Mideo Cruz, in defending his exhibit “Poleteismo,” explains that “most of the outcry has been about the phallic object placed on the works. Phalluses have been objects of devotion in many cultures; they use them as amulets, symbolic statues, etc. They might be a symbol of power and patriarchy.”
The above statement is ignorant, insensitive and nonsensical. The outcry of the people is not against the symbolisms, but rather against how those symbolisms have offended Christian belief and morality. Cruz is wrong to think that his work is a portrayal of “power and patriarchy”; rather, it grossly manifests his failure to understand the Filipino sense of religiosity. If you put a phallic object in the face of Christ, it is not Christ that you offend. Rather, Cruz offends every Filipino who believes that Christ stood for love, humility and peace; that Christ is one among the poor, that Christ is “the way, the truth and the life.”
The argument against Cruz is simple. We need not consult the experts on art because his work is not about art. The argument comes from the life of Richie Fernando, a Jesuit missionary and hero who died in Cambodia. Every single Filipino youth should remember these words from the young Jesuit: “I wish, when I die, people remember not how great, powerful, or talented I was, but that I served and spoke for the truth, I gave witness to what is right, I was sincere in all my works and actions, in other words, I loved and I followed Christ.”
If Cruz is bright enough, and I think he is, he must understand that the issue is no longer aesthetics.
I also doubt that his work is an expression of human freedom. Rather, I think that he suffers from the same element he is supposed to subvert: power. He just wants our attention, and his big ego has got it from us. As such, Cruz has won because he has made many bright Filipinos, including the country’s most influential school, columnists and artists to argue for and against him. Most of his defenders say that his work is “freedom of expression”; but I’d like to kindly ask, is this freedom moral? Does it not destroy a young child who thinks Christ is his model?
The word “aesthetics” originally means “perception”; and according to Kant, it is “disinterested, purposive but without a purpose”; Schopenhauer argues that art is “will-less, like a state of Nirvana”; Lukács, the Hungarian critical theorist, asserts that art must reveal “objective truth.” Cruz fails in all these criteria. But there is one description that I assume he should allow me to say—inasmuch as he claims that he must be allowed to express his belief in the way he did it in the “Kulo” exhibit: his art is “sick.”
—RYAN MABOLOC,
ryanmaboloc75@yahoo.com