1993 APT1 Conference : Identity, tradition and change

phallic adoration. But this tableau included broken pieces of the giant prickly phallic cactus thrust aside. With this work, Lluch blazed a personal- social mission of "declaring war against the painful, overwhelming fact that society treats its men better than its women". She further posits that men por­ tray women as they wishfully imagine them to be : passive, and erotic for male delectation. " Men portray themselves, whether in literature or in painting in moral conflicts that speak of the human condition which women can easily identify with. But can men identify with women when they express their miseries and struggles in the kitchen or in the bedroom?" Cutting Onions Always Makes Me Cry (1985) and Philippine Gothic (1985) are Lluch's other works on woman's endurance of her domestic burden. The former shoes tearfully fatigued housewife preparing a meal. It wittily captured the reality of woman's exasperation over domestic tasks that never end. The latter is an unabashed depiction of macho domination in marriage. One of the methods of socially committed art is to depict oppression and its root cause, in order to conscienticize its viewers. True enough, Lluch's images redeems woman from her stereotyped rendition by men as joyful river nymphs laundering by the river or kitchen cinderellas slaving in the kitchen with a smile. In celebration of Women's Month in March 1992, an exhibition on the theme of woman by over forty women artists was put together by KASIBULAN, a women artists' collective. Though most avoided the feminist tag, the gender debate in the visual arts was truly enlivened. Among the more notable works was Disipulo (1992) by young but accomplished painter Karen Flores. It depicted a woman in a seething vat and her man reading a book. As if in a romantic act of adoration, she with outstretched arms beholds her man who is ensconced in the higher position of power. Represented as a truncated male figure showing only his lower half, he is apparently indifferent to his woman's precarious situation. Francesca Enriquez wittily laughed at the folly of trying to please.male desire for woman's sensuous "good looks" in Young Smoothie (1992), wherein she thickly impastoed the lower half of a mannequin with a rough layer of cooking lard. The sculpture, begirdled with in elastic lace finery and shod in elegant high heels soon dripped oil in the hot, humid atmosphere of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Main gallery. Set against a frameful of fragrant Camay soap called Classical Girls (1992) and a bookshelf full of juvenile escapist romances called Cove of Promises (1992), Enriquez situated female passivity and relegation to sexual objecthood within society 's systemic miseducation of the female populace as such. By appropriating common images drawn from the glamor market, she blames advertising and mass media industry for woman's sorrily shallow state. 2