IN his science fiction novel “Idoru,” William Gibson suggests a future where the nation’s biggest pop star – the titular “idol” – exists only in the realm of virtual reality, an entity of artificial intelligence. The novel’s plot turns around the idol’s impending marriage to a nominally flesh-and-blood rock star who, by virtue of his own celebrity, is largely a creature of media himself.

Of course, we’re not there yet.

Or are we?

In “Wag Ma-inlab sa Tao sa TV,” artist Jose Tence Ruiz seems to raise this question, as well as many others, about our current mediated existence where, more often than not, image trumps substance – or rather, where image is substance.

Opening on November 15 at Kaida gallery in Quezon City, “Wag Ma-inlab” consists of several large works, four of which will be instantly recognizable to those familiar with Tence Ruiz’s ouvre as the latest mutation of his long-running “Kotillion” series, in which he reimagines iconic female figures as ballroom-gowned archetypes of our current cultural mindscape.

As the title explicitly states, the Four Queens of the artist’s current suite come from the realm of the tube. The faces should be instantly familiar because we see them everyday, but never like this.

For instance, the figure christened “Signora Olvida,” whose gown is painstakingly constructed from kris, okir patterns, AK47s and M203 grenade launchers, bears a striking resemblance to TV reporter Ces Drilon. In one hand she casually carries a lit cigarette, in the other a bottle of skin lotion – a sly if somewhat arcane reference to Drilon’s experience as a hostage of the Abu Sayyaf, whose members are said to carry bottles of Eskinol in their kit, presumably in anticipation of their close-up moments on cam which media personalities like Drilon are all too ready to give them.

“Señora Carcel” wears a gown constructed almost entirely of armaments and, a seeming incongruity, shoes. Closer scrutiny reveals the comely visage of CNN anchor Anjali Rao, and the connection between armaments and shoes becomes clearer as one recalls the network’s coverage of the Iraq conflict and its one comic moment: President Bush ducking a shoe hurled by an Iraqi journalist.

“Señorita de la Troiiana” bears the familiar toothy grin of ANC reporter Ginger Conejero. Why?

“Why not Ginger Conejero?” asks Tence Ruiz, although why she should be wearing a gown made of viruses and helmets is a question requiring deeper inquiry.

(The series would have included another figure based on Pinky Webb, thus giving ANC a near sweep of the surrealism derby, but that painting has been snapped up by a leading international auction house in advance of the exhibit.)

“My flashback when I was doing these paintings was ‘Being There’ by Jerzy Kosinski,” he says. “The absurdity of mediation is when your entire reality is taken from being in front of a TV. But that’s so old – 1970s pa ’yon. I was also inspired by the ideas of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. He said that at the end of the day, the only capital you need is the illusion, when everything collapses upon the image. It’s a scary thought, but every time we have an election, you have to think about it. Oo nga [Yes], we are working in the world of the image.”

In showbiz parlance, Tence Ruiz’s “Kotillion” series has “legs” –and it hasn’t run out of steam yet.

“I’m really interested in the series,” he says. “It’s allowed for so many permutations. I’ve never repeated any motif.” Among the celebrities that have made it to Tence Ruiz’s canvas are Sharon Cuneta, Kris Aquino, Judy Ann Santos, Nikki Gil, Angelina Jolie, Zhang Ziyi, Madonna and Nicole Scherzinger.

“I’m just responding to the milieu,” he adds. “You can’t avoid their beauty. They’re yours, but they can never be yours.”

He adds: “It’s really a preoccupation with the question: who are the women who become icons, and why do we iconify them? It’s a question that no longer has a clear agenda – the older we get, the more we realize that we just have to ask the questions, we may never get the answers.”

One might surmise, for instance, that the “Kotillion” series merely makes explicit the machinery behind the images that continue to seduce us and hold us in thrall. While acknowledging their power to attract us and hold our attention, Tence Ruiz also hints at the hidden agendas that lie just beneath the visible surface.

“At the end of the day, what’s more interesting than what’s around us?”

It’s a rhetorical question.

The closing of the decade finds Jose Tence Ruiz at the peak of his creative powers, nearly 30 years since he first made a name for himself as part of a coterie of visual artists identified with social realism (SR).

When social realism is mentioned in relation to Philippine art, one immediately thinks of the iconic images of the genre which date back to the 1970s: stolid peasants, heroic workers, the wretched of the earth and a suffering Inang Bayan ranged against venal landlords, corrupt bosses and the repressive machinery of the military industrial complex. In other words, the worst cartoon clichés of left-leaning propaganda art.

“It was right for the time,” says Tence Ruiz. “You have to remember that the art that was being pushed at the time was an art that was totally detached—abstraction and minimalism were considered art. SR was called propaganda. The debate then was: should art be about a very private joy, or about a bigger experience?”

But critics of social realism have been flogging a dead horse.

“Parang galit ka pa din kay [it’s like you’re still mad with] Marcos, but Marcos is long dead. People on the other side of the fence keep saying that SR is a dead end, but we’ve left that behind long ago,” says Tence Ruiz. “If you look at the shows, they don’t reflect the same ethos anymore.

“The whole point of SR was to get away from orthodoxy. To us that has always been the challenge – it’s been a constant reinvention.”

The result is what the artist calls “SR in the age of SM.”

He explains: “It’s a mall of ideas. ‘SR’ is just a label. What it brings people back to is that art is really connected to human existence. SR was just a nice way to call it, but it should not obscure the fact that it’s more interesting to be an artist.”

The SR school, if it can be called that, privileged social relevance and engagement, and it is not surprising that a number of them, notably Neil Doloricon, Dante Perez and Tence Ruiz himself, branched out into newspaper journalism as editorial illustrators. This was partly as a day job to keep them afloat during the lean years, but also as an artistic choice.

“Enough of us went to the newspapers because that’s where you find the biggest audience, possibly with a little more independence,” he says. “For those of us who understand Philippine media, it goes without saying that I don’t think you can go into television and still have independence, so newspapers were the best.”

In fact, Tence Ruiz’s editorial illustrations for, first, the Manila Chronicle, and later, the Singapore Straits Times, prefigure the images and preoccupations that continue to crop up in his paintings. One might attribute the artist’s prolific streak of recent years to his finally resolving the perceived contradictions between his journalistic work and his “personal” work.

“At the end of the day, labels weaken – they just will not hold the complexity of art,” he says. “Maybe it’s not reinvention so much as allowing the label to grow into its natural complexity. The abstractionists and conceptualists believed that art would evolve to be universal and purely formal and everything else would just be either journalism or propaganda. But whether they like it or not, art has not only been infiltrated, it’s been taken over – the inmates are now running the asylum. Art is everything available to us. That’s not exactly a new idea.”

Or to quote Marx quoting Terence, nothing human is alien to me. •
Kaida Gallery is at 26 Scout Torillo corner Scout Fernandez, Quezon City.