Raven Jillian Catuday | Arts 1 [Crtical Perspective in Arts]
Posted on February 11, 2025
What is art?
Is art a form of expression? I entered college struggling to define what art means. Although I took curriculum-prescribed art-related classes before university, I felt the word art was already pre-loaded, so I could never pinpoint what it truly meant. Its concept daunted me. Because I felt intimidated for a long time, I consciously shied away from consuming artworks under the discouragement that I would never understand and relate to them. I initially put museums and art galleries in a position far away from me, thinking their beauty and message were elusive and sophisticated, and they were somehow a place I could never find myself in.
But the place I have found formidable is where I learned what art is and what it has to say.
I first encountered art as a subject, a notion that has endured until September 27, 2024. Our Arts 1 class was scheduled to visit the Vargas Museum for our field activity. As part of a class show-and-tell, we were free to choose an artwork we resonated with to analyze using Alice Guillermo’s Four Planes of Analysis.
Where do we find art?
The Jorge B. Vargas Museum & Filipiniana Research Center, commonly known as the Vargas Museum, is a 3-story building inside the University of the Philippines Diliman campus. It houses art collections composed of stamps, paintings, papers, and sculptures bequeathed to the university by alumnus and former regent Jorge Vargas. When I visited the museum, the first floor was occupied by a gallery of conceptual art. Meanwhile, the second floor sheltered the museum’s permanent collection, featuring works by notable artists such as Juan Luna, Victorio Edades, Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo, Fabian de la Rosa, Fernando Amorsolo, and more. I was enthusiastic to read these names; their familiarity rendered comfort and encouraged me to explore the area, hoping to find an artwork I could resonate with. Upon reaching the third floor, I learned the museum also temporarily hosts a treasure trove recovered from the Marcos family. According to the curatorial texts, some of the artworks retrieved “were originally meant for worships, patrons commissioned others, known artists crafted a few, and peasants supposedly painted some.”
For a building with a level count of less than five, I was surprised that the kinds of stories it holds are versatile. We find art in places where patience and disposition are required to organize the perspectives they allow us to see. I found beauty in how the works are arranged in the Vargas Museum; they are not segmented in walls simply according to their creator, but rather deliberately rearranged as if trying to depict the interconnectedness of humanity. There, I stood alone in front of various artworks, trying to imagine myself in the shoes of the presented characters. It intersected my present struggles against the fragmentizing past the artworks bear. The space was an invitation to make sense of how two things can be at least remotely connected, no matter how disjointed they seem to be.
What does art tell us?
At the time of my visit, my criteria for the word “resonate” was whichever artwork gave me the initiative to know more about it. Sitting in what would otherwise be a quiet room, surrounded by stagnant paintings and sculptures, a remoteless TV plays Ode to Empire by Renan Ortiz.
In our discussion of the Four Planes of Analysis, art can make us realize concealed realities. The planes guide us on how the physical aspects (basic semiotic plane), symbols used (iconic plane), historical, cultural, and social backgrounds (contextual plane), and values expressed (evaluative plane) influence the meaning and significance we attach to an artwork.
In the case of Ode to Empire, Renan Ortiz created a video collage in 2012 out of war documents to illustrate the rise of a global superpower. I chose this for our show-and-tell because it was one of the only two video artworks I saw on the second floor; its message was not found in plain sight and had a void that needed an individual to link its suppositions. As a child, I was so used to museums displaying things that were only dominated by the visual that it was time for me to know that artistic experience was never inherently visual alone.
What intrigued me the most about the piece was how it arranged audio clips similarly to instruments. I first noticed that the sound duration corresponded to the length of specific video clips. There were clips of red, which reminded me of power and its dangers, while some gray segments hinted at loss, abandonment, or proposing stability. It was a dichotomous experience that substituted for the chaos and despair of people at the frontlines of war and how we try to justify it under the disguise of patriotism. Standing in the corner of the gallery, I ask myself whether freedom can exist in such cases, especially when patriotism and freedom are so closely intertwined with violence that they already contradict themselves paradoxically.
Before I left the room, a group touring the museum became interested and approached the television. But unlike me, they highlighted other aspects of the work, such as how the colored clips collectively represented a flag, the respective sizes of the clips, the duration of the video collage, and what it all means for them. I started to wonder how many meanings will be drawn out of a single artwork alone and whether there is a meaning that reigns supreme over the rest.
How do I define art?
On the day the class shared their respective chosen artworks, I noticed the same scenario happened when at least one of the artworks in the museum had multiple presenters—but none shared the same interpretations. A few shared about Lights for Christmas by Emilio Santiago, saying they resonated with the theme itself, got intrigued by the method of painting, or because of the sense of nostalgia evoked by the work. At that point, I regarded art as something that could never be affixed to a wall (figuratively, that is). It constantly avoided a definitive state and resisted ownership of what it could be.
After my first academic field activity as a college student, when one would dare ask me if I had managed to unravel what art is, I would confidently answer by saying yes. But to answer the follow-up question, “Then what is art?” I would purposely fail to do so. In responding to the unexplainable, I have found another question: why do we need to? By drawing the meaning of an artwork and comparing it to those made by others, just like in Ode to Empire and Lights for Christmas, we learn to live with certain ambiguity. I learned that art has a paradoxical nature, resistant to standard answers. Although we have prescribed methods such as the Four Planes of Analysis, at most, they are foundations that guide us in the process of meaning-making.
Before this semester, I had feared the lack of consensus in describing what art is, and in efforts to abolish this, I have tried to commit to one answer. My takeaway is that we must acknowledge that some things in life are left for us to resolve individually. But, we could contemplate these messages together and know that each perspective is equally important.
Try to visit a museum or any place you resonate with, and ask,
What is art? What does this mean for me?
Raven Catuday is a freshman at the UP School of Statistics. An independent writer and collaborator of zine makers, her interests include philosophy of language and conceptual art.