A day at the museum(s)

If a picture paints a thousand words, among the words must be: “Don’t bring a camera to a museum!” Which was why on a recent field trip to the National Gallery of Art and to Museo Pambata, my camera stayed in the van even while my classmates voraciously took photographs while roaming the halls.

I deemed I could not enjoy taking in the celebrities I knew only in Makabayan textbooks if the camera was in the way. It was my first visit, and I took my time in reveling at every objet d’art, every magnum opus—and touching it when no one was looking. The time I would have spent taking photographs I spent talking to the ubiquitous docents, whose actual purpose was not to tell me about the “Spoliarium” but to apprehend me if I tried to take it home.

The dead black-and-white photocopy of the textbook “Spoliarium” I had back in the day used to be a horror to me. As a third grader, I thought this 19th-century Juan Luna opus was about some gruesome cannibalistic activity—that the man being dragged across the bloody floor was about to be chopped into bits, to be sold to what appeared to be monsters in the background.

It was only 11 years later that I learned that the Spoliarium was actually a dungeon witness to the fate of fallen warriors in Roman gladiatorial prizefights, and that the actual allegory is that, as former National Museum senior consultant John Silva puts it, “Luna sees the lifeless gladiators as Filipinos and the Romans as Spaniards, which inspired [our heroes to wage a revolution and make our nation].”

Silva, who travels the country to teach teachers aesthetics and dreams that one day at least one of them will produce “the best artsy-fartsy kid in the world,” presents scientific evidence on the benefits of arts education. Art forms like music, he says, “increases math proficiency, theater enhances memorizing skills, and dance heightens agility and grace among students.” For him, works of art make us good citizens.

But as it happened in primary school, I learned, or rather was indoctrinated, to memorize the details of the Manunggul Jar, the “Mona Lisa,” and the Banaue Rice Terraces not because of love of art but because “there’s a long ‘identification’ quiz tomorrow.”

We had “educational” field trips in grade school but these did not instill in us art appreciation and love for museums. Instead, field trips were occasions for “yehey” moments, with our usual much-anticipated destinations being the crass “Wowowee” TV show and the SM Mall of Asia.

And there’s just too much in the National Gallery of Art and Museo Pambata, so that it was a challenge for an instant art buff to make four hours suffice. At the outset, your jaw will drop at the picture-perfect grandeur of one of the National Museum’s two buildings. The National Gallery of Art, “evoking the thought of the classic Parthenon,” seems to be the gateway to heaven in the middle of the city, with its Athenian pediments and Corinthian columns. Formerly the Legislative Building, it was built in 1916 by the Americans and contrived so as to, lifting a line from Silva, flaunt “an American branding statement that their country was founded on democratic ideals.”

Entering the museum, I saw Juan Luna walking down the august halls while sipping coffee with Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo. They were alive! I must have a third eye, and am thankful for it, except that it allowed me to realize that Hidalgo actually looked like a pimp and Luna must have been an excessive user of hair gel, and that they, contrary to what textbooks would have us believe, looked exactly like me—human.

Ensconced adjacent to the “Spoliarium” is Hidalgo’s “Assassination of Governor Bustamante by the Friars,” which depicts the gold-less  las  Filipinas  ultramar  (Philippines at the end of the sea) as ruled not so much by the king of Spain as by friars who imposed and spread the Catholic faith.

There’s also the 16th-century galleon San Diego captained by Antonio Morga (whose name I once forgot, so that I missed one point in a third-grade Makabayan exam). In its hold are porcelain, altars, silk, and spices. It was crewed by Filipinos and Spaniards in a one-off attempt to reach the Americas across the Pacific Ocean. There are the ship’s genuine astrolabe, “the envy of nautical museums around the world,” and Ming Dynasty jars and plates and other dining implements.

There are the contemporary paintings by the likes of the master Diosdado Lorenzo. There’s “Mother’s Revenge,” a wee sculpture by—guess who?—the renaissance man Jose Rizal.

At Museo Pambata, I was deeply enamored, more than anything else, of the replica of the  tranvia  or the streetcar of Old Manila. The obsolescence brought forth by war and industrialism took it out of the streets and into the museum, carrying passengers whose faces hint of stories about the simplicity of life when things like Facebook had yet to happen.

There are so many things in museums that textbooks

cannot tell you about—things you can’t enjoy looking at in pictures or describing in a piece of writing. Museums are, after all, meant to be visited.

Bri Velasco, 20, is a campus journalist at De La Salle Lipa.