
WE HAVE SLUMS HERE
NESTLED IN A SPOTLIT ALCOVE at the Cultural Center of the Philippines for the 1979 exhibition “Five Contemporary Sculptors,” Joe Bautista’s Bubong, created the same year, made for a strange scene. Large sheets of corrugated iron leaned against the wall to create a modest slope, recalling the shantytown rooftops that litter Manila’s skyline. Atop the rickety platform, genteel visitors playfully teetered, the soles of their shoes clacking against the metal. But the first lady of the Philippines, the institution’s most powerful overseer, was not so amused. According to Bautista, when Imelda Marcos