Twisting the Hands of TimeCommentary by Antonio Calipjo GoTo teach a lesson on computer/digital art, a Music, Arts, Physical Education and Health (MAPEH) Grade 10 textbook presented a digital “artwork” by a certain Lander Blanza. It shows a young and beautiful Imelda Marcos superimposed—digitally—against a painting from the famed “Water Lilies” series of the French impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840-1926).
MAPEH TEXTBOOK PAGE SHOWING SAMPLE DIGITAL ARTWORK
On December 4, 2017, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Renee White sentenced Vilma Bautista, erstwhile New York-based personal secretary of the former First Lady, to two to six years in prison for selling stolen artworks worth tens of millions of dollars and lying about them in her income tax returns.
Vilma Bautista was a foreign service officer assigned to the Philippine Mission to the United Nations in 1986 when the “People Power Revolution” sent Marcos and his family into forced exile in Hawaii. Four paintings the Marcoses had acquired during their long reign vanished from the Upper East Side townhouse where the Philippine Mission in New York held office.
It was determined during the trial that Vilma Bautista had stolen and sold Monet’s 1899 “Water Lily Pond” painting for $32 Million to a London art gallery in 2010. In her defense, Vilma’s legal counsel argued that she had written permission from 1991 to sell the artworks for and in behalf of Mrs. Marcos but had simply not been able to remit the proceeds of the sale.
All of these facts are part of the public record. However, I find this very strange indeed—that Lander Blanza who was the “creator” of this digital “artwork,” along with the nine authors of this Grade 10 MAPEH textbook and its editors and the publisher, all failed to see the negative implications and ramifications of the inclusion of Monet’s 1899 “Water Lily Pond” painting in a textbook meant to be used by today’s young and impressionable high school students.
First of all, not one of those involved in the making of this textbook thought to give proper citation, attribution, and acknowledgment to the real creator who drew that portrait of Imelda in 1968—the Chilean hyperrealist painter Claudio Bravo. Without that needed recognition and attribution, doesn’t it give the misimpression that it was Blanza who drew Imelda’s portrait? Didn’t the makers of this book in fact reproduce a copyrighted work without the knowledge and consent of Bravo? That is a major mistake! That is plagiarism!
Is it right to allow this “artwork” to serve as a model and prototype of all computer/digital art when there exist thousands of materials out there in cyberspace from which they could have sourced a suitable artwork? Why didn’t they present examples that are not tainted with negative subliminal messages and intentions?
Art should appeal to the higher, finer sensibilities in us. Art should speak for the Truth and about the Truth. Presenting a picture of Imelda when she was young and beautiful does not speak of the reality of the moment. Even more disturbing is the utterly brainless act of superimposing this vanished and no longer existent image of youth and beauty against a backdrop that’s overlaid, tainted and marred by legal and political intrigue, one that is fraught with memories of The Evil That Men Do.
The inclusion of Lander Blanza’s digital “artwork” in this textbook is insensitivity and mindlessness in the extreme. It extols qualities that no longer exist in real time—the youth, beauty, and innocence of the subject person, the serenity and tranquility of the place where Monet’s otherworldly lily pond used to be.
What horned, hairy monsters lurk beneath the placid waters of the lily pond? What beasts hide behind the false and fake façade of beauties who only seek to enchant, bewitch, and ensnare the unwary and the unthinking?
Perhaps, this digital “artwork” of Blanza may also be viewed as an attempt to turn back the hands of time, to revise history and to resurrect something which should by right be finally and absolutely no longer living.
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THE SOURCES OF LANDER BLANZA’S DIGITAL ARTWORK IN MAPEH TEXTBOOK: Left: Painting of Imelda Marcos by Claudio Bravo, 1968. Right: Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies
and Japanese Bridge,” 1897–1899, Princeton University Art Museum.
