User:Tash/grad reading
On politics + media
Staal, J. and Sison, J. (2013). New World Academy Reader #1: Towards a people's culture. 1st ed. Utrecht: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst.
Abstract
Towards a People’s Culture is a reader of critical essays and poems chosen by artists and political figures from the Netherlands and the Philippines. It discusses the vital function of art and artists in the Maoist-oriented National Democratic Movement of the Philippines, and concerns itself in particular with the figure of the cultural worker, and its imaginative and practical role in a progressive democracy. Co-edited by a former director of the Philippines Communist Party, the reader as a whole calls for the use of art as a means of mass education, agitation and organisation – in other words, of cultural revolution – against a heritage of colonial mentality and national amnesia. One particularly interesting essay also looks into the protest art of effigy making, and how these “constructed spectacles of pomp and parody” are used to take back / subvert state-controlled images of political figures.
Annotation
I picked up this reader because the Philippines and Indonesia share a similar social and post-colonial context. Both archipelagos emerge from a history marred by cold-war era anti-communist propaganda, military governance, and cultural regulation. Where in Indonesia, Islam has been the most striking cultural force, in the Philippines it was Catholicism first, then Americanism second, which became the greatest influence.
As such, the media landscape in the Philippines seems to be much more susceptible to and dominated by American film, music, fashion – and their accompanying values. This comes from their semicolonial history with them, and the continued meddlings of American economic and political institutions (including those carried out by the CIA) into Filipino life.
Though globalization is also a significant force shaping modern Indonesian culture, for us the influence comes from many sources – South Korean music, Bollywood films, Taiwanese soap operas. What strikes me as the same in both countries though, is the need for the local culture to be released from colonial mentality, that is, the need for Filipino and Indonesian history and heritage to be affirmed into a kind of national consciousness. In simpler terms, I think both countries need to turn their eyes inward and make visible (and audible) the past which have been swept under the rug. After all, what is a political revolution without a cultural revolution?
At this point it’s also interesting to note one of the questions brought up in this reader – that of how art in service of politics is often branded as ‘propaganda’. This concern has ended up discouraging and depoliticizing artists for a long time. But I like the idea that in the right hands, propaganda can also be a ‘progressive and emancipatory tool’.
One last note I want to make is about the interesting essay by Lisa Ito on the popular use of effigies in Filipino political protests. On the visual impact that the burning of these puppets has on the masses, she writes: “Dozens, if not hundreds, of cameras and devices document these performative deaths that bring the spectacle to the same public that consumes state-controlled images of the president.” I find this bears similarities to the role that political memes play online. The main difference though, is that memes are fast and cheap media: easily made by anyone, anywhere.