Abby Nicole G.

Yee / 2014-75013

March 9, 2018

Prof Dakila Fernando

FA 28 Exam

There are dozens of theories out there about what dreams mean, ranging from the

dramatic—prophetic visions and omens, to the more mundane but probable theory of our own

subconscious processing of daytime experiences. The T’boli women in South Cotabato believe

that the goddess Fu Dalu visits them in their sleep, not to give them visions or solutions to

yesterday’s problems, but intricate patterns for their painstakingly woven T’nalak fabric.

In Alice Guillermo’s “Art and Society,” art has its own specificity, which makes it unique

from other fields in that it uses signifiers: combinations of techniques, forms, and styles, and

signifieds, concepts that are being represented. The T’nalak weaving process requires intense

labor and specialized skillsets, from stripping the abaca tree and turning the fibers into strands, to

hand-tying and rolling them into round masses. From there, the fibers are boiled in natural

vegetable dyes. Moreover, their work is unique and cannot be replicated since they claim that Fu

Dalu communicates to them the patterns woven into the T’nalak.

The second assumption is that art has its own language: an exchange takes place between

the work and the viewer. In the documentary, T’boli, aside from selling their art, are shown

dancing in their traditional clothes and singing their chants, with an enthusiastic audience of

fellow Filipinos and foreigners. Through these performances they are showing the rest of the

world what their culture can contribute, their attention to detail in choreography and handmade

crafts, music, and dedication, and the viewers can recognize their contributions as valuable not

only because of the discourse that is provoked by their cultural practices and traditions by
themselves, but also because their art and performances are deeply rooted in their social and

historical contexts, which can provide new ideas and worldviews that may or may not further

human endeavors and humanity as a whole.

The third assumption: art is a human construct. The T’boli’s T’nalak are handmade, not

mass-produced by machines. Each T’nalak is uniquely designed and can take months to

complete. Art as a human construct can also mean it has its own mode of production. While it is

important to appreciate the qualities of the T’nalak, it is also crucial to reevaluate where it is

from conceptually, the problems surrounding its production, market demands that may constrain

the artistic production, and the specific problems of the creators and their resources, the actual

T’boli women who seek to preserve the value of creating T’nalak while satisfying demand. In

addition, the T’Boli ascribe spiritual meaning to their weavings and there are a host of other

traditions applied in the production process.

The fourth assumption is that art has social import. Art becomes value-laden because it is

embedded with human psychophysical experiences and the cultural codes of a particular society.

The T’nalak are made not only for aesthetic reasons, but to preserve the T’boli’s stories, which

not only show their specific values and concepts but also the worldviews they subscribe to.

Lastly, it is important for people in colonized or neocolonized societies to become active

subjects to be able to carry out resistance. A nationalist position requires that we document and

study the large majority of the people’s cultural and artistic expressions that advance their true

interests and to be careful about imposing our point of view polluted by ingrained imperialist

concepts that might repeat the same colonial biases. With the sacred T’nalak, it is important to

avoid appropriating their culture by just taking a small aspect of their culture and ignoring the

rest like their practices and ideas because they might disagree with ours or seem too alien to us.
 The first aesthetic case I will discuss is the case of the zealous bookburners, in which

almost every book and its existing copies that are considered dangerous are destroyed, including

J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. While some old people still remember reading it, we assume

they no longer have copies and the story only exists in their memory. The first pertinent

questions is: Has Catcher in the Rye itself been destroyed? I would argue that while the physical

copies can be destroyed, technically, burning all copies of a work means getting rid of their

physical manifestation which is a part of making the artwork’s consumption possible, aside from

telling people about it. So in a way, it does limit the artwork’s reach to those who can remember

reading it.

This leads to the second question: Will the work die when these old people who

remember Catcher in the Rye do? Or will the work continue to exist, even though there are no

longer any copies of it and no one will ever be able to read it again. At some point, there will be

no one left to remember the book, and the best case would be mentions of the book’s title

somewhere in history books, but with no actual context or synopsis. Unfortunately, I may have to

agree that it will die, since no one will be there for the two-way exchange that art requires. The

artwork itself cannot exist in a vacuum, and although people might know J. D. Salinger was a

writer who wrote a great piece of literature, by then no one will know what he wrote first-hand,

and it will be like an extinct language with no new learners because they do not have access to

the grammar, words, and their meanings.

The second aesthetic case I chose was the William Carlos Williams and the Icebox that

tackles Williams’ poem “This Is Just To Say.” The poem in question is: “I have eaten / the plums

/ that were in / the icebox / and which / you were probably / saving / for breakfast / Forgive me /

they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold”

Williams did not intend to write it for publication or for anyone to read it like a poem, but that it

was just a note left on the refrigerator for the friend to be informed that he ate all the plums,

would it still be considered a literary work of art?

To answer the question, if Williams himself did not intend for it to be seen as art, then it

isn’t art. In San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, a teenager had left a pair of glasses on the

gallery’s floor as a joke, and people believed it was one of the gallery’s pieces, because by

assumption nothing is accidental in a modern art museum and so every object randomly placed

in a gallery could be art to the people inside. Going back to Williams’ poem, if someone had

randomly found the unintended poem and thought it kind of looked like a poem and then actually

thought it was a brilliant piece of literary art, it still wasn’t intended to be art in the first place by

its creator, because he has not explicitly given any thought to how people might read it as a poem

and make their own interpretations and opinions about it. The poem becomes the glasses in

SFMOMA, accidental art.