Art Matters

"A life without boundaries, that's what art offers. That's why art matters."
- Santi Bose

I found him on the 3rd level in the cone-shaped building of the Yuchengco Museum. His voice sounded animated yet shy, filling the space from the computer speakers of the Remixed, Revisited, Remembered exhibit.

Bose passed on in 2002, and his life and work continues to puzzle and inspire many: Espiritu Santi: the strange life and even stranger legacy of Santi Bose.

He is quoted to have said that he didn't mind his art being re-used by others. He did not feel as if he owned his art, and was happy to contribute his knowledge to young artists.

He wouldn't have minded this remixing of his work by his fellows. I could imagine him sitting in that green upholstered carabao chair in his studio, now a part of the exhibit, and watching how visitors reviewed his remixed work.

That evening, my good friend and I watched the 1996 Broadway musical Rent played by Manila's 9 Works Theatrical group. Rent is based on Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème, which was artfully transposed to a cold Christmas Eve on the lower East side of New York City.

The story depicts a group of young bohemians squatting at a cavernous loft at a time when AIDS was making an entrance. Through a series of crises and discoveries, the group wakes up to their connectedness, and they come to realize and affirm that "there is no day but today" before parting ways to continue their lives in pairs and alone.

That no boundaries theme was also explored by Ken Wilber in a book by the same title. Wilber posed that boundaries are not realities but figments of our own imagination.

Years earlier, Einstein and other quantum physicists had come to the same conclusion when they discovered that we are all connected energy fields. This awareness is now spread by modern-day gurus like Deepak Chopra.

More than half a century ago, Krishnamurti made very similar points in his sharply illuminating speeches in California, preceding the flowering of the new age and self-development genres in the decades to follow.

Yet how far have we understood and taken this no boundaries message? Where are we today?

Looking around, we cannot but observe that people individually and in groups are still spending much of their time and energy creating, maintaining, and fighting over boundaries that cause separation rather than synergy, hurt rather than healing.

Standing before Santi Bose's altar and studio, I realized that if art can help us see a life without boundaries, we had better let the artist in each of us come out of hiding.

No boundaries, that is why art matters.

Photograph: Trees on Pasay Road beyond the boundary.