The Mango Pickers of the Current Times
Fernando Amorsolo is one of the most renown painters in the country. His paintings of landscapes and sceneries, especially of people's happy life in the farm or the tranquil beauty of Filipina women, have been his signature genre in painting. Ever since I was in elementary, he is always discussed as a painter who represented the peaceful life of the Filipinos in the country.
Looking at his painting “Mango Pickers”, it encodes a country that is both peaceful and beautiful, with no sign of oppression and discrimination like poverty, brutal capitalism and sexism. We can see that the women are happy, smiling with each other, as they pick pieces of mango and pile them up in sacks. We can infer that mangoes have been their primary business for them to live. Of course, they will sell these mangoes so that they will have money. Given that, people, therefore, decode its meaning and reduces the image of the Philippines in that one single representation – wherein people are happy with their simple life and simple business.
Like the concept of Peorce’s iconic images, “Mango Pickers” is a visual representation of what Amorsolo’s perception on the life of the farmers, particularly small-scale mango farmers. With its realist and formalist attempt, I can say that it really tries to represent a version of the mango farming life.
But, as Sturken and Cartwright said, these images gave people the capability to read it and respond to it either through affirming or questioning it. Thus, it has become a battleground of ideology. In this sense, Amorsolo's painting became a debate on his idea of how he wants the country to look like, against other ideas, such as how Filipinos really see the country, and how the foreigners' take pleasure in portrayals of the country through their gazes.
In the contemporary context, where brutal capitalism is everywhere, especially in the agriculture business, the capitalists exploit the farmers who do the hard labour. For an instance, the farmers are given very low compensation, with no benefits, and even, worst, no land rights. As the farmers work day and night to earn a living and to keep the country alive, the capitalists, on the other hand, deprive them of their priveleges, and even their rights to have their own lands from the landlords, to earn what they really earn as compared to their labour, and to even have the government protect them from insurgencies and people that harass their welfare. Even in the context after the Marshall Law Era, as portrayed in Orapronobis, where the village people receive the worst inhumane treatment, the farmers, among the other fisher folks and workers, are the ones most oppressed in the class-based society.
Like what Karl Marx said, Amorsolo has the mode of production in a sense that he has the capability to produce his works to the public, thus, giving him the power to represent the country in his own desires. This, therefore, creates a false consciousness of how the country really looks like right now. Because of Amorsolo’s intention to show a country that is pure and serene, masking faces of oppressions and struggles behind, he created another version of the world which he used to fabricate everyone’s reality.
In the present times, the false consciousness Amorsolo has produced hindered people’s critical thinking in seeing the rotting society. Also, through his depiction, the society tends to just see a simulation of a farming scenario where everyone is happy with their underpaid tedious labour and inhumane experience. Through that, emancipation is lagged far behind. We became interpellated with what we usually see, and therefore, we pretend that these oppressions and the oppressed being portrayed happy with it, normal, mundane. This, therefore, becomes hyperreal since it produces a world that does not really have a referent in the real world, or in this case, a farming scene or life that does not really reflect or refer to how the farming life it is right now, yet, it still emphasize in its closeness to reality.
As through the process of interpellation, wherein we are shaped with everyday ideologies as stated by Sturken and Cartwright, we see, or imagine, the lives of the farmers just simple, yet, they are happy with it. In fact, our imagination of the simple yet beautiful and happy life, as represented by Amorsolo in his paintings, became the dominant mental model of a farm life in our heads. Actually, when I was in elementary and early high school, I used to draw a simple farming ground with farmers happily doing their job, despite of the real oppression on land and human rights, every time our teachers asked us to draw something about farms or farming. I drew like that before because my imagination was shaped by the everyday dominant ideology, including Amorsolo’s paining, in that way.
I, on the other hand, like some other people, employ my own gaze at such paintings of Amorsolo. As a boy growing in the Metro, I am detached with the lives of the farmers in the rural places of our country. Given that, my mental model tend to be constructed as I learn from different pictures, paintings and books. My urban gaze tends to focus on the highlighted simplicity and beauty, as created by the vibrant colors and facial expression, of the lives of the farmers, without questioning the real status of their everyday lives.
But now, as I learned that these are products that promote false consciousness, I realized that counter-readings can be created. Since Berger, in his books Ways of Seeing, said that images, particularly publicities, can present another version of the world that is totally different from how it really is just to satisfy the people’s want for glamour, I found out that Amorsolo’s painting is no different. Since the rich people wanted to see a secured and peaceful country, they, of course, will want images that give them the feeling that they want, which in this case, are paintings like that of Amorsolo’s. These images can clear out the consciousness of the people behind brutal capitalism with the oppression and exploitation they employ on the farmers just for them to be richer.
Because of that, the whole painting of Amorsolo has become a punctum for me, wherein it pricks me every time I see how Amorsolo distorted the imagination of the Filipinos with regard to the real status of the farmers in the rural places when it comes to the inhumane treatment they receive from the government, capitalists and modernizing society.
Given that, I did a appropriation, in my own sense, of Amorsolo’s “Mango Pickers” by putting different things from the internet together, like a bricolage, to create a textual pouching that alters the meaning of the painting or the text as a cultural product.
Still using the painting as the base, I included different elements to serve as symbols for different readings. I included a picture of an undernourished poor child, which served as a symbol of the deadly poverty they experience. Cars and buildings show the modernizing environment of the society that farmers are being neglected and that even it their lands are converted into private buildings. The military, on the other hand, symbolizes the aggression they experience from the hands of the military authority, as well as in insurgencies and counter-state militaries. The American cartoon and a caricature of Gloria Arroyo symbolize the political power behind such oppression, especially in cases that they use their power to serve their own personal interests. Like the USA, they promise development in the country by privatizing farmers’ land and then letting them employ for cheap labor. Same goes with the capitalists represented by the people carrying bags of money.
Using Saussure’s concept, this appropriation, together with all its signifiers or elements, signifies that in the current time, the life of the farmers are not just simple and happy, but, instead, under the humane treatment of the society, the capitalists and the government, and that they are not happy, and should not be happy, in it anymore.
In Alice Guillermo’s contextual plain, this cultural product produces a counter-meaning to Amorsolo’s work by giving the people another experience as they see the digital photo, and have it weaved with their actual experience of what is happening today, especially with the country folks in the farming business. People then are able to interpret this image based on the meanings I encoded in it, and then relate it with the experiences of oppression and exploitation they feel, or even just hear or read, in their everyday lives.
In this sense, the meaning of the text is altered based on the current circumstance that I can perceive. As Susan Sontag said in photos, these images serve as memorabilia or souvenirs of the past, of what has been there. By appropriating it, it can serve not just a souvenir, but an actual symbolical record of how the past, and the today, and probably the tomorrow, can be. In Gramsci’s term, this hegemonic painting can be countered by an appropriation of the image, which serves as a counter-hegemonic text that opposes the reality Amorsolo produces through his painting.
