Detailed Biography

“INSECT BOUNTY” (artist statement)

MANILA, Philippines (IP)--The police commander in a trash-filled district of Manila has offered to pay residents $5 for every 1,000 flies they capture. Lt. Col. Romero Maganto, who is well known for going after suspected assassins in the slum district of Tondo, said the bounty is part of his area’s effort to prevent an outbreak of insect-borne diseases.

“If we cannot do away with this garbage, I think it is better to eliminate these creatures that bring sickness,” said Maganto.  He said inmates in his station’s jail have been assigned to count the flies before they are burned. Tondo is the site of Manila’s dump, called Smokey Mountain, where officials say 300 tons of garbage is dumped daily.  The bounty project is being funded by several civic and business organizations.

--Associated Press, September 20, 1988

My artwork provides an ongoing reflection of the world that surrounds me, depicting physical and metaphoric environments.  In my images I articulate ideas that indulge in the ridiculous.  The dark humor I utilize in the work is a play on absurdity and futility as a means of satire.  The bleakness of the images implies the desperation one encounters in the sleep of reason.  I am reminded of Francisco Goya’s etching “El Sueno De la Razon Produce Monstrous.” {The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.}.  In my sleep of reason, concerns of identity and origin, particularly my cultural roots as a Filipino American become apparent.

In a recent series of drawings, I created a fictional history through an exploration of visual artifacts.  I reflected on my own identity to define a mixture of culture and history.  In the drawings I present a potent allegory that mimics airs of Filipino oral story-telling tradition.  Having spent the early part of my childhood in the Philippines, I was enamored of the American comic books in which I learned to understand the English language.  In the images, I have contextualized a wide range of iconic imagery mirroring both American and Filipino traditions.  When these traditions collide, they morph into over-inflated political cartoons that serve as satirical and melodramatic surrogates for the folktales and personal prose shared by my grandmother.  As a youth from the East, I looked to this particular brand of American pop culture as a source of language; I now look to the social history of the Filipino experience as a source of meaning from the West.

We pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag.  And so, by these Providences of God--and the phrase is the government’s
not mine--we are a World Power.

--Mark Twain on the Philippine War   

As an artist I implement a weathering of the object and space to develop a historic shifting of both vernacular and semantics.  Translational glitches, misinterpretations, and misreading not only begin to serve a rhythmic pattern, but also play an important role in the dialogue.  That dialogue serves as a window for inspiration and reflection.  Through the literalness of a visual landscape, I use society’s detritus to illuminate the emergence of marking points that illustrate the stereotypes, ambitions, and expectations that occur at the intersection of immigrant and mainstream societies.  The politics of cultural identity are vocalized through the allegorical characters and symbols that exist in the landscape.  Consequently, visual and textual language itself is broken down and reevaluated.  In the drawings language is revealed as simultaneously simple and obscure.  As the caretaker of these drawings I am sifting through and recycling vernacular signposts, re-contextualizing the wreckage in this wasteland and attempting to understand the historical, social, and cultural forces shaping the landscape.  In this site of allegory, of character slurs and racial epitaphs, can one attempt to classify identity?  Is it in this wasteland that stereotypes become a reflection of how things once out-dated never become completely eradicated?  These are some of the questions I pass through in my search for reason; that search empowers the work.

-- Jose E. Guinto