Baguio Graffiti - Stray Cats by Santiago Bose [White Wine Press No. 2]

Santa Monica: Smart Art Press, 2006. First Edition. Softcover. New. New copy. First Edition. 52 pages, Softcover, 4.5 x 6.5 inches, 2006. ISBN #8493423653. White Wine Press No. 2. . Santiago Bose was a major Philippine artist, highly conscious of the weight and legacy of the Colonial past on the Archipelago. His text centers on his early education on an American army base in Baguio and its cultural impact.. . In English and in Spanish. The book can be turned upside down and read in the reverse direction for the two different versions.. . "Santiago Bose has always been known in Philippine contemporary art as an innovator and a bricoleur who explored the shifting archipelago of his culture. It is a culture shaped by the domination of empire in its various guises in history as well as the creative struggles against empire which generated a lively makeshift strategy of resisting exhaustion. Bose thought of himself as a drifter whose oeuvre and life made up a diary full of incident, diverse engagement, and the incessant search for the “weapons of the weak.” The artist’s gear largely consisted of mixed-media, installation, and performance art projects that cut up and suture, mix and remix, photocopy and juxtapose, steal and replace found objects, pictures from the archives, garden statues, animist imagery, and even the traces of the sun’s rays which pierce marks into his works. Though he often crossed borders, Bose found his center in Baguio, a mountain city in northern Philippines which was an American hill station in the early twentieth century. Surrounded by the living traditions of indigenous peoples, faced with the encroachments of globalization, and taking on the role of a gregarious firebrand of local artists, Bose--hunting and gathering, slashing and burning in economies that subsist on performative parodies--nurtured an agile and ludic imagination committed to the imperative of change and its highly hybrid, fantastic, and resolute dispositions." . –Patrick Flores. . White Wine Press is a series of texts, one hundred being the goal, as an open project that seeks to wander a world. We are looking simply for those voices that have an urgency of saying. The artists are free to write about any subject, preferably about something outside the overwhelmingly present frames of their own work, or at least to come at the same in tangential fashion. In other words: state an interest. . . The texts will be published in the original language and in an English translation. If the texts are written in English, they will be accompanied by a Spanish translation and thus cover two large linguistic areas. Our basic animal condition, as Charles Olson put it, is move/meant. We are now in movement and thank the artists for providing state/meant. There is no story that is not true.