U.P. Humanities 2 - Art, Man and Society by Brenda V. Fajardo and Patrick D. Flores Module

Humanities II
Art, Man and Society
Brenda V. Fajardo
Patrick D. Flores
University of the Philippines

OPEN UNIVERSITY
Humanities II: Art, Man and Society
By Brenda V. Fajardo and Patrick D. Flores
Copyright © 2002 by Brenda V. Fajardo and Patrick D. Flores

and the University of the Philippines Open University
Apart from any fair use for the purpose of research or private study,
criticism or review, this publication may be reproduced, stored
or transmitted, in any form or by any means
ONLY WITH THE PERMISSION
of the author and the UP Open University.
Published in the Philippines by the UP Open University

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Table of Contents
Unit I Introduction to Art, 1
Module 1 Defining Art, 3

Objectives, 3
Defining Art, 4
Why Study Art, 5
Aesthetic experience, 6
Consensus of the art world, 7
Focus: Music as art, 8
Summary, 13
Module 2 Art Forms, 15

Objectives, 15
Art Forms, 15
Focus: Architecture as Art Form, 20
Summary, 21
Unit II The Form of Art, 23
Module 3 Medium and Technique, 25

Objectives, 25
Introduction, 25
Medium and Technique in Two-dimensional Form, 26
Medium and Technique in Three-Dimensional Form, 26
Medium and Technique of a Traditional Art: Mat Weaving, 27
Art as Invention Rather than Imitation, 30
Summary, 31
Module 4 Aesthetic Experience and Expression, 33

Objectives, 33
Aesthetic Experience and Expression, 33
Aesthetic Experience in Landscape Painting, 34
Aesthetic Experience in Dance, 36
Summary, 38
Unit III The Language of Art, 39
Module 5 Art as Language, 41

Objectives, 41
Art as Language, 41
A Review of the Film “Itim”, 42
Signs, 48
Summary 50
Module 6 Art as Representation and Interpretation, 51
Objectives, 51
Art as Representation and Interpretation, 51
Focus on Theater, 53
The stage 54
The theater and reality, 57
Summary, 64
Unit IV The Production of Art, 67
Module 7 Mode of Production, 69

Objectives, 69
Milieu and the Environment of Art, 70
Productive forces of society and the arts, 71
Dynamics of Production, 75
Summary, 75
Module 8 Mode of Distribution, 77

Objectives, 77
Cultural Institutions, 78
Schools, museums and galleries, 78
Government cultural agencies, 79
Exhibitions/Performances, 80
Art competitions, 81
Museums and archives, 81
Artists’ Initiatives and Other Programs, 81
Local Cultural Activities and Events, 82
The Need for Art Education, 84
Module 9 Mode of Reception, 85

Objectives,85
The Social Contexts of Reception, 85
Art and social class, 85
Art and ethnicity, 87
Art and gender, 87
Art, race and culture, 89
Art and Social Transformation, 90
Summary, 91
Unit I
Introduction to Art
Module 1
Defining Art
T o define art is a difficult task. It requires painstaking investigation into

how people in specific contexts value art as a human endeavor.
Context here refers to the complex of conditions

that locate a particular place in a particular history.
It accounts for institutions like government, religion
Objectives
and the mass media; community practices in the
form of traditions, political movements and After studying this module, you
mythologies; and the social forces at work in should be able to:
conflicts, struggles, dynamics of power, relations
with other people and places and the pursuit of 1. Discuss how art is defined in
well-being. relation to assumptions about
its place in society and how
Art is defined in different ways by people situated the process of definition
in specific social environments. To fully grasp the operates in specific societies,
complexity of this process of definition, we must cultures and histories;
view art not as product, but as production and its 2. Analyze how social, cultural
mode— that is, how it is produced in society, culture and historical forces
and history. constitute the specific value
of art;
Society refers not only to systems of regulation and 3. Explain how institutions
control, but also to social relations based on class, claim things or processes as
gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, spiritual art and people as artists and,
persuasion, political commitment and moral norm. how they deny the privilege
to others; and
Culture involves how people in society make sense 4. Acquire a critical attitude
of the world around them by making meanings and toward the ways in which
sharing these meanings with others in the context art is defined in particular
of common but also oftentimes contradictory and contexts.
changing fields of communication.
4 Humanities II: Art, Man and Society
History is the process by which society and culture are created by people
who, because they are active human agents, transform nature in the constant
remaking of everyday life.
A study of clay pottery, for example, is the study of how it is made using
certain techniques and technologies (society); how it gains significance in a
community of people who could appropriate it as vessel, treasure or gift
(culture); and how it is made possible in the context of the productive forces
of labor and capital, relations of production existing in the place of work and
modes of distribution as well as mechanisms of circulation (history).
Art as an instance of human practice assumes specific value. How certain

things or processes take on this value is part of the study of art.
Defining Art
What is art? To answer the question is to make ourselves aware of the contexts
in which people in a society, culture and history make art part of their lives.
These contexts are important in our understanding of the idea that there is
no one definition of art, in the same way that there is no one society, culture
and history. As we consider change and transformation both as possibility
and reality in our lives, so must we assume that the ways in which people
regard art can be made “different” through time and in relation to specific
material conditions.
Therefore, as we come face to face with the problem of defining art, we also
confront the issues underlying certain ideas about it. Is art, for instance,
slave to a particular notion of beauty, as in the classical ideal of the true, the
good and the beautiful? This notion will have to be seen against other
perceptions of art in other societies, cultures and histories.
We, therefore, have to reflect deeply on our assumptions about art, keeping
in mind that there is no universal meaning of art that can stand true for all
time, place and people.
This discussion inevitably brings us to the reasons we must study art as a

mode of critical thinking. Critical is taken to mean as a method of feeling,
thinking about, and acting on art in the broad realms of social issues, political
response, and cultural struggle. To be stressed here are the links in the chain
of emotion (feeling), thought (thinking), and action (doing) as they bear on
the attempts at renewing the world in more humane and liberative ways.
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Unit I Module 1 5
If we believe that there are various contexts which frame art, we will be
prepared to consider the following implications:
1. That these contexts are arbitrarily produced and therefore proceed from
a point of view, a perspective and a framework.
2. That these contexts establish conventions, rules, norms, hierarchies,

classifications, assumptions, predispositions (as opposed to natural
inclination) and notions regarding art.
3. That these contexts define value and modes of valuation and therefore
embed labor and capital in works designated as art.
4. That all this can be questioned and in fact have to be questioned in light of
a critical attitude as well as human agency, or our ability to transform,
recreate, mobilize our will and potential to make things new and different,
including the value of art.
Why Study Art

The Getty Education Institute Center for the Arts (in Rosmic, 1987) assures us
that the integration of the arts in the Humanities curriculum of the General
Education program does not only round out the human person, but also makes
him or her a better and more progressive citizen. According to the Center:
1. Arts education encourages non-algorithmic reasoning, i.e., a path of

thinking and action that is not specified in advance and which often leads
to novel solutions.
2. Arts education trains students in complex thinking, i.e., thinking in which

the path from beginning to end is not always visible from the outset or
from any specific vantage point as, for instance, when a student learns a
piece of music, or has to solve unforeseen problems with the use of
materials.
3. Arts education encourages thinking that yields multiple rather than unique
solutions, as when an actor tries different ways of portraying a character,
each with its own cost and benefits.
4. Arts education asks students to use multiple criteria in creating a work of

art, which sometimes conflict with each other, as when artistic goals fight
with clarity of communication.
5. Arts education involves thinking that is laced with uncertainty. Not

everything that bears on the task is known, e.g., whether a particular
kind of paint will achieve the desired artistic effect.
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6. Arts education requires self-regulation of the thinking process itself, as

when students are forced to make interim assessments of their work, self-
correct, or apply external standards.
7. Arts education involves learning how to impose meanings and find

structure in apparent disorder, as when purpose emerges from seemingly
random movements in a modern dance.
8. Arts education also involves nuanced judgment and interpretation, as

when playwrights work to find exactly the right words to establish a
character, signal a turn of plot, or achieve an emotional effect.
From this list, we realize that art is indispensable in harnessing the potentials
of the human agent for the urgent task of social transformation. As the Center
states.
1. An education in the arts encourages high achievement.
2. Study of the arts encourages a suppleness of mind, a toleration for

ambiguity, a taste for nuance, and the ability to make trade-offs among
alternative courses of action.
3. Study of the arts helps students to think and work across traditional
disciplines. They learn both to integrate knowledge and to ‘think outside
the boxes.’
4. An education in the arts teaches students how to work cooperatively.
5. An education in the arts builds an understanding of diversity and the

multi-cultural dimensions of our world.
6. An education in the arts insists on the value of content, which helps

students understand ‘quality’ as a key value.
7. An education in the arts contributes to technological competence.
On what grounds do we base our definition of art?
Aesthetic experience
Are our responses toward phenomena like enchantment, fear, awe, terror or
guilt all that it takes to name something art, or consider something artistic?
Or must that something be always and only pleasant or enchanting? And
must that something be a thing or commodity?
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Unit I Module 1 7
Consensus of the art world

The art world is a network of institutions that exercises the power to set the
terms with which the public is made to perceive art. It is sustained by the
practices of museums, galleries, the art market, schools, mass media,
publishing houses, government cultural agencies, organizations of artists and
so on. If the art world says that a urinal by virtue of its place in the museum
and the signature of the artist on it is art, then is it art? If a canvas filled with
scribblings merits review by an art critic in a newspaper, then is it art? If a
work of a well-known Master is auctioned off, then is it art? Who decides
what is art and what deserves to be subjected to a set of criteria based on
artistic quality, competence or relevance?
Activity 1-1
Write a short essay to discuss your own definition of art. Use these
questions as guide: Does ritual have artistic significance? Are tourist
souvenirs made by villagers but sold in the town a form of art? Is
textile used in everyday life art? Are all things cultural also artistic?
Comment on Activity 1-1

We cannot aspire to pin down one absolute definition of art which
will be made to account for highly discrepant forms, from ballet to
basketry, photography to plastic sculpture. We have to understand
that art as a presence in our lives does not naturally present itself, but
is constructed by contexts. Are you now able to recognize the contexts
from which a certain definition of art emerges? Can you enumerate
these contexts?
We must also take note of how certain perceptions of art are reinforced
by structures of power in society. We have to be perceptive of how
this power works: how government, religion, the school system,
museum and galleries define for us the idea of art and speak on behalf
of works and name them as art. They also confer value on objects.
One of these values is artistic value. Do you now realize how value is
defined and disseminated for the object of art? Can you cite examples
of some processes involved in the definition of this value?
If you were able to locate the definition of art in specific contexts, you
are on your way to understanding how “art” makes sense in
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Comment on Activity 1-1 continued
relation to specific modes of living. You are on the right track. But if
you cannot seem to place art in context, you may not be able to
appreciate the differences of experience and expression at work in the
creation of a vast number of artistic productions, some of which lie
beyond the pale of your cultural norms. You have to try harder to
understand the lesson.
If you were able to demystify the aura of artistic value by tracing how
it is arbitrarily set, you gain insight into the politics of defining art.
You are on the right track. But if you failed to do so, you will not be
able to exercise critical judgment on matters having to do with artistic
value. Please go over the lesson again.
Focus: Music as art

If we take music as example, what do we really mean by it? As organization
of sound into a meaningful structure and articulation, what constitutes music?
How does our knowledge of the western scale (do-re-mi), for instance, relate
to other scales of other cultures? And just what does it mean to be “out of
tune?”
Activity 1-2
Recall the way you were taught music in the elementary and high
school. Do you think you were afforded a range of musical possibilities
in your learning and understanding of music? Or, were you exposed
only to a particular musical culture at the expense of other musical
cultures? Are there differences in the way you experienced music in
the classroom and your other musical experiences outside it? Please
note them down in a table (see the sample table below). It is good for
you to have an ACTIVITY NOTEBOOK where you can jot down your
findings and make drawings or paste pictures.
Musical Experience Context Value
singing in a church community spiritual

as part of a choir and religion
singing in a karaoke bar peer relations and entertainment

personal enjoyment
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Unit I Module 1 9
Comments on Activity 1-2

We must realize that as art, music cuts across the processes of:
1. improvisation
2. composition
3. performance
According to the Getty Foundation Institute Center for the Arts, these
interrelated aspects of musical practice involve the body as intuitive
technology of sense, as in the heartbeat-establishing a certain rhythm.
This seemingly spontaneous act may be translated in terms of
composition, which entails “controlled interaction of impulse,
generation of gesture or idea, play, planned recomposition, cultural
influence, and craft. It relies on symbology (notation) for
communication.” Such a “studied act” is rendered in performance in
time and space, a presentation of both improvisation and composition,
the body and the mind in action and at work.
Activity 1-3
Expose yourself to a wide range of musical examples and examine
how music as art effects your life. Listen to the radio, attend a concert,
sing with your friends, and so on. You might notice differences between
“live” performances and “recorded” performances.
Some suggestions by the Getty Foundation Institute Center for the
Arts:
You could explore western musical historical styles like baroque,
classical, or 20th century. Or research on local contemporary traditions.
You could discuss western musical forms like the sonata, fugue, or
opera. Or, again, research on local musical forms like the Pasyon, awit,
or kundiman.
You could talk about media like the orchestra, band, Music-Made-
For-Television (MTV), or music in healing. It is possible also to study
the materials which create sound like air, membrane, and so on.
You could touch base with the contemporary music industry and
analyze the Broadway musical, reggae, heavy metal, jazz, rap, hip-
hop, funk, and world music.
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Activity 1-3 continued
An interesting area to explore is western modern music. Georgina Born

(in Benjamin and Osborne, 1991) gives you the spectrum of expressions:
1. The attempt to compose a piece of music out of, or including

reference to, ‘other’ musics— non-western, folk, ethnic, jazz, or
other urban musics— through pastiche, parody, quote,
juxtaposition of genres, fleeting allusion or, more often, some subtler
transformation (as in Debussy, Ives, Stravinsky, Bartok, Vaughan
Willimans, Weill, Krenek and so on).
2. The attempt at a nationalist music (as in Ives, Bartok, Kodaly,

Janacek, de Falla and so on) which continued the concern of earlier
romantic nationalisms.
3. The attempt to find a new set of pure, autonomous and abstract

laws of musical material and structure, as in the serialism of
Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School. This was pursued from the
1950s by post-serialists such as Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Babbit
who wanted, in various ways, to develop a ‘total serialism’ that
extended beyond pitch organization to encompass all musical
parameters.
4. The attempt to construct analogies, alliances or associations between

music and the other arts: visual art, poetry, theatre (as in
Schoenberg’s own music and painting, and his relationship with
Kandinsky; Eisler and Weill in their work with Brecht; Cage and
post-Cageian experimental composers in their links with Abstract
Expressionism and then Pop Art; Boulez in his relationship with
Mallarmé, Artaud, Char and Genet).
5. The appeal to science as a basis for musical systems by analogy

with scientific analyses of other systems, mathematical, acoustical,
or technological. This became the main direction of post-serialism
in the 1950s and ’60s, as in the work of Stockhausen, Babbit,
Xenakis, and it continues in the field of “music research.”
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Unit I Module 1 11
Activity 1-3 continued
6. The attempt to distill a musical system out of the material nature

of the sound itself (as in Cage and certain post-Cageians such as
Feldman, or the minimalist and systems tradition), at the same
time rejecting serialist and scientific rationalities. Cageian
experimental materialism thus proposed motions of sound and its
‘opposite,’ silence (Cage), instrumental colour (Feldman), or time
and unfolding temporal processes (minimalism and systems music)
as the basis of music.
7. The production of scientific analyses, using high technology,

specifically of music and sound, as in the relation fields of music
research and psychoacoustics, which are then proposed as a basis
for a new aesthetic.

We must always remember that there are various forms of music in
the world, and those that belong to the western tradition are only
some of them. Each tradition operates in particular contexts and
situations— from something as personal and as everyday as humming
a lullaby our mothers had taught us, to symphonic music performed
by an orchestra in a cultural center, to a rock concert of a heavy metal
group. Music, in other words, takes place in specific settings: rituals,
concerts, recording studios. It also circulates across publics organized
by certain modes of production the music industry, community
traditions, government propaganda. Finally, it makes use of resources:
voices, instruments, audiences, composers, arrangers, sound engineers.
In our understanding of music as art, we have to probe deeper the

ways in which it is practised as music by people in a society making
sense of sound.
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Activity 1-4
Go around your community and identify three people who create
things: a shoemaker, a builder of houses, a hairdresser, an embroiderer,
for example. Ask them if they consider what they do artistic. If they
don’t, ask them to describe what it is. If they say yes, list down their
ideas of what constitutes the “artistic.” From these definitions, make a
matrix of categories that collects certain notions of art in terms of value.
Sample matrix:
Artistic Activity Art Work Value
carving of object Sto. Niño made religious

from natural material from wood
making of lantern commercial

Christmas symbol
weaving textile ritual

In drawing up this matrix, you should realize that your community is
a particular context and location of art making. Indeed, art is defined
by a specific context and location. Just imagine how many more
contexts and locations produce a wide array of artistic activities, art
works, artistic values, and artists.
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Unit I Module 1 13
Summary
This module tries to underscore critical thinking with regard to how art is
defined. You applied the process of locating art in the context of your
environment, the social and art world around you. In so doing, you realized
that art and its value are deeply rooted in, although not exclusive to their
social surroundings.
References
Benjamin, Andrew and Osborne, Peter, eds. (1991). Thinking art: Beyond
traditional aesthetics. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Resnic, Lauren B. (1987). Education and learning to think. Washington DC:
National Academy Press.
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Module 2
Art Forms
A s students of art and the humanities, we must

be aware of the variety of art forms around
us. We must not limit ourselves to the commonplace
Objectives
or traditional ways of knowing art. We must look After studying this module, you
beyond conventions when we appreciate art should be able to:
because art always has the potential to go against
the grain of established norms. We must be open 1. Identify the broad range of
to what could be regarded as “accepted” and forms involved in the study
“acceptable.” of art;
2. Classify forms according to
how the senses perceive
Art Forms them; and
3. Describe the art forms in
As times change, new ways of making art emerge. terms of their visual, musical,
As the material conditions of art change, so do their and performative aspects.
forms. Conventional notions of art can no longer
give justice to the transformations in the field of art
in the course of history.
We must, therefore, put up a classificatory system of art that is reflexive enough

to accommodate the complex processes of historical and technological change.
A Humanities student like you must learn to deal with the wide range of the
visual, musical, and performing arts in various contexts.
In terms of form, we can classify art according to:
1. Two-dimensional arts: painting, mixed media, graphic arts, textile, fiber

2. Three-dimensional arts: sculpture, jewelry, furniture, monument
3. Architecture: religious, residential, industrial, commercial

4. Music: folk, indigenous, popular, conservatory
5. Dance: ballet, folk, indigenous, street, modern, popular
6. Theater: street, school, ritual, sectoral, travelling, puppet
7. Photography: art, glamour, commercial, itinerant, instamatic
8. Cinema: mainstream, short film in feature, experimental, and documentary
formats
9. Broadcast and video: radio, television, video-8, videoke, MTV
10. Computer arts: pixilated designs
11. Installation: site-specific works
In terms of the Philippine cultural context, we can classify painting, sculpture,

and architecture, for instance, according to the following matrices:
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Matrix 2-1. Historical Overview
Form Pre-conquest Spanish Period American Period Japanese Period Postwar 70s
1521-1898 1899-1940 1941-1945 1946-1969 Republic Contemporary
Painting Pottery religious (icon and landscape, wartime scene modern, figurative,
body adornment ecclesiastical) portraiture, genre, (agression, conservative, non-figurative,
ornament secular (portraiture, interiors, still life nationalism, abstract, art-for-art’s
(boras designs) scientific, atrocities, experimental, sake,
enthographic, symbolic protest, public art multimedia,
topographic, aspiration for mixed media,
historical) peace), transmedia
propaganda,
santos, furniture, indigenizing and
Sculpture pottery carving reliefs, altar pieces, free-standing relief orientalizing
and woodwork jewelry, metalwork, sculpture public works, genre,
metalwork fiesta ornamentation idylls (Amorsolo,
and expression Francisco,
Ocampo)
Architecture dwellings and church, plaza city planning, parks, public works real estate, sate housing,
houses, shelters, complex, town waterfronts, civic/ accesoria, tenements, squatters,
worship areas, planning, fortification, government convention architecture,
official residences, civic buildings and structures, public commercial/business,
mosque, masjid, installations, private works, apartments, condominiums, malls,
Unit I
State edifices, residences, residences, subdivision development,

castle commercial edifices for health low-cost housing
structures, and public
cemeteries, bridges, education,
lighthouse business, chalet
Module 2
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Matrix 2-2. Stylistic Overview
Form Precolonial Spanish/Islamic American Colonial Modern Postmodern or

Colonial Contemporary
Painting religious: classical or classicist Incipient (Triumvirate: Collaborative

proselyte idyllic Francisco, Ocampo, Hyper-realist
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devotional nostalgic Edades); Paris School Neoexpressionist
religious 13 Moderns (Pratt Neofigurative
(animist or secular: Institute, Cranbrook Computer-aided
Islamic) formal Academy) Neorealist New painting
community-based naturalistic Abstract (Geometric Social Realist
everyday life (homegrown, and Gestural) Mabini Art
inter-ethnic miniaturismo, guild) Expressionist Conceptual
Humanities II: Art, Man and Society
relations collective academic Surrealist

history
Sculpture junk/scrap (arte povera,
objects trouve, Duchampian)
Abstract neo-indigenous
Expressionist site-specific
installation
performance art
hybrid
Architecture worship-related and Neoclassic Filipino architecture

residential Art Deco urban planning
Earthquake Baroque (Juan Arellano, International economic-zone style
Hispanic Revivalist Juan Nakpil, Eclectic Industrializing neovernacular
(Neogothic or Pablo Antonio) “look” (Leandro regionalist
Neoromanesque) Art Nouveau California Locsin) cosmopolitan
Islamic Mission Style prefabricated (modular)
Matrix 2.3. Cultural Overview
Form Indigenous Islamic or Philippine Folk or Lowland Fine or Art Popular or Urban
Southeast Asian Muslim Catholic World-Based and Mass-Mediated
Painting
Sculpture ritual and ritual and organized colonial and museum-circulated mass-produced
governance religion post-colonial artist-centered market-oriented
gallery-distributed
Architecture
Matrix 2.4. Thematic Overview
Form Location Patronage Encounters and Religion and Mode of Identity

Interventions Belief Exchange Formation
Painting geopolitical Statemarket power relations mythology trade systems ethnicity

spaceland and communities social colonialism ritual and relations nationalism
people technology institutions imperialism worship mass media class
local culture town global capitalism cosmology commodification race
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Sculpture city metropolis war and revolutions folklore gender

region nation diaspora
diaspora
Module 2
Architecture
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You can classify art, too, according to the periods of western art history like
the classical, rococo, or realist periods. You can also construct a timeline of
art in your community based on your local art history.
All these categories of art must be seen in the contemporary context, meaning
they are dynamic and do not cease to transform as people who make and
receive them continually create history. We must also learn to consider that
these forms overlap and cut across one another’s boundaries. We must,
therefore, be alert to hybrid forms. Moreover, we must not limit our examples
to the fine arts and elite culture.
Contemporary art historians report on recent developments in the visual arts

(In Stiles, and Selz, 1996):
The unprecedented expansion of media in the visual arts contributed,

at least in part, to the alteration of the very category ‘visual art,’ which
now encompasses everything from painting and sculpture to hybrid
forms in previously unthinkable materials: the human body in
performance, invisible matter (gases), energy (telepathy), large-scale
projects and earthworks in remote landscapes and urban centers,
interventions in social and political institutions, and computer and
other electronic works, including virtual reality. Artists have created
postcards, records, and books, and, although previously marginalized,
video, film, and photography increasingly have been accepted.
Focus: Architecture as Art Form

Art is and can be found in specific spaces. These spaces come to form
architecture. We have been accustomed to knowing that architecture refers
only to palaces, temples, skyscrapers, and castles made of stone. But space
organized into functioning form is architecture: the marketplace, the school,
the park, rice terraces, gardens, your own house. The specificity of architectural
style lies in materials, cultural geography, and taste.
There are certain factors to consider when appreciating architecture:
1. The relationship of space to climate and topography.

2. The relationship of space to its use by people.
3. The design of the space which takes into account form, function, surface,
structure, and systems.
4. The relationship of structure to a sense of dwelling and locus of human
inter-action.
5. the relationship of space to building technologies, materials, and
components.
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Unit I Module 2 21
Activity 2-1
Like any other form of art, architecture is produced under specific
conditions. For a Humanities student, it is fruitful to rediscover your
environment— your space— and renew your ties with how it is
organized as space in the context of structure. Also look for art
wherever your space may take and find you. Write a short essay
about the architecture of your space. Be sure to cover the factors
enumerated above.

Where did you go? Describe it. Were you able to appreciate how
forms are connected to the place where they are produced? You have
to realize that the space of art influences the kind of art that is
produced.
Summary
As time goes by, technology renews itself, and materials evolve, art changes
and new forms are created. Some art forms cross genres or transgress genres
altogether. But however it may change, art is to be viewed as living and lived.
References
Stiles, Kristine and Peter Selz. (1996). Theories and documents of contemporary
art: A sourcebook of artists’ writings. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Unit II
The Form of Art
Module 3
Medium and Technique
Introduction
Objectives
T here are many forms of art that concretely
express ideas and meanings. With visual form
we are able to see and touch objects that have been
After studying this module, you
should be able to:
transformed from raw materials into products of
function and beauty. 1. Explain art as a form
transformed from nature or
In order to understand the meaning of art, we need art mediated by medium and
to know how form is created within the context of technique; and
human life. As the artist perceives something about 2. Discuss the idea of art
life, the experience is processed internally involving invention as opposed to
thoughts and feelings which may be transformed imitation.
into a visible concrete form through the use of some
physical material. Artists use physical materials as
their medium of expression of ideas, thoughts and feelings. In using material
as medium, techniques in handling the material becomes part of the artists’
processes which contribute to the quality of the form being created.
Such materials may be used to express meaning in two-dimensional or three-

dimensional forms. And even three-dimensional forms sometimes carry two-
dimensional images on it that combine both processes.
The materials used in creating art, especially in earlier times, came from nature.
Whether the material was wood, stone, twigs, vines, pigment or dye, it had to
undergo a process of transformation as the artist applied techniques in forming
abstract ideas into concrete form.
Though nature provides ideas for expressing meaning in life and materials by
which such meaning is expressed, the resulting form is borne out of
imagination and invention rather than imitation.
In this module, we shall introduce the various media and techniques generally
used in the visual arts and then specifically focus on the art of mat weaving in
order to understand the role of medium and technique in the creation of the
art object.
Medium and Technique in Two-dimensional Form

The pintados of the Visayan Islands applied dye on their skins to symbolically
mark themselves in what is now referred to as tattoo art. Marks on cave walls
showing figures of people and animals were also part of the early drawing/
painting experience of the first inhabitants of the archipelago.
The skin is the surface or ground on which the vegetable dye and the stick,
called the medium, inscribe the marks. The manner in which the marks are
placed is the technique. Any surface may be used as ground. Surfaces range
from translucent dried animal hide to paper, wood, stone or cloth. To create
the marks, minerals are ground into pigment and mixed with some liquid
which acts as the vehicle, such as water or oil, or dyes are extracted from
plants and used to apply color on the surface.
When the Spaniards taught our ancestors how to use pigment with a liquid
vehicle, painting techniques were also introduced. There is the indirect method
of painting which is done by applying colors in layers of transparent color
and the direct method of painting as it is.
Through time, materials have been explored and technology advanced so

that there are now many possibilities of creating two-dimensional art using a
varied number of media and techniques. These include techniques such as
dripping, spattering, impasto or thickly applied paint, silk screen, woodblock,
etching, engraving and digital art, among others.
Medium and Technique in

Three-Dimensional Form
When we speak of the three-dimensional we are referring to a form that can
be seen from all sides. Such forms of art are called sculpture.
During the Stone Age, stone was the medium of expressing meaning in three
dimensions. The monumental stones at the Stonehenge in England provide a
clue about the mystery of the cosmos in the same way that stone boulders
and caves provide spiritual experience for the believers of indigenous
spirituality in Banahaw, Quezon. Stone figures found in archaeological
research in Calatagan, Batangas show the licha, which are figures
approximating the human form and which were part of ancestral worship.
UP Open University
Unit II Module 3 27
When stone or wood is used as medium, a subtractive method such as carving

is used as the technique. Clay is also used to create pottery or figurative
sculpture using both a subtractive and additive method called modeling: it is
later fired in a kiln, resulting in what is referred to as terracotta.
Another medium is metal. This is transformed using the technique of casting,

a replacement method traditionally called cire perdue or the “lost-wax” method.
In this method, one material is replaced by another. For example, a wax form
is placed in a mould and molten metal poured into it: thus, the wax is replaced
with metal. The Maranao brassware from Tugaya, Lanao and the figurines
by the T’bolis of Lake Sebu are fine examples of this medium.
New ways of handling material have been explored. Metal, for instance, can
now be hammered into shape and welded together. This is a 20th century
innovation. Other new materials include resin and cold cast marble made
out of plastic and synthetic material.
New techniques of using traditional materials have also come about, such as
combining wood and metal. Likewise, non-traditional materials found in the
environment are used to create forms referred to as assemblage, using new
techniques of assembling pieces together.
Medium and Technique of a Traditional

Art: Mat Weaving
A mat is a piece of material woven or put together to use as a covering, to
kneel or lie on. Mat weaving is a traditional art of many cultures. In the
Philippines, mats are used to sleep on or to cover the ground for palay to dry
under the sun. Traditionally, smooth mats were used for sleeping on while
the rough ones were used for grains to dry on. Now mats are made into bags,
placemats, and wall hangings.
The making of mats is actually called plaiting which is weaving without a

loom. Plaiting is used in the making of containers, fences and mats and a
variety of shapes and designs is possible with this technique. Plaiting is
practised in many parts of Southern Asia, as plant materials like pandan leaves
and reed plants like the sesed and ticog are abundant in the tropics.
Simple tools such as a knife and stones are used for plaiting. The leaves of
pandan plant, palm trees and grasses such as ticog and sesed are dried, stripped,
boiled and dyed, dried again and bundled.
Plaiting for mats is usually in diagonal directions such that small and large
plaids created. The general procedure for mat weaving is to start from the
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left corner moving on to the bottom and the right corner until all edges and
corners are finished. There are two identical wefts— the destral and the
sinistral, which are plaited one under and over the other. New wefts are
added as needed to extend the old wefts as they become too short. Patterns
are created by adding destral and sinistral wefts at predetermined points.
There are many different types of mats based on the raw material, dyes and
design in the Philippines. Undisputedly the most interesting are the mats
from Tawi-Tawi, a province in the Sulu archipelago, specifically those by the
Badjao, who are boat dwellers, and by the Samal, who occupy the bigger
islands in Tawi-Tawi and are engaged in trade and agriculture. The mats
woven by the two groups are distinguishable by their design and use of colors.
Samal mats have muted colors and are softer to the touch because of the
repeated beating in the preparation of the fiber. The glossy effect on the
surface is achieved by diluting the dye with some coconut oil. Samal mats
have stripes, squares, checkered and zig-zag patterns. Badjao mats are more
exuberant in color and have stylized symbols such as crab designs or boat
forms, moving water or marine life forms.
Laminusa Island in Tawi-Tawi is known to produce mats of excellent

craftsmanship, pliability and fine design. After a mat with an intricate design
is finished, another undyed plain mat is woven and used to line the back of
the more decorative piece. The lining usually extends by two to three inches
beyond the border of the main mat.
Most of the mats woven in Mindanao are characterized by linear and

geometric designs. The colors used in Tausug mat weaving are bright and
designs are intricately woven together in rhythmical geometric patterns. The
Maranaos weave rectangular mats and round-shaped mats with spiral design
and colors are usually magenta with yellow and green. The T’boli weave
mats which are used to line the dais in their houses. Generally uncolored,
they are occasionally dyed. One of the most durable are the Tagbanua mats
from Palawan because their borders are carefully edged by closely weaving
them with smaller rattan strips. A similar tradition is found among the Dyak
people of Sarawak in Borneo.
Mats are also woven in Basey, Samar. The raw material is ticog grass which
grows profusely in the area. Basically, these mats have a border design and a
central motif which is usually a stylized rendition of flowers, with colors
ranging from monochrome to polychromatic work that may be likened to
painting. Using a technique similar to embroidery, the colors are inserted
after the basic plain background mat has been fully woven. The mats can be
monogrammed. Some mats feature the Philippine map, Leyte-Samar
landmarks such as the San Juanico Bridge, and lately, portraits. Recent designs
have appropriated motifs from Mindanao such as the mandala motif in the
Yakan fabrics woven in Basilan.
UP Open University
Unit II Module 3 29
Mats abound in the other regions of the Philippines. The island of Romblon
produces delicate mats with lace-like edges made from buri palm. They are
used during wedding dances to define the space for dancing. In Bolinao,
Pangasinan buri is used to make double-layered mats with one side using a
plaid colored design and the other plain.
Bicol mats are made out of a palm called karagamoy which comes in two
shades, a natural straw color and a deep brown shade due to its having been
soaked in sea water to make it impervious to insects.
Runo reeds are used for mats woven in the Cordilleras. The mats are used to
line earthen floors so people can sleep on the ground.
There are as many different types of mats as there are raw materials available
in different regions in the Philippines. There are also as many designs depicted
in the mats. The technique of weaving dictates the created forms, which have
characteristics based on the limitations of how they are made. Thus, the mats
have design motifs referred to as being technomorphic, i.e., form bound by
technique. Technomorphic designs are those shapes or forms created on
account of the nature, characteristics and limitations of the technique used.
Activity 3-1
1. Go to a public market and find what mats are sold there. Interview
the vendor to find out the source(s), materials, costs and the
characteristics of the mats they are selling.
2. Find out if there is anyone in your community who knows how to

plait mats. If there is, visit this person, and find out what you can
about the plaiting of mats in your area.
3. Are there any other forms of weaving done in your area besides
plaiting? What are these?
4. Note the design and colors of the mats.
Record your observations in your ACTIVITY NOTEBOOK.
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If you found mats sold in the public market, differentiate the different
mats you found by identifying the raw material used, the technique
used in its formation, the color, design motifs and function. Remember
that mats have been used to produce other things such as bags, place
mats, and so on. Include such by-products in your listing.
Isn’t it interesting to discover art forms in your vicinity? Aside from

weaving examples, do the same process for other forms of art you will
find in your community.
Art as Invention Rather than Imitation

Art forms use materials from nature as a medium for expressing an idea or
thought. In mat weaving, plant fiber is taken from the natural environment
and processed using certain techniques. Color is used to add beauty to the
mat. In some areas of the Philippines, the mat is enhanced with the addition
of varicolored dyed fiber that is interwoven to create geometric and linear
patterns likened to a mandala. These mats actually express the spiritual
consciousness of the people who make them. When woven for meditation,
these mats serve a religious function.
In other areas of the Philippines, sleeping mats are now used as tapestries to
decorate the walls. From material taken from nature, it has been transformed
into an art form that signifies meaning for the people who made them. The
weaving technique has produced a form that is the result of the way the
material is handled. Thus nature comes out differently and becomes a product
of invention rather than imitation.
Activity 3-2
Let’s see if you understood the concept of art as invention rather than
imitation. Take a good look at a claypot such as one used for cooking
or one used as a flower pot. Explain how it is an invention rather than
an imitation of nature. Your explanation must include information
about the materials used and the process by which the claypot was
created.
Write your explanation in your ACTIVITY NOTEBOOK.
UP Open University
Unit II Module 3 31
Summary
By studying how a mat is woven from a plant material, we experience the
transformation of a raw material derived from nature into an art form, using
a particular technique. When a weaver uses original ideas to create motifs
inspired by the material itself, we find a creation based on invention.
Even if mats are generally intended for sleeping on, their creators sometimes
incorporate colors and designs which carry meanings based on social contexts.
Thus, the geometricity of the Tawi-Tawi mats differs from the floral motifs of
the Basey mats not just in appearance but also in significance. Each
geographical area has its own history, customs and traditions that influence
the weavers’ designs.
References
Alegre, Joyce Dorado. (2000). Banig ng buhay, ARAW. Agosto-Setyembre

2000, NCCA Publication.
Baradas, David B. (1996). BANIG: Art to sleep on. Sulyap kultura II exhibition
catalog, National Commission For Culture and the Arts.
Datuin, Fajardo, Flores, et al. (1997). Art and society.
Lauzon, Alden Q. (1999). Weaving changes. Mat-making as industry and
art, Pananaw 3/Visayas, National Commission for Culture and the Arts.
Newman, Thelma R. (1977). Plaiting mats, contemporary Southeast Asian arts
and crafts. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.
Stiles, Kristine and Selz, Peter. (1996). Theories and documents of contemporary
art: A sourcebook of artists’ writings. Berkeley: University of California Press.
UP Open University
Module 4
Aesthetic Experience and
Expression
F rom time to time, we find ourselves admiring

an object, such as a vase or a chair, for its color
and shape, and sometimes for its texture. We might
Objectives
find ourselves staring in admiration at a beautiful
sunset, a fluttering butterfly, or the curl of smoke
should be able to:
from a bowl of steamed rice. Or we might find
ourselves transported by a song or a movie from
1. Define aesthetic experience
the experience of daily life to a world of grace and
and expression;
beauty. All these are aesthetic experiences, our focus
2. Undergo the process of
in this module.
recreating an aesthetic
experience by creating work
of art; and
Aesthetic Experience and 3. Describe an aesthetic
Expression experience.
Aesthetics is that branch of philosophy in which questions about the nature,

meaning and value of art are examined in order to understand art as a
phenomenon or experience. Aesthetics has to do with one’s perception of the
qualities of the phenomenon being experienced. It also has to do with the art
of artistic creation, the art object, its interpretation and appreciation, critical
evaluation, and its social and cultural context. Therefore, both the audience
and the artist experience expressed form aesthetically.
The act of creating art is an aesthetic experience. The art object is the expression
of someone’s perception of a life experience which has undergone internal
and external processing, so that the percept transformed into a concept is
expressed in form.
Likewise, the percipient receiver or viewer of this object expressed by the

artist may have an aesthetic experience by viewing the object. This person
who encounters the art object may or may not have an aesthetic experience
exactly like that of the artist but just the same he or she experiences the object
aesthetically, based on previous experiences and level of aesthetic appreciation.
A practical experience such as putting cream in a cup of coffee can be an

aesthetic experience if you observe the fusion of the white cream into the
black coffee and appreciate its beauty. An ordinary poster announcing an
event has a practical function but when you view it for its design, then it
becomes an aesthetic experience.
Everyday we make aesthetic choices, ranging from practical things such as

what color of dress to wear to more complex decisions such as that images
and vocabulary to use in writing a poem.
Activity 4-1
Observe a practical everyday experience and discover in what way it
can be an aesthetic experience. Write a description of this aesthetic
experience for you.

This activity is meant to make you more conscious of the beauty found
in everyday experiences. Writing about it will help you find the
appropriate language to describe the qualities of the phenomenon you
are observing.
Aesthetic Experience in Landscape Painting

A natural landscape is usually a beautiful sight that gives a feeling of inner
warmth and expansion. Such an aesthetic experience of reverence and awe
may be felt from sunrise to sunset and from season to season. Countless works
of art have been created as a result of nature’s beauty and artists have tried to
capture on canvas the atmosphere and mood of the scenery. These landscape
paintings are generally pictures composed of the sky in the background, the
houses and trees along the horizon in the middle ground and a foreground
that gives the eye a depth of field by which we appreciate distance in a
painting.
UP Open University
Unit II Module 4 35
Artists from different cultures have expressed the natural environment in

various styles. While some paint what they see as a physical world, others try
to capture its mood, and others express what for them is life’s meaning in
their renderings.
Landscape paintings were popular in the early 20th century in the Philippines.
Most students of art invariably painted landscapes as a matter of course while
learning how to paint. Many beautiful landscapes by artists such as Miguel
Zaragoza, Isidro Ancheta, Dominador Castañeda, Teodoro Buenaventura
and Toribio Herrera captured the bucolic environment of rural Philippines
before its urbanization. Generally done on a small canvas, the landscapes
painted in the 1930s and 1940s show a Philippine environment characterized
by lush foliage and rose-colored skies. One of the early landscapes which
show the serenity and beauty of the country was painted by Fabian de la
Rosa. Riverview of Sta. Ana is a composition that expresses the aesthetic
experience of the artist of an environment not yet polluted with urban toxic
waste. Fabian de la Rosa y Cuerto (1869-1937) was born in Paco, Manila and
attended the Academia de Bellas Artes, where he learned the rudiments of
painting in the European way.
The Filipino landscape shows a palette of colors close to that of early European
landscape artists like Claude Monet (1840-1926). This French artist painted
specific sites several times in a day to record his visual perception of the same
view, capturing its different moods as the atmosphere changed in time and
space. Monet painted different views of the village along the river Seine where
he lived. Fascinated with the reflection of light on the water or the effect of
light on the atmosphere, the painter studied nature by doing a number of
studied of the same scene. Monet belonged to the group of impressionist artists
working in the late nineteenth century in France.
From directly capturing landscape as a motif and subject matter, the efforts
of the impressionists show a shift of interest from natural phenomenon to the
formalistic aspects of a more technical nature, specifically of how best to use
their materials to effect the images they wanted to create. This led to artists
heightening the expressive value of color, making it independent of the specific
objects, transforming color from having a direct correspondence with nature
into having a feeling toward nature which is expressed in color. Thus the
work of French and German expressionists paved the way to modernism in
the visual arts. An example would be the paintings of German expressionist
August Macke (1887-1914), which show the geometrization of landscape as
the artist perceived it in terms of colors.
Landscape painting is a major form of Chinese painting. The Chinese produced

a school of landscape painting at the beginning of the 10th century. To them,
landscape was not merely a pretty picture or a recorded scene, but held major
philosophical implications. There were many styles.
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One of the easily discernable style was called the monumental style; it began
in the Five Dynastics period in A.D. 960. Such a style would show a towering
mountain composition with attention to the achievement of a believable path
as a place to walk in.
In Chinese art, the landscape painting must have what is called the qi yun the
spirit or breath of life. A criterion that is thoroughly meaningful, the aesthetic
quality of this intangible spirit is that which is displayed in the work of art
and which a great artist can impart. In Chinese art, canons or general
principles are present as guides to the artist by which their works are received.
Activity 4-2
With simple materials such as watercolor or vegetable dye, make your
own landscape painting of a natural scene. In your ACTIVITY
NOTEBOOK describe how the scene affected you and how you felt
while painting it. Have someone view your work and record how the
viewer responded to it.

The experience of actual painting must have given you an idea of the
process of perception, conception and creating a form which has
become, in turn, another perceptible object. Asking someone to view
and comment on it will make you aware of the aesthetic experience of
another person.
Aesthetic Experience in Dance

Dance is a rhythmic and patterned succession of movements executed by
body or limbs or both, commonly in unison with music and/or hand clapping
as an expression of personal or group emotion, a religious rite, theatrical
entertainment, physical education, social amusement or a form of art.
The body responds to rhythm with movement such as swaying or stamping.

The physical body is stimulated to move in rhythm in imitation of some action,
story, myth or in relation to a magical or religious event.
The experience of dance varies— from the mimetic dance of the Agtas miming
the monkey as it looks for honey, to the folk dance of lowland cultures
performed during fiestas as part of a religious celebration, to dance as art
form whether folkloric or in ballet form. The folkloric dance evokes an aesthetic
different from that of the peasants’ actual dance. Folk dances as rendered by
UP Open University
Unit II Module 4 37
dance troupes are highly stylized, theatrical and visually appealing, while
the more authentic folk dance demonstrates serene and seemingly stoic stances
showing archetypal gestures.
We experience a different aesthetic as dance acquires an iconographic language

based on the culture from which it comes. By this is meant a specific movement
language created by gestures that have set meanings. For instance, the dance
movement of India has isolated movements of the eyes, neck and head, this
has a different expression from the Japanese dance which has a different
rhythm of movement. In the Philippines, the pangalay movement from Sulu
has a different gesture or dance language from that of the dance from the
Cordilleras even if both signify the movement of birds.
In modern dance, the dance choreographer expresses an aesthetic using a

language of forms rhythmically moving in space and time using the idiom
and experience of a highly technological life.
The magic we derive from watching dancers move is the manner in which
forms interact with the space and the rhythm of time. The soul life of the
dance is that of the dancer’s who expresses an idea, though or feeling in
movement. As the dancer unfolds the aesthetic of dance through body moving
in space, so does the viewer experience the quality of life expressed in
movement.
Activity 4-3
1. If possible, view a dance performance in a theater or in your
community or learn how to dance. Write about your experience of
dancing or watching dance performances in your ACTIVITY
NOTEBOOK.
2. Find a critical review of a dance performance and study the points

considered by the critic.
3. Find books on Philippine dances and comment about the different

dance expressions in Philippine social life in your ACTIVITY
NOTEBOOK.
Comment on Activity 4-3

Dances are expressions of culture. Thus, as you experience its aesthetic,
you also feel the expression of unique cultures. The diversity of culture
found in the Philippines may be seen in Philippine dances.
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Summary
The cultural life of the people is expressed and seen in the art forms that exist
in the community. These art forms can serve as a gauge of the level of aesthetic
experience of a people. Within the same community, various levels of aesthetics
may be observed. Some may want to participate in folk dancing during fiestas
while others prefer to dance socially, or learn the ballet. The differentiation in
aesthetic experience is a normal phenomenon and need not alarm us because
it shows the differentiation of individuals. Some can appreciate different types
of art experiences depending on the appropriateness of the events within a
community. What is important is that we are able to respect each person’s
level of aesthetics.
Art expresses as well as evokes a sense of beauty and wonder. The act of
creating art is in itself an aesthetic experience. Likewise, art as perceptible
object provides the possibility of an aesthetic experience for its viewer. There
are different ways of expressing one’s aesthetic experience. Affected by one’s
culture, expressive values differ, depending on the way life has meaning for
people living in different contextual settings.
Looking for art in public places will give you an idea of the level of aesthetics
of a community. Basic questions that relate to art, how to think about art and
observing the art that comes out of the community could lead you to making
others conscious of the beauty or lack of it in their surroundings.
References
Amilbangsa, Ligaya Fernando. (1983). Pangalay: Traditional dancers. Filipinas

Foundation Inc. for the Ministry of Muslim Affairs.
Fajardo, Libertad Villanueva. (1961). Visayan folk dances. Volumes I-III. 3rd
ed., Manila.
Mirano, Elena Rivera. (1989). Subli. Museo ng Kalinangang Pilipino. Cultural
Center of the Philippines, Manila.
Tolentino, Francisca Reyes. (1946). Philippine national dances. Silver-Burdett
Company. Reprinted 1990, Kayumanggi Press, Inc., Quezon City.
Tiongson, Nicanor, ed. (1991). Tuklas Sining. Manila: Cultural Center of the
Philippines.
UP Open University
Unit III
The Language of Art
Module 5
Art as Language
A s human endeavor and social practice, art has

the capacity to render reality in different ways.
This capacity has a lot to do with its language. Like
Objectives
any other form of language, artistic language After studying this module, you
enables artists and audiences to create and should be able to:
communicate meanings and deal with these
meanings. 1. Discuss the relationship
between art and reality; and
Artistic language, therefore, mediates reality and 2. Examine how art makes
does not simply reflect it like a mirror. It remakes meanings; how these
reality and transforms it artistically. Mediation is a meanings are interpreted;
mode of intervention. Art intervenes between and how these meanings are
reality and the form of art. shared and contested.
Art as Language
We must bear in mind that form, although accorded integrity as a specific but
not an autonomous entity, is meaningless if seen outside the world in which
it is grounded. In other words, the form of art does not begin and end with
itself.
Art is a vital part of the process of making the world. This world is perceived
as reality and art exercises a certain capacity of translating that reality in
specific terms. Art realizes its potential only when it grapples with the reality
with which it has an intricate and intimate relationship.
Like other languages, the language of art is made possible in a given context
of makers and receivers of ideas, concepts, and ways of making sense of the
world. Moreover, it follows certain rules and conventions, a scheme of
possibilities which allows an art form to signify whatever it wishes to signify.

The receivers of art in turn are able to negotiate the process of gaining access
to signification by cracking the codes of language and decoding what the art
work tries to say. The language of art entails both the making of sense and the
reception of sense through form.
As a matter of principle, therefore, when we confront a work of art, we situate

it within a horizon of possibilities of why it makes sense to us. A woven cloth,
for instance, which incorporates geometric motifs may refer to the shape of
nature in the form of trees or rivers. A particular technique of the film camera,
like in the case of a stalking shot, may clue us into the conditions of impending
danger. A movement of the hand in ballet or a facial gesture in a play may
imply a specific sentiment or emotion. All these are signs produced by the
artistic language and which are received by audiences of art in various ways.
Let us review a film to illustrate the points.
A Review of the Film “Itim”

ITIM
Direction: Mike de Leo

Screenplay: Clodualdo del Mundo, Jr., Gil Quito
Editing: Ike Jarlego, Jr.
Production Design: Mel Chionglo
Cinematography: Ely Cruz, Rody Lacap
Sound: Ramon Reyes, Luis Reyes, Sebastian Sayson
Music: Max Jocson
Cinema Artists Philippines, 1976
When stillness culminates, there is movement. The living potential

returns afresh, the cycles of the moon go on regularly, again and
again the light will wane. In the process of infinite beginnings, even
immortality is immortal.
-Trinh T. Minh-Ha
The pervading gloom that hovers in the film assumes deep black. Immersed
in the mournful rituals of Lent, Itim secretes not only the dolorous feeling of
rural Catholics awaiting redemption but also the repressed stirrings of the
soul of a murdered novice raring to set everyone free with the truth she must
tell. And she does, spilling rage on her tormentor amid the oppressive heat of
cuaresma, on the eve of Easter.
UP Open University
Unit III Module 5 43
The opening scene shows séance Aling Angelina (Sarah Joaquin) imploring
the name of the spirits to guide her in the pursuit of a wandering soul: Aling
Pining (Mona Lisa) wishes to know what had happened to her missing
daughter Rosa (Susan Valdez). Aling Angelina is terse and cryptic: Rosa is
dead. The camera focuses on Aling Pining’s other daughter Teresa (Charo
Santos), who suddenly becomes uneasy. Then, the title of the film flashes on
screen.
The story of Itim, a film on discovering the “truth,” revolves around Jun Torres
(Tommy Abuel), a Manila-based photographer who visits his ancestral home
in San Ildefonso during the Holy Week. He arrives there very early in the
morning and is met by Aling Bebeng (Moody Diaz), the caretaker, and her
lazy husband.
The camera lingers, absorbing the sight and sound of a sleepy town awakening-
sunlight filtering through large capiz windows, a pan de sal peddler barking
his trade, women chanting the pasyon, bells tolling, rooster crowing, silences.
Jun checks on his wheelchair-bound father and hands him a musical cassette
tape. There is practically no verbal exchange between the two during
breakfast, except for some perfunctory gestures and glances, intimating that
their relationship is somewhat strained. At once hesitant and deeply
sympathetic, the “stranger” finally relents: “Kumusta ka na?”
Cut to Jun pulling open a rickety window and complaining to the maid why
the house is neglected— faucets regurgitating rust, dust accumulating. A
head of a santo rolls down the floor, prompting Jun to ask if the family still
loans its statues for processions. Aling Bebeng, somehow in a premonitory
tone, tells him that it had been the wish of his mother to do so: “Kung hindi
masusunod ang gusto ng patay, hindi matatahimik iyon.” Jun opens about five
large windows to let the air and light in, so to speak, and stares out. Cut to
Teresa standing alone in front of a lake. This cross-cutting connects Teresa to
the Torres household. And so, the mystery.
Jun finally gets to take his picture of a pabasa, with women chanters gathered
around a long table taking turns to read the pasyon. Unexpectedly, he sees a
woman standing outside the hut where all this is happening and photographs
her. Then cut to Dr. Torres watching television. Teresa is irritated by the
flash and, strangely, Dr. Torres is likewise agitated. At this point, the
intercutting of Teresa and Dr. Torres establishes a specific form of relationship
between the two.
Back to Jun. He meets an old man, who leads him to what could be a grave
digger’s quarters. The man puts his right hand on Jun’s right shoulder and
lets it reach up Jun’s arms and hands, after which ushers him to a dark room.
There, the man murmurs: “Hesukristo, kaawaan mo kami, Itim, Itim, Sa liwanag,
Sa Dilim Itim, Itim.”
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Abrupt cut to Aling Bebeng slaughtering a “sick” chicken as father and son
eat dinner. Jun opens windows again and sees Teresa across the street; Dr.
Torres feels uncomfortable.
Teresa comes home and Aling Pining chastises her for arriving late. Teresa
explains that she had mysteriously found herself in the next town, San
Ildefonso, implying that she had been “taken” there. The mother does not
buy her daughter’s explanation and scolds her, in the process revealing that
Rosa had been the more favored daughter. It is in this scene where we are
introduced for the first time to Rosa through a picture venerated by a votive
candle. The scene ends with Aling Pining slapping Teresa, who is not as
“pious” as Rosa.
Intercuts: Jun developing the photographs and Dr. Torres sleeping as music
wafts in the air. The latter starts feeling restless as the picture of Teresa is
slowly blown up to what could be metaphorically put as larger-than-life
dimensions.
Eerie noises lead Jun to walk around the house. He turns on the lights and
proceeds downstairs, where he hears the sound of a door sliding. We see a
person actually passing through his father’s clinic. Jun asks aloud if someone
is there. No answer. Shot of Jun back against camera, as if the latter were
pursuing or tracking him down. Suddenly, Dr. Torres moans as if experiencing
some nightmare.
Dream sequence of Jun. Images: Jun enters a large room bathed in harsh
light and sees the same old man he had seen in the pabasa, then a person
tinkers with test tubes and medical paraphernalia.
Jun chances on Teresa in the church the following morning and takes a picture
of her. Teresa leaves in a huff. Jun catches up with Teresa, introduces himself,
and gives her a ride home. There, Jun sees Rosa’s “picture” and asks about
her.
Back to his assignment, Jun takes pictures of penitents flogging themselves.

One penitent grabs Jun’s legs. Something snaps in his mind and hurriedly
heads for home. Intercutting this scene is Dr. Torres wending his way to
Jun’s room where he sees Teresa’s picture, which terrifies him so much that
he scurries towards the escalera. Jun arrives in the nick of time to prevent Dr.
Torres from leaping down the stairs.
Later, we learn from a conversation between Aling Bebeng and Jun that Dr.
Torres is a notorious womanizer, that his dead wife had never forgiven him
for his indiscretions.
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When Teresa finally visits Jun’s house, we begin to realize that Rosa is
possessing Teresa. She rightly identifies the clinic and in fact confronts Dr.
Torres face to face, seething: “Nagbalik ako,” leaving the latter almost
convulsing in shock.
Because of these strange things happening to her, Aling Pining asks her
daughter if there is a problem. And Teresa sobs: “Si Ate Rosa.”
After another dream sequence where Jun is virtually attacked by a group of

santos, he hears a woman sighing, almost in lament. The voice is traced to the
clinic. There, Jun is terrified by the sight of a divider flapping its curtains. He
goes near the medicine cabinet; the key dangles and swings from its hole. He
inspects the rosary and novena pamphlets inside. And a photo negative. He
develops it, enlarges it. The picture: Rosa and Dr. Torres posing outside the
church. Jun seeks Teresa, who had just left the house. Jun shows Aling
Pining the picture. She asks Jun to look for Teresa and then consults Aling
Angelina. Jun finds Teresa alone in the lake, confused and utterly distraught.
Aling Angelina tells everyone that Rosa might be leading them to something,
and arranges a session. Teresa insists that it be held in Jun’s house, the better
to let Dr. Torres participate: “Mas magiging malaya ang kaluluwa ni Ate Rosa.”
Before the session, Jun dreams of the same scenario, but this time, sees his
father beside a bed on which a nude woman lies.
Everyone is gathered now around a round table. Rosa would finally speak
through Teresa and unload the oppressive truth: that Dr. Torres and she had
been lovers, how she defied religion and her mother when she had consented
to this illicit relationship, how Dr. Torres turned cold when she had informed
him of her pregnancy, how he forcibly aborted the baby— which led to her
death; and how Dr. Torres dumped her body into a lake and met an accident
while driving home. The flashback is swathed in gray and sepia.
Rosa, through Teresa, taunts Dr. Torres severely and unremittingly—

“Kriminal, Kriminal.” The latter refuses to take it, withdraws from the table,
and falls off the stairs. The final frames show Dr. Torres lying prostrate dead
and Teresa awash in anguish.
Heralding Itim, Mike de Leon’s directorial debut, was a 30-minute short film,
Monologo, explicating the dilemma of a photographer who stumbles on a
mystery in one of his photographs.
In Itim, De Leon sets up a fuller narrative on a witness’ (also a photographer)

attempt to bring to light the ugly truth, a crime in fact to which he himself is
complicit: he is the son of the perpetrator.
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The film cannot be classified in the generic terms of the industry as “horror”
or “mystery-suspense” or “crime-thriller.” While it combines some genre-based
conventions with non-mainstream prerogatives, Itim does not really tie in
with expectations about how scary movies must proceed and how its audiences
must scream in the face of its “gimmicks.”
Itim meticulously structures its development in such a way that the viewer
gets to imbibe first the corked-up atmosphere of Lent – especially the sensibility
of sin, the necessity of remorse and penance, the purgation of guilt, the colonial
culture of spiritual violence – before taking in and being engulfed by the horrific
details of an extra-marital affair that leads to murder. Adding texture
definitely is the idea that the victim is a novice, a Catholic religious, who
cohabits with the town’s illustrious doctor-philander. Rosa’s defiance/
deviation thus is not only ranged against moral or ethical codes, but more so
against the political structures of religion. Placed within the circumscribed
world of an out-of-the-way bayan immersed in the rituals of the semana santa,
the film achieves a substantial degree of tension smoldering on the arid soil of
summer.
This milieu, however, is not merely contrivance, or ethnographic élan. It is

crucial to the telling of the narrative. The bahay na bato— replete with totems
of Hispanic ideology (santos, mater dolorosa images, cavernous salas, bulky
furniture, window traceries, servants, and so on) towering over the fields
and small houses— implicates the political, economic, and cultural capital of
Dr. Torres, which he dispenses efficaciously to conceal a heinous crime. The
absence of any State or Church authority in this setting merely heightens the
clout Dr. Torres wields in the town. And, surely, he could have gotten away,
literally, with murder, had it not been for some folksy construals of karma or
“pagbabayad ng kasalanan” and “pagkabagabag ng konsensiya.”
For the manner in which Aling Pining resorts to the competence/knowledge

of the séance to “solve” the crime and ferret out the “truth” is symptomatic of
the “faith” in non-institutional apparatuses— those outside the auspices of
the police, the Church, local government— and the slippages within a
supposedly Catholic order in which, while parishioners conform to Christian
traditions, nonetheless sustain a folk culture nourished by habits and
predispositions inscribed in such beliefs and ceremonies as flagellation,
“pagpaparamdam,” possession (“pagsasanib ng kaluluwa”), séance (“pagtawag
sa kaluluwa”), other penitential rituals (“paglakad ng nakaluhod”). It is this
folk religiosity that informs/subverts Catholic doctrine and allows other
longings to be unleashed, other voices to be heard, other aspirations for justice
to find fulfillment. And it is not as if dominative systems here transcend
critique altogether. Aling Bebeng, in fact, is irrepressible and is able to weigh
and barge in with her stinging comments on Dr. Torres’s being “makati sa
babae” and father and son being “malibog,” thus undercutting the primacy of
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the feudal power configuration that is supposed to structure a “servant’s”

position in relation to her “master.”
That Rosa, through Teresa, is able to tease out the oppressive moment in her
liaison with Dr. Torres and construe that the injustice inflicted on her must be
addressed is clearly marked. “Inapi ako,” she definitively intones, not only as
a marginalized member of the community, but also as a woman who because
of an affair is further stigmatized into a subaltern position: a poor novice
shacking up with a married man. Rosa here, moreover, thinks in terms of
betrayal of trust: “Nilinlang mo ako … ikinahiya…Pinatay mo ang aking
sanggol…Magbabayad ka.” This is a woman crying out from the depths of her
most repressed heart, from her dead body, from her avenging spirit. A “soul”
re-claiming her rights, retelling the memory of violence, re-defining the terms
of justice.
The manner in which Dr. Torres is made to pay for his crime may partake of
deus ex machina maneuverings. But in the context of agrarian lifeways, it is
not to be merely understood in terms of fatalist philosophy. Rather, it must be
viewed within the matrix of options truncated by traditional politics. For this
accident turns out to be an incomplete project, not a closure, to be sure, but a
prelude to something more unerring— death and justice. If someone like
Rosa cannot gain access to the agencies of justice, given the power relations
that support feudal politics in the Philippines, folk culture provides other
ways of balancing the equation, as it were.
Still and all, Rosa is unable to escape the interpellation of such hegemonic
narratives as Catholicism. After recounting her trysts with Dr. Torres, she
asks for God’s forgiveness, which while seemingly ambiguous since Rosa does
not feel guilty at all over her decisive attempts to actually “kill” Dr. Torres,
reinscribes her within Catholic pedagogy as she reinscribes it within her
ambivalence. This is no doubt just a simple story of revenge. It reveals how
folk strategies in coping with patriarchal and State oppression in the
countryside are constructed within a dominant but hemorrhaging discursive
field constituted by Catholic dogma and economic underdevelopment.
And also by empirical logic: Philippine folk paranormal paradigm intersects

with the truth of photographic evidence as circumscribed within the temporal
and causal requirements of film. The manner in which the picture of Rosa
and Dr. Torres are taken out of context lays bare, in another sense, the processes
of deciphering truth through the sign structures of cinema. In this instance,
the picture is assembled as part and parcel of a signifying chain, of a narrative
structure that makes sense in light of certain events combined in a planned
sequence. In a way, the picture is severed from its prior setting (the picture-
taking in the church grounds) and located in the scheme of the “investigation’
on Rosa’s mysterious disappearance. But while the “body of evidence” is
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scientifically validated, the inexorable voice that compels everyone to listen to

the truth is a disembodied entity operating on the level of folk mysticism and
supernatural laws. This is the dialectic of contradictions that girds the
asymmetrical relationships within uneven social formations.
Signs
Since film viewing is an ephemeral experience and our knowledge of the film
is modeled by memory, it is instructive to point out certain signs that the film
foregrounds to position its viewers to comprehend the narrative.
We can in this regard identify particular foreshadowing devices like the

radio news that we hear in Jun’s car: a daughter of a wealthy family is
abused by Mario, a suitor but not her boyfriend, who had threatened to
retaliate if the victim’s family would inform the authorities of the crime. The
intertext is quite uncanny considering that Dr. Torres is played by a Mario
(Montenegro).
The manner in which shots of the lake are intercut with the flow of the
narrative at its crucial pressure points aims to enlighten us on certain
relationships among events and characters that our minds must forge. We
are, for instance, at a loss with regard to the probable relationship between
Teresa and Dr. Torres. The intercuts of Dr. Torres’ restlessness and Teresa’s
strange shifts of temper are therefore meaningful when taken as part of the
film’s sign system and narrative strategies.
Jun’s dreams are, again, full of telling signs: an old man, perhaps the village
sage, who seems to privy to a town secret would “waylay” Jun to his father’s
clinic or to a church strewn with lighted candles, subtly subjecting him with
his promiscuity.
The context within which folk Lenten practices and feudal life are situated is
vividly delineated: grim faces of penitents and devotees against shrill vegetal
shades and the resplendent fabrics and accoutrements of images, domineering
domiciles haunted by spirits, silences punctuated by the clatter of footsteps.
All these point to a social environment acutely fired up by repression, in fact,
by structural violence that impels the putrid passions of power to destroy
people who dare love and live outside the law.
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Activity 5-1
Movies are said to be “make believe” though not in the sense that they
are false. Their reality comes in the form of the specific language they
use as expression and as mode of experience. This only means that
“make-believe” is a production of belief or disbelief toward the film.
Watch a movie. Identify aspects of the movie of which you can find
correlations in actual life. Identify also how these “real life” aspects
are made different in the movie.

I hope that you were able to distinguish between actual reality and
filming reality. By focusing on the difference, you learn to realize that
art speaks of reality in its own language. This language which is a
signifying system or a system that is able to signify or make meanings,
is governed by rules of functioning, vocabulary, and modes of
articulation.
The performing arts, for instance, reach out to society for materials.
How they process reality in the domain of the arts is an important
question to explore.
Michael Ryan explains to us how language translates actual reality

into filmic reality.
“Films are discourses in part because they are made up of

elements (characters, actions, settings, and so on) that already
have meanings and values (are encoded) within the existing
social systems of significance, the prevailing social discourses
or systems of encoded relations whereby each social element
takes on meaning by virtue of occupying a certain position in
the social system or of being in differential relation to other
elements in the system (male/female, rich/poor, white/non-
white/ as well as such things as character types— executive/
radical, capitalist/worker, and so on). As each element in
language takes on value differentially or relationally, that is,
by being marked or not by certain values (inflected/non-
inflected, etcetera), so each social element takes on value
through its difference from other elements. Each element is
encoded by possessing or not possessing certain traits.
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Films incorporate these elements, recodify them, and give them

meanings and values specific to the codes of film, but the raw
material out which the new values and images are constructed
is always already codified by social codes of meaning. “The
Politics of Film: Discourse, Psychoanalysis, Ideology.”)
What Ryan tries to say is that film transcodes social codes in the context
of its signifying system. A much-hated criminal in society may, for
instance, be transcoded as hero in film. Class oppression may be
negotiated by romance or marriage of two people coming from
contradictory social backgrounds. Rape may occasion sensuality or
be made to serve as an excuse for movie stars to bare their bodies.
These examples point to the fact that film and society circulate in
circuits, constituting each other’s realities.
Summary
This module tried to lead your attention to the idea that although art and
reality are intimately related, art transforms that reality in different ways
through its language. Without knowledge of the language of art, artists and
audiences will fail to appreciate the potentials of both expression and
interpretation.
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Module 6
Art as Representation
and Interpretation
T he language of art ensures that art maintains

the power to offer a different notion of reality
through a different way of speaking about it. It is,
Objectives
therefore, important for us to know how to speak
the language of art and be able to recognize how it
should be able to:
represents reality and how we interpret that
representation.
1. Explain how reality is
transformed in artistic
To represent reality is to comment on it and not
language;
simply mirror it. Even the most naturalistic
2. Discuss how art represents
depiction of reality may only resemble reality but
reality from a point of view
will not render it as it is. A representation of a tree
and not from a state of
does not refer to a mirror image of the tree, but to
neutrality; and
its interpretation. Therefore, to interpret reality in
3. Analyze the ways in which
art is not simply to accept how art represents it,
artists encode meanings and
but also to question the implications of the
how audiences decode them
representation in our lives.
in the active process of
signification or meaning
making.
Art as Representation and
Interpretation
If the idea of art as form insists that art is not merely imitation of nature, the
idea of art as language posits the view that the relationship between art and
reality is not based on reflection, or a mechanistic (that is, one-to-one
correspondence mirror) imaging of its world, but on representation, or the
capacity of art to produce meaning about reality and articulate it.
For example, in dance, the body signifies meaning through the transformation,
of time, space, and energy as meaning-generating elements. In theater, reality
is enacted on stage as social place and articulated by meaning-generating
gesture and narrative through the signals and codes of drama and its
performance (dramaturgy).
The notion of representation asserts art’s ability to speak a specific language

and communicate its meaning to viewers. This process implies that this
communication is made possible by the structure of artistic language and the
ensuing exchange of meanings brought about by that language system. The
language of cinema, for instance, creates meanings through the elements of
direction, screenplay, cinematography, editing, sound, and performance. The
art of the cinema is to be distinguished from its kin, the art of photography,
which also maintains its integrity as specific form and meaning system. The
lens, lighting, treatment of subject, and the angle of vision are the main
concerns of photography.
The concept that art is a structure of signification and facilitates the exchange
of meanings between itself and audiences guides the life of art as lived practice.
Finally, structure and exchange involve the power of interpretation, or the
manner in which art represents reality in whatever light and according to
specific choice. The choice is meaningful because people, who are human
agents, select it against a background of other options and alternatives, or
other ways of interpreting reality and perceptions of life.
The process of making meaning in culture, society, and history goes through
various levels. This makes the range of meanings of art rich and vigorous
such that it cannot be reduced to literal sense.
In contemporary times, everyday life is more or less ordered around the

broadcast media— television and radio. The technology of video has become
so pervasive that we see it everywhere. It is quick to appropriate urgent needs
like information and entertainment; it also links up with other forms of popular
culture, especially mass-market literature, music, and print media. Radio, for
its part, reaches more audiences as its technology is more accessible.
Most recently, the emergence of the microprocessor as the key feature of

computer procedures has made it possible for software and hardware operators
to create and disseminate art in cyberspace.
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Focus on Theater
To clarify further the idea of art representation and interpretation, let us take
the art of the theater as example. According to Michael Goodman,
The art of theater cannot be separated from the mechanism of

appearance and disappearance. Theater is exit and entrances.
Resurrections and rehearsals, the dimming of lights, curtain calls, the
curtain itself, the structure of the scene, wings, traps, the clown’s head
around the cardboard tree, the deus ex machina, prologues and
epilogues— are all refinements and recurrences of the one pervasive
motif. Whenever we have theatre, we have hiding and surprise,
appearance and disappearance.
William Shakespeare had once remarked that “All the world’s a stage.” But
not all the world is theater. This is so because theater, as a category of cultural
production, conforms to specific conventions of staging and performance.
Theater, unlike ritual, is based on text, or to be more specific, a dramatic text
that is staged using techniques of theater production and enacted by theater
artists and other personnel before audiences who are situated in areas
especially delineated as sites of performance.
The substance of theater is drama. But not all dramatic events are theatrical
in the sense that they are not properly presented within the context of the
stage. How many times have we been witness to a neighbor’s quarrel so tragic
it seemed to have come straight from a “play,” or branded some dubious
political adventure as a moro-moro, the colonial theater form which pits
Muslims against Christians? Ceremonies like funerals and weddings somehow
observe “stagy” decorum, but do they constitute theater and are they received
by the participants as such?
Honorious (qtd. In Barrault, 1981, p. 6) believes that “the priest is a tragic

actor who re-enacts in front of his Christian audience in the theater of the
Church, the struggles of Christ and the victory of Redemption.” But, again, is
the celebration of the Eucharist, popularly known as the Mass, understood in
terms of performance, and does it cohere with the expectations of a theatrical
experience?
The conventions of various theatrical practices located within particular

cultural traditions provide us with valuable insights into how people emerging
from diverse historical situations and conditioned by divergent social forces
have made sense of theater and its modes of theatricality.
Early Indian theater aesthetics, for instance, was informed by the Natyasastra,
a compilation of instructions for dramatists, producers, actors, and costumers
as well as of specifications for building playhouses.
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Drama historian Charles W. Meister (1985) points out that the highly
intellectualized Brahmin-oriented Hindu drama was underlain by “rigid
categories of plays based upon the caste of the characters, the supernatural
elements, the style of writing, the intensity of emotions, and numerous other
criteria. Initially there were ten types of ‘higher’ drama and eighteen types of
‘lower’” Sanskrit theorists attuned themselves to the emotion or rasas to be
aroused in the audience by the work. Meister relates that there are nine possible
rasas: love, anger, heroic ardor, disgust, laughter, pathos, wonder or
admiration, fear and tender affection. “If a play mingles several of these, one
must always remain dominant, so as not to confuse the audience. It was
believed that in a great play, the audience lost itself in the rasa it was
experiencing.” (Meister, 1985, p. 3)
The stage
According to Jindrich Honzi (1976) “One theatrical function is to locate a
play spatially... Signs whose function is to promote the spectator’s
understanding always involve the designation of space” through visual
(properties, performers, and lighting) and acoustic signs. Elizabethan theater,
to give a stark example, hug inscriptions on the stage such as: “terrace below
the castle,” “the throne room,” “a chamber,” “a cemetery,” “a battlefield.”
(Honzi, 1976)
Honzi refers, for instance, to “a glass as a prop... represented by the pouring

of wine or by a clinking sound.” (p. 75) In Anton Chekov’s Cherry Orchard,
the cherry orchard is on the stage, “but in such a way that we cannot see it. It
is not represented spatially, but acoustically, as the blows of axes cutting down
the orchard are heard in the last act.” (Honzi, p. 76)
On the other hand, aside from realistic furniture and architecture, a Gothic
arch may be used to represent an entire church as in Kvapil’s staging of P.
Claudel’s 1.’ Announce faite a Marie; or a green square on the floor may be
taken to refer to a battlefield like in Kvapil’s Shakespearean cycle; or the English
coat of arms on a silken arras may evoke the reality of royal halls as can be
gleaned from the same cycle. (Honzi, p. 77)
These conventions of the stage can take on various forms. The art of the theater
deploys its arsenal of resources, including performers, as signs to make its
audiences understand how the aesthetics of the stage effects the transformation
of “natural” reality into a theatrical context, and “imagine” the illusion of
that presentation on stage.
English director Peter Brook clues us into the ways in which the “stage” has
been mystified by the conventions of theater: “In the theater, the tendency for
centuries has been to put the actor at a remote distance, on a platform, framed,
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decorated, lit, painted, in high shoes— so as to help to persuade the ignorant

that he is holy, that his art is sacred. Did this express reverence? Or was there
behind it a fear that something would be exposed if the light were too bright,
the meeting too near?” (19___, p. 18)
What must be brought out of the wings and into the light, to be sure, are the
operations that empower theater to articulate its distinct mode of reality. And
an extremely indispensable procedure in this “laying bare” entails the
deconstruction of the concepts that tend to elevate or separate the stage, the
locus of dramatic action, from the spectator’s area, and necessarily the
audience from the performers.
Mainly, there are two forms of the stage: the platform and the proscenium
(the section between the main part of the performance area and the audience,
including the arch and the curtain). The platform style availed of by ancient
Greek, Japanese, Chinese, and Shakespearean theater has the stage surrounded
by the audience on three sides (three-quarter seating arena/thrust stage style),
a set-up that relatively integrates the overarching audience and the stage.
The proscenium style, on the other hand, locates the stage as a hollow fourth
wall of a room where action takes place. Theater researcher Mordecal Gorelic
calls this scheme “illusory,” since it attempts to “create an illusion that the
audience is not in a theater at all. Its psychology is that the audience is watching
an action that has never been planned by a dramatist or rehearsed by
actors...the audience is separated from the performers by means of the
proscenium and the stage curtain, and the playgoer seems to be watching a
lighted picture inside the proscenium frame.” (1967, p. 257)
But not all staging traditions can be categorized either as platform or

proscenium, in the same way that not all theatrical productions subscribe to
Lodovico Catelvetro’s Three Unities of Time, Place and Action. The 16th
century passion play, for instance, was performed in the market place on a
three-level scaffold representing Heaven, Earth, and Hell; mystery plays (“two
weeks to act and covered millennia in their action”) were staged on movable
platforms (wagon stages) which travelled from town to town during the feast
day of the Corpus Christi. Contemporary theater practice, for its part, makes
use of the theater-in-the-round form, in which the stage is placed at the center
with the audience encircling it, as well as various techniques involving
electronic stagecraft, which had proven to have played a substantial role in
enabling the art of the theater to tackle the complexities not only of time and
place, but also of ideas.
Swiss stage designer Adolphe Appia studied the psychological effects of light
changes and explored four plastic elements in staging: perpendicular scenery,
horizontal floor, lighted space, and moving actor. (Meister, 1985) While they
heightened the theater’s naturalist potentials, while they ushered in shifts of
theory in the theater, permitting dramatists and theater practitioners to stage
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the changing realities of contemporary life. Thus, 20th century thematics of

alienation, angst, nihilism, and existentialism were enfleshed by the new
conventions invariably introduced by Expressionist theater. Theater of the
Absurd, Theater of Cruelty, and the Strindbergian Chamber Drama. Post-
modern concepts would further push the frontiers of theater technique and
re-situate the territory of theater to non-illusionistic spaces and sensibilities:
non-theater buildings, outdoor settings, abstract stages, and so on.
What must be emphasized in this aspect of the stage is the notion of

theatricality, that is, how the medium of the theater works on its material in
order to communicate its “truth” to its publics. Surely and clearly, what
audiences witness on stage is no longer just drama read as “literature” and
enclosed in a book and discussed inside a classroom: “Once it has been uttered
on stage, the dramatic text acquires a specific coloration and a new status.”
(Paris, 1990, p. 32)
In this study of the determinate instances in which drama is “written” and

“read, ”Patrice Pavis proposes that we come to grips with dramaturgy, or
the construction of drama in various contexts. To facilitate the discussion,
Pavis identifies three areas:
1. Stage direction (didascalia): The manner in which the “playwright

conceives of the implementation (reading and/or staging) of the text”
subject to the textuality and theatricality of drama, “each mode having its
own mode of fictionalization.” (p. 37)
2. Narratology (narrative analysis) the scheme within which plot is

“reconstructed— comparing the story told and the telling discourse... An
analysis of conflicts and situations clarifies the character’s motivations as
well as the text’s dramatic progression and segmentation into episodes.”
(p. 37)
3. Scenic Plot: the performance itself which Brecht describes as “the overall
composition of all the gestural processes, containing all the information
and forces of which the audience’s pleasure will be made.” (p. 38) Included
in this category are the crucial considerations of action, time, and space in
theater.
Theater space refers to the “indications of time and place of dialogues through
an imaginary production of the spectator.” (Paris, p. 38) Sarah Bryant-Bertail
contends that “theatrical space is not just a backdrop, a set, a floorboards, the
square feet of playing area, or the fictional setting. All of these are instead
spaces that, overtime, combine rhythmically to constitute a unique spatiality.”
(1990, p. 107) We must carefully consider that space in theater does not
correspond to the space inhabited by audiences and that the latter construe
spatiality through the predetermined “cultural model in which the spectator
has developed by the spectator’s experience of gestural, proxemic and rhythmic
space.” (Paris, p. 38)
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Theater time, on the other hand, pertains to the “time of the action
represented— it is the time of the fiction” (Paris, p. 39) modelled according to
the exigencies of action and plot. Again, Bryant-Bertail thinks of this kind of
temporality in peculiarly theatrical terms: “Time is not a specific number of
minutes, nor the units that we call acts and scenes, but a design of temporal
dimensions: a temporality woven at every level of text and performance into
the spatiality.” (p. 107)
Finally, action encompasses the various signifying practices of theater,

particularly verbal and scenic signifiers (set design, acting, lighting effects,
sound, and so on) and the peculiar rhythmic pattern around which they are
organized. “Verbal action translates into the performance convention of theater
language that makes an action of every word, both as the image (symbol) of
an action and the speech act itself, the diction and the direction of the text.”
(Paris, p. 39) Still part of action is the elocution/enunciation of the text by the
performer, whose “fictitious body” represents theater’s inscriptions into the
world of the theater and the world outside the theater. The fact that the
performer is seen live compels audiences to regard him or her as “real,” at the
same time that his or her performance is already constituted by textuality
and discourse.
“The whole spatio-temporal dynamic,” Bryant-Bertail writes,” can be read

as an integrated system of signification.” (p. 109) Material scenography; spaces
that appear and disappear, space, time, and action that are comprehended
in the imagination as “happening” off stage: and the social context of the
theater and the ecology of audience reception enter into any analysis of staging.
The theater and reality

Theater as we know it today is heavily guided by realist aesthetics, predisposing
its audiences to regard the action that unfolds before their eyes as a replica of
life revealing itself, and not a constructed performance. But this realist claim
to naturalism. Martin Esslin notes, only began to preponderate after the second
half of the 19th century: for before the introduction of modern stage machinery,
production design, and other three-dimensional properties, “the theater could
not even pretend to create a complete illusion of actual life, observed through
a missing fourth wall.” (Esslin, 1974, p. 128) Examples can be cited.
In Greek theater, part of the materials of stagecraft were masks that instantly
identified the characters as old or young, man or woman, happy or sad. Further
to create a larger-than-life appearance, the actor was equipped with thick-
soled boots and robes with sleeves. There were other devices: mask with calm
expressions on one side and angry ones on the other, allowing the actor to
change moods with one swift movement of his head.” (Bowra, 1966, p. 151)
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Harold Clurman further tells us that there had been several conventions of
Elizabethan theater which made realism impossible. “The actor, it is true,
wore no masks but always appeared in contemporary wigs and costumes
regardless of the historical background of the character he was portraying.
Thus the actor who played Julius Caesar was dressed not in a toga but in
doublet and hose. Since the plays were written in verse, the actors declaimed
in oratorical fashion, differentiating the dialogue from common speech.
Women’s roles were played by boys a convention which must have imposed
restraints upon the realism of love scenes, turning them into highly verbalized
and idealized, rather than physical, encounters between men and women.
The convention of the bare stage, with its paucity of furniture, forced the
actors to stand up and move about throughout the play; and finally; the use
of an open-air theater, in which performances were given in afternoon
sunlight, made it necessary to rely on the verbal medium of poetry to indicate
locale, time of day, or season of year.” (p. 90)
It was only through the advocacies of Duke of Saxe Meiningen, Stanis-lavsky,

Antoine, Brahm, Granville-Barker, and Reinhardt that the realist proposals
gained pervasive influence in a theater world which would henceforth be
fixated on stimulating”the changing light from the blazing sun of noon to the
bluish tints of the moon at night.” (Esslin, p. 128)
Dealing a tremendous blow, however, to realist dominance was German

playwright Bertoit Brecht’s concept of Verfremdungseffekt which assiduously
attempted to overcome the limitations of identification (Aristotelean drama)
and illusion. British literary theorist Terry Eagleton asserts that by “dismantling
the traditional naturalistic theater...Brecht produced a new kind of drama
based on a critique of the ideological assumptions of burgeois theater.”
(Eagleton, 1976, p. 64) At the crux of his theorizing, Brecht sought to reinvent
the relationship between “stage and audience, text and producer, producer
and actor.” (Eagleton, p. 64)
One of the artifices of theater problematized by Brechtian theory was the

“Aristotelian concept of drama, the drama of catharsis by terror and pity, the
drama of spectator-identification with the actors, the drama of illusion, which
tries to create magical effects by conjuring up events which are represented
as ‘totally present,’ while palpably they are not.” (Esslin, p. 130) Brecht hoped
for a theater that did not encourage the audience to surrender their faculties
to the contrivances of drama, and abandon their prerogatives to critique how
that drama had been forged by a conspiracy of social forces in the first place,
Esslin states that the V-Effect “by inhibiting the process of identification
between the spectator and the characters, by creating a distance between
them and enabling the audience to look at the action in a detached and critical
spirit, familiar things, attitudes and situations appear in a new and strange
light; and create, through astonishment and wonder, a new understanding
of the human situation.” (Esslin, p. 136) Like Newton looking at the falling
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Realistic Techniques Non-Realistic Techniques
Story Events which do not occur in real life but

Events which the audience knows have only in the imagination: Emily in Thomton
happened or might happen in everyday Wilder’s Our Town, after she died, appears
life: “Blanche Dubois in Tennessee alive and returns to visit the earth for one
William’s A Streetcar Named Desire goes day.
to New Orleans to visit her sister and
brother-in-law.
Structure Arbitrary use of time and place: in
Action confined to real place, time passes Strindberg’s The Dream Play, walls
normally as it does in everyday life: in the dissolve, characters are transformed, as
Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman, the activity in a dream.
occurs over several days in Regina’s house
as she takes control of her family’s estate.
Characters Unreal figures like the ghost father in
Recognizable human beings, such as the Hamlet. The Three Witches in Macbeth,
family— mother, father, and two sons— or the people who turn into animals in
in O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. lonesco’s Rhinoceros.
Acting
Performers portray people as they behave Performers act as ghosts and animals,
in daily life. Nora Helmer in Ibsen’s A Doll’s they also engage in singing, dancing,
House leaves her husband and an acrobatics, and gymnastics in musical
unsatisfactory marriage in a believable, comedy or a performance art piece.
forthright manner.
Language
Ordinary dialogue or conversation: the Poetry such as Romeo speaks to Juliet
Gentleman Caller in William’s The Glass in Shakespeare’s play; or the song
Menageria tells Laura about his future in Tonight sung to Maria in the musical West
language of an optimistic young salesman. Side Story.
Scenery
The rooms of a real house, as in Abstract forms and shapes on a bare
Chehkov’s The Cherry Orchard. stage— for a Greek play, for example,
such as Sohocie’s Elektra.
Lighting
Light on stage appears to come from Shafts of light fall at odd angles, also, an
natural sources— a lamp in a room, or arbitrary use of colors in the light. Ex
sunlight, as in Ibsen’s Ghosts, where the single, blue spotlight on a singer in a
sunrise comes through a window. musical comedy.
Costumes
The bright costumes of a chorus in a
Ordinary street clothes, like those worn
musical comedy, the strange outfit worn
by the characters in August Wilson’s
by Caliban, the half-man, half-beast in
Fences.
Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Make-up
Masks worn by characters in a Greek
The natural look of characters in a
tragedy or in a modern play like van
domestic play such as Hansberry’s A
Itallie’s America Hurrah.
Raisin in the Sun.
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apple or Galileo at the swinging chandelier, audiences must see through things
with a distantiating eye. “The natural must be made to look surprising,” so
goes Brecht. (qtd. In Esslin, p. 136)
Brecht’s thesis on theater congeals the politics of transformation in its passionate

argument that the world is not fixed and unchangeable and that the theater
has the ability to propose strategies of how that world could be reworked and
refunctioned in order to bring forth a more just society. Proceeding from this
theory, Brechtian theater is itself characterized by discontinuity, open-
endedness, contradiction, complex possibility, and the dialectical deferral of
completion. Eagleton describes that the play, “far from forming an organic
unity which carries an audience hypnotically through from beginning to end,
is formally uneven, interrupted, discontinuous, juxtaposing its scenes in ways
which disrupt conventional expectations and force the audience into critical
speculation on the dialectical relations between the episodes.” (Eaglenton,
pp. 65-66)
How is this achieved? Brechtian theater utilizes such ‘extra-theatrical’ media

as film and slide projection which could unexpectedly cut into dramatic flow;
in an adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s Mother, for instance, Brecht would flash
the prices of basic foodstuffs onto the backdrop when something about the
cost of living is mentioned in the dialogue, in the same way that in Galileo,
stage designer Caspar Neher would project maps, documents, and
Renaissance art works to serve as intertexts to the play’s action. (Eagleton,
p. 135) Also, song and dance numbers could abruptly intervene in the course
of the performance and bring into play strange elements which “would refuse
to blend smoothly with one another, cutting across the action rather than
neatly integrating with it.” (Eagleton, p. 66) A chorus could also make a sudden
appearance, not to annotate the play’s progress thus far, but to comment on
action and character.
In terms of lighting, Brecht did not favor the use of optical effects, as it would
paralyze the audience with the narcotic inducements of atmosphere and mood.
“The coming of night was indicated, in his theater as in that of the Elizabethans,
by properties like lamps or the appearance of a moon disk, not by a dimming
of the uniformly bright light in which the stage was bathed. To dispel any
illusion of reality...the sources of light should remain visible to the public.”
(Esslin, p. 143) The same case applies to musicians who are sometimes placed
onstage; performers who talk to the audience, or change costume before their
very eyes, or take off masks to become other characters abruptly thrust onto
some unextended time and space; and narrators— “usually cynics, like
confrères of cabarets”— who “see through social facades and distance
themselves from the event they recount.” (Hollington, p. 76) “Alienation means
historicizing, means representing persons and actions as historical, and
therefore mutable.” (Hollington, p. 76) As opposed to the Wagnerian efforts
to dazzle the audience with Gesamkunstwerk (accretion of numerous art
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forms), Brechtian theater tries as conspicuously as possible to keep audiences

on their toes, soliciting their dissent; fostering, instead of stifling, disturbed
disapproval; rousing affirmation and violent reprisals; and so making their
role as performative and participatory as those who “actually” assembled
the production. The theater, therefore, “ceases to be a breeding ground of
fantasy and comes to resemble a cross between a laboratory, circus, music
hall, sports arena and public discussion hall... The audience must ‘think above
the action,’ refuse to accept it uncritically, but this is not to discard emotional
response: ‘One thinks feelings and one feels thoughtfully,” (Eagleton, pp.
66-67)
Brecht even went another mile when in his last years he replaced epic theater
with a kind of dialectical theater premised on Lehrstucke, a radical practice
that aimed to dissolve the distinction between performers and audience
altogether: “The performance itself— with potential Nazi wreckers at the
doors— became a political act,” (Hollington, p. 77) not only a rehearsal of a
revolution, but a generation of subversion in the realm of artistic production,
of a theater/society bursting at the seams.
Performance
Equally significant in the discussion of theater is performance or acting.

Popular wisdom puts it that theater is a performer’s medium. And there is
compelling truth to that: “Action must primarily mean the movement of actors
on the stage. It is not enlightening to offer a map of Scotland in an edition of
Macbeth: he does not travel from Glamis to Forres, but enters and exits on the
stage. Drama depends on actors with an audience. Performances, even of the
same production with the same cast, will vary, sometimes radically, from
night to night, and the variation will primarily depend on the different
audiences, and the actor’s response to them.” (Bradbury, p. 68)
But as per conversation acting is almost automatically regarded as necessarily

“realistic.” As in conventional theater’s predisposition toward realism, realist
acting also anchors its theory on verisimilitude and naturalistic effects.
Extremely influential in nurturing this aesthetic was Konstantin Stanislavsky,
a Russian theater producer-actor and founder of Moscow Art Theater who
theorized that performers, quarrying from their own psychological reserves,
are able to achieve almost “natural” emotional identification with the character
portrayed, saturating themselves through and through in the “role they are
portraying.”And so, the performers can offer the illusion that they have
become the characters— looking and being them.
Again, Brecht tried to undercut this tendency by advocating an acting style

that negated role-identification and disallowed performers to entrance the
audience with realistic portrayal. Brechtian acting is acting in quotation marks,
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with the performers always conscious that they are just acting out, not living
out, something which was constructed by the playwright and orchestrated
by the director. “They ‘show’ the characters they act (and show themselves
showing them), rather than ‘become’ them; the Brechtian actor ‘quotes’ his
part, communicates a critical reflection on it in the act of performance.”
(Eagleton, p. 65)
Brecht gives as an example a street scene, the aftermath of an accident in

which an eyewitness attempts to inform onlookers on what had happened.
And so, he indicates how the old man, walking very slowly, had been run
over by a vehicle. Here, he quotes the old man’s gait and the rest of the latter’s
movements salient to the scenario being related. Brechtian theater stresses
that the performer never “forgets, nor does he or she allow anyone to forget,
that he or she is not the one whose action is being demonstrated, but the one
who demonstrates it.” (Esslin, p. 137) This kind of acting implies a
“deliberateness of action, a consciousness of the presence of the audience,
which are diametrically opposed to Stanislavsky’s ideal of an actor who is
completely alone, completely wrapped up in himself and unaware of being
observed.” (Esslin, p. 139)
Furthermore, unlike in realist acting, whose propagation has been efficaciously

secured by Staniskavskian derivations in Lee Strasberg (Method) and Eric
Morris (Being), Brechtian performers resist the introspective sensibility or the
internalized inferiority that could lead them to nourish an emotional bond
with the characters they are to merge with. Brechtian acting, instead, supplants
essential character and human nature with human relations, thus emphasizing
Gestus, or “the clear and stylized expression of the social behavior of human
beings toward each other.” (Esslin, p. 141) Brecht pulls away from realism’s
impulse to plumb the depths of inner life and instead attempts to render the
manner in which characters behave toward one another in terms of class,
gender, racial, political positionalities: “the way in which the downtrodden
tutor in Der Hofmeister bows to his master, the way in which the kindly
prostitute of Sezuan moves differently when she turns to her ruthless cousin.”
(Esslin, p. 141)
Watching a play beyond the theater
Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dellimore underscore the idea that “a play by
Shakespeare is related to the contexts of its production— to the economic
system of Elizabethan and Jacobean England and to the particular institutions
of cultural production (the court, patronage, theater, education, the church).
Moreover, the relevant history is not just four hundred years ago, for culture
is made continuously and Shakespeare’s text is reconstructed, reappraised,
reassigned all the time through diverse institutions in specific contexts.”
(Dollimore and Sinfield, 1990, p. 239)
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As a student of theater, you must be methodical in your inquiries into how

theatrical productions are staged— the material consequences and
considerations of scenic design, lighting, music, performance, stage
management, costume, make-up, properties, direction— the narrative
strategies of theater (tragedy, comedy, melodrama, musical, and so on), how
capital finances dramatic performances, how audiences are made to consume
plays, and how the social situatedness of practitioners factors into the process
of producing theater. A play by Samuel Beckett changes dramatically as it is
re-staged in different locations. Bechett’s Waiting for Godot performed, let us
say, by a professional repertory, which depends on corporate subsidy, in a
commercial playhouse is bound to be “different” from the one performed by
an experimental university-based drama guild, or by a group of factory
workers, or by a troupe of travelling thespians.
Finally, German Marxist critic Walter Benjamin, prescribing the kind of theater
for our times, theorizes that commitment is more than just a matter of
presenting politically correct messages in art; it must nurture the efforts of
artists to reconstruct modes of artistic production and the relations of
production these modes presuppose, and thus revolutionize society— mode
of production, relations of production, and so on— as a whole. Your study of
the theater must, therefore, implicate theatrical activities which have been
denied artistic status and canonical privilege. These include street plays (as
opposed to Broadway, for instance); protest demonstrations; productions from
folk communities, labor unions, and other groups in diasporan enclaves; oral
traditions of the troubadour/epic mold; and popular theater types which
represent certain subversive desires from the masses. As for conventional forms
of staging, instead of ruminating on the human condition and faceting from
it the angst of a fragmented existence, they must explain the sordidness of the
complexly constituted and highly mediated “status quo” and prefigure
possibilities beyond it.
Activity 6-1
Watch a live performance of theater, music, or ritual in your place
and explain the performance in terms of how it.
1. Represents a particular aspect of real life.

2. Affects you as audience who interprets reality and generates
meaning in light of how it is represented.
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It is clear that there are no definite answers to these questions. But you
have to be very attentive to the exchange of meanings.
1. between you and reality

2. between art and reality
3. between you and art and reality
Summary
This module tries to impart to you the lesson that art is a meaning generating
process. Art is capable of conveying meaning through:
1. the expression of the artist;

2. the resources of the art form; and
3. the capacity of audiences to decode significance
The three activities come to form the complex and rich process of the arts.
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References
Barrault, Jean Louis. (1981). “How drama is born within us,” The making of
theatre: From drama to performance, ed. Robert W. Corrigan. Illinois: Scott,
Foresman and Company.
Bowra, C.M. And the Editors of TIME-LIFE Books. (1966). Classical Greece
Nederland: TIME-LIFE International.
Bradbury, Malcolm. “”Drama, A dictionary of modern critical terms.
Brook, Peter. “The Holy Theater,” The making of theater: From drama to
performance.
Bryant-Bertail, Sarah. (1990). “Cultural Materialism.” Readings on contemporary
criticism. Manila: De La Salle University Press.
Esslin, Martin. (1974). Brecht: The man and the work. U.S.A. W.W. Norton &
Co., Inc.).
Eagleton, Terry (1976). Marxism and literary criticism. Los Angeles: University
of California Press.
Gorelic, Mordecal. (1967). “Theater,” Collier’s Encyclopedia, ed. Louis Shores.
Great Britain: Crowell Collier and MacMillan, Inc.
Hollington, Michael. (1987). “Epic theater,” A dictionary of modern critical terms,
ed. Roger Fowler. London: Routledge.
Honzi, Jindrich. (1976). “Dynamics of the sign in the theater,” Semiotics of art,
eds. Ladislav Matejka and Irwin Titunik. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Meister, Charles W. (1985). Drama: A history, London: McFarland & Company,
Inc.
Pavis, Patrice. (1990). “Approaches to theater studies,” ASSAPH studies in
the theater 6.
Wilson, Edwin. (1988). The theater experience (New York: McGraw-Hill).
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Unit IV
The Production of Art
Module 7
Mode of Production
A rt is produced individually as well as

collectively. The study of societies shows that
objects are produced to serve a purpose in daily
Objectives
existence. The production of functional objects used After studying this module, you
in daily life serves the group of people to which the should be able to:
maker belongs. Often, the objects are produced as
a communal endeavor done by more than one 1. Explain how the social milieu
person. Such objects are eventually decorated with creates an environment of
symbols that express a particular understanding art;
and relationship with life or a worldview. Symbols 2. Identify the social forces that
seen in tattoo, pottery or fabric may be derived from lead to the production of art;
natural phenomena such as the sky, stars, sun, 3. Analyze the relationship
moon, lightning, animal forms and the like. between art and society
through modes of
The forms and functions of these functional objects production; and
have an organic relationship to the worldview of a 4. Describe the relationship of
particular group of people. They developed as a artist, audience, and society
result of need and function creating traditional in the context of production.
community forms, so that particular design motifs,
colors and materials have become identifiable
according to cultural groups.
Objects such as pottery, baskets, textiles and weaponry are but a few examples
of these art forms, produced by specific groups of people who have developed
them to become what are known as traditional art or ethnographic art—
traditional because it has been handed down through generations and
ethnographic because it delineates the personality of the group that created
it.
In contemporary societies, an attitude of competitiveness pervades the

individual’s mode of production. The creative process is taken over by a shift
from the natural unfolding of a creative act to an attitude of materialism as a
result of pressures of present day life. As craftspeople produce works for
economic reasons, traditional and/or ethnographic art have become objects
of commerce.
In this module, we shall study the nature of the mode of production of art in
the context of social life.
Milieu and the Environment of Art

The artwork appreciated by people varies and is influenced by the social milieu
to which they belong. Thus, artists who have access to natural, organic
materials will probably produce works of art using such materials as bamboo,
plant fiber, vines and so on, while urban-based artists are likely to pick up
objects that surround them and recycle these, sometimes resulting in the
production of art from junk. Someone living in the mountanous regions of
the Cordilleras may opt to quietly play a bamboo flute in meditation reflecting
the quietness of the natural surroundings, while a city-based musician would
prefer to amplify sounds in order to be heard above the din of urban life. On
the other hand, someone from a farming community may want to have access
to citified forms of life and art while city folk may appreciate more natural
and organic forms.
Economic status also has an effect on the mode of production. Someone who
can’t buy materials will use what is available while those who can afford it
use materials that are purchased in art stores. The same is true for unschooled
and schooled artists. The latter will have a more difficult time producing
original and creative work because of the amount of processing and distillation
of learned knowledge before being able to arrive at their own identity in
contrast to the unschooled artist whose development unfolds naturally. The
evolution and improvement of the art of both artists actually depend on the
evolution of their thinking-feeling capacities as they continue to create in their
respective milieu.
Even their aesthetic taste is subject to the influence of their milieu. Thus, their
use of the elements of art such as line, color, texture and form is guided by a
culture specified to the community in which they live. Only if they are strongly
individuated can they rise above the pressure and influence of their respective
environments.
Many of the traditional arts had certain norms in production. In Mindanao,

there are gender categories in art. There is the okir-a-dato (male art) and okir-
a-bai (female art). Wood carving, boat making, basketry, pottery and brassware
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Unit IV Module 7 71
are considered male art while fabric weaving, mat weaving and embroidery
are considered female art.
Traditional arts were done either individually or in community. But while it

is true that a single person may be weaving a piece of fabric, the next person
who weaves another carries the same design motif which belongs to the same
cultural community. Thus, the woven fabric will carry the same aesthetic as
the one woven by another person, giving the traditional art its communal
dimension. Also contributing to its communalism was the fact that art was
produced in a shared space where everyone worked together. There were
also works of art done collectively as in wood carving or building shelters.
Collective art making has long been part of the working process of the Filipinos.
This is still in evidence during fiestas. During the Pahiyas in Quezon, the
community wakes up early to set up the decoration of kiping and produce in
front of their homes, all working in creative frenzy and joyful community
spirit.
Productive forces of society and the arts
Culture
The life-contexts of people provide the impetus for producing art. In early
times, hunters drew animals on the cave walls believing that this would lead
to a bountiful hunt. As people became domesticated, they produced pots,
jars and vessels using the clay that surrounded them; they wove baskets needed
for specific functions necessary to their lives and wove plant fiber to use for
clothing. Thus, their life-activity drove them to produce objects they needed
for different purposes. Cultural practices led them to create objects essential
to their life as a social group. Ritual objects and paraphernalia, chants and
dances were born out of these needs. The key to existence was a worldview
that came out of that existence, naturally unfolding as life went on.
The basis for cultural life is the living together of peoples; people who live
communally, share certain truths and beliefs based on their own observations
of life’s phenomena. Cultural life is imbued with meaning derived from the
thinking, feeling and doing of people as they lived their daily life. Thus, culture
is contained in the spiritual symbols and representations of meaning found in
the material objects that people use.
The cultural base is now threatened by globalization, which is economically

motivated. Because of globalization policies and regulations, cultural forms
are in danger of being appropriated. For example, it is easy to access
information through computer technology and homogenization of lifestyles
has occurred.
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Contemporary artists now use new media and electronic technology. Digital
art or images generated by a computer has taken the place of images done in
freehand with paints and brush. Music can be composed using electronic
media. Video images can now be found in art museums installed as part of a
multimedia presentation. Media in art has become revolutionized by
technology that has dangerously advanced beyond expectations.
Thus it is necessary for people in any given society to strengthen their identity
as a cultural group so that the integrity of the people’s culture is protected
from the onslaught of forces from other domains.
Contemporary artists are able to express their perceptions and insights about
life. While the creative process helps them contemplate life, their work in turn
helps others see the meaning of life expressed in the forms they create,
influenced by the conditions around them and the new media available to
them.
Politics
Politics is a force that may influence but should not dominate the production
of art. The production of weaponry from bamboo or metal came out of the
need to protect people against enemies, whether other people or animals,
thereby, answering a need. It was a question of one’s power over the other, a
matter of life and death.
When the Spanish colonizers reached the islands, they saw the necessity to
build churches, resulting in church architecture that contained within its walls
the political will of a colonial power. Churches served a pedagogical function
as Spain sought to evangelize the people into their way of life. Built with
thick stones, these churches also served as fortresses that guarded them against
enemies. Under a system of forced labor service, the natives produced edifies
using heretofore unknown building techniques imposed on them by the ruling
power.
Here we are witness to how politics played a role in the production of material
art and culture. Whenever art is created for the purpose of controlling others,
it operates under the dynamics of politics.
Throughout history, politically motivated art has been produced. Politically

motivated art of the 19th century and even earlier may be considered as a
form of oppression. The construction of churches that would be used to
evangelize/indoctrinate the natives into Christianity were done under
oppressive circumstances. Labor was forced and the natives had to slave over
the building of churches. In more recent times, political power was expressed
through gargantuan edifices that projected the strength of a dictatorial
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Unit IV Module 7 73
government. Just like the churches of the Spanish period, these more modern
but nonetheless formidable structures, were politically motivated. Such
buildings were usually accompanied by equally formidable sculpture pieces.
In the middle to late 20th century, politically motivated art would be seen
propaganda art by one side and a form of liberation for those who produced
it. Examples of this would be songs, literature and paintings that focused on
the political situation. This was very much in evidence in the mid-70s to the
late 80s in the Philippines. As a response to the political forms by ruling
governments, many politicized artists created works that challenged the
hegemony.
Political intervention in the cultural life of any society is detrimental to that

life. For instance, up to the present, the major cultural institutions in the
Philippines have been in the control of the ruling government as its heads
have been appointed politically. One such institution was in fact initiated
into being by concerned artists of the nation. But having become a part of the
government system, it has now become an organization run by bureaucrats
and has become part of a corrupt political system.
These are concerns which need to be addressed systematically if culture is to

be nurtured independently so that it may develop further.
In the 1970s up to the late 1980s, the perceived injustice and violation of
human rights during the Marcos regime led to the production of political art
which spoke to the masses as part of the campaign for change in the social
order. From north to south, the body of works— visual, music, dance, theater
and cinema— produced during this period in Philippine social history clearly
demonstrates the manner in which artists respond to political conditions and
attests to the role of the artist as a social being. Thus, the concept of art as
pure art or art for art’s sake is rendered irrelevant as artists involved with
social ills increase in number. Indeed, the artist as a social being has a role to
play in society, making art a living form of expression dynamically moving in
time and space.
Economics
Because of economic need, art has been produced by some people to generate
income. Mabini Street in Ermita is known to have had a row of art galleries
selling paintings to tourists immediately after the second world war. The Art
Walk at the SM Megamall is replete with galleries trying to sell art to the
shopping public. The increasing number of commercial galleries demonstrate
the economic viability of the arts at this time. However, it has also contributed
to the confusion of the artist’s motivation for creation. There have been painters,
for instance, who produce works that are made-to-order, according to the
taste and needs of buyers.
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Art competitions sponsored by multinational corporations continue to entice

young contemporary artists into regularly entering such competitions in order
to gain recognition and financial remuneration.
Economic factors affect art production. Film as art has not been able to progress
much artistically as film directors continue to compromise these artistic
integrity for the sake of a box office hit. Cinema is more an industry than art
in this country in spite of the efforts of a new breed of independent filmmakers.
Even the premier cultural institutions, the Cultural Center of the Philippines,
compromised the performing arts by allowing an economic venture such as
Miss Saigon to occupy its main venue for many months, displacing Philippine-
based performing groups. While it is true that the economic aspect of
production is an important factor to contend with, it must not overturn the
more important values contained in art ventures that need not be
compromised.
Activity 7-1
Observe the various forces related to the production of art. Find
concrete examples of how these forces operate in your community.
Record your observations in your ACTIVITY NOTEBOOK.

In this activity, you are being asked to analyze the relationship of art
to the community in which you live. Who are producing the works of
art? Why and how do they produce these? It is like taking an inventory
of the art being produced in the community.
A listing of these arts and who, how, they are produced could be the
start of your activity, ending with a short essay on the relationship of
the artist and the society.
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Unit IV Module 7 75
Dynamics of Production
In theater, a play production cannot be considered complete without an
audience. The dynamic relationship among artist, art and audience completes
the creative process. Those who create jars and vessels feel fulfilled when the
vessels are used as intended. Thus, the artist is able to complete a cycle of
production when someone appreciates or uses the art produced.
Our cultural experience during Holy Week shows a dynamic process where
the art forms become an integral part of the social life as a cultural process
rather than as isolated objects. Similarly, the experience of large political
paintings used in street rallies during the highly politicized period of the 1980s
see production as part of the social process and not separate from the totality
of human experience within a social context. In contrast, art isolated and
valued for itself is given a context that leads us to value it differently.
SAQ 7-1
In the blank before each statement, write whether the statement is
true or false. Explain your answer.
________ 1. Art is art even if it does not have an audience.

________ 2. There is a difference between art created for its own
sake and functional art.
________ 3. Economics is an important factor to consider in the
production of art.
Summary
Cultural, political, as well as economic factors affect the production of art.
The forms, process and content will vary according to who, where, how and
why art is created. A major value of works of art is its function as historical
document, a form loaded with meaning as expressed by individual human
beings within the content of their particular time and space.
UP Open University
Module 8
Mode of Distribution
M ode of distribution engages the issue of how

art is brought to the attention of others or how
it is disseminated or circulated so that others will
Objectives
become aware that it exists at all. After studying this module, you
should be able to:
In ancient times, art was integral to life and the
distribution of works of art was a matter of course 1. Discuss how art reaches its
because art was part of actual life. People wore audience through venues
decorative ornaments or colorful clothes and these and institutions (such as
were seen and admired by people around them. schools, museums, galleries
Ritual objects such as jars and baskets or containers and other institutions) of
were also accepted routinely as part of life and were dissemination and
present all the time. Since art was not considered circulation; and
apart from life, it was not perceived as a 2. Explain how activities such
commodity. as exhibitions, competitions,
museum acquisitions help
Later, art objects became detached from daily life circulate art.
and began to be produced for their own sake; these
were greatly admired by others who sought to
acquire them. As demand for creative objects increased, such objects were
produced in excess of what was needed, and sold to generate income, they
then became consumer products. The people who make them now think of
how works of art may be “distributed” as market commodities. In this manner,
art operates within the economic domain of production for distribution.
Art has become institutionalized, and it has entered realms other than the
cultural in the threefold social order. Aside from the symbolic meaning it
carries as a cultural form, it becomes a part of the political realm when it
serves political ends and of the economic realm when it becomes a source of
livelihood for the artist. All these contribute to art’s complex state.
Cultural Institutions
When art was an integral part of life, its creator, user, or wearer appreciated
it for its function in life or even just as an expression of it. A big number of
people appreciated it as it was a common group art. Art gradually became a
separate entity and has now become an isolated object appreciated by an
audience outside of the creator’s community. This created the need for a venue
where it can be seen. Thus we have art exhibitions usually placed in a hall, in
a community center, in school, in an office or other places where people can
view them. However, most of this activity has been in urban centers where
art is procured as collectors’ items or as investments. In many rural
communities, most of the art experience is still part of the communal life usually
expressed during town fiestas and celebrations, its aesthetic still folk- and
tradition-based.
Cultural institutions usually take charge of circulating and disseminating

information about culture and the arts. Such institutions also make art
accessible through exhibitions and educational programs.
Schools, museums and galleries

Some schools offer art as a degree program. This gives them reason to act as
disseminating centers. Degree programs in art include performances and art
productions that are open to the public for viewing. Many universities and
colleges have performing or exhibition spaces for showcasing these art
productions such as recitals, concerts, theater productions and art exhibitions.
Aside from their in-house productions, these venues are also open to outside
groups that may need a venue for their own productions. The Far Eastern
University theater space used to be the busiest venue for the performing arts
in Manila in the 1950s and 60s. The University of the Philippines campuses
have several venues that have hosted performing groups from within and
outside the university. St. Scholastica’s College have recently refurbished their
concert hall into an excellent theater space. Almost all universities and colleges
have gymnasium that doubles as an auditorium for performances and
exhibitions.
In the Philippines there has been an increasing number of museums and art
galleries nationwide. With the increase in number of museums, there have
been more occasions for art that comprise the cultural history of various groups
of people to become accessible for viewing.
In Metro Manila alone, there are a number of museums such as the National
Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, GSIS Museum, Lopez Museum,
Ayala Museum, Museo Pambata and the U.P. Vargas Museum.
UP Open University
Unit IV Module 8 79
Communities in various parts of the country have opened local museums

that have active exhibition and education programs, such as the Hiyas ng
Bulacan in Malolos, Museo ng Makati, Marikina Shoe Museum, Museo Iloilo in
Iloilo City and the Casa Gorordo in Cebu, among others. There are also a
number of university-based museums such as the UST Museum and the
Ateneo Art Gallery.
Contemporary works are shown in smaller venues called galleries where the
art shown is not permanently installed. The increase in the number of artists
has also increased the demand for venues such as galleries. Art galleries may
also be found all over. There are school-based galleries such as the Ateneo Art
Gallery, U.P. Vargas Museum Changing Exhibitions Galleries, U.P. College
of Fine Arts Gallery and others which are non-selling galleries exhibiting
contemporary works of art. Other galleries of a more commercial mode are
found in various parts of Metro Manila such as the Arts and Associates, Hiraya
Gallery, Boston Gallery, Green Papaya, Finale, Galeria Duemila and so on.
The SM Mega Mall Level 4 has an Art Walk where people can view exhibitions
in a series of galleries mostly owned by enterprising artists that not only make
art accessible to the general public but also herald the entry of art into the
world of commerce. Indeed, the number of people in the malls could help
build an audience, however, because the art works are immersed in a
commercial center they are perceived by some as commodities rather than
artistic endeavors. There are also initiatives by young artists such as Big Sky
Mind in Quezon City, Goodtimes Cafe in Dipolog, Kamarikutan Gallery in
Palawan or Surrounded by Water in Angono and Quezon City. While some
of them double up as a performing space cum coffee shop, most are creative
adventures in setting up exhibitions of young contemporary art.
Government cultural agencies

One of the two leading government agencies of art and culture is the Cultural
Center of the Philippines which is mainly a performing arts center. It gradually
became transformed into a coordinating center, implementing art programs
related to cultural development in an effort to democratize distribution of
services, accessible not only to the National Capital Region but to the rest of
the nation. Recently, its latest venture has displaced local groups for many
months, by reserving its main theater for Miss Saigon, an imported economic
venture.
Most of the functions were later absorbed in Republic Act 7356 which created
the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) right after the
change of government and the People Power Revolution in 1986.
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The NCCA has the function of disseminating information about arts and
culture and help in distributing resources to artists nationwide through
projects and activities of its various committees. However, while it basically
stemmed from the imagination and inspiration of concerned artists of the
Philippines for service to the people through the arts, its structure is overrun
by a Board of Commissioners made up of representatives of government
cultural agencies whose thinking is more along bureaucratic and technocratic
lines rather than responsibility to the needs of local artists and cultural groups.
The NCCA has set up a public information and dissemination office precisely
to strengthen the distribution of knowledge and services through the arts.
It has a regular newsletter called AGUNG and a magazine entitled ARAW:

some Committees have flagship publications such as the Committee on Visual
Arts’ PANANAW. It has also had a series of books published on Philippine
art and culture. However, even an institution seemingly as solid as the NCCA
has had difficulty in capturing the attention of the greater public for art and
culture.
Exhibitions/Performances
Exhibitions and performances make it possible for artists to show their work
to the world. It is the venue for showing their creative products. Once, a
cultural administrator who is a creative writer, asked why visual artists always
had exhibitions. It was like asking why the artists painted at all or why writers
publish their works. Exhibitions and performances allow the public to see the
perception of the artists about the world around them through their art work.
Properly promoted, more people will be able to view them and contribute to
the recognition of the Filipino artist. In the late 1980s and early 1990s,
exhibitions and performances motivated by a sense of nationalism brought
about by people power were put up (PIGLAS and similar thematic exhibitions)
showing art’s relation to the political life of a nation.
These art events are announced in loading newspapers and reviewed by

respected art critics. The main information distribution center is usually print
media like newspaper, unfortunately the media has not placed art as its
priority.
When exhibitions and performances are properly documented with a

catalogue, souvenir program or playbill, the document becomes valuable for
those who follow the history and development of art of any culture.
UP Open University
Unit IV Module 8 81
Art competitions
There are a number of art competitions in the Philippines that many artists
join in order to achieve recognition. A strong phenomenon in Philippine art,
this can be traced historically to art competitions as part of carnivals, festivals
and fairs. As far back as the 19th century and earlier, Juan Luna, Felix
Resurreccion Hidalgo, Mariano Madriñan and other early Filipino artists won
competitions here and abroad. The Art Association of the Philippines founded
in 1948 has had annual art competitions as its main activity. It gave a chance
for artists to exhibit their works motivated by the possibility of wining, thereby
gaining recognition and cash through its awards. Receiving an award was
like an imprimatur about one’s being an artist. Since then, there have been a
series of regular major and minor competitions such as the Shell Art
Competition, NOKIA Art Awards and others. Mostly sponsored and
organized by corporations, these competitions often pit art’s essence against
material value; but undoubtedly they provide the artists better economic
opportunities and recognition. These competitions tend to confuse the artists’
reason for being. Seeking recognition and financial remuneration rather than
create authentic art, many artists produce art for competitions rather than
concentrate on doing a body of work.
Museums and archives

Very few museums in the Philippines can afford to acquire works of art.
Therefore, most museum acquisitions are donations by artists. Museums have
educational programs in its functional agenda, contributing greatly to the
aesthetic education of the general public. Its education program help people
to know about art as well as contributing to the dissemination of art knowledge
to a larger audience. Archives are also important institutions that the
Philippines lack. There is no Film Archive or Audio-visual Archive at the
present time. Such institutions can help in the preservation, conservation and
accessibility of intangible and temporal cultural heritage such as exhibitions,
performances and so on.
Artists’ Initiatives and Other Programs

Other programs continue to distribute art consciousness for various reasons.
Regional art and cultural programs, such as those of the ASEAN and other
projects covered by bilateral agreements between nations, help distribute
knowledge of art in a larger sphere but such activity is basically part of the
political agenda of nations.
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Meanwhile, many artists have taken the initiative to combine creative, work
with business sense. Original art forms are reproduced into T0shirts, note
cards, caps, calendars, posters and books sold in museums, bookstores and
art shops as income generating activities, making it clearly an economic
initiative. Although this might help their economic situation, it tends to distract
the artists from their art production other than those needed by their business.
The positive side is that it brings original works to the public. Because most
are mass produced, it becomes affordable. However, it has been transformed
to another form and is not necessarily an art work per se.
Another recent phenomenon is that of young artists taking on initiatives that

combine art with business. This ensures a venue for exhibition combined with
other creative activities to gain an audience and clients.
Local Cultural Activities and Events

More than established private or public institutions, local cultural activities
and events which have continued through time help continue traditions of
culture. Town fiestas and cultural festivals are still the most accessible with
the widest participation of communities of people. Depending on the
coordinated efforts of local government, culture an tourist officers, art patrons
and educators, town fiestas offer art and culture activities initially at the level
of the nuclear families within a town, participated in by neighbors, friends,
tourists and onlookers. Activities range from music bands, processions,
dancing, singing, to art exhibitions and theater. One of the best examples is
the Pahiyas celebration in Lucban, Quezon on May 15. In celebration of the
feast of San Isidro Labrador, families decorate their homes inside-out with
colorful kiping, flat crispy shapes molded from leaves which are then assembled
as chandelier forms or aranghas along with the display of their bountiful harvest
or home product such as bread forms, longanisa, garlic, bananas, vegetables,
and the like. They also decorate the front of their houses with effigies of farmers
in life-sized dioramas, sculpture from vegetables, baskets, and other farm
products. Since the Pahiyas has become a very popular event, many local and
foreign tourists go to Lucban on May 15 and as a continuing activity has
become a living tradition, even if it has also become quite commercial with
the sponsorship of the business sector.
Every place in the country have fiestas and special days to celebrate with
artistic expressions.
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Unit IV Module 8 83
In the 1980s, an art and cultural festival called MAKIISA was held at Fort
Santiago which featured alternative arts and music with a large audience
coming from the youth, student, workers sector and the politicized public.
The program of activities included lectures, conferences, workshops,
exhibitions, performances of song, dance and theater and attracted a wide
audience from among concerned citizens expressing their political views in
the arts.
In Dumaguete City, mural art on buildings have helped disseminate art to

the people. Through the efforts of the United Architects of the Philippines,
Dumaguete Chapter and the VIVAA (Visayas Islands Visual Artists
Association)-Dumaguete, mural art may be found in the Sports Center of the
city and the side walls of the public market. Such public art is one way of
educating the majority about art and helps in bringing it to the consciousness
of the people who are exposed to it.
Activity 8-1
Recall the art and cultural activities programmed in your community
such as town fiestas, whether church-initiated or sponsored by the
local government. Observe the number of people who participate in
the activities and how widespread its reception is. Find out how often
such cultural activities are held and what a a year’s program consists
of.
From your study of the distribution of art in your community, assess

whether it is enough to educate the people about art and culture. Write
a report of your findings and make your suggestions for an aesthetic
education program in your community.

The purpose of the activity is for you to find out how art is distributed,
received and appreciated by your community.
It is best to interview people who have been involved in the

implementation of the activities and events in your community. Find
out what factors are involved in implementing the event, the good
things and negative things that they have encountered. Write out your
thoughts about the experience of promoting art to a community. Be
ready to discuss your suggestions during your fourth study session.
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The Need for Art Education

Art in its vital form stems out of a cultural realm and expresses significant
human experiences. The discussion above show how art is very much a part
of communities and as such art is integral to life. That it reaches an audience
is part of a dynamic process of interaction and dialogue not only of the senses
but of minds as well.
When we speak of a mode of distribution, the concept contained in the phrase

stems out of the economic realm and becomes subject to the logic of economics
and the experience of materialism. Thus, a confusion may arise in its use. In
actuality, whenever people are gathered and art activities are presented,
significant human experiences are conveyed in the form of art and its meaning
received by its viewers or audience. It is only when art is considered as a
commodity and marketing strategies are discussed that distribution becomes
its concern. It might be appropriate to say that we need to concern ourselves
with making other people aware of the expressions of the artists for whatever
understanding of life it will contribute.
While it is necessary to have exhibitions and concerts to reach an audience,

material concerns such as marketing the show could distract the artists in
their development as bearer of meanings because of the practical
considerations which tend to take their time.
The key to proper distribution or dissemination of the arts and cultural activities
lies in art education.
People need to become educated about art and culture so that they themselves
will develop as better human beings with such experiences. It is apparent
that even up to now, the majority have no motivation to experience art, either
as viewer or audience, because of the increasingly formidable price of seeing
a production. The economic situation does not help this status quo. The
indication is a need to bring art back to life as an integral activity in community
life. With the concerted effort to educate not only people in art and culture
but also people in governance and the business sector, it is hopeful that attention
will be given to the arts and cultural development so that venues and more
activities will be offered evenly throughout the nation through sponsored
free shows for the greater public.
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Module 9
Mode of Reception
T here are three factors of concern in the

production of art and we have already studied
two of them. We discussed the mode in which art
Objectives
is produced and the manner in which the works After studying this module, you
are distributed in order that these will reach a wider should be able to:
audience. The third factor is the manner in which
art is received by its audience. How do different 1. Explain how art takes root in
types of people appreciate art? Is art recognized as social practices and is dealt
such or is it too integral to life to be recognized at with by audiences organized
all? around social differences in
terms of class, gender,
ethnicity and so on;
The Social Contexts of Reception 2. Describe the social contexts
of the reception of various
The general public that serves as art’s audience is forms of art in a society;
composed of a variety of people with their own 3. Identify the role of art in
peculiarities. The differences among the people in establishing social relations
this audience are a result of differences in economic not only within a society but
status, gender, ethnicity and/or race, political beyond it; and
orientation and religious beliefs. All these influence 4. Explain the significance of art
their reception of art. in social transformation.
Art and social class

The quality of life in the Philippines varies according to social class. The rural
folk who have moved to the urban centers in search of livelihood have become
the urban poor community that live as squatters in vacant lots, under bridges,
and near garbage mountains. Theirs is a culture of survival.
Consider a poor family looking for their next meal. Such a family’s priority is
survival. Art is probably the least of their concerns. Given the way it is perceived
at this time, art will probably not be a part of this family’s consciousness
unless their basic needs such as food, shelter, clothing, water, light, and so on
are met.
On the other hand, perhaps the children from poor families who are able to
go to school will grow enlightened about their history and cultural patrimony.
The middle class continues to manifest neocolonial attitudes of preference for

foreign and imported cultured instead of developing and nurturing their own.
This attitude is fed by mass media and the most accessible art forms which
comprise popular culture. Newspapers, magazines, romance books, radio soap
operas, television’s imported telenovelas and cinema are the purveyors of
melodrama and sentimentalism that perpetuate a non-critical lifestyle. Unless
they are conscious of what they want, these stereotyped art forms that have
dominated popular life tend to shape and mold the public’s thinking into a
numb and dull kind of consciousness.
The very rich, on the other hand, have access to the arts not only of the
Philippines but also of the world. Aside from the fact that they learned about
art in the universities they went to, they can afford to buy books and computers
that allow them to surf the internet for knowledge. They are also exposed to
the arts when they travel abroad. In the case of the rich, they have a choice as
to which art to accept or reject.
Of course art exists in unconscious forms. For instance, people decorate their
homes regardless of social stratum. The very poor decorate their walls with
pictures of their favorite movie or basketball stars taken from magazines or
posters, both as protection for the wall and as decoration. Those who can
afford to buy posters. Others purchase wall décor made of shaved wood from
Pakil or folk paintings of landscapes. Still others buy decorative paintings
from shopping malls like those sold in Mabini. Those who have artist friends
or relatives have their paintings on their walls. Art collectors, on the other
hand, can afford to acquire precious art for the walls of their homes. Art
collectors vary from the young professionals exposed to the arts in school,
their travels and visits to museums, to those who collect art for aesthetic reasons
or as investment.
The social class of the people dictate the type of art that they can receive and
appreciate. Usually, the manner in which they receive art in their lives depends
very much on their life condition as affected by their economic situation.
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Unit IV Module 9 87
Art and ethnicity

Actually, our cultural history shows art as part of daily life. The integration
of art with life was seen in the way people adorned themselves and wove
their clothes, and the many functional objects they made such as baskets,
sleeping mats, pottery, weapons, and so on.
Each ethnic group has developed its art in a distinct manner. From north to
south of the Philippines, people express their ethnicity in forms and expressions
that are reflective of their natural environment, geography, the rhythm and
pulse of daily activities, religious beliefs and values common to the group.
These art forms express a cultural history that embodies their worldview.
Thus, cosmic motifs are seen on their clothing, weapons, ornaments and tools,
just as objects are formed from materials available from their own
surroundings and expressed in contemporary means. These motifs and
symbols hold special meaning for the people especially because they signify
the meaning of their life as a people. Through time, however, they have become
so integral to life that their reception has become unnoticeable.
On the negative side, as a result of non-transference of knowledge, many

young members of cultural communities no longer know the original meaning
of the symbols found in their material culture. Once, in conversation, an old
woman from the north deplored the fact that the young in their community
negate certain practices such as tattooing. She said that her granddaughter
would not have herself tattoed because she intended to study in Metro Manila
and feared that they would cause her embarrassment.
Even in places where ethnicity is still strong, indigenous art has become a
memory that is often romanticized. Economic sectors have also capitalized
on its exotic nature for business purposes such as tourism. Ethnic art is brought
to the public’s attention in events such as the”Kasaysayan ng Lahi” during
the Marcos era and the recent “Dayaw” festival that brought members of
various Philippine ethnic cultures to converge as a showcase at the Rizal
Park.
However, it is best to remember that living traditions manifested in the lives

of our compatriots in cultural communities need to be received with respect
as they exemplify the beauty and dignity of the culture and its people. In
these times of globalization, the specificity of various cultures in the country
is a strength that contributes greatly to the nature and identity of our people.
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Art and gender

In these post-modern times, the question of gender is an issue not only for
women but also for the gay and lesbian movement.
One of the issues is whether there is a need to distinguish art by gender.

While men see no point in doing this, contemporary women exposed to the
question of gender have argued that women need to assert their contribution
to the arts because this has not been properly acknowledged or documented
even in world art history. Generally the documented artists are men and the
women are either there as an afterthought or forgotten altogether.
The question of gender as a women’s concern became prominent with the

increasing number of academic institutions awakening to it. This came as
problems and criminal cases against women became more and more exposed.
Workshops and seminars and institutions establishing women centers such
as the NURSIA of St. Scholastica’s College and the Center for Women Studies
at the University of the Philippines, have promoted studies concerning
women. The National Commission for the Role of Women in the Philippines
had a series of conferences when Corazon Aquino became president. Women
belonging to different sectors and professions were conveyed to meet, discuss
and make plans for a better Philippines. Women in media and the arts also
met, and thereafter five contemporary women artists organized a women art
organization, the KASIBULAN, an acronym for Kababaihan sa Sining at Bagong
Sibul na Kamalayan. In March, Women’s Month, many art exhibitions by women
artists are usually held then.
Gender in traditional Philippine art is not a serious issue because various

genders have peacefully coexisted with each other, accepting gender
assignments as a seemingly natural phenomenon. In Mindanao, for example,
there is art for women and art for men. The Muslims have specific terms for
women’s art (okir-a-bai) and men’s art (okir-a-dato). The weaving of fabric
and sleeping mats (banig) is considered women’s art while wood carving,
boat making and basket weaving are men’s art. The same is true in other
ethnic communities in the country. Art making that requires a heavier work
load is usually a man’s work.
In contemporary times, this distinction has diminished somewhat. For

example, weaving, traditionally a woman’s art, is now done by men, women
and children in farm communities as a response to the economic situation. In
Negros Occidental, there are traditional weavers of the patadyong or mosquito
nets.
UP Open University
Unit IV Module 9 89
In the past, only the middle and upper classes had a chance to learn about
art. Women who studied art did so as part of their preparation for marriage.
Those who went into serious art were more of an exception than a rule. Even
now, women need to take care of their children before they can seriously
attend to art as their profession. Women artists are able to assert their identities
as artists only when their children have grown and can take care of themselves.
Meanwhile, in Philippine theater and cinema we see the active participation

of gay men and women. Male homosexuals are also active in the world of
fashion design. As a result of male homosexuals coming out of their “closets,”
gender has also become the subject in many works of art. The Philippine
Educational Theater Association has gender in its program. In 1975, PETA
produced “Hanggang dito na lamang at Maraming Salamat” a play about
male homosexuals, the first ever produced about the subject. Later it would
include plays that centered on issues that had to do with attitudes about
gender or relationships between genders, such as “June Bride,” “Aray Ko,”
“Damas de Noche,” “Kung Paano ko Pinatay si Diana Ross,” “Usapang
Babae” and so on. It has also formed a sub-unit of women theater artists
concerned with women and gender issues.
In recent years, lesbians have also come out of the closet. With the gay and
lesbian congresses, both the gays and lesbians of Philippine society have become
more liberated than their counterparts in other countries within the region.
There are more group exhibitions by lesbians.
Exhibitions and conferences on women’s art have also become part of the
over-all art scene. In all these, the practitioners have been very active and
energetic in their creative efforts.
Art, race and culture

Race is broader than ethnicity, which focuses on the differences created by a
cultural experience within a particular group of people. But like ethnicity,
race has an impact on art.
The Philippines is a multicultural society as a result of migration and

transmigration throughout its history. Speaking racially, the Chinese, Indian,
Arab, Spanish, American and Malay races make up the Filipino people. They
constitute the collective unconscious of the people. And they are reflected in
the artistic traditions of Filipinos.
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Activity 9-1
Can you identify the Chinese, Spanish, Arabic and American influences
in Philippine art forms? Write your answers in your ACTIVITY
NOTEBOOK.
Art and Social Transformation

Art is an effective catalyst for social change. It contributes to social
transformation.
For proof of this statement, we only have to recall the use of protest art during
the time of the dictator. Murals, effigies, sculpture, music, dance and drama
expressed sentiments that were heard and received by many specially since
these were shown in the streets rather than in theaters.
Now, these works of art have become documents of the transformation that
society underwent. Art expresses a consciousness of a transformed nature
where the art form itself may have undergone changes of form and expression.
The creation of a work of art is itself a process of transformation from abstract

concept to a concrete form. In it is contained a concept formed by the artist
on the basis of his/her perception of the world. It is this that is conveyed to
the viewer of the work of art, and which gives art the capacity to transform
that viewer. In theater, for instance, there are forms or styles that will provoke
the audience to think about issues and concerns of society. Here is the
transformative power of art as significant human experiences are shown
detached from real life but encapsuled in a form that allows the viewer to
think collectively. For both the creator and the perceptor, viewer or audience,
art has the power to transform. It has the capacity to transform society.
UP Open University
Unit IV Module 9 91
Activity 9-2
1. Visit a museum or art gallery and select some paintings to study.
Or watch a play or a movie.
2. Reflect on how you receive these works of art. What is it that makes
you like and/or dislike them? Is liking the same as appreciating?
Can you appreciate art that you don’t like?
3. Interview others about how they receive art (it will help to be
specific about the art form or even the work of art itself). Compare
and contrast the various ways you received the experience of art.
Summary
The experience of art becomes a complete process only when it is received by
an audience, viewer or listener. This reception allows the artist to connect
with the outside world beyond their own workplace. Corollarily, the one that
receives the art is given a chance to be part of the creative process. Thus, we
experience a continuity of process that involves the inner and outer realities
of both the creator and the viewer.
An individual’s reception of art is influenced by one’s gender, race, ethnicity

and socio-economic status. On the other hand, art has the capacity to transform
individual consciousness as well as the public consciousness. Under certain
conditions of production, distribution, and reception, art has the power to
transform society.
UP Open University

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Humanities II

Art, Man and Society

University of the Philippines

Copyright © 2002 by Brenda V. Fajardo and Patrick D. Flores

Published in the Philippines by the UP Open University

First printing, 2002

Printed in the Philippines

Unit I Introduction to Art, 1

Module 1 Defining Art, 3

Module 2 Art Forms, 15

Unit II The Form of Art, 23

Module 3 Medium and Technique, 25

Module 4 Aesthetic Experience and Expression, 33

Unit III The Language of Art, 39

Module 5 Art as Language, 41

Unit IV The Production of Art, 67

Module 7 Mode of Production, 69

Module 8 Mode of Distribution, 77

Module 9 Mode of Reception, 85

T o define art is a difficult task. It requires painstaking investigation into

Context here refers to the complex of conditions

Art as an instance of human practice assumes specific value. How certain

This discussion inevitably brings us to the reasons we must study art as a

2. That these contexts establish conventions, rules, norms, hierarchies,

Why Study Art

1. Arts education encourages non-algorithmic reasoning, i.e., a path of

2. Arts education trains students in complex thinking, i.e., thinking in which

4. Arts education asks students to use multiple criteria in creating a work of

5. Arts education involves thinking that is laced with uncertainty. Not

6. Arts education requires self-regulation of the thinking process itself, as

7. Arts education involves learning how to impose meanings and find

8. Arts education also involves nuanced judgment and interpretation, as

1. An education in the arts encourages high achievement.

2. Study of the arts encourages a suppleness of mind, a toleration for

4. An education in the arts teaches students how to work cooperatively.

5. An education in the arts builds an understanding of diversity and the

6. An education in the arts insists on the value of content, which helps

7. An education in the arts contributes to technological competence.

On what grounds do we base our definition of art?

Consensus of the art world

Comment on Activity 1-1

Comment on Activity 1-1 continued

Focus: Music as art

Musical Experience Context Value

singing in a church community spiritual

singing in a karaoke bar peer relations and entertainment

Comments on Activity 1-2

Activity 1-3 continued

An interesting area to explore is western modern music. Georgina Born

1. The attempt to compose a piece of music out of, or including

2. The attempt at a nationalist music (as in Ives, Bartok, Kodaly,

3. The attempt to find a new set of pure, autonomous and abstract

4. The attempt to construct analogies, alliances or associations between

5. The appeal to science as a basis for musical systems by analogy

Activity 1-3 continued

6. The attempt to distill a musical system out of the material nature

7. The production of scientific analyses, using high technology,

Comments on Activity 1-3

In our understanding of music as art, we have to probe deeper the

Artistic Activity Art Work Value