A CHAIR IS STILL A CHAIR even when there's no one sitting there goes an old song but a rock can also be a chair--for as long as there's somebody sitting there. It is a linguistic fact that we have no single word for a piece of furniture fitting Webster's "a seat typically having four legs and a back for one person"; the closest word we have for "chair" is upuan, which literally means "the place where one sits". UPUAN: Philippine Seating Arrangements During the American Colonial Era is the title of a current exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila and, appropriately, one of the first items on display is the large rock that Emilio Aguinaldo was supposed to have been sitting on when the American troops finally caught up with him. Whether or not this is apocryphal and the rock has the proper authentication papers, it is a probable enough story.
The place where one sits could be anything, even a rock. This is not to say that rocks were our early seats of choice. Outside the house, there were the all-purpose bangkô (from the Spanish banco, meaning "bench") and the Ifugao hagabi, both designed for communal sitting and bearing a greater resemblance to a perch than a chair. In the same exhibition area as Aguinaldo's fateful rock are three examples of a Picasso-esque piece of furniture whose proportions are those of a small quadruped with a toothed metal "head." This is a chair for grating coconuts, hence a pangkudkod. For all our lack of an exact equivalent for the word "chair," we have a remarkably large vocabulary for sitting. The exhibit's wallnotes list sixteen terms besides the generic upo. The difference between kumukuyakuyakoy and kumukuyakuyakos is that, in the former, one swings one's legs back and forth while, in the latter, the feet are rubbed together. There is no single English word equivalent to "sitting like a hen" which is halimhim and we all know what kandong means.
Most of our vocabulary for sitting has a bucolic air but with the arrival of the Americans and their subsequent occupation of the islands, the story of sitting shifted to the cities, the chosen centers of governance. Each new government building erected by the colonial government called for more chairs and other bureaucratic furnishings. A chair is still a chair even when there's no one sitting there but, increasingly, chairs became more than just furniture for sitting on. On a dais in the central exhibition area, near the spiral staircase festooned with red, white, and blue drapery, are two armchairs. The left-hand chair is ornately carved with art nouveau designs featuring local flora and dragonhead handrests and is typical of the chairs where Carnival Kings and Queens once sat in state. The right-hand chair, a swivel chair, is more austerely decorated yet still imposing as befitted the captain of industry's dignity. Both, in essence, are thrones that represent the exhibit's theme: that during the American Occupation, chairs came to symbolize social status and power.
The ascendance of the chair as status symbol is amply demonstrated in the exhibit. There is an almost dizzying array of dining chairs, armchairs, side chairs, sofas, rocking chairs, lounging chairs, and even a divan where the lady of leisure can recline Madame Recamier-like. Various styles of embellishment are also represented, ranging from the simply elegant Vienna chairs to a tapestried number on whose back is a quaint picture of a lady and a gentleman in vaguely Louis Quatorze dress. There is also an art nouveau armchair, dating from 1916, with hand-painted velvet upholstery much the worse for wear but still beautiful in its fine carving which includes the head of a girl in high relief. Another unusual piece is an intricately-carved three-seater with oval mirrors set into the backrest. One can imagine the de buena familia trying to outdo each other and hosting dinner parties just to show off their chairs.
In Fernand Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life, a similar development in China betokened a "separation between seated life and squatting life at ground level, the latter domestic, the former official." Among ordinary Filipinos at ground level (i.e., the great majority of the population with minimal if not non-existent social status and power), it is more than likely that the old chairless ways continued well into the American Occupation yet, in certain ways, they too were drawn into the new culture of the chair. One of these is through the mass introduction of the latrine seat, part of the American campaign for improved hygiene. Included in the exhibit are blueprints for a "Design for a New Commode for the Pail System" and a "Fly Proof Sanitary Pail," complete with perspective drawings of front and side elevations and recommended materials ("hardwood frame and kerosene oil tin pail"). The actual commode on view is an elegant 1920s model with a back, armrests, footrest, and wheels, and fashioned from narra wood.
A grimmer use for the chair--as means of punishment--is shown in two large period photographs showing the garrote in action. Fortunately for the squeamish (and unfortunately for the curious), this version of the chair with adjustable metal attachments is not to be found "live" in the exhibit. The chair also played a role in disciplining, with Bilibid prison becoming a major source for ornate wicker chairs, also known as "peacock chairs," destined for the front porches of the rich here and abroad. Other models could also be made to order. Inside a glass case are pages from the Bureau of Prisons Catalogue from which a captain of industry on the quest for the ideal swivel chair to soothe his mind and buttocks could choose either "No. 434," a high-backed model with slatted armrests, or "No. 436," with its caned back and sloping armrests.
Towards the end of the American Occupation, before the Second World War, the chair had become a more democratic piece of furniture and found itself a new set of users among the mostly urban middle-class. While many of the chairs from the turn of the century up to the 1920s had been exquisite works of art from craftsmen who were individually contracted by their wealthy clientele, the pre-war years saw the rise of furniture companies exemplified by Puyat's ("The 'Alma Mater' of the Finest Furniture Made in the Philippines"). These companies provided the middle-class with trendier designs such as an Egyptian-themed 18-piece sala set made from "allpure narra guaranteed."
These days, the chair has lost much of its cachet as a status symbol and all of us, rich and poor alike, are bound to encounter a plastic monobloc as we go about our daily lives. We would like to think that democracy has banished the need for thrones but, of course, progress has made possible other ways of showing off one's social status and power. UPUAN, the exhibit, is the history of the American Occupation as told with chairs. On hindsight, it wasn't too long ago that we supposedly lived in trees, in dire need of civilizing. This exhibit makes tangible long-past decades and shows them for what they are: finite blocks of time. This sense of tangibility may serve to render the past's furniture--as well as the future's--more rearrangeable. (Sofia Guillermo)