Participatory Propulsions: New Tendencies in Philippine Protest/Revolutionary Art

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This essay investigates alignments between contemporary art practices and the aims of the National Democratic movement in the Philippines. We will begin with the context of the Philippines and the National Democratic movement, identifying key early examples of artistic experimentation and protest/revolutionary art (with particular reference to the work of the Kaisahan artists’ organisation and David Medalla’s activities in the 1970s); followed by case studies of contemporary art practices engaging with National Democratic activism (with reference to SAKA, Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien, and Renz Lee). In articulating these contemporary practices in this way we aim to sketch out a reading of the broadening forms of political commitment and revolutionary art in the Philippines; and to locate potential ‘powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy’⁰¹ within an expanded field of contemporary art.

In 1966, the late revolutionary (and poet) Jose Maria Sison announced, ‘Just as revolution is inevitable in politico-economic relations, revolution is inevitable in culture. A cultural revolution, as a matter of fact, is a necessary aspect of the politico-economic revolution.’⁰² Two years earlier, he co-founded Kabataang Makabayan (KM; Patriotic Youth), a youth organisation envisioned as the ‘assistant of the revolutionary proletariat’.⁰³ Under the banner of KM, Sison and his comrades called for ‘a cultural revolution of the new democratic type’, emphasising ‘the role of creative writers and artists in the various art forms’ and advocating for a ‘national, scientific and mass culture’.⁰⁴

We begin this essay with Sison’s remarks as it explicitly underscores the intertwining of culture and politics within the National Democratic movement. This section contextualises culture and, by extension, art practices as superstructure that rests upon a specific economic and material base. In the Philippine context, culture rests on a semi-colonial and semi-feudal base created by the combined forces of US imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism, which the National Democratic movement seeks to materially dismantle through genuine agrarian reform and national industrialisation. Specific to culture, the National Democratic movement works to overthrow the colonial, feudal and bourgeois culture that fraught politico-economic conditions have created and to replace it with a national, scientific and mass-oriented (NSMO) one.⁰⁵

Late art critic Alice G. Guillermo articulated this process in her 1993 essay ‘Mao Zedong’s Revolutionary Aesthetics and Its Influence on the Philippine Struggle’.⁰⁶ Guillermo’s succinct summary and synthesis of Maoist aesthetics – drawing in particular from ‘Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art’ (1942) – is developed via the work of artist collective Kaisahan (Solidarity), amongst others.⁰⁷ Founded in 1976, Kaisahan formed as progressive groups such as the Nagkakaisang Progresibong Artista at Arkitekto (NPAA; United Progressive Artists and Architects) became increasingly involved with underground revolutionary work, many of its leaders having relocated to the countryside to join the armed struggle following Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s proclamation of Martial Law in September 1972.⁰⁸ Kaisahan’s manifesto announced its critical examination of Western influence in Philippine art and campaigned for a national culture, positioning national identity as ‘firmly based on the present social realities and on a critical assessment of our historical past so that we may trace the roots of these realities.’⁰⁹

Within the context of Philippine art history, Kaisahan is commonly associated with social realism, an artistic movement defined, as Guillermo states, by ‘a commonly shared sociopolitical orientation which espouses the cause of society’s exploited and oppressed classes and their aspirations for change.’¹⁰ It emerged in the ’70s as a response to the political and social unrest caused by the Marcos administration, which, on the state-level, supported more abstracted and ‘avant-garde’ artistic explorations through the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP).¹¹ As Eva Bentcheva notes in her text on Philippine experimental art during the ’60s and ’70s, ‘[t]he programmes of the CCP expressly rejected art which bore messages of overt political expression or criticism, most notably by social realists […] Their mode of work often demonstrated strong performative and conceptual elements, yet their political nature ensured they remained outside the scope of the “experimental” art programmes of the CCP.’¹²

As Guillermo emphasises, such an understanding of social realism is to be distinguished from state programmes of Socialist Realism, such as those associated with the Soviet Union or China at that time. In their manifesto, Kaisahan note that while their commitments are firm, they do not limit themselves to ‘a specific form or a specific style’. Guillermo enumerates manifestations of this tendency, accounting for popular ‘low’ art forms (such as wall posters and comics), indigenous traditions, and foreign influences (e.g. modernist idioms such as expressionism, cubism, and surrealism) as explored by Kaisahan and other protest artists. In terms of artistic medium, Guillermo’s writings on social realism concentrated on the use of paintings, sculptures and illustrations along with the more protest-aligned forms of effigies, murals, graffiti, and peryodikit.¹³ In examining these artistic concerns and formats, she asserted that ‘technique does not exist for its own sake alone or as an autonomous practice, but is inseparable from the production of meaning and ideology.’¹⁴ Similar to Sison, Guillermo concludes her essay by advocating for an NSMO culture, underscoring the understanding that while art is ‘subordinate’ to politics, it in turn ‘[exerts] a great influence on politics’¹⁵ and the aspiration to optimise art as ‘indispensable cogs and wheels in the whole machine, an indispensable part of the entire revolutionary cause.’¹⁶

Another starting point for us to unpack these questions is the practice of David Medalla. Medalla is a mercurial figure whose alignments would shift throughout his career, but for us it is his activities during the 1970s in particular – at roughly the same time as Kaisahan’s formative years in Manila – that indicate a comparable struggle for form in artistic and political terms. In the 1960s in London he pioneered kinetic art and developed various experimental approaches, co-founding of the experimental Signals Gallery (1964–66) and later the interdisciplinary collective Exploding Galaxy (1967–68). Medalla’s artistic experiments coincided with the development of his own political commitments; in 1969, during a return visit to Manila, he famously staged a protest during the inauguration of the CCP alongside artists Mars Galang and Jun Lansang.¹⁷ In the ’70s, he co-founded more explicitly political groups such as the Artists Liberation Front (1972–74) and Artists for Democracy (1974–77), where he looked towards ‘participatory propulsions’ with a keen eye on the ‘masses’. Foundational in this stage of his practice was the Maoist quote ‘the masses have boundless creative power’, with Medalla later writing that ‘[e]ventually the masses themselves will evolve further these propulsions and bring them to higher levels of artistic realisation.’¹⁸

The struggle on both fronts, artistic and political, seen in Medalla’s practice in the ’70s is crucial for us. It invites a different understanding of artistic practice, where aesthetic concerns are not disconnected from a sense of political consciousness and movement. As the poet-revolutionary Kris Montañez warns, investigations into artistic form can ‘easily slide into abstractions’ and unmoor artistic efforts from ‘the historical movement which gives [them their] purpose, tasks, scope, direction and source of creativity’.¹⁹ Much like Guillermo, we are interested in expanding ideas of form and practice in relation to the National Democratic movement, its advocacy for an NSMO culture, and recent trajectories in contemporary art. Elsewhere, Guillermo articulates that ‘[a]rt has expanded greatly in terms of materials, techniques, styles, and the artist, enjoying artistic freedom, is heir to these rich resources discovered, explored, and elaborated on by [the artists’] precedents.’²⁰ This expansion of art, likewise reflected in Guillermo’s shift in research from ‘social realism’ to ‘protest/revolutionary art’, begs deeper examination of contemporary art practices and how they can be aligned with the aims of the National Democratic movement while struggling and searching for form.

This struggle to embody political activity in artistic practice – to enact in art the Maoist methodology of the mass line – continues to be explored by contemporary art practitioners, through what may be termed the ‘expanded field of art’.²¹ We situate this expanded field of art in conjunction with National Democratic ideologies through the following case studies of specific projects by Renz Lee, Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien, and the Sama-samang Artista para sa Kilusang Agraryo (SAKA; Artist Alliance for Genuine Agrarian Reform and Rural Development), highlighting their ‘investigative’ or research-oriented aspect, which builds upon the Maoist notion that art ideas come from social practice and investigation. Within these case studies, we seek to elucidate artists’ struggle for form, in often entangled political and aesthetic dimensions, especially as aligned towards proposals for an NSMO culture. To paraphrase Medalla, these artists could be regarded as transmitters of creative ideas which come directly from the masses, discovered through investigation, and are given back to the masses in ‘more concentrated, spiritually dynamic, and organically and structurally coherent forms’.²²

SAKA, an artist alliance of cultural workers, was convened in 2017 to mobilise for genuine agrarian reform and peasant struggles. As an alliance composed of cultural workers, they have organised public events, exhibitions and workshops as pedagogical tools for political education. SAKA has specifically referenced the collective farming practice of bungkalan in their Bungkalan LAND (Learning and Demonstration) initiative, held in collaboration with Unyon ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura (UMA; Federation of Agricultural Workers) and the Anakpawis Party-list.²³ Bungkalan is a particular form of peasant resistance and collective farming practiced by plantation workers in the Philippines, where cash crop and monocrop cultivation (in particular, sugar in Negros Island) is rampant. These plantations leave little to no areas of cultivation for other crops such as staple vegetables and grains, which not only provide more nutrients for the soil, but also food for the farmers tilling the land. The act of collective farming for sustainable crops in unused plots of farmlands has been used as a way for farmers to assert their right to the land that they till against these feudal conditions.²⁴

In 2019, SAKA began tilling a plot of land in Pook Amorsolo, Quezon City, Metro Manila, located inside the campus of the University of the Philippines (UP) in Diliman. The residents of Pook Amorsolo and the nearby community of Krus na Ligas have claimed that since the 1850s, they have settled in their land therefore becoming its rightful owners.²⁵ A similar claim, however, was made by the Tuason family which traces its ownership of the land to a Spanish royal grant. The Tuason family subsequently sold their landholding in Quezon City to the Commonwealth of the Philippines with its initial plans to build a new capital city and with it, the new UP campus.²⁶ The land, covering ten hectares in total, is planned to be converted by the university for income-generating assets, such as a parking lot and mall.²⁷ Every Saturday morning from February 2019 until the onset of COVID-19 restrictions in March 2020, the members of SAKA along with the community of Pook Amorsolo and organisers from the Anakpawis Party-list tilled the land of Pook Amorsolo. Some members of SAKA also visited the site throughout the week to prepare the land and water the plants. Using the agroecology methods of the bungkalan developed by UMA, SAKA applied this peasant practice in the often-forgotten agricultural land inside the UP Diliman campus.

Viewed through the lens of socially-engaged art practice, this initiative spoke to an expanded educational and participatory form of art, providing an entry point to anyone willing to learn more about the collective form of resistance waged by farmers in the countryside. Alongside physically tilling the land, workshops and discussions were held by visiting communities such as Lumad students from the Bakwit School, an alternative pedagogical initiative for national minorities in Visayas and Mindanao, aligning solidarities and struggles between the issues of Pook Amorsolo with those of students dispossessed of their ancestral lands.²⁸ In engaging in the bungkalan, the bodily knowledge gained from the act of physically tilling the land – along with the attendant educational discussions on the peasant struggle – has more bearing than the form that the plot of land takes after being tilled.²⁹

The bungkalan also provides a reference point for Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien’s work. In their installation Compostlight (2023), projected light is filtered through onion skins and reflected off of rotating mirrors onto the walls of the space to mimic disco lights – a gesture that speaks to the social and celebratory activities that often occur in the midst of militant struggle, and was inspired by a colorful disco lightbulb that the artists spotted while visiting a community in Negros engaged in bungkalan. The installation was part of the artists’ multi-site exhibition ‘Offerings for Escalante’ (2023), a tribute to the potential and revolutionary optimism of mass action, as read through the lens of the memory of the Escalante Massacre. The Escalante Massacre occurred on 20 September 1985, towards the end of the Marcos regime, and emerged from a welgang bayan (people’s strike) and ending with government forces gunning down 20 protesters.

Camacho and Lien’s experimental documentary Langit Lupa (2023) reflects on the memorialising of the massacre through their research into reenactments organised by progressive cultural groups such as Teatro Obrero. These reenactments, which began a year after the massacre, were halted in 2019 as a result of continued state harassment. Camacho and Lien’s film brought together testimonies from survivors and organisers, coupled with abstracted analog film sequences made with foliage foraged and treated using phytogram techniques during their long-term research period in Negros and its communities. However, rather than just focussing on the casualties and violence of the massacre, Langit Lupa also sheds light on the significance and power of a welgang bayan that united broad masses in collective action, across physical geography and political alliance. Across different forms, their work emphasises rural resistance amidst continuous struggles with the state. In their works involving phytograms and handmade paper produced using local plants, the duo express a sensitivity to the poetics of matter and material, creating objects that not only embody their collective modes of production but invoke unfolding narratives of the peasant struggle. In doing so, they present a multilayered understanding of the tragedy, one affected by centuries of imperialism, semi-feudalism, and state violence, yet emblematic of the desire for generations of people to challenge the government and its policies.

These deep-rooted struggles in the Philippines, and their relationship with neighbouring histories of imperialism and resistance, is also explored in the work of the late Renz Lee (1995–2019). His exhibition such as ‘A Tale of Two Countries’ (2017), at Galeri Nasional Indonesia, Jakarta, explored Indonesian and Philippine contexts and their respective struggles in art and politics through an intimate engagement with archival material. The exhibition laid out archival material, photographs and academic studies on a wooden table, through which Lee highlighted parallels between two US-backed fascist and authoritarian regimes occurring at roughly the same time and ending with a popular uprising: Indonesia’s Suharto and the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos Sr. Lee’s practice engaging with mass movements, its archives and material sought to ‘visualize global ‘civic unrest’’.³⁰ In ‘A Tale of Two Countries’, documents presented by Lee reveal the bloody regimes enacted by the neighbouring states towards its citizens, from the anti-communist mass killings in Indonesia to the First Quarter Storm in the Philippines.

Lee’s exhibition made visible dissident attitudes towards the government and a struggle for alternative political forms. As well as the found photographs and documents, the exhibition included a mural painting based on a photograph of a protest against the Marcos regime, which was notorious for enforced disappearances of student activists, teachers, and journalists. This was accompanied by a video work, Tugu Tani (Heroes Monument, 2017), which depicts the silhouette of an Indonesian socialist realist sculpture of the same name, memorialising an armed peasant youth and his mother. The anti-communist mass killings would begin only two years after this monument was given by the Soviet Union to Indonesia in 1963. Reflecting the difficulty of publicly discussing Suharto’s regime in Indonesia, particularly the 1965 massacres, Lee, in a Facebook post, noted an attempt of censorship on the part of the Galeri Nasional Indonesia.³¹

Lee’s research on Cold War anti-dictatorship mass movements returned to Manila via his work The Case for the Third Worlds (2017) for the exhibition ‘Dissident Vicinities’ at the University of the Philippines – Diliman. Presented as a provisional constellation of information, Lee combined photographs with handwritten notes and chalk diagrams, expanding his research to include other similar histories of resistance from Myanmar and Thailand. In doing so, he adopted a pedagogical voice in presenting his open-ended research project. Lee constellates seemingly disconnected ideas, sites, or contexts to highlight shared conditions, brutalities, and movements, bringing to light the pervasiveness of these issues and potentials for liberation against a shared enemy.

These case studies briefly explore a sample of recent art projects that experiment with form while aiming to help advance the struggle for national democracy. By way of a conclusion, we would also like to trouble the struggle for form politically and artistically as it is commonly articulated. As Medalla had stated, the people, or the masses, are what propel movements. These case studies only hint upon recent tendencies to struggle for artistic form while aligning such efforts with the aims of the National Democratic movement. It is, we would like to emphasise, not enough to only dismantle and struggle for artistic form but also to struggle with the political form in which the artist finds themself in. As Alice Guillermo wrote: ‘With these resources, however, there rests for [the artist] the crucial matter of political choice and standpoint: an art caught in the toils of the bourgeois establishment or an art in search of a new liberating order.’³²

The Galeri Nasional Indonesia’s attempt to censor Lee’s exhibition is just one example that brings to the surface art’s entanglement with economic and political forces, of an art that while in search of a new liberating order, has to contend with existing institutional contexts and historical traumas. With reference to art institutions in the Philippines, Angelo V. Suárez and Donna Miranda – both of whom are founding members of SAKA and current members of UMA – explore this entanglement in their text ‘176 Gifts/176 Dispossessions’ (2019). Highlighting the relationship between art in the Philippines, patronage, museum collections, and the country’s big landlord class, they argue that museums that benefit from their donors’ (most of whom are landlords) gift-giving have a vested interest in suppressing the demands of the peasant and working classes.³³ In another essay, Suárez writes about the necessity of activist work that seeks to dismantle these bourgeois conditions for artmaking.³⁴ Camacho and Lien likewise reflect:

There is often anxiety for folks working in the professional cultural field regarding resolving the contradictions of political art-making in relation to institutional spaces and the capitalist marketplace in which these spaces are entangled. We think these questions are important, but aligning our work with the Philippine mass movement has given us a different perspective. The art world isn’t where these contradictions will be resolved because the context is already too compromised. The most important work happens elsewhere. But nonetheless, there are platforms here in the art world, and they do reach audiences.³⁵

In recognising the art world’s entanglements with the country’s semi-colonial and semi-feudal condition, the aforementioned artists all point to the limitations of political artmaking within such contexts, what these contexts can and cannot enable, and affirm the necessity of direct organising. It is therefore worth noting that the artists discussed above have all engaged in the work of agitating, educating, organising, and mobilising fellow cultural workers through their participation in National Democratic mass organisations and alliances: Lee was a member of Tambisan sa Sining while Camacho, Lien, Miranda and Suárez have all volunteered for SAKA at some point.³⁶ These artists have also framed their artistic experimentations in line with their activist work. Lien and Camacho, for instance, contextualise Offerings for Escalante as ‘one attempt to ascertain formal strategies’³⁷ to help inform future decisions on how to give visual forms to narratives as charged and complex as the Escalante Massacre. Suárez, on the other hand, observes that, ‘Poetry has so often invoked autonomy in pursuing innovation, but rarely has innovation been invoked for pursuing autonomy.’³⁸

As the field of contemporary art expanded and became more permeable with other forms of cultural production and activism, the realm of National Democratic protest/revolutionary art also discursively expanded. With institutional critique, socially-engaged, archival, and participatory art practices established as methodologies in contemporary art, disparate endeavours such as setting up community pantries³⁹ or alternative schools,⁴⁰ establishing a café to help families affected by state violence,⁴¹ or even brazenly militant actions like occupying idle housing allotted for police officers⁴² can be discussed in the same spirit as ‘art as social practice’ – either as National Democratic-aligned contemporary art or, more accurately, as National Democratic protest/revolutionary art engaging with an expanded field of art.

Similar to Camacho and Lien’s view, we see these experimentations with form as ongoing attempts at ascertaining formal strategies with the aims of reaching audiences, shedding light on issues and histories of resistance, and popularising the National Democratic line among artists and cultural workers both within and outside of the Philippines. This process of ascertaining formal strategies entails that these efforts must continually be assessed and evaluated, a process that should involve not just artists but workers, peasants, and other oppressed and exploited classes and sectors. The aspiration for an NSMO culture provides a framework that regards the interests of all the oppressed and exploited classes as the basis and horizon for both art criticism and artmaking, or as a guide to the continuous, dialectical process of ‘popularisation’ and ‘raising of standards’ as conceptualised at the Yenan Forum. It is through this process that these struggles for form could transform into participatory propulsions which, as Medalla envisioned, the masses, with their boundless creative power, will bring to higher levels of artistic realisation. Through these case studies, we hope to contribute to this unfolding process, offer entry points into the struggle for form, and aspire towards more participatory propulsions for national democracy.