Gregg S. Lloren University of the May 24, 2015

Cebu ’s : Curating Frames of Antinomies, from a Cultural Heritage to the Culture of Indifference

2015 J. Elizalde Navarro National Workshop on Critical and Cultural Heritage Studies

“Antinomy is more suited to the postmodern moment (defined historically as the moment when modernization gradually eliminates from the socioscape all aspects of the premodern)” Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Postmodernity

Much has been said about the demise of a certain cultural heritage: that we saunter at the sight of old churches, landmark edifices, landscapes — even traditional customs — and community spaces becoming powerless to the forces of both nature and nurture (and the lack thereof). One can simply browse Facebook and find a proliferation of shared nostalgia of the past as vintage photos of old Manila and elsewhere (e.g. Escolta) juxtaposed with current urbanization where colonial brick houses are replaced by artistically unpalatable architecture; turn-of-the-century streets transformed into a commercial hub that brightens in neon lights by night, whimpers into dreary images of grimy urban capitalism by day. It is not totally subjective for a social commentator and cultural critic to suggest with utter pessimism that these transformations are almost dystopian.

In the classical aesthetic point-of-view, the beauty of the past is measured in proportion, by the discipline of ordered arrangements, symmetry and harmonious content. On the other hand, the emergence of democratization redefined consciousness and perspectives into seeing and doing things by new rules on every person’s own initiative (Eco, On Beauty 2004) in the spirit of both autonomy and heteronomy. Consequently, this paradigm shift in aesthetic production and consumption has contributed to the consumerist deification of bad taste. The polarities introduced by democratization do not come without sacrifices. To do what one ought to do, one becomes indifferent with another: to keep up with progress, roads are widened, resulting to the sacrifice of colonial era edifices that may get in the way. Say, in order to maximize the value of location where the view of sunset is the prized feature of a property, a tall building is built against a backdrop of a historical landmark. The same goes when a family who owns a heritage house raises the said property to give way to a more practical and profitable investment. These antinomies cause us to wake up to a world where a cultural heritage fell victim to some nuisance in cultural consciousness; indifference is one, among others.

In determining my purpose to write a critique on the frustration over the preservation of cultural heritages (vis a vis indifference, consumerism, new aesthetics and bad taste, etc.) it was a matter of serendipity to consider the antinomies that worked behind the polarities between cultural heritages and the cultures of many others that I shall be illustrating further in the following discussions. Thus, I stumbled upon some cultural phenomena that threaten a cultural heritage; which I regurgitated in the following discussions under my own informal coinage. Consequently, I found it fair and impartial to reflect on the importance of a cultural heritage on one hand, while recognizing the inevitable presence of other cultural phenomena in an ecology that is indefatigably changing.

Perhaps, by curating these phenomena in word-frames, I can call attention to the very causes why and how our cultural heritage sites bleed away, and how it may rise again.

I must note that these frames of antinomies are curated against a backdrop of foreign scenes and ideas. I am attempting to demonstrate that what Colon St. shows us is not unique to the Cebuano narrative, nor to that of the Philippines as a whole.

Frame 1: The Culture of Spiraling Cycle

“These stood their ground and fought a battle by the banks of the river, and they were making casts at each other with their spears bronze-headed; and Hate was there with Confusion among them, and Death the destructive; she was holding a live man with a new wound, and another one unhurt, and dragged a dead man by the feet through the carnage.” Homer, Iliad, Book XVIII

In Book XVIII of the Iliad, Homer devoted a lengthy elaboration on a shield fashioned by Hephaestus (Vulcan in Latin), upon the request of the river goddess,

Thetis, for her son, Achilles, as a weapon in avenging the latter’s beloved, Patroclus.

Homer’s lyrical descriptions are replete with scenes from the daily life of a Greek community, sandwiched between particular celestial bodies (e.g. Pleiades, Orion, Ursa Major) and Earth: images of war, scenes of peace, wedding and hunting tableaus, the tensions between the Fates and warriors, a king and his subjects, women and their house chores, farmers and their routines, festivals and grief, blood and birth… death as complementary to life, vice versa; with the “mighty river

Oceanus surrounds, limits and ends every scene and separates the shield from the rest of the universe.” (Eco, The Infinity of Lists 2009) This framing of the shield brings us to appreciate a mise-en-scene where antinomies, one phenomenon reversing and contradicting the other, as paradoxes occurring in cycles, shaping the dynamics of life and community. Outside the boundaries set by Oceanus – a kind of frame that sets the boundaries of this universe – life could have been better, or maybe worse. But Homer wants us to keep our focus on the universe enclosed in the shield by Oceanus.

Homer’s poetic narrative on the shield of Achilles sums up what I felt when I first saw Colon St. in ; vibrant yet chaotic; for the romanticist, beautiful but fatal. Reputed as the oldest street in the Philippines, the street was founded by

Miguel Lopez de Legaspi, the first Governor-General of the Philippines, as the first seat of Spanish governance of the colony before Manila. Colon St. has shown me how daytime in a city can be crazy, how maddening it can be at nightfall (Fig. 1).

Having been the center of Spanish colony in the country, one can surmise with little inaccuracy the impeccable urban planning of the community using an analogy of the order and symmetry found in old European towns and (Fig. 2). It is framed by Cebu’s significant landmarks: The Parian Monument (Fig. 3) and the Cebu port in the east, the down north (where another enormous SM Mall is being built), and Jones Street and Fuente Circle far south (Fig 4). Its vicinity is jotted by Cebu’s most important historical sites: the Sto. Nino Shrine (Fig. 5) and

Magellan’s Cross (Fig. 6), Malacanan sa Sugbu (Fig. 7), Plaza Independicia (Fig. 8),

Fort San Pedro (Fig. 9), Cebu Metropolitan Cathedral (Fig. 10), among others.

More than a showcase of colonial history, Colon Street has witnessed the rise and fall of Cebu. As the island city progressed into the twentieth century, prominent

Cebuano families marked the area with their ancestral homes; cinemas featuring classical and art deco architecture were built; and some of the finest universities in southern Philippines were established: (Fig. 11), University of San Jose-Recoletos (FIG. 12); and the first campus of the University of the

Philippines outside (then known as University of the Philippines Junior

College), once an American garrison, Warwick Barracks (Fig. 13). But as a witness to this economic and intellectual resurgence, Colon St. has also fallen victim to the devastation wrought by the Second World War (Fig. 14); to which it has yet to take back its former glory from a spiraling cycle of birth, death and rebirth.

From the ashes rose shopping centers, malls, bazaars, and other small-time business establishments that characterize bargain commercial centers (Fig. 15 & 16). Art deco Cinema Oriente (Fig. 17), before its brave make-over, was near to becoming a house for sex traders while its neighboring cinema, Eden Theatre (Fig. 18), has exactly that kind of designation. Neo-classical Vision Theatre (Fig. 19) ironically houses pirated DVD hawkers. As most major businesses have moved to newly developed properties elsewhere in Cebu City, Colon St. fell into neglect and became synonymous to pickpockets, snatchers, night crawlers, and sex workers. In aggregating opinions from travelers and tourists, TripAdvisor Philippines has only three words to describe the area – “dirty, dangerous, and crowded.” (TripAdvisor

Philippines 2015) It can be contemplated whether Colon has really risen from the war’s devastation or simply incarnated into another form of death.

If one wishes to see hope glimmer for this heritage site, it could have come from the current Mayor who called for the rehabilitation of the street. He believes that such move will “promote tourism as it gives back life to “classical Colon” being the oldest street.” (Quintas, Rama mulls revival of old Colon street 2014) However, this same call was already made eight years ago by then Councilor Hilario Davide III, now current governor of the Cebu province, who proposed the closure of “historic Colon

Street and its connecting roads to vehicular traffic so the closed areas can be converted into a tourism zone…” (Bongcac, Colon Street eyed as special tourism zone 2006) One could simply suspect that the Mayor’s call will flicker away just as the Governor’s proposal did. Bongcac reported in the same article that the closure of Colon Street met opposition from the very establishments that could have benefitted from the proposal. The business owners believe that the closure will hurt their enterprises as it once did when the road was rerouted due to traffic management. Many of these businesses are informal enterprises: street vendors, hawkers, stores-on-wheels, etc. However, the case of these establishments – small time as they are – could be one legitimate reason Cebu’s government should consider as the move to rehabilitate Colon St. calls for sacrifices these business owners cannot afford.

Looking back at the universe framed in the shield of Achilles, this is one war where

Strife (Hate), Riot (Confusion) and the Fates (Death) become the only victors in one destructive combat.

Frame 2: The Fast-Food Culture

“American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100 degrees centigrade in plastic thermos cups, usually obligatory in railroad stations for purposes of genocide, whereas coffee made with an American percolator, such as you find in private houses or in humble luncheonettes, served with eggs and bacon, is delicious, fragrant, goes down like pure spring water, and afterwards causes severe palpitations, because one cup contains more caffeine than four espressos.” Umberto Eco, How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays

In his compilation of essays about his travels around the USA, flaneur Umberto Eco plays the social commentator “in search of the ‘Absolute Fake’ – a ‘hyperreal’ version of the holy grail…” (Cohen, The 'hyperreal' vs. the 'really real': if European intellectual stop making sense of American Culture can we still dance? 1989). What

Eco finds is a gamut of artefacts that the Americans created as “manipulated reality”:

Disneyland, Knotts Berry Farm, Universal Studios, wax museums, San Diego Zoo, to name a few. The US, as per Eco’s observation, typifies the cultural simulacrum of a fast food chain. Copies upon copies of European icons, from art pieces (e.g.

Michelangelo’s David, Da Vinci’s Last Supper, Venus de Milo) to architecture and interiors (e.g. Venetian ecclesiastical building, palazzos, loggias), litter across the country, from at least San Francisco to Los Angeles. Eco finds in them the

Americans’ habitual fascination with representation. This compulsive obsession results to the proliferation of the pastiche, in other words, kitschy rendition that verges on the ‘freak show’, in turn mediated by a kind of extreme consumerism – typified as ‘very American’ – of a late capitalist society. (Cohen, The 'hyperreal' vs. the 'really real': if European intellectual stop making sense of American Culture can we still dance? 1989)

Like Eco traveling with a salmon, a Cebu visitor would stumble upon Colon a

Disneyland of a sort. Depending upon a particular visitor’s experience and interest,

Colon can be relatively dazzling or starkly frightening: a ‘fast-food’ of bargain hunts or a ‘cafeteria’ of lawlessness, chaos, and anarchy.

This fast-food culture can also be traced back to the capitalist standpoint of Colon’s stakeholders: the producers who bring in cheap products, attracting relatively low to middle income consumers emerging in the resurgence offered by a rising late capitalist society (i.e. bourgeois), fed by profiteering business players, and everyone else who has a stake in the daily cacophony of selling and buying (e.g. pickpockets, transporters, pedestrians, the curious). As Colon typifies this side of the hemisphere’s – this part of the Philippines – new capitalist society, the obsession to produce and consume (i.e. supply and demand), builds up without control until anything and everything circulating in this kind of free-market (literally) mutate into the pastiche: portable speakers resembling rabbits; Hyphone (pirated iPhone from China); DVD copies of movies with garbled titles (with playbills written in alien

English); chargers and earphone cords that double as disco lights; handy radios shaped like a bacillus bacterium; carelessly washed pre-owned Raggedy Annes; flowers in vases both made from Sprite bottles… Those sitting figurine dogs with nodding heads would pale to compare. Fascinatingly, people buy them.

Fast-food culture is not exclusive to Colon. It simply illustrates the fact that the consumerism of a late capitalist society – capitalism that rose from the ashes – attracts bad taste, one that has a disintegrating effect on heritage sites with an equally ill effect on the communal psyche. The same taste from which Escolta and

Quiapo in Manila has suffered. But that’s another story.

Frame 3: The Culture of Bad Taste

“Kitsch is the ideal food for a lazy audience that wants to have access to beauty and enjoy it without having to make too much of an effort… a petty bourgeois phenomenon…” Umberto Eco, The Open Work

In situating the whereabouts of meaning in the field of semiotic production and consumption, Sean Hall placed taste as one of the components of consumption in his illustration on how we manage our distinction between others and ourselves. Borrowing the idea of Bourdieu, he elaborated on how taste “have enabled us to maintain social distinctions in relations to gender, race, and class by encouraging classification based on aesthetic judgment and education.” (Hall, This Means This

This Means That: A User's Guide to Semiotics 2014) Together with taste, there is style and status. But let me frame this discussion around the context of taste as I can see its connection between the culture of bad taste and that of the previous, the fast- food culture. This I began by reflecting on Eco that, like fast-food, bad taste – such as kitsch – is a petty bourgeois phenomenon; an ideal food for an audience unwilling to exert effort in the consumption of meaning. Think of fast-food and bad taste as a disastrous mix that would only result to a disastrous date. Say, if we are to look at a first date as “putting the best foot forward”, only bad taste would cause a person to have McDonalds as a dinner venue for a first date.

What is most malicious about bad taste – in particular kitsch – in these antinomies of cultures that threaten a cultural heritage is its manipulative effect. Kitsch, as opposed to the avant-garde, is not concerned with the process of beauty but, rather, its effect. It only matters for the producers of kitschy artefacts that they elicit emotion from their consumers; especially when the target audience is of the bourgeois type. The bourgeois is out to prove himself having taste as he flaunts his newfound power to consume in the new capitalist society, from which he emerges; heroically proving to the rest of society that the power to consume is not exclusive to the elite. Unfortunately, this brand of heroism is fueled by a kind of capitalist empowerment where an enabled consumer is strongly emotional and lacking of cognitive function. Consequently, kitsch is made to satisfy that insatiable thirst for illusion. (Eco, The Open Work 1989) In this sort, kitsch becomes identified with the consumerism of the mass culture, the realm of the bourgeois. Having observed the weakness of the masses that are wanting in knowing the complexities of a sophisticated culture, producers (i.e. business owners) woo their target market “by selling them ready-made effects.” (Eco, The Open Work 1989) As such, kitsch becomes an essential part of a marketing device most targeted to the bourgeois market.

I have never realized how kitsch can be so offensive until I came to realize the amount of manipulation that comes with its presence. Years ago, immediately after the cremation mass for my late sister, the funeral attendant turned on a Karaoke player and filled the silence of the chapel with what could have been otherwise an insipid piano music. Everyone started to cry. I left the hall to catch some air, or simply to avoid the wailing that ensued. In hindsight, I felt assaulted by an unseen power I now know as the manipulation of kitsch.

The display of horribly kitschy merchandise in Colon gives witness to what have been said above. To respond to the demands for “cuteness”, audio speakers in the shape of rabbits would have to be sold. That the grandeur of new capitalist illusion

(i.e. the power to consume) has caused dearly for a cultural heritage when the likes of neo-classical Vision Theatre is turned upside-down into a hub of pirated DVD’s.

When bad taste becomes the culture of a community, stately colonial streets rise from the embers of the last World War as a mock of urban filth. This pattern careens into a domino effect where those who found themselves unable to catch up with this kind of capitalist hysteria resort to anarchy and crime. As such, Colon becomes almost a no-man’s land at night. Some well-loved family destinations such as the art-deco Eden Theatre, right next door to Vision Theatre, has become trading places for sex, either for free or for pay.

Frame 4: Culture of Indifference

“It often happens that, once the reader or viewer of contemporary art has understood what the work is all about… he no longer feels like reading the work. He feels he has already gotten all there was to get from it, and fears that, if he bothered to read the work, he might be disappointed by its failure to offer him what it had promised.” Umberto Eco, The Open Work

The most alarming to contemplate in all the antinomies I have framed in this curatorial work on the threats confounding a cultural heritage site, such as Colon St., is the culture of indifference. This last of the frames is the sum total of – and latent in – all the frames that were previously discussed, as if the image of indifference was constructed from the elements of the previous frames: production, consumption, taste, individualism, and economic status; including the implication of materiality, heteronomy, and autonomy. As such, if there will ever be another serious moves to rehabilitate Colon, of all the frames of antinomies that ought to be addressed, it is indifference that is most complex. It starts and ends the series of contentions that the unwilling stakeholders of Colon St. may forward when the table on the street’s rehabilitation is once again laid out for discussion.

The economic impact to local business can be daunting enough that business owners could simply be indifferent to the proposal. For those in the lowest bracket of Colon’s “trading” economy – the pickpockets, holdupers, sex workers – hope is too vague a concept, not to mention the concept of heritage, culture, art, and beauty; not to mention order in the community. Their comfort from this hopelessness is indifference, because indifference has a numbing effect. (Wilfred et al., A Handbook of Critical Approaches in Literrature 2005) For the consumers that flock the bargain hunts, the illusory empowerment of consumption is reason enough to fuel indifference. It would be a tough call to suggest the (re)education of everyone who has a stake in Colon, as indifference is the refuge of the uninitiated. This is short of saying that this curatorial work on the frames of antinomies confronting Colon St. is worthy of the Time’s Ten Weirdest Museums in the World. (Grossman, The 10

Weirdest Museums in the World 2014).

To paraphrase Jameson, the significance of antinomies of the postmodern is found in the moment in history where modernization blights out any trait of the pre-modern from the current socioscape. The prognosis for Colon to become once again a glorious cultural heritage is bleak, dark, and dismal. These antinomies, like the painful cauterizations by natural selection of the weak species from the order of nature, can most likely lead to Colon being removed from the list of cultural heritage sites of the Philippines.

Nonetheless, it is not entirely pessimistic and incorrect to say that Colon’s unstoppable deterioration and impending demise is yet the surest destruction it has to suffer after the war. Perhaps, from the carnage shall rise an urban landmark as great as those that have risen from the great conflagration that befell London in

1666 and Chicago in 1871. By then, lessons must have been learned, and Colon St. shall truly become a heritage not by its antiquity but by the grandeur it is currently longing for.

Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Fig. 5 Fig. 6

Fig. 7 Fig. 8

Fig. 9 Fig. 10

Fig. 11 Fig. 12

Fig. 13 Fig. 14

Fig. 15 Fig. 16

Fig. 17 Fig. 18

Fig. 19

Bibliography

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______. The Open Work. Translated by Anna Cancogni. Cambridge, Massachusettes: Harvard Universitty Press, 1989.

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Photo Acknowledgements

Atty. Constantine Agustin Cebuano Heritage cebufinest.com cebucity.org National Commission for the Culture and the Arts nhcphistoricsites.blogspot.com philippinescities.com Ryan Seismundo, UP Cebu Fine Arts student www.skyscrapercity.com toptrendingnewsnowphilippines.blogspot.com

NB: The original source of some of these photos could not be traced despite the exhaustive effort to locate them. The author of this paper acknowledges the rightful claimants of these photos whenever they raise claim of their work.