NOT THE FIRST TIME
The 39 portraits in the exhibition are all from BenCab’s own collection. In his exhibition are portraits of men and women in blue or hot pink hair or mohawks, decked out in studded belts, boots, and bracelets. Some women were nude while some were braless.
“I was invited to exhibit any work here [in Conrad]. I realized that I have some drawings. I went to my studio to check and I have found I have a stock of drawings, of punk drawings. I thought
(I still had many of them), good enough for a show.’ So I proposed to them and [waited if] they would agree to show an early work. They liked it. Timely, with the Bohemian Rhapsody
[referring to the Queen movie currently in theaters].”
So, after nearly 40 years, BenCab is resurrecting his collection of punk drawings. He said: “Somehow it’s good to have a retrospective. Uso na ’yun no? (Its trendy now) It’s also to show the era of that period.”
The 76-year-old National Artist said of his more than threedecade-career: “work every day.”
“Number one is to be healthy and continue your creative process. Have discipline, work every day. Sometimes I do bonsai and assemblage of things. You get a lot of pressure, lalo na (especially) when a lot of people are demanding some works from you. But you have to be happy first. I take my time, that’s why there are few works [of mine] in the current market, except in auctions which I don’t own, they are cashing in [money],” he said.
“The punks lived in squats. They’d go and sign their UB40, [an unemployment benefit form card] where they get a weekly allowance and they used the money to buy paraphernalia and dyes. I found it interesting. I asked them to pose for me and I paid them £2 per hour. They agreed because they were hard up, too. They brought their own casettes to listen to their punk music [while I drew them].”
But this isn’t the first time that the artist is doing a punk-themed exhibition. By the end of 1981, he had amassed such a large collection of punk portraits that he was able to put up a show called Punks at the Tricycle Theater Gallery in London. The following year, during one of his periodic homecomings from London to Manila, he also held a punk-themed exhibit at the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Little Gallery. He arrived at that show decked out in a studded leather vest, a black shirt, and a studded bracelet. But the show wasn’t a success. In the words of writer Eric S. Caruncho who wrote an essay that accompanies the current exhibition: “Perhaps the art crowd didn’t know what to make of it at the time,” and the local art aficionados, he said, had a hard time reconciling BenCab’s Larawan series with European punks.
The artist said of the experience: “They were not as saleable as now. That time maybe they found it very different from what I used to do.”
But now that the punk culture has gained more local resonance and popularity, his current exhibition at Conrad might tell a different story. —