Digitally revised art

Pinggot Zulueta was another struggling artist and newspaper illustrator in the ’80s, a fresh graduate from the University of Santo Tomas College of Fine Arts along España. Among his batchmates were Federico Sievert and Rowena Bancod, and together they looked up to their upperclassman Jose Tence Ruiz, then already doing the art work for Who magazine.

Zulueta cut his teeth doing spot illustrations for Midweek magazine and later Abante, but soon enough realized that the wages of an artist, even an in-house one, were barely enough to keep body and soul together, much less support a growing family.

As it happened, Pinggot was just another face among the table of drinkers in such places as Wings on Quezon Ave., where along with fellow struggling artists Benjie Lontoc, Ludwig Ilio and Roxlee he would hold forth until the wee hours, exchanging stories and banter on the lighter side of an absurd existence post-EDSA I revolution.

Then all of a sudden Pinggot was pounding the beat as photographer for Diyaryo Filipino, and eventually Manila Bulletin for which he still aims a mean lens. Pinggot’s second one-man show – his first since 1985 – is ongoing at the RCBC Plaza Lobby in Makati until today, entitled Asinta: Images and Imageries. Its original title was Editoryal... Kuwentong Bayan, until some mentors and advisers helped him think up a catchier title.

Asinta is actually a dual project of Pinggot with avant-garde performance poet Vim Nadera, a schoolmate at UST who had first broached the idea to the artist-photographer in 1997. The fruit of this collaboration, aside from the images of digitally revised artwork and photographs in the exhibit, is the UST-published book Asinta launched during the latest book fair, which features Nadera’ poems alongside the digital illustrations.

Now Pinggot’s form of hybrid art and photography might raise the hackles of purists from both sides, who may subscribe to the not altogether indefensible idea that one craft should not corrupt or impinge on the other.

Similar howls of protest may have greeted daring experiments in other fields, such as when Bob Dylan first picked up an electric guitar at the Newport Festival, or when Miles Davis decided to dabble in electronics that would give birth to the expanding school of fusion, both in the ’60s.

But Pinggot is definitely no Dylan nor Miles, though his melding of his art and photography in the thoroughly postmodern gadget that is the computer may be just as controversial as the uncompromising, in-your-face acts of the masters that came before him.

For starters we have his digitally colored and reproduced photos of a demolition in a squatters’ colony in Intramuros, a child eating kamayan style in lahar-infested Central Luzon, the May 1 siege of Malacañang in 2001, and full-color reinventions of his editorial cartoons like the activist in media and the dictator who feasts on his own intestines.

"It’s good that I still kept the old artwork and drawings," said Pinggot over beer and assorted pulutan at the National Press Club, where the neon signs across Jones Bridge and the Pasig River could perhaps be a future subject of computer graphic meanderings.

As it happened, after Vim’s suggestion to gather together his old work and "repackage" them in new and alternative canvases, Pinggot was like an artist-photographer possessed with the chance to revive his art.

A quick perusal of the photographic reproductions of the enhanced illustrations and photos evokes mixed feelings of dread and exhilaration, and makes one wonder what the original looked like.

"Wasn’t it possible to place the digitally altered works with the untouched one?" I asked the Tarlaqueño Pinggot.

It was of course possible, but time and cost constraints came in, not to mention that Andy Warhol already did sort of the same thing in a series of four panels in his Campbell Soup series, Pinggot said.

Whatever way one looked at it, there was no denying that here was something exciting to come out of the current art scene, not the least reason for which an artist saw fit to return to his craft, if only by way of the computer.

Granted, no new ground has been broken in Images and Imageries, and to some the whole show may have a juxtapositional touch of the wild with the antiseptic, but maybe we should have a closer look at the actual canvases at the RCBC before passing final judgment.

Meanwhile in Bicol, by the foot of Mount Mayon and very near the Cagsawa Church ruins, there opened at the end of August a new art gallery and performance venue called the Ayuntamiento Art Project.

One of the regular exhibitors is Roxlee, who describes Ayuntamiento thus: "It is an art venue with three sections: the middle part which is the biggest section has the panels for the paintings; the left wing as we call it accommodates the sculptures; and the right wing is well-suited for the musical and art performances, and stage and poetry readings."

Among the artists on exhibit in Ayuntamiento are the Bicol-based Gus Albor and Dante Perez, as well as Roxlee, who Pinggot and I agreed should be recruited to perform at the NPC during cultural night to regale the habitués with his rendition of "Bulate ni kyuti- kyuti, puwedeng gawin spaghetti."