TEACHING/LEARNING THE HUMANITIES IN OTHER

WORDS/WORLDS
by Patrick D. Flores

The Institutions of the Art World

The institutional theory of art [13] forwards some answers. Arthur Danto asserts that an object
will be admitted to be art if it can be related to already acknowledged objects or by way of a
theoretical justification. Danto requires that a theory must validate the existence of the object
(e.g. a painting, a poem, a dance performance, a film, a musical composition), a theory
“testifying” that the said object and, let us say, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa share common
features which are both aesthetically legitimate.

George Dicke, on the other hand, advances the view that artistic distinction can be conferred
by anyone who can conceive of himself or herself as an agent of the art world and operates
within the appropriate institutional contexts. Thus, a soup can become art if an acknowledged
artist puts it up for sale, a curator displays it in a museum, an art critic gives it a review, an art
historian includes it in a book, an art teacher discusses its aesthetic merits in school, and so
on.

An ordinary urinal in an ordinary public toilet is not art. But Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 urinals[14],
mostly entitled Fountain, which were exhibited in various museums and are now in the
possession of State and private collections, are. In the same vein, the kala, a bracelet, is just
one of those daily fashion accessories worn by T'boli women. When a curator hangs it on the
wall of a museum, it “becomes” a work of art. Also, a street play performed amid a protest rally
or a hunger strike cannot be art. But when it is staged within the context of the so-called
legitimate theater, its value changes. The urinal is not just for urine anymore but for the
aesthetic sensibility. The kala is no longer part of everyday wear; it has become an artifact, an
ethnographic evidence to be looked at and observed. The street play ceases to be
“propaganda,” it has transformed into drama.

Simply put, the agencies of the art world–academe, media, the gallery/museum network, the
art market, State cultural bureaucracies, connoisseurs and collectors, publicists and dealers,
culture industries–send off to their publics the “signals” of art, locating them within the proper
institutional scheme, and ingraining in them the appropriate aesthetic reception, disposition,
or attitude to accept and include some things as art and reject and exclude others as anything
but art.

It is in this context that our notions of art are constructed, validated, reproduced, and
disseminated to “others” whom we think must be guided by the same principles. The art world
has taught us since our kindergarten drawing-and-music- lesson days, for example, how to
render line, space, and color correctly, or how to reach the correct pitch of a tone. An art critic
points out that some people are in touch with and “know” such particular art concepts as
musical patterns (e.g. the diatonic scale and the major triad) “because anyone who has grown
up in any Western country, lived as a child there, and, especially, gone to its schools, will know
them. From our earliest days in a culture which uses scales and harmonies, we hear songs–
lullabies, nursery rhymes, and, later, popular songs of all kinds–based on these ubiquitous
conventional building blocks of Western music. When we enter school, we learn the names of
those notes (in the conventional do-re-mi notation and in conventional notation on the staff,
with the letter names C, D, E, and so forth), and learn to sing them on cue when we see the
notes.”[15]
In short, this education has made us part of an art world that privileges specific norms
governing and regulating the production of art. This is why it has become almost second nature
for us to judge the artistic credence of something as if that something were “naturally” artistic
or non-artistic. What we have forgotten or what has been hidden from our “sight” is that these
judgements are just constructions of a particular culture and of an industry of culture. And
there are other cultures that would construe art in different terms, in different scales and
harmonies. Who is to say that their standards are any less valid?

It is not only the concept of art that must be analyzed, however, but also that of artist. A critic
relates that deeply embedded in the mindsets of many people is the Romantic myth of the
artist as the superstar who is driven to make art by torture and inspiration, a heroic soul or
genius who “agonized to produce a masterpiece,”[16] very much like “Edgar Allan Poe drinking
his way to greatness, or Byron, the aristocratic individualist riding his horse and declaring
rebellion against tyranny.”[17] This imaging of the artist elides the political process which leads
a person to take on the position of artist, who definitely is not born as such but is rather turned
into one by society: Jackson Pollock who spills and splashes paint onto his canvas is an artist,
but a San Fernando lantern-maker is not. The contrivances that make people artists–the hype,
the awards, the publicity, the reputation, the cult adulation, the artistic license, the hocus-pocus
of self-expression–are simply that, devices, which we must dismantle in order to understand
and explain the reasons by which artists are “recognized,” “assessed,” and gain the credibility
and credentials of artistry, in other words, how they are able to appropriate the competence to
practice art and make sure that their art is made available to the public.

These problems cannot but confront politics and power, or to be more specific, the economic
and cultural capital that mediate our responses towards matters involving art.

The French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu points out that “consumption is… an act of
deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code…
the capacity to see is the function of knowledge, or concepts, that is, the words, that are
available to name visible things, and which are, as it were, programmes for perception. A work
of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence,
that is, the code into which it is encoded. The conscious or unconscious implementation of
explicit or implicit schemes of perception which constitute pictorial or musical culture is the
hidden condition for recognizing styles characteristic of a period, a school or an author, and,
more generally, for the familiarity with the internal logic of works that aesthetic enjoyment
presupposes.”[18] Bourdieu theorizes that the ability to appreciate and enjoy and even to
simply recognize is not borne out of natural intelligence, but rather is learned and is in fact a
function of pedagogy: “The encounter of a work of art is not ‘love at first sight’… and the act
of empathy, which is the art-lover’s pleasure, presupposes an act of cognition, a decoding
operation, which implies the implementation of a cognitive acquirement… the 'eye’ is a product
of history reproduced by education.”[19]

The activity of consuming art is therefore determined by the distribution of knowledge in an

economically and intellectually uneven social organization. While many of our cultural
technocrats bandy about the idea of “art for all” and “democratization of culture,” we cannot
remain oblivious to the real constraints of access to cultural goods, which can only be availed
of within the system of unequal distribution of capital/power across social groups and through
the pressures that the artworld, as an ideological state apparatus, exerts on its audiences to
acquiesce to forms of valuations which have been virtually canonized by the cultural
establishment. Can we really hope that the poor people of a squatter colony would learn to
appreciate the aesthetics of ballet after watching a prima ballerina dance sacrificingly on the
basketball court? And what if indeed they manage to “like” ballet, can they afford to subsidize–
not only under the auspices of economic but also of cultural power–this newly acquired taste
for something supposedly superior to Tinikling and disco dancing?

We must realize that art forms are inscribed in conventions and not everyone is “free” to
become privy to these, no matter how the manufacturing sector insists that the consumer has
the option to choose and the market is all that liberal. The very definitions of art and even the
specificity of art to form reality are suffused through and through with matters that have to do
with how power circulates in society–a power that overdetermines the production of art, artists,
the art world, and certain commonsensical notions of art.

Bourdieu writes that the “sacralizing of culture and art fulfills a vital function by contributing to
the consecration of the social order: to enable educated men to believe in barbarism and
persuade their barbarians within the gates of their own barbarity, all they must and need do is
to manage to conceal themselves and to conceal the social conditions which render possible…
the legitimized predominance of a particular definition of culture.”[20]

As a visitor in Versailles had once remarked: “This chateau was not made for the people, and
it has not changed.”[21]
In the same way that the SM Megamall Art Walk, while it cohabits with upscale sari-sari stores
and high-class carinderia within the sprawling postmodern complex, was meant for those who
can buy paintings, those who can pretend to be au courant with antiques, those who can see
potential investment value through the canvas, and those who can during glittering exhibit
openings blurt out lines like: “That looks like Chagall… that’s derivative of the worst elements
of Abstract Expressionism…"

And we say that the market is free? In order to reposition ourselves away from the
contemporary ethos of making and consuming art, it is imperative to be skeptical and
suspicious about how we regard art, always keeping in mind that the term is mainly a construct,
a category of social activity not justified by essence–that is, an object like a urinal does not
become art because there is something inherently artistic about it–but by the status which is
arbitrarily conferred by the institutions. And so, taste or predisposition for and towards
practices and productions deemed as art is an inculcated norm conditioned by conventions
and nourished by the consensus entered into by a community of artists and audiences, a
symptom in fact of certain assumptions about how reality must unfold, how things must look,
how texts must be read, how their effects in society must be calculated.

Moreover, we must continually be wary of the manner in which hegemonic discourses attempt
to totalize experience and universalize taste, as if contradictions and disparities did not exist
in this world. As part of its objectives, the canon, for instance, foregrounds such artificial
categories as fine, folk, and popular, as well as a range of differentiations as in high, serious,
avant-garde art which is distinguished against low/illegitimate/bad art, artisanal craft, kitsch,
entertainment, commercial, mass, and pulp. Wedded into these boundaries are hierarchies
that, according to Bourdieu, valuate some works as "worthy of being admired” and treat the
rest as outside the domain of critical reception, and so not part of the “cultural wealth” of a
particular history.

Between Nick Joaquin's Cave and Shadows and Nerissa Cabral's Bukas Luluhod ang Mga
Tala, which work is more legitimate and has the right to be taken up in “literature” classes and
published in anthologies? Between Puccini's Madama Butterfly and the Pasyon, which of the
two contains “better” music? Between film superstar Nora Aunor and architect Leandro Locsin,
who deserves to be declared National Artist? And between abstractionist Jose Joya and
Mabini painter Peck Piñon, who is more eligible for a retrospective grant from the Main Gallery
of the Cultural Center of the Philippines? Why? Why not? Why cannot the study of painting,
the technique of putting pigments on two-dimensional surfaces, accommodate movie
billboard-making in its perspective? Why cannot the business of literature deal with the
underground poetry of the New Peoples Army cadres or the daily “narratives” of tabloids?

The canon sets up parameters beyond which we cannot see and know. It charts histories and
sanctifies paradigms against which others are but mere aspirations. And, of course, it cogently
enforces particular social configurations: “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social
subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they
make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their
position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed… The denial of lower, coarse,
vulgar, venal, servile–in a word, natural–enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of
culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the
sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the
profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and
deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimizing social differences.”[22]

The process of consolidating a canon needs to be rendered problematic because it is a

political project. The canon does not operate by whim. Its practice is never idiosyncratic; it is
always ideological. Ideological because when the canon insists on Art with a capital A, it posits
a universal view of the world, a mystification that obscures the power behind the so-called
universal unity. When a white middle-class Republican professor and his student, a third world
woman of color, confront a Vietnam film, the dominant institutions and traditions of
interpretations generally expect, or better yet, interpellate the latter to assume and subscribe
to the canonical reading of the former by virtue of power relations: the yuppie of an Ivy leaguer
is more authoritative to judge the text in the “right” way than the illegal alien of a Chinese is.
The construal of the former in effect invalidates or weakens that of the latter in an attempt by
the regulating agencies of reading to totalize experience and speak for someone else, or, why
not, for everyone; in an attempt to situate all of us within a frame of reference as realized
through “reading habits” and representational strategies outside of which we cannot speak,
write, read and within which we become coherent, represented, knowing subjects. It is always
an imperative of those in power to assume the position of correctness, of proposing the most
feasible truth in order to prove once and for all that, indeed, life must be lived this way and
certain things will have to prevail. By re-viewing how the canon is constructed, we become
aware of how it is arbitrarily put together, why it has been produced in the first place, how it
disseminates its effects in society, how it impinges expectations on how people must make
sense of the world through art. And how we must labor to transform the kind of society that
sustains it.

The term art has a naturalizing premise. We refer to some things as art because those things
have always been considered to be such. But says who? We have the tendency to take the
term art as if it were “natural” (already there) and “neutral” (just there). We must learn to
demolish the basis on which it achieves efficacy as a term and derail the “bottom line” with
which we conveniently formulate it.

Furthermore, the homogenizing politics of the canon occludes the multiple spaces people
inhabit in their relations with society, positions that either seize the aegis of dominance or ache
under the trauma of powerlessness. We are not people, solely; we are also “named” in terms
of an “immense discontinuous network” of class, race, gender, sexuality, language, religion,
ideology, historical experience, and other more “different knottings of these strands,
determined by heterogenous determinations which are themselves dependent upon myriad
circumstances.”[23] In other words, people are irreducibly different and therefore cannot be
governed by a singular culture, as this would deny the specificities with which people
encounter power and wage struggles in the name of interlocking, shifting differences and
strategic alliances. George Yudice reminds us that “the member of an oppressed marginal
group cannot escape the repercussions attached by a society to his/her skin, sex, speech,
and other marginalizing marks of distinction: a black in a white world, a woman in a patriarchal
culture, an unskilled worker in a (post)industrial economy.”[24]

But nevertheless, we must strive for total, not totalitarian, transformation: to regain not a
universal humanity but those human particularities and subjectivities and the conditions under
which they could flourish–something that can only and truly be realized if we confront the
oppressive structures which “wound” and “refuse” them, if we “try somehow to go right through
those estranging definitions to emerge somewhere on the other side,”[25]and if we think of
how others might be able to coalesce with us in transforming our, their, and hopefully
everyone’s situations progressively and rigorously. As Terry Eagleton puts it: “The feminist,
nationalist or trade unionist might now come to recognize that in the long run none of their
desires is realizable without the fulfillment of the others’s.”[26]

The canon though is not to be regarded as a non-changing, all-powerful empire, a solid grand
monolith that overwhelms thoroughly, massively, completely, and therefore resistant to
challenge. For it is part of the liberative practice to read against the grain, to recuperate,
rearticulate, and reappropriate the potentially subversive stirrings repressed in canonical texts
and realign them along revolutionary interests. The canon’s fabric of power is not seamless.
Therein are fissures, disruptions, disjunctures, ruptures, and cracks through which radical
intervention by way of strong and committed interpretations is very much possible and real-
izable. Historian Ranajit Guha, conducting emancipatory and redemptive critical practice,
secures the gains of a tactical re-reading of colonial historiography: “It is of course true that
the reports, dispatches, minutes, judgements, laws, letters, etc. in which policemen, soldiers,
bureaucrats, landlords, usurers and others hostile to insurgency register their sentiments,
amount to a representation of their will. But these documents do not get their content from that
will alone, for the latter is predicated on another will, that of the insurgent. It should be possible
therefore to read the presence of a rebel consciousness as a necessary and pervasive
element within that body of evidence.”[27]

The story of art, culture, and civilization is said to be the story of the white, heterosexual,
Christian man of property. It is also a story of benevolence and beauty. History tells us,
however, that repressed in this story is the story of violence, deracination, cultural pillage,
exploitation, underdevelopment, poverty, slavery, obscurantism, imperialism, genocide.
Repressed, still, are the other ways of reading, writing, looking, seeing, living, making art; the
other experiences of women, people of color, peasants, workers, sexual dissidents; the other
realities of Third World revolutions, socialist alternatives, ethnic societies, nationalist
movements, indigenous science and technology, folk and other popular philosophies; other
desires, other voices, other knowledges, other worlds, other truths, other gods.

Homi Bhabha enjoins us to retell these struggles and the narratives of our histories in our own
gatherings, indeed in this classroom: “Gatherings of exiles and emigrés and refugees,
gathering on the edge of 'foreign’ cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos
or cafés of city centres; gathering in the half-life half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny
fluency of another’s language; gathering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees,
discourses, disciplines; gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of other worlds lived
retroactively; gathering the past in a ritual of revival; gathering the present. Also the gathering
of the people in diaspora: indentured, migrant, interned; the gathering of incriminatory
statistics, educational performance, legal statutes, immigration status–the genealogy of the
lonely figure that John Berger named the seventh man. The gathering of clouds from which
the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish asks 'where should the birds fly after the last sky?’”[28]
It becomes a daily revolution to foreground and empower all these other tales, retrieve them
from the periphery, and purge them of the stigma of otherness. This necessarily entails the
struggle of enlisting the people in support of ideological agenda, configuring an exchange of
power and meaning that does not, because cannot, degenerate into playful pluralism and
bourgeois tolerance, but one steeled by a politics of transgression and transformation.

As Indian feminist thinker Gayatri Spivak states: “Tolerance doesn’t work both ways. The rich
and the poor are not equally free to sleep under the bridges of Paris. Tolerance is a loaded
virtue because you have to have a base of power to practice it. You cannot ask certain people
to 'tolerate’ a culture that has historically ignored them at the same time that their children are
being indoctrinated into it.”[29] What is at hand, hence, is the passionate clash of discourses,
a purposive battle of positions on how society must be arranged, and not just a celebration of
diversity. And what is at stake is no less than the invalidation of totalitarian systems and the
transformation of society, a transformation that involves not merely the reversal of roles (from
oppressed to oppressor, from slave to master), but a vehement refusal to extol anything as
absolute and at the same time a joyful commitment to a complex, creative humanity and a life
of struggle and solidarity.

This rethinking must, for instance, inform the feminist practice of reappropriating texts and
practices from the margins. Nerissa Cabral and a Cordillera weaver are to be recovered not
only for the sake of gender or racial pride, but also for the purpose of reclaiming the term “art”
to encompass productions subjected to the epistemic violence of canonical discrimination and
of blasting away the ideological binarisms of art/not-art, fine art/folk art, literary/commercial,
and so on. This demands that the reading and making of the aforementioned productions
transcend the conservative limitations of normative classifications and instead grapple with
the intricacies of signification and mode of production. It is not enough to invoke basketry as
testimony to women’s creativity; it is important to examine the processes by which baskets are
transformed from, let us say, communal expressions into commodities inserted into the
marketplaces of capitalism, critique the exploitative moments rankling in the imbalances
brought about by the dislocation, and map out positive potentialities within a new locus of
activity that is at once displaced and reconstituted.

Reading and writing alternative texts and practices must then be no less than strategies of
empowerment, in which women[30] are able to locate themselves and redefine according to
their politics more liberating foci of art and culture, explore the cracks and gaps of the field
through which they can pursue their struggles, and so ultimately resist the resistances of
patriarchy.

Cultures are terrains of contestation and sites of struggle. Cultures must compete in the
ideological arena, continually deconstruct the monopoly of the canon, construct new
possibilities of meaning, and prefigure conditions of visibility for more human futures. It is only
in this way–this recuperation of the specific struggles within society’s heterogenous
constituencies and permeating life with freedom–that art and the “Humanities” shall finally
become meaningful and urgent for all those who work to conceive a life that “obliges them
over and over again to give birth to themselves,”[31] so that there would emerge “a new and
sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where
love will prove true and happiness be possible.”[32]
Endnotes

[13] For further reading, please refer to:

Danto, Arthur C. “The Artworld." The Journal of Philosophy 61 (January-December 1964):
574-584.
Dickie, George. "Defining Art." American Philosophical Quarterly 6 (July 1968): 253-256.
[14] "A urinal is a fountain; that is, it is an object designed for discharging a stream of water.
The reason most urinals are not fountains, despite their designs, is that their locations and
use differ from similar devices we do consider fountains. The objects are structurally similar,
but their cultural roles are very different. Putting a urinal in a gallery makes it visible as a
'fountain’ and as a work of art because the context has been changed. Cultural contexts endow
objects with special meanings; and they determine arthood.” (in “Piece: Contra Aesthetics,"
The Philosophy of the Visual Arts, ed. Philip Alperson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992),
458.
[15] Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 41.
[16] E. San Juan, Jr., "Ideology, Criticism, History: Textual/Sexual Politics in Third World
Narratives." Writing and National Liberation: Essays in Critical Practice (Quezon City:
University of the Philippines Press, 1991), 23.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard
Nice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 3.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Pierre Bourdieu, "Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception," International Social
Science Journal 20 (Winter 1968), 610.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Bourdieu, Distinction, 6.
[23] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York:
Methuen, 1987), 204.
[24] Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (London: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) 235.
[25] Terry Eagleton, "Nationalism: Irony and Commitment," Nationalism, Colonialism and
Literature Field Day Pamphlet Number 13 (1988) 5.
[26] Eagleton, 17.
[27] Spivak, 204-205.
[28] Homi Bhabha, ed. Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990) 291.
[29] "Who Needs the Great Works,” forum, Harper’s Magazine, September 1989: 46.
[30] Linda Nochlin, writing in “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists,” explains why
“natural assumptions must be questioned and the mythic basis of much so-called 'fact’ brought
to light.” She elaborates: “The question 'Why have there been no great women artists?’ has
led us to the conclusion, so far, that art is not a free, autonomous activity of a superendowed
individual, 'influenced’ by previous artists, and, more vaguely and superficially, by 'social
forces,’ but rather, that the total situation of art making, both in terms of the development of
the art maker and in the nature and quality of the work of art itself, occur in a social situation,
are integral elements of this social structure, and are mediated and determined by specific
and definable social situations, be they art academies, systems of patronage, mythologies of
the divine creator, artists as he-man or social outcast.” (in The Philosophy of the Visual Arts,
266).
[31] Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
[32] Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “The Solitude of America," New York Times, February 6, 1983.