Bose, the trickster-bricoleur
My dear buddy Santi Bose would have turned 76 last week had he not left us early in 2002. One wonders how this singular magician who climaxed his tricks before kids and fellow oldies with his mantric incantation of “Sprikitiks Marabunta Smortskens!” would have fared well into the present, when his antic glossary of enchantments would have had to contend with AI and its own Pandora’s Box of disruptions.
The artist commonly identified as a pioneer in the employment of indigenous materials, let alone themes, left quite a legacy that continues to resonate, well beyond his other popular credit as the founder of the Baguio Arts Guild.
Last Thursday, July 24, his original fan base and motley successors celebrated his memory for an nth time, with the launch of a new book that strengthens his status as a global influencer.
Santiago Bose: Painter, Magician by Patrick Flores with contributions from Santiago Bose and Lilledeshan Bose, was published late last year by his family in collaboration with Silver Lens and ArtAsiaPacific, which had it designed and printed in Hong Kong.
Representing that last entity, Elaine W. Ng asserts in her Foreword: “Bose’s work continues to reverberate, offering us a model of engagement with the world that is as relevant today as it was four decades ago. Our hope is that this book will serve to acknowledge Bose’s contributions to the growing art history of the Asia-Pacific.”
The 160-page, softbound coffee-table volume in full color that more than “provides a glimpse into the life and artistic practice of artist, educator, and community organizer Santiago Bose” was launched at 4:30 p.m. at Balanghai ni Ikeng Independent Cinema, Ili-Likha, Baguio City. It featured a conversation between authors Lilledeshan Bose and Patrick Flores.
The formidable art scholar and critic Flores, who had previously curated several major exhibits of the subject’s works, and long been acknowledged as the leading expert on his lifetime produce, has written:
It is hard to put together a book on an artist whose work is basically about disarticulation and reassembly. Emerging from an archipelago so textured in its cultural relations and a country that was successively colonized three times, his practice confronts strata of citations that can only be dense, teeming and layered. Santiago Bose renders this density with whimsy and urgency as he disfigures painting, mixes media, stains surfaces, claims everyday objects, purloins images, and ventures into installations and performances that are at once heady and practical in their activation of local materials and historical references. At the same time, he sheds light on the depth of the complexity through juxtapositions across various visual stimuli that only a trickster-bricoleur can. Amid intense mixture and migration, the lush lifeworld of nature and culture, Bose performs the role of the exemplary makeshift artist and community firebrand, bearing fragments from inveterate memories, and anticipating new forms and the inventive ways of making them in contemporary art.”
Preceding the book launch at the same venue was an ArtSpeak session presented by the Ateneo Art Gallery, with featured Baguio artists of the exhibition “Gongs. Smoke. Blood. Earth”—spearheaded by Kawayan de Guia who took up mentorship under Bose before he himself became an outstanding visual artist and organizer. The on-site participants who also went livestream discussed “the history and cultural contexts of Baguio and Cordillera art dating back to the founding of the Baguio Arts Guild in 1986, up to the current zeitgeist with artists who have emerged or have been influenced by the guild.”
The exhibit opened last April at the Ateneo Art Gallery, showcasing works that underscore the concept of “indio-genius”—a term fashioned by National Artist Kidlat Tahimik a.k.a. Eric de Guia. The ArtSpeak program also served as an extension of the book Tiw-tiwong: An Uncyclopedia to Life, Living, and Art, in Baguio, the Cordilleras and Beyond. Published by Baguio Kunst Publishing, it “explored the relationship between indigenous communities and the artist—whether schooled or unschooled.”
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This ArtSpeak program is currently on view until Aug. 3 at the 3F Ateneo Art Gallery, Soledad V. Pangilinan Arts Wing, Areté. For inquiries, email aag@ateneo.edu
Santiago Bose: Painter, Magician is available for purchase in Silverlens Manila and Silverlens New York.
