Lee Aguinaldo: An artist of appropriation
While primarily known as an abstractionist, Lee Aguinaldo (1933-2007) had many other interesting facets to his artistic career. One in particular is his being an artist of appropriation.
His appropriative strategies were wide-ranging—from using imagery from newspapers and magazines to employing other artists’ methods to making versions of other artists’ works to even appropriating himself and making “doubles” and variations of his pieces. As examining Aguinaldo’s body of works exposes, Aguinaldo was clearly skeptical about the idea of originality. He confirmed this in an article in Metro in 1990, saying, “I prefer a good fake to a bad original. You can do variations on somebody else’s work.”
He had also commented on this also way back in 1966 in a letter to the Spanish artist Gustavo Torner writing, “I think that we are going through a ‘homage to the past’ era both in music as well as in art through the eyes and ears of today. The era of free experimentation is closing and the serious artist is beginning to realize the importance of taking stock. It will be an era of re-saying what has already been said.”
Aguinaldo’s references to appropriation, however, go back much earlier than that 1966 letter. A self-taught artist whose artistic career was never approved of by his father, he is quoted in an interview by Cid Reyes as saying he began teaching himself by copying the Prince Valiant series of comics. While he had taken interest in art early on—in his unfinished biography he says he probably learned to crawl in order to find something he could use to draw—his beginnings as an artist really took flight during the period he was studying at the Culver Military Academy in Indiana which he detested. He used that time to learn more about art and he wrote in his unfinished autobiography of that period, “I had read a book on the techniques of the Old Masters and wanted to learn how they made their paintings and most important of all… hoping to find out what made them the great paintings they were considered to be.” He continued, “As a consequence of my investigations, I was able to paint a Vermeer or a Pieter de Hooch…and could have made a career as a faker and probably would have made more money if I had not been determined to find out more about what I could do on my own by developing new skills and techniques that would be suitable in aiding me to explore myself more efficiently.”
His passionate drive to learn led him to experiment with a number of styles and techniques, paying tribute to, translating and using other artists’ methods and influences to his own purposes. His restlessness as an artist was already noted of as early as 1965, when Weekly Women’s Magazine wrote that, “With intensity and devotion he has explored and abandoned one style after another, forever seeking new ways to convey his personal vision. To Lee Aguinaldo, style is of little importance. It is merely a vehicle for the creative act, the external shape of feelings, thoughts and emotions seeking new forms.”
In 1953, after having already returned to Manila, he made Homage to Pollock, an evident tribute to the painter who was an early influence and whose Action Painting he was emulating. After his “Flick” series in the early ’60s of arduously flicking paint onto a ground with a loaded scalpel knife, he made the “Galumph” series, which included a number of paintings collaged with images from fashion magazines like Harper’s Bazaar. His foray into pop continued with his use of the frottage image transfer technique of Robert Rauschenberg, continually appropriating images from magazines and newspapers. He used this in 1965 and continued his experiments with it for at least two more decades. Contrary to popular belief, Aguinaldo was not solely an abstract artist but consistently explored the figurative as well.
Lee Aguinaldo’s “Homage to Vermeer,” 1983, photo collage and acrylic mounted on plywood In 1967, two years after he began using hard-edge abstraction, he made “Linear No. 72 (Homage to Fray Sánchez de Cotán),” a tribute to the Spanish still-life painter who had been interested in simplicity and light. He would continue paying homage to other artists till his last few years as a practicing artist in the early 1990s. Some of the explicitly acknowledged include “Homage to Brassai” (1979), using a famous image of a Parisian couple by the Hungarian photographer; “Homage to Vermeer” (1983), which used two photographs taken by local photographer Wig Tysmans which was composited together by Aguinaldo; and the Linear painting “Homage to Saul Steinberg” (1994), the illustrator for the New Yorker whose drawings Aguinaldo admired. Aguinaldo’s last solo exhibition in 1992 at Lopez Memorial Museum showed his pen and ink renderings — his own versions of the self-portraits of Rembrandt van Rijn.
His body of work contains a plethora of wide-ranging art historical references. He even appropriated himself, revisiting old works and making versions of them. He understood, as the art theorist Rosalind Krauss articulated in her seminal text The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, that the “actual practice of vanguard art tends to reveal that ‘originality’ is a working assumption that itself emerges from a ground of repetition and recurrence.” The very act of making art was to already invoke past works of art.
His “quoting” the styles of eminent Western artists also touched upon the issues of originality that tie into the debate—often discussed during the period of nationalist fervor in the 1960s and 1970s—of finding a nationalist, Filipino “original” kind of art. Yet, Aguinaldo was against being imprisoned by nativist demands and thinking. Though any artist would be constrained by the particular context he or she was working in, when Cid Reyes asked Aguinaldo about the issue of Filipinism in art, Aguinaldo responded by saying none of the artists responsible for creating the New York School were native American but were all foreign-born or second-generation immigrants.
As the art critic Emmanuel Torres has said of Aguinaldo’s position, “If a Filipino painter can use these ideas which comprise some kind of international lingua franca in the visual and plastic arts and create paintings that are artistically good, isn’t this all that really matters?”
Lee Aguinaldo loved making doubles as in the literal double — “Double Scotch on the Rocks,” transfer, pencil, craypas on paper * * *
This is an edited excerpt from the book The Life and Art of Lee Aguinaldo. Lee Aguinaldo is part of the exhibition Windows to Conversations: Chabet, Aguinaldo, Zobel at the Ateneo Art Gallery, ongoing till 28 January 2012.The show is Ateneo Art Gallery’s contribution to the year-long multi-venue program of Roberto Chabet: Fifty Years and focuses on Chabet’s friendship with artists Aguinaldo and Fernando Zobel. Ateneo Art Gallery is open Mondays to Fridays, 8 am to 7:30 pm, Saturdays, 8 am to 6 pm. Call 426-6488. The author may be emailed at letterstolisa@gmail.com. Her art writings are at http://writelisawrite.blogspot.com.
