Rizal as the hero who was once alive

It might be out of the way, and painfully in the middle of the corporate hustle and bustle of Makati, but Rizalizing the Future was a good enough reason to leave anti-corporatism in the car and step into the Yuchengco Museum. The hook, and one of the more powerful things in this exhibit, is the inclusion of Team Manila’s contemporary renderings on wood of Jose Rizal in shades (and later on their other Pepe products), in colors too vivid you forget he’s national hero. In “Rizal in Shades" one can only thank the heavens for Team Manila’s reconfiguration of history into interesting and viable images that comes from a stable and consistent sense of popular nationalism. Let me forget, of course, that I have yet to be able to afford one of their products. Truth to tell, in the context of the museum, this was a feat in itself; in the context of the exhibit it would be the portent of the diversity that’s here, only united by notions of Rizal. Contradictions are welcome! Hear! Hear! Your telling of this story is as good as mine! As it turns out, this works infinitely well with the Rizal heirs’ exhibition of things / correspondence / lives equated with our national hero. At first glance the collection seems too trivial for comfort, but in reality, it is more inspiring than we’d like to admit. Art as inspiration to do better in our lives seems cliché, never mind that it has as market the younger students among us, yet there is an amount of greatness in Rizal that’s difficult to ignore, or not be inspired by, the jaded among us notwithstanding. At the very least, you must get goose bumps looking at the pencil sketches of portraits Rizal did himself. If you allow yourself, goose bumps are default for the rest of this exhibit, too, if not a slow quiet process of being enveloped in the truth of the fact that Rizal actually lived once, and wasn’t a hero for most his life. This is the fundamental difference between an exhibit and a documentary filled with heirs and “experts" talking about Rizal: the latter bombards you with what you must see and know, the former lets things speak for themselves and allows the experience to be all yours. This is not to say that there is no curatorial hand in Rizalizing the Future, but it does lend itself to being silenced as you walk through the museum’s spaces.

And here there are plenty, all filled with Rizal memories and memorabilia. In contrast to the Team Manila pop Rizal portraits, the inner first floor area had as its central image Felix Resurreción Hidalgo’s “Portrait of Jose Rizal" dated 1883. Above it is the tagline “Genius Knows No Country" which remains personal as it reveals the friendship among Rizal, Hidalgo and Juan Luna, in times and places we can only imagine to be wonderful. At the second floor, you are greeted by the romance that surrounds Rizal, though in the most concrete ways possible, diverse as these ways are. “Loving Rizal" reveals the women who adored Rizal as a young man, as husband, as son. It is about Leonora Rivera Kipping, and the love letters she didn’t get to read on time or wasn’t allowed to see, the ones she burned seven years too late and kept in a box covered with the dress she wore at 13, when she was betrothed to Jose. The top of the box had the initials L and J, and looks as forlorn and sad as Leonor must have been. Love is also about Teodora Alonzo -- she whose strength, while cloaked in being Jose’s mother, is actually about an identity that knew how to survive in difficult times, from being forced to walk 30 kilometers on charges unknown to her, to watching a son leave for elsewhere in the world and later being forced into exile, to his jailing and death. It shows Teodora writing to request for Jose’s pardon in 1896, two days before Jose’s execution. It reveals how she sees herself as an “unhappy mother (... about to) have the greatest and most poignant sorrows." But of course love could only mean a glimpse into the love between Josephine Bracken and Jose, the one that began in Dapitan, and ended with Josephine being Jose’s “unhappy wife." This is what Jose writes in his dedication to Josephine, dated December 30 1896, in the book The Imitation of Christ by Tomas á Kempis that he leaves behind for her. And despite the various elements that divide Rizalizing The Future into sections, there is an amount of love -- and pride -- that resonates from the collection. From the spiritual love for Rizal, i.e., the Rizalistas and the Knights of Rizal; to the making of Rizal as an advertising and commercial icon, i.e., Team Manila products and Rizal’s name and portrait on various advertisements; to National Artist BenCab’s “Rizal," a set of colored photocopier prints that slowly builds Rizal’s portrait one aspect of his face at a time; to JP Cuizon’s “Cyborg Rizal" and “Rizalborg," the first a portrait of Rizal as half robot, the second polymer resin sculpture, both reimagining Rizal as an impossibility made possible by high technology. But too, there is Rizal as alive at one point in time, in the fact that he played the violin, the calling card that he had as a doctor in Hong Kong, and the things that he used. And here is where this exhibit ultimately succeeds: it shows Rizal not just as alive in his articulations, but as alive in the things that were his, the loves that were concretely part of his life. In the end, when you are faced with the image of Rizal being executed, in the midst of the “Suspended Garden" by Tony Gonzales and Tess Pasola, with his humanity as context, it just works as an amount of love and respect, ultimately an amount of pride, in this man who was many things including teacher and student, writer and doctor, son and lover, genius and the every Joe. Ultimately, Rizal was a man who lived, and knew how to do so in light of nation and nationalism. Right here the trivial is shown to resonate, when it is chosen well, when it remains relevant to our knowledge of Rizal as a real person who lived, and most importantly when it can generate discourse, or at the very least a fantastic classroom lecture for the more intelligent teacher, the more interested student. - YA, GMA News Rizalizing The Future runs until October 29, 2011 at the Yuchengco Museum, RCBC Plaza, corner Ayala and Gil Puyat Avenues, Makati City.