Looking for Action: Performance, Video and Direct Art in Cebu

by Paul Grant

In 1991, Alice Guillermo, the respected Manila-based art critic published a much-needed history of Cebuano art entitled Cebu: A Heritage of Art [1]. Guillermo eloquently expounded on works created in Cebu, from church ceilings to what she referred to as the then contemporary “crop” of artists. While the work is a laudatory, necessary and insightful effort, one might be struck by certain gaps, not in the history she recounts, nor in the group of artists whom she celebrates, but rather more generally in the very concept of art described: in large part what we encounter in this avowed heritage is painting. The resultant picture is of an artistic tradition touched by certain realist schools, folk art, tendencies in art brut, and a fair amount of portraiture and landscape.