DEC13_SUPERDUPERFINAL

Regional Art Forum +
Community Art Archive
(RAF+CAA)
by Nomar Miano
Art is now deployed to interrogate the kind of space that power uses
to insinuate itself in everyday life. That is, instead of focusing on the
“public” or “publics” of art, the inquiry has shifted to the interrogation
of space that art occasions. The groundwork for this shift was laid by
seminal discourses on “new genre public art” and socially engaged
art in the 1990s. Artists are asked this question today: for whom
is the space that you create? If art promises inclusion, does your
practice emancipate the excluded? Does it empower the voiceless,
the unseen, the marginalized, or does it merely aid in the persistence
of unjust dominations and exclusions that are operative in art and,
by extension, in public life? At first, urban-based art practices appear
to be tailored-fit for this task: the contestation for and creation of
emancipatory spaces. But, in the last two decades, vanguardism in
art has moved away not only from the center (i.e. the cityscape)
but also from the original auteurism that shaped art practice for
over a century. Urban art, so it seems, remains ensconced within
an avant-gardist framework that sees artistic practice as an auteurist
affair. This kind of valuation and deployment of art may no longer
be responsive to present contexts that shape emancipatory practices.
For one, the self-critical reflex that characterizes vanguard art has led
to rural-based and community-engaged practices which yield the
very ‘authority’ of the artist to public negotiation. Hence, as noted
by scholars elsewhere, the community-based artist (in RAF+CAA’s
case, cultural and development worker) now functions as a facilitator
of the work rather than its author.
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In this sense, the project of RAF+CAA for Kalibutan is not merely a
“work” in the traditional sense. The project, rather, manifests a work of
development labor as a form of intervention in a particular planarity
that manifests a world (the artworld). Here, labor is intended to
mediate the biennale and development work as a critique of certain
pretensions that animate the world of art. This is not to say that the
practice of RAF+CAA represents a rupture or a new revelation in
art, or that the project manifests a dismantling (or deconstruction)
of the biennale form as an institutional interface of and for art. No.
Rather, the project merely points us to a patent revelation: that art
revels in mediations; that the emancipatory dimension of art practice
is anchored in a certain form of pre-understanding which enables us
to mediate different worlds (mga kalibutan). This is in line with
the realization that the rapprochement between communitarian
engagement and contemporary art practice has already been
consummated (i.e. new genre public art or socially engaged art in the
1990s). Whether or not this is a desirable development remains to
be seen. What is certain though is that the promise of development
(i.e. modernity) is implicit in the very notion of art. Therefore,