I really enjoyed Kwame’s article, and was deeply shocked by the attitudes of the curators; the so-called experts on African art. No wonder African artists feel the need to distance themselves from their ancestors! Even though this distancing is an act of resistance to the realism and nationalism that followed in the wake of liberation from the colonial power, I would have resisted with all my might against an art establishment that that, despite its alleged postmodernism continue to place such old-fashioned and, and Kwame points out, modernist demands on African art and culture. For whereas postmodernism claims that African art cannot be legitimated merely on the basis of culture- and history-transcending standard, modernism asserts that “primitive art was to be judged by putatively universal aesthetic criteria” (347). It is incredible that an (almost) contemporary curator, safely and ‘objectively’ placed in the Center of the art world, actually allows herself to patronize an African artist by indirectly claiming that he – unlike her Western self – is ignorant of the diversity of African art and hence does not know how to appreciate it. It does indeed seem just if it is true that the good curator became a victim of her own superiority: if the commodification of African art works that encourages the continued construction of African Otherness and gives room for the introduction of works of ‘falsified otherness’, led her to include such works in her postMODERNIST exhibition of exotic objects of interior décor.
False constructions and otherness are also major themes in Dream Jungle. We are never sure if Zamora Lopez de Legazpi is, like his namesake Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, a true explorer, or a man who has set the whole thing up, ‘just because he could’. Zamora could have ‘refurbished’ reality a little, or himself have been fooled by Duan. It is also possible that the President (who has in every other way prostituted his county), has gone behind Zamora’s back to use PIMPF for his own dubious purposes. Just like Sebastian Clairborne, the President might have inserted himself into the script of the Jungle Emperor and changed it. In Clairborne’s case, the script is Tony Pierce’s. Ironically, Pierce is making a movie about the Vietnam War in an area in which there is an actual armed conflict going on. Yet despite his work on a movie that attempts to portray the complexities, dehumanization and suffering of the Americans’ great war, Pierce has absolutely no thought for the ‘natives’ or the conflict going on around them. To him, the country is merely a backdrop; one that frequently causes them inconveniences; such as having to stop shooting of the film because the helicopters are needed in actual shootings, or having to deal with the nuisance of real dead bodies instead of the expected props. For this reason, Pierce seems to me the worse ‘colonialist’ of the two Jungle Gods.
Because it depicts the Vietnam War, because of its setting, its drugged and disillusioned cast, and because it is being documented by Janet, Pierce’s film alludes very clearly to Apocalypse Now. So much so, that I wonder if it is not a comment upon this film, and the notion it plays upon (taken, of course from the great modernist work Heart of Darkness) that the Philippines with its dark and dreamy jungle, just like Africa and its cultural expressions, is still to us that ultimate Other. And we want to keep it that way. The great response to Zamoa’s discovery of the ‘lost tribe’ underscores people’s need for this Other – to which we are both drawn and repelled – just like films like “Napalm Sunset” promise to perpetuate its image.