1993 APT1 Conference : Identity, tradition and change

for postmodern Filipinos to basics, minimizing wants, and simplifying needs if we want a glorious survival. Lani Maestro, now based in Canada, does installations on Philippine political situation. In Suspended Voices (1987) and Heart Is Stronger Than The Hand, (1988), she paid homage to political martyrs of a dictatorial regime. She used scrolls of tracing papers inscribed with names of the dead, scatterings of pungent funerary flowers, and rows of burning candles. Imelda Cajipe Endaya's series of paintings done on the woman question in the 1980's heavily drew leitmotifs from the confines of home: such as windows, crocheted doilies, home and child care artifacts. Windows were wide open, doilies were torn, curtains were tumultuously blown, and nursing bottles melted, as they were deviced as arena for larger social issues such as neo-colonial hegemony, labor migration, and land rights. But alas image-making and image-reading are.two different things. What are the results of using windows as allusion to woman's isolation, or kitchen implements as aspiration for shared household responsibility? Does not the use of tears as symbol of feminine plight further drown women's causes to a sea of unresolvable ambiguity? With such art works will women viewers rise up to their own redemption? Are male viewers conscientisized? Or are the artworks interpreted as sheer masochist surrender to the male powers that be ? When women artists attack patriarchy or satirize female servility by using the same images of subjugation, do they win any battle for themselves in the war of genders? It may be relevant here to relate the arguments raised by some feminists against a community craft revitalization project for women done by KASIBULAN wherein Rhoda Recto's sculpture of a breastfeeding woman was adapted into a popular papier mache toy. While the colorful toy was intended to counter the dominance of transnational corporation's campaigns for canned infant formulae, it was criticized for further monumentalizing woman's reproductive shackles. Birthing (1992), another KASIBULAN- initiated collaborative work was an ephemeral installation composed of a giant papier mache of a battered woman struggling for her own life, laboring to give birth to a vision of hope. The figure was a crude paste up of newspaper clippings on domestic violence, rape, and other crimes against women. Hope was concretized as a construct of mesh and draperies alluding to the creative act of weaving. In the collective process artists argued on whether to emphasize woman's suffering, or instead her vision of a gender-liberated society; or whether the spotlight was to be focused on her cervix which is the source of her vulnerability , or on her head which is the source of her strength. They chose to balance realism (by highlighting the cervix) with optimism ( by lavishing on a vision of a lush ecological haven). 4