Art History Vs Art History: A Critical Essay on Patrick Flores’ "Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art"

Complete Title: Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art
Author: Patrick Flores
Publish Date: 1998
Format: PaperbackPublisher: Office of Research Coordination, University of the Philippines [and] National Commission for Culture and the Arts
Pages: 393 p.: ill.

“The task of Philippine colonial art history is to theorize on the various aspects of the construction of Philippine colonial art studies and evaluate its effects on multiple audience ethnographies which comprise the public of the canon. (105)”

Indebted to neo-marxist theory, British cultural materialism, semiotics, and structuralism, Patrick Flores’ book Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art situates itself within the new art history which itself took root from the new history of the third generation of the Annales School since Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora coined the French term nouvelle histoire in the 1970’s among others (Burke, 2).

Flores’ discourse, in line with this tradition, asks “the question for art historians…not ‘what do pictures mean?’ but ‘what do pictures want’ (xv)” which reconsiders “covert intentions, functions and agenda within a synchronic history of competing social forces (ix)” as opposed to “what paintings as pictures overtly convey or communicate (ibid.)”.

The book is a critique of art historians within the milieu of “traditional” historiography (which merely gathers and measures) encouraging the recovery of fluctuating receptions and interdisciplinarity in art historical writing and criticism. Flores explored the viability of the concept of colonialism in the post-colonial text as ambivalent―both peaceful and violent. He discarded the dichotomy of form and content that has long governed traditional art studies, revealing the nature of painting as commodity in the process.

Shifting the ground of traditional art historiography further, Flores’ rhetoric persuades art history to deconstruct itself by interrogating its stock premises. One salient interrogation of this type is the dependence of art history to economy which he regarded as simplistic and overdeterministic. In turn, he endeavored to create a comprehensive colonial art history by doing an extensive research on the Academia exposing neglected facts in previous historiography. One such fact is the Mexican influence to colonialism since the Philippines was not directly under Spain but by the viceroyalty of Mexico of New Spain until 1815. Recognition of such complexities is to be the basis of a truer account of art history.

Form as Mode of Production

Central to Flores’ theoretical basis is the concept of form as a mode of production. Overtly a neo-marxist concept, he coins Eagleton and Berger to situate art within the political economy. He quotes Eagleton:

“Oil painting creates a certain density, lustre and solidity in what it depicts; it does to the world what capital does to social relations, reducing everything to the equality of objects. The painting itself becomes an object – a commodity to be bought and possessed; it is itself a piece of property, and represents the world in those terms (54)”

This establishes the nature of the visual rhetoric as not merely a reflection of material and style, but a reflection “of social relations between artist and audience with which that technique is bound up (ibid.)”. This visual knowledge, he argued, is manufactured by a semiotic technology and can be applied to view the baroque (and painting) as not merely style and form. This argument revives the perceived dominant style of colonial painting (baroque) from an overdetermined analysis and appreciation.

Flores materialized this concept of political economy within the site of Philippine experience by citing the attempt of the government to acquire colonial artifacts (including paintings) in the name of “heritage.” This attempt, he analyzed, is situated in a historical context that fastens art to the question of national identity proving that art is programmed in narrative settings. The book attempts to relieve art of this burden.

The author further explores the post-colonial ideological formation by citing Bordieu and Williams in his attempt to explain cultural reproduction as generative rather than replicative. This discussion is mainly intended to place colonial art within a specific sphere of ideology-producing mechanism using Bordieu’s concept of habitus and Williams’ constituting subjectivities. It provides for a rational understanding of how colonial art achieved its complexity by arguing that cultural ideological production is not replicated but generated leaving the latter ideology in art more complex than the one it was born out of.

Still within the attempt to understand cultural ideological formation in the post-colonial milieu, the author criticized Zeus Salazar’s Pantayong Pananaw as subjecting art to orientalization and other-ing through “fetishized and fetishizing constructions of institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, and doctrines accruing to the category ‘native’ (65)”.

In weaving these post-colonial theories, the author clarified the usage of the term post-colonial as non-diachronic but referring to repercussions of colonialism from the very first colonial contact to the present. This clarification is important in appreciating where the author is coming from and in understanding the amount of development that post-colonial theory has gone through in the light of achieving clearer perspective (read: sanity) for the reader.

The author handled the sites of transgression in colonial painting history by establishing that mimicry is not necessarily a form of silent subjugation but a form of resistance. He did this by rationalizing the relationship of the indigenous and the colonial. He argued that the representation of transgression in history (especially in religion) endows the indigenous an inferior character as that of the colonial and by subjecting colonial paintings to this kind of analogy, art history betrays the previous.

The specific nature of colonial exigencies was discussed by the author using the backdrop of a feudal society. He gave premium to social and organizational make-up to construct colonialism. The set-up of towns, forced labor in the name of the church, and urbanization gave function and effect to hispanization.

Institutions of Colonial Art

In discussing and constructing colonial art, the author recognized the assumptions and current ideological configuration of the audience he is writing for:

“When we lay claim to colonial art, we address a determinate field: a set of representations of colonial art regulated by structures and practices of colonial art history in the Philippines. We locate the museum system as one of the main sites of encounter.(106)”

It is this recognition that the author presented eight museums that house colonial artifacts: Intramuros Administration, Central Bank of the Philippines, San Agustin Museum, University of Santo Tomas Museum, Burgos Museum, National Museum, Vargas Museum, and Ayala Museum (ibid.). This listing is integral not only in establishing the sources of the corpus of the study but, more importantly, in tracing the sites of ideological construction that concerns colonial art

Damian Domingo and the Academia

Fundamental in the author’s discussion of ideological construction of art in the colonial period is his exposition of the Academia de Dibujo y Pintura that is long credited as the first art institution of the Philippines. Gathering extensive data, the author rendered the (re)history of the school that exposed the following findings and issues regarding history of education of art in the country:
The early schools run by friars taught art within the catholic subscription. These schools started canonization and the dichotomy between art and craft.

1. The Academia de Bellas Artes was the first institutionalization of painting discrediting Domingo's academia as the first
2. Recognition of the Chinese connection in artists and themes.
3. The concept of authorship started with printmaking as the printmakers signed their works.
4. Architectural and framed/panel painting (includes icon painting) are the forms of early colonial painting.
5. The current taxonomy of style endorses a colonial continuity ultimately serving the Academy.
6. The edict of Charles III on May, 1785 was the beginning of secularization which started portraiture.
7. 6 forms that flourished during the secularization: Miniatures, Miniaturismo, Letras y Figuras , Tipos del Pais, Historical Scenes, Scientific Plates
8. Damian Domingo’s works constituted miniature portraits, religious paintings, and albums of costume, idylls, and regional milieu.
9. The style of the Academia was miniaturismo.
10. Artists were divided into 2 groups: those in the Academia who gained access to European techniques and aesthetics and those ''homegrown." Domingo is both.
11. The Academia made the guild painters lose value because of institutionalization.
    

Politics of Research

“All historical narratives contain an irreducible and inexpungeable element of interpretation.

What is at issue here is not, What are the facts? But rather how are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another
- Hayden White (97)”

The author successfully communicated to the reader his subject position and the politics of his research. This exposition is key to the presentation of a methodology that is relatively new. He also made clear that a research cannot be fully objective since a study is based on a premise and the premise (whatever it maybe) is inherently indebted to its structural configuration which, in nature, is subjective.

Art History as Art Criticism

In dealing with the colonial, the author consciously reviewed his strategy in approaching the artworks. Oblivious to the institutionalization of certain conceptions of colonial tradition, the author formulated “an art history that unmasks the traditionality of colonial art and grasps it as a contemporary text whose inscriptions represent the various moments of its relations and realizations (307)”. The author relocates colonial art from the past recognizing its undeniable presence in the present

Flores’ critique on diachrony resists ahistoricity, or the condition to regard the conditions of colonial painting as belonging to the past. Rather, because they are indeed in the present, he deconstructs the construction of their coloniality by employing a synchronic study.
He also critiques critics that employ strictly formalist approach in criticism:

“The kind of descriptive analysis pervasive in the analysis of Philippine colonial painting gives inordinate attention to elements of the visual arts: line, color, texture, composition, perspective, brushwork, and so on. Nothing much emerges from this form of ‘looking’ at art objects, as it just reproduces the object of analysis in more or less in own terms. (312)”

It is also a concern that with formalism, critics have a strong tendency to endow hasty symbolism for certain details promoting empiricism and uninformed criticism. Another concern is the dependence of artistic success to “verisimilitude, a kind of realism or illusionism that strives to be faithful to the ‘natural’ (314)”.

Lastly, the author questions the attribution of value to source and influence. The term “reminiscent of” for example must be sustained with a competent analysis of influence rather than being an easy exit for a baseless judgment. In line with these problems in criticism, the author proposes a hermeneutic code to assist in valuation for the purposes of criticism such as figuration, iconography, and reception. These codes would then aid in the attempt of the critic to communicate aesthetic values to an audience. Arnold Isenberg, in a 1949 Philosophical Review article said: “it is a function of criticism to bring about communication at the level of the senses; that is, to induce a sameness in vision, of experienced content (Feagin, 369)”.

New Art History

Veering away from presenting history as necessarily involving heroes and battles, Flores’ take on art history is sorely obliged by the theories of the Annales School and the History of Mentalities School that redefined the scope of history to include everyday objects. Especially important is historian Fernand Braudel’s idea of everyday life things as historical which makes sturdy the position of art in the scheme of historical things.

This indebtedness bestows upon Philippine art historiography the important task of ensuring transdisciplinarity—enclosing art history in an interrogative field, trying to go out of the already-existing art historical discourses and institutions, ultimately attaining the perfect unity of theory and history.

Sources:
Burke, Peter. 'Overture: The New History, its Past and its Future', in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. By
Peter Burke (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), pp. unknown
http://www.kowa.euv-frankfurt-o.de/iba_european_history/iba_european_history_text_p_burke_new_history.PDF
Feagin, Susan L. and Patrick Maynard (Editors). Oxford Readers: Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press.
1997
Flores, Patrick D. Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art. Quezon City: University of the Philippines
Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Development, 1998.