Pinggot Zulueta hits
the bull's eye
Posted: 9:45 PM (Manila Time) | Sept. 29, 2002
By Lito B. Zulueta
Inquirer News Service
 

REVOLUTIONARY is a cliche in these days when "world-class," "genius," "radical" and "sublime" are a dime a dozen, and one is hard-pressed to resist the temptation of applying it to exhibits and works that emerge out of the blue to surprise and impress. Definitely one should fight off the pull of doing just that to Pinggot Vinluan Zulueta's "Asinta: Images and Imageries," showing until today at the RCBC Plaza Lobby, Ayala Avenue, Makati City. At the least, it can be said that an exhibit such as this has been long in coming.

"Asinta" is a digital art exhibition. Both in medium and content, it extends the frontiers of art. It features some 50 works on canvas paper in pen and ink and watercolor, recast through inkjet print technology with UV-resistant coating. The themes are trenchant: poverty, human rights violations, street protests, slum demolition, repression, agrarian iniquity, neocolonialism and fascism.

Zulueta (no relation to this writer) has said that the exhibit marks his "coming of age." Make that artistic coming of age. His social and moral rite of passage took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s when he was a fine arts student at the University of Santo Tomas and an artist of the school paper, The Varsitarian. Although not a campus activist, he was not inured to the heavily charged political climate obtaining at that time and drew illustrations that were remarkable for their scorching lines and graphic depiction, what Jose Tence Ruiz would later on call as the "gigil na gigil" style of drawing. Ruiz, who was later to draw illustrations and cartoons for newspapers, himself mirrored that style, which perhaps owed to leftist protest art and agitprop that singed the political landscape as the Marcos dictatorship became more repressive and the people were rising from their political lethargy.

Zulueta's evolution as an artist is notable. He started as a campus paper illustrator and layout artist, dabbled in oil and acrylic painting (his first one-man show consisted of paintings on marine life), shifted to newspaper cartooning (Abante and the defunct Globe), explored prints, and then, quite suddenly, reinvented himself as a photojournalist (Manila Bulletin). His latest reincarnation as a computer artist draws from the resources and wisdom of his past.

Well-grounded

Indeed, he cannot be accused of taking the line of least resistance. He did not come to computer art by mere caprice. His exploration of the new media is well grounded on the old. He is not your usual computer graphic artist: someone who hides his aesthetic ignorance behind computer flair.

Along the way, Zulueta has fine-tuned not only his aesthetics, but also his social consciousness. In a way, it couldn't be helped that he should turn to photojournalism. The graphic bravura and the burning social consciousness of his early works could only prefigure greater involvement with social concerns. But it is perhaps owing to the true artist in him that he could only embrace his subject with the objectivity and the discernment afforded by journalism.

Along the way, too, he has experimented with mediums that should betray the craftsman in him. It was only a matter of time for him to turn to computer print, considering the fast extinction of the darkroom and the rapid advancements in computer printing technology.

The result of all of this aesthetic and socio-moral evolution is a work that best represents the evolution of the Philippine artist in the last 20 years. It is an evolution in social realism (some would say a resurrection, considering the retreat of that school in the last decade) and technology. Social realism has been remade into the new media, the new art.

It has been an evolution that is inexorable. "Asinta" is bull's eye in English, that is, right on target. Zulueta's is an art that has been determined by the mordant social conditions of the Philippines and the essentialism and critical thrust of newspaper illustration and editorial cartooning. In fact, editorial cartoons are supposed to make socio-political comments by abstraction and caricature. They send the message right on target.

It is also an evolution that is technologically conditioned. Zulueta's art fulfills Marshall Macluhan's technological determinism. More and more, artistic statements have been molded according to the nature of the medium and material. Photographic technology and the new media will determine the aesthetics of the new century.

One can only welcome with both excitement and trepidation the contours of the emerging artistic landscape. Will the new media result in art that is more immediate, more open? Or will the new media further reify art, undermine and ultimately banalize social consciousness?

We don't know. What we know at this point is that technology has widened the frontiers of art and even collapsed some of its more cherished foundations. In Zulueta's case, the frontier spirit is also evident in the release of a book that complements the exhibit. In "Asinta: Tula and Tudla" (published by the UST Publishing House), Zulueta collaborates with poet and performance artist Vim Nadera, himself a visual arts practitioner, to craft a book in which text and image intersect. The book is an exercise in intertextuality and interactivity. The boldness of the project should be the subject of another essay.

"Asinta" the exhibit runs until today at the RCBC Plaza. Call Marge Ocampo at 887-4942. For orders of the book "Asinta," call 731-3522 or 731-3101 local 8252/8278.