Pinoy Art: Kwatro Kantos in Oakland y Mi Pare Mel Veracruz

Today I am working on a couple of write-up’s that I have promised to a couple of different Pinoy artist parties:

(1) I’ve promised Mel Veracruz a write-up for a project which I won’t way too much about here, suffice it to say it is a write-up about his art, and his poetics/ars poetica. Yes he does have a poetics/ars poetica, the way that Santiago Bose and Jean-Michel Basquiat have a poetics/ars poetica. Or you visual artists out there can tell me what the equivalent word is for visual artists. Still, I like that (some) visual artists have a poetics/ars poetica.

(2) Under the curatorial awesomeness of Lian Ladia, the Kwatro Kantos have a show coming up at 21 Grand in Oakland. Well, thank goodness for having saved my old blog archives, which I may be mining for some good critical reading of their art. Wow, part of what’s so difficult about writing an introductory statement for these artists’ works is that I view them, and think their “messages” are so straight forward, as above.

I feel like their artistic statement is clear as Ginebra San Miguel there: see the monstrosities we are, see us in this skull-headed Balul in Kong Kong pose. Balul as Philippine northern provinces’ rice god/fertility god. Skull-headed dead thing, hybrid/mutated thing. Also skull-headed as kind of punk rock in its visual shock value, and as well, I think it’s a play on the headhunter thing; we savage, primitive others. The artists are saying, this is what you think we are.

The artists are also saying, see how we’ve been warped, fucked up, and undeniably empowered by American popular culture. King Kong apparently was a “god” to the natives of his island, and without Kong, these emptied islanders would soon be easily overtaken, purposeless, alcoholic (see the almighty Ginebra San Miguel bottle here, this cheap gin phallic monument towering over the American cityscape), according to the 1976 Jeff Bridges/Jessica Lange film version! But I am not kidding here, drawing such a grave message from a seemingly throwaway piece of American popular culture. How do we “colonized” folks learn about the mores of our “colonizers” if not through their media, their constant streams of (useless) information.

Another thing about this large brown monkey we know as King Kong (yes, he was an ape, not a monkey, but indulge me here): let’s consider how he is a threat to racial purity, how he is (not so) implicitly depicted as a sexual threat to the blonde heroine’s virtue. In fact, in my viewing of this 1976 film (not the 2005 Peter Jackson version), the chemistry between Kong and Lange disturbed me utterly. What I was thinking was bestial, I will say Hollywood was feeding us as interracial.

I do and I don’t want to say here that Pinoys, early 20th century West Coast laborers, in their slick Macintosh suits and dance halls (Right? Pinoys can hella dance.) were also viewed as a threat to racial purity, branded “brown monkeys,” as laws against miscegination were enacted to assure racial purity. So what I am saying here then, is that the Kwatro Kantos are invested in, concerned with inserting themselves into this American historical continuum, and that this Balul/Kong image is a jab, a swipe, and a bastardized reinterpretation of an aspect of American history and popular culture.

Tell me I am reading too much into this art, and I will tell you to look again, and to think about it for a second.

Tags: Kwatro Kantos, Lian Ladia, Mel Veracruz