DEC13_SUPERDUPERFINAL

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The design-driven creative scene in Cebu has likewise created certain
conditions that nurtured a distinct art world, different from other
art centers in the Philippines. Cebu’s art world functions outside
of a gallery system. Local artists like home-grown designers mostly
engage in client-directed commissions rather than being represented
by art galleries and museums. Artists struggle to thrive in the context
of this system or the lack of it.
The user-centeredness and functionality of design differs considerably
in works that put premium in artistic intention and stylistic
expression. Client-oriented art-making has produced a strong
disposition of Cebuano art towards realist imitation, rendering
subjects as how clients see them, that is pictorially, realistically.
Bisaya realism of the Abellana School has become for the longest
time the formal visual language of Cebuano painters. Experimental
and avant-garde expression tend to have limited audiences.
Furthermore, art becomes almost exclusively accessible by a few
– only those who can commission and collect art for their private
estates. This lack of opportunities to exhibit their works has compelled
young spirited artists to bring art closer to the people, to the streets
of Cebu and showcase a different approach in art-making. Street art
in Cebu has helped balance out elitist inclinations. With street art
at the helm, the world of Cebuano art expanded to integrate new
approaches, new expressions.
Emergency and Normal Life
Responding to the curatorial vision for the Kalibutan exhibition,
I tried to ground my curatorial approach to the temporalities of
the Everyday and the Emergency. Theorist Ben Anderson in a
chapter in the book Time: A Vocabulary of the Present describes
the current lifeworld as precarious and therefore deserving of the
term emergency. He further contends, “the category of emergency
does not, however, name only an exception that interrupts ‘normal
life’…the claim is that action is necessary immediately to meet the
exception (2016, 177).”
To look into the structures of the kalibutan, the temporality of the
everyday becomes immediately necessary as it proscribes to what
Anderson may define as the ‘normal life’ –the monotonous, circular
affairs that downplay meaning as one awaits for the next eventful
moment. The everyday lays bare the grandness that Cebuano
creativity especially works of design has been branded to become