Male artist 'writes' the female
By Gary C. Devilles
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:24:00 05/12/2008
MANILA, Philippines - Feminist scholars believe writing the body, or l'ecriture feminine, is not a possibility only for female writers but also for male authors.
It may seem ironic, but a lot of male artists have portrayed l'ecriture feminine by not only being bold and aggressive in terms of representation but also by insightful gestures and depictions.
Such is the case with artist Jeff Dizon, whose "Lakbay," "Yakap," and "Mag-ina" series, exhibited at Choice Expression Gallery, reveal the body poetics that render female bodies as contorted, eroticized or idealized.
Labor of women
With their contorted limbs and feet and angular faces and hardened muscles, Dizon's women are not the typical women romanticized in movies and pop culture. They resemble more the hardworking female labor force that keeps this country's economy afloat.
They are the hordes of domestic helpers and nurses our country has sent to the United States, Japan, Europe and the Middle East. Often with hardly any support from the government, and ridiculed and looked down upon by socialites and nouveau riche, these women defy all forms of alienation and bear in silence all indignation and maltreatment from their abusive employers.
It is not unexpected, therefore, that Dizon would pay tribute to these women by naming the works as "Lakbay" series. After all, the works do not just show how our women have changed over the past years, their inner journey toward enlightenment that bourgeois' women in general wish for, but how Filipinas have literally traveled all over the world to provide for their families here.
"Lakbay" reveals the inherent contradiction of our life, an ugly truth we have long suppressed-that women have been behind all the things that we have enjoyed and reaped in this country.
Roland Tolentino calls our economy the vaginal economy insofar as the vagina becomes the metaphor and metonymic register of the seeming absence of women in the final computation of our gross national product.
Hence, for Dizon, the body of a woman insofar as it is rendered grotesque becomes the apt body politic for this nation's malaise.
Other forms of violence
Dizon's employment of body poetics extends to the eroticization of the female body.
His "Yakap" and "Mag-ina" series tell us the power of seduction women have over men, which for generation has accursed them and depicted them as fearsome monsters based on myth and oral lore.
Therefore, Dizon's depiction of the grotesque and eroticized body offers a counter-myth, echoing what Angela Manalang Gloria intimates in her poem "Soledad," where a wretched and accursed woman finds heaven in the depths of hell.
In the end, Dizon does not just want an end to violence against women; he, like all of us, wants an end to all forms of violence.
Jeff Dizon's "Recent Works" opens May 16, 6 p.m., in Choice Expression Gallery, 2F Dońa Consolacion Bldg., 122 Jupiter St., Bel-Air, Makati. Call 899-0718.
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