DEC13_SUPERDUPERFINAL

RAF+CAA’s project, which calls our attention to a rapprochement
that occurred in recent past between communitarian engagement
and contemporary art should be treated as an opportune event that
could compel us to ask important questions.
The notion of art has a history and, as such, this notion is also
subject to mediations. The shift from the fixation with the “public”
or “publics” of art to the space of inclusion that recent dialogical
works occasion liberates the valuation of art practice from its
original elitist orientation. This point is no longer controversial.
In fact, if precarity politics is to be believed, the counter-culture
values that have animated art in recent past (self-management,
collaboration, DIY, etc.) are now integral to the mechanism which
makes the neoliberal world go round. What is new today, rather,
is the reconfiguration and reframing of our encounter with art
in the here-and-now whereby emancipatory practice, as in art
practice, is also recognized as a form of labor (or work) and vice
versa. RAF+CAA realized that, when the world of art is made to
accommodate traditional communitarian interventions, art practice
takes an uncharacteristic regionalist attitude. This realization is
liberating to RAF+CAA because it means that the constitution of
Philippine art is spread-out. By being so, art can be approached
from different levels and angles of regional orientations.
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