|
 he
desire to be beautiful, to enhance the appearance, is a
primeval impulse as ancient as man. Jewelry
satisfies this impulse. Essentially ornaments that adorn
the body, jewelry are “personal works of arts whose
origins are as old as human vanity” (Gregorietti
1969:13). They elicit the sense of beauty, the
pleasurable sensation which is man’s response to
“certain arrangements in the proportion of the shape
and surface and mass of things preset to the senses”.
The Pilipino lexicon for jewelry, hiyas, is a cognate of
hias, “well dressed” in Bahasa Indosenia, and
“beautification” in Bahasa Melayu.
More than the intuitive quest for beauty and more
than just to please the perceiver, however,
ornamentation “involves a certain range of ritual
aspect that moves between signs and symbol. Jewelry
achieves its function on three levels: 1) subjectively,
as things created by artists to adorn certain body parts
of particular individuals; 2) objectively, as things on
which art is applied; and 3) artistically, as things
which create the illusion of significance (rank, status,
prestige) and symbol (happiness or sadness, celebration
or solemnity, and other emotional states).
On the first level, they belong to dance,
persuading the body to take certain poses and make
particular movements, and to music, being evocative
instruments that tinkle, even as their glitter and color
cause the eye to tinkle, even as their glitter and color
cause the eye to tingle. On the second level, jewelry
belongs both to plastic arts, since they attract touch,
and to visual art, since they appeal to the eye. On the
third level, they are properties of theater, drawing
from the beholder a heightened sense of the individual
human personality undergoing the drama of living
reality.
Jewelry is Art
Jewelry is usually considered as an applied and
decorative art, although the distinction between its  being
“applied” and “fine”, as with other arts, is
pernicious. It is by no means utilitarian – its
materials are often rare and precious, the labor
expended in its making is highly skilled and the move is
expressive. Nevertheless, it is an applied and
decorative art since it works on and around the human
body, altering its appearance by the temporary appending
or affixing of expressive elements which may themselves
stand as objects of art.
Jewels are discrete art objects on the human
body, not of it. To beautify the human body some
Philippine groups altered the body itself – flattening
the forehead, tattooing the skin and filing and
gold-pegging the teeth – through surgical operations.
Wearing jewelry, however, satisfies the demands of
vanity without causing physical pain.
Jewelry, like all art, is expressionist pure and
simple, the creation of biased, subjective vision. The
art of jewelry is in the artist’s mind. Its impact
begins when worn, altering the visual itself, but a
jewel changes its function and impact depending on the
moment, the wearer and the viewer Jewelry is real,
but it also fully achieves its function are pure illusion.
|