An Artist Excavates Archives of American Colonial Philippines
/Review: White Balance/Color Cast/ Stephanie Syjuco: Wisch Family Gallery, Anderson Museum of Modern and Contemporary American Art, Stanford University, September 18, 2022 - March 5, 2023
Colonial history, on the other hand, is rarely honest and seldom includes the native’s story. Much of this history is incomplete, dismembered and hidden. They need to be read with much skepticism, and are hard to access, especially those in foreign archives, whether in Spain or in the United States. Historiography, especially its very linear orientation, becomes academically and financially arduous. Artists, on the hand, may eschew linearity and work with multi-modal perspectives that use image, text and motion.
Stephanie Syjuco, the featured artist at the Anderson Museum, although academically a sculptor (Associate Professor of Sculpture), conducts an archeology of photographs in the Missouri and Smithsonian archives. Both museums (the other is Chicago’s Field Museum) were repositories of photographs and artifacts of the Philippines at the turn of the century during its American occupation. Unapologetically biased, the camera was a euphemism for a rifle pointing its imperial male gaze at everything Philippines -- flora and fauna, geographies and, of course, people. The camera visually acquired the Philippines without the violence of firepower.
Stephanie Syjuco (Source: stephaniesyjuco.com/ Photo by Kija Lucas)
These photographs (there were no native photographers then) single-handedly created the Philippines in America’s eyes. Like an archeologist, Syjuco digs deep into these archives to find out what can be salvaged (as in “rescue anthropology”) and re-imagined outside the colonial encroachments and detritus. Unearthing what is hidden after decades of being buried in the archives is a daunting task. No longer can we know what the dead photographer was thinking when a shot was taken. Syjuco choice of photographs, or “artifacts” if you will, required an aesthetic to frame the monumental task of sorting out what to the artist evokes meaning, and is ultimately re-imagined.
In two large frames, Syjuco assembles the photographs into “Pileup,” much like how an archeologist would mark each layer of earth where an artifact is found. Except in this archive there are no layers, only labels that identify an image. One pileup catches my attention. It is a montage, but it is not. A montage presumes a new composition from a sequence of images, or successive ideas. It pays homage to the view camera, which is at the center of the frame. Nineteenth century photography caused a paradigm shift in how reality was depicted. Photographs were to be considered “lifelike” representations; a pictorial capture of an actual event (historians love it); an uncontested proof or evidence (“photographs do not lie”); and so on. Pointed at subject peoples, the camera is complicit in the colonial project.
“Pileup” (Courtesy of Anderson Museum of Modern and Contemporary American Art)
The pileup in question has a photograph of a handmade pistol, a paltik, as it is called in the folklore of Filipino weaponry. Above it is a small photo of what appears to be American soldiers shooting at local folks dressed in white shirts and pants. The copy is fuzzy, as expected from early lenses. But the white clothing takes your eyes along the margins, to a picture of young boys in white shirts. Your eyes settle on a photograph below it, of a dead person, clothed in white shirt and trousers, sprawled on a grassy field. Students of Philippine history will recognize these as images from the Philippine-American War. To secure its territorial possession wrested from Spain during the Spanish American War, the U.S. engaged a fledging Filipino Revolutionary Army. Filipino soldiers wore white shirts and trousers as a modicum for uniforms.
The white tone engages your gaze once more towards a portrait of a young native female dressed in what appears to be piña. Made from fine fibers of the pineapple leaf, the white, gossamer silk-like fabric was the clothing of choice by urban women of this period. It is an ensemble of blouse with flared sleeves and accented by a panuelo, a piña shawl that is often embroidered. But hers appears to be a plain ensemble. What the picture evokes, however, is the sheer contrast between her white dress and dark skin tone. Syjuco questions your interpretation of these tones by including a color scale guide in another picture below. Elsewhere, in the frame, she places a color table, again to throw the question of tonal veracity and bias. The layering of tones, images, and history is a slow process of revelation.
Indeed, the subtitle of Syjuco’s show is “White Balance/Color Cast.” Working with archival pictures in the Missouri Historical Society and at the Smithsonian while on a research grant, Syjuco excavated hundreds of archival photographs that were taken during the St. Louis World Fair of 1904-07. This event introduced the Philippines to the United States public as its newest territorial acquisition. A Philippine village complete with houses and native people from represented “tribal” groups, “christian and non-christian,” using the labels of that time, who were made to reenact typical daily life. A racist view of evolution, one of the Fair’s greatest attraction was the notorious publicity of “dog eating Igorots.” This event depicted a long-lasting image of Filipinos to Americans all the way to the ‘60s. Except for scholarly research, many of these photographs stay “hidden” in U.S. archives.
What appeared as ingenious was the revelation during Syjuco’s accompanying talk for the exhibition of a photograph labeled “Picture of a Man 1900.” It’s part of the Pileup discussed earlier; a sliver of a photograph behind the image of the crude pistol.
At first viewing, it skipped my attention. One is tempted to lift the top picture to see what is behind. It was during the talk that Syjuco revealed the full photograph. Without its cover, the “Picture of a Man 1900” was immediately recognizable. I have seen it countless times. Filipino children swear allegiance to him every morning during flag-raising ceremonies. Almost all major towns in the Philippine archipelago will have his statue as depicted in the photograph installed at the town plaza. The Man was Jose Rizal, the national hero.
Inset in Syjuco “Pileup”
Labeled in the archive as “Picture of a Man 1900” may have been an innocent effort by an uninformed archivist to label the photograph for cataloging (an act of interpretation itself) and stacked with countless unknown portraits. Two years later, in 1902, the Americans were promoting the unknown portrait of a man, as the model Filipino, highly educated and peace-loving. The US would declare the end of the Philippine Insurrection, a.k.a., the Philippine- American War and remake the Philippines in its own image. The portrait of a man was essential to building a peaceful colony under benevolent colonialism. (During her museum talk, with largely a white audience, Syjuco alludes to this war in a slide of her archival method that included a picture of Paul Kramer’s “Blood of Government” book in the foreground), thus satisfying the needs of the curious. But how many would have noticed the allusion?
World Fair photographs validate America’s colonial experiment, the consequence of a hidden conquest. Native resistance was delegitimized as an “insurrection” rather than a revolution. With the St. Louis World Fair image archives, this layering of context produces a rhetorical effect. The subject of the World Fair, a live human museum, is reenacted and retold in a contemporary fine arts museum. The World Fair was to exhibit a colonized people.
Much of this background information hides in Syjuco’s work. A video installation titled “Block Out the Sun” shows looped archival images with an omnipresent hand that covers part of the image as it flashes through the screen -- a woman’s face (only the skirt is visible); a hand covers the face of a woman in piña finery; or fingers cover the face of a portrait of an Igorot (a colonial misnomer to identify Cordillera mountain communities) woman. The hand over the image in the video installation rejects camera’s view and forces you to rethink the original intention of the photographer. A double entendre of multiple ironies.
In another photograph assemblage, Syjuco spray painted live orchids in white as if to hide the color of the flowers, rendering the image frozen, ashen and static, a monochromatic oddity. It no longer is a plant; the flower is left in suspended animation.
The challenge for any artist is how to contain the multiple points of their creativity and the interpretations thereof. The work of the artist, to my mind, is to make the invisible, visible. Even if the artist has to make the work invisible first.
Embedded deep in the Philippine psyche is the notion of hiddenness. They reflect it in religious culture, where spirits and signs are everywhere. Bathala (impinito dios) is hidden in a rock. Rizal “did not die” and was hiding to reveal himself at the right time. The loob (inner self) is the deepest level of the Filipino psyche. Few artists have been able to tap into this aesthetic of hiddenness, and its companion, the art of revelation.
In another installation titled, “Afterimages (Interference of Vision),” at the adjoining Cantor Museum, currently exhibiting works of Asian American artists, Syjuco has a crumpled archival photograph of three Bontoc women in traditional dress. Syjuco’s refusal to show the original uncrumpled photo is to state that what you otherwise might have seen is untrue, an interpretation by a colonial photographer. Crumpling the photograph frees you from the colonial gaze (of women) and rejects the appropriation of culture. Can a photograph render authenticity under these circumstances?
Syjuco questions that in the contemporary content with two apparent “self-portraits,” or rather, the artist posing as a subject. In both portraits, Syjuco mimics notions of ethnicity, thereby of authenticity, in the age of consumer fashion. The subject is dressed in clothing, beads, bronze bells and bangles. In another portrait, the subject is seen holding a plaited reed (or bamboo) basket. Both portraits evoke esoteric exotica and the subject’s brown skin tone adds an illusion of authenticity. From which “tribe” is being represented becomes a question. Until you realize the entire ensemble is contrived and the imagery is to be consumed at the moment. The telltale department store “Return” tags belay the intent. Authenticity can be purchased and consumed, as might befit Instagram’s capitalist social media ecosystem. The viewer is asked to “read” between the pixel dots. What you see appears real, but it is not.
“Cargo Cults (Basket Woman)” (Courtesy of Anderson Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art)
Stephanie Syjuco was one of the trio of Stanford MFA student artists (Michael Arcega and Lordy Rodriguez are the other two; the first Filipino American cohort, I am told) whom I met while working as the technology manager of the Stanford Art Department in 2005. I have enjoyed following their trajectory from emerging student artists to professional artists in the Diaspora, in their own right, and with their own art practice.
Syjuco is now an Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, who in her own words, rips, collages, piles, or crumples archival photographs, to tell her own story from what has been considered “photographic truth.” These archived photographs, reproduced and consumed in textbooks, websites and social media, have defined the representation of the Filipino in the minds of the American public. Her work is not to erase the photographic record, but to recast them as an art experience minus the colonial baggage of the photographer. Extracting a Filipino American identity from centuries of photographic bias is a daunting project but a necessity amidst social media falsehoods. Filipinos in the Bay Area would do well to view the exhibit and ponder how what is hidden can be revealed, and remembered.
Dr. Michael M Gonzalez after decades of classroom teaching in Philippine and American colleges, retired in 2022. He is looking forward to devoting more time to his nonprofit activies with the Hinabi Project, the NVM & Narita Gonzalez Writers’ Workshop, the Kaisipan.org as an outreach to the culture and arts communities. Outside of that, he is an avid student of fiction and nonfiction writing; and the classic guitar, and indigenous music.
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