adamson continued to be one of the least expensive schools, made available many scholarships and strengthened the study grant program for student assistants.
At close range, one notices the parallelism of the Greek and Vincentian visions. Both looked upon education as key to attaining a better quality of life.

Educational Orientation
More recently, the administration has redirected the purely technical orientation of the students, veering to a more holistic one. Total development of the human person through a comprehensive cultural program is being pursued. Among the giant steps in this direction are: the establishment of the Cultural Affairs Office, the makeover of the theater, the opening of an art gallery, the recognition of several culturally-oriented student organizations, the opening of the university archives, the opening of the school's permanent history and memorabilia exhibit, the purchase of new books on literature and the arts, the installation of three plasma TVs in strategic areas playing videos on school history and activities, the much-improved library, the facelifting of facilities for a more aesthetic ambience - with a fountain and palm trees, the ST Quad looks more relaxing - and many other enriching servings.

Transformed Lives
That a tree is known by its fruits may sound jaded but the success stories of many alumni reflect the kind of tree that Adamson University is. It is one enduring institution that is faithful to its vision and mission and transforms lives by doing so. From schooldays struggles to rewarding careers, from being nameless to being known, from meager resources to abundant blessings - alumni homecomings are punctuated by falcon-like soars like these. Not only that, they walk the Adamsonian-Vincentian talk, extending their success beyond their personal boundaries. They support scholarships, sponsor school improvement projects, employ Adamsonians in their companies, involve themselves in their communities, serve in their parishes and help empower the poor. In short, they continue the cycle of sharing the benefits of their success, albeit in a low profile manner, hewing to the pay-it-forward ethic of their Adamson education.

Cuing The Future
February 5-11, 2007 was the weeklong celebration of the Diamond Jubilee. Within that week, many significant activities and events took place. A marker from the National Historical Institute declaring the whole university a historical site was unveiled. With its colorful past, there's no doubt that the university deserves the honor. It's another feather on its cap but one more reason for it not to rest on its laurels.
And so, as the new Jubilee sculpture (unveiled in the same week) cues, the transgenerational passage of the school will continue. St. Vincent de Paul, C.M. founder and university Patron Saint and George Lucas Adamson, school founder, are shown in the mis-en-scene as giving a young man and a little girl that precious legacy called an Adamsonian-Vincentian education. Two streams becoming one river on which young people sail to fulfil their dreams.
As history would have it, the one-room experiment became a full-blown project. Today it is an exciting work in progress, holding a lot of promise for the future.

Welcome!

welcome everyone. to have room to share my articles, artworks, photos, thoughts, etc., that's the reason i am having this blog. the big picture on this page is that of my pen and ink drawing entitled "bubbleman: off course." you can have your own interpretation of it. the picture on my profile is another drawing called "asinus asinum fricat." again you can figure out what it is all about.
"egotrikk," the blog title is a re-spelling of "ego trick," a title of another artwork which started my "taong bula" or bubbleman series of artworks featuring a soap-bubble-spewing pinoy archetypal fool as my metaphor for all the futile and senseless things that continue to hamper our national and personal lives. unfortunately, i don't have a photo of it at the moment.
the articles i write are mostly about adamson university where i have a regular job as an archivist. if you are an alum or a student of that school, chances are you could be interested in reading them. of course i write on other subjects too.
as for the photos, no promises but i'll try to share those that are worth sharing.

again, welcome!