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ABSTRACT
This article explores social practice art in the Philippines. Focusing on the work of Manila-based practitioner Clara Balaguer from the Office of Culture and Design (OCD), the article examines less the work and more the barriers to practice. Examining the two key obstacles, that of the market and the Movement, the article aims to underscore the still uneven topography of the global art milieu. While exploring the possibilities and problematics of social practice in the paper – the key tension between ethics and aesthetics, something highlighted by our eponymous hip-hoptivists – what in fact remains central is the complexity of locality and the inherent impediments to social practice in the Philippines. Following the collaborative and dialogical foundations of social practice itself, the paper includes Balaguer’s comments, thoughts and responses as marginaliaFootnote1Footnotea.
Acknowledgements
This paper was initially written by Schacter following a period of seven months’ fieldwork in Manila in 2016. It was then sent to his key interlocutor for the work, the social practice artist Clara Balaguer, for her comments and thoughts. Once returned, and following the dialogical foundations of social practice itself, the pair decided that these comments should be included as marginalia in the final paper itself, rather than being incorporated into the text by Schacter. As such, and following discussions between the pair, Balaguer has been credited as co-author of this piece.
Notes on contributor
Rafael Schacter is an anthropologist and curator from London, presently British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Anthropology Department at University College London.
Rafael is currently exploring contemporary art practices in Manila, the Philippines. He has recently undertaken seven months of fieldwork in the region and is working on numerous written outputs as well as an exhibition scheduled for 2019 in London. Rafael has also been undertaking research on graffiti and street art for over 10 years. He has worked on numerous exhibitions, including co-curating Street Art at the Tate Modern in 2008 as well as curating Venturing Beyond at Somerset House in London and Crossing Borders / Crossing Boundaries at the Street Art Museum St Petersburg, both in 2016.
Rafael has authored numerous articles as well as two books, The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti (2013) published by Yale University Press, and Ornament and Order: Graffiti, Street Art and the Parergon (2014) published by Ashgate. He is currently completing a manuscript for Lund Humphries entitled Street to Studio, slated for summer 2018.
Notes
1 Footnotes by Schacter are identified with numbers in superscript. Marginalia by Balaguer, with letters in subscript.
a From my understanding, it is rare that the subject of an anthropological investigation be allowed the opportunity to assist in their representation. To grant co-authorship and find ways to work together, at whatever level, in the generation of a critical portrait seems a crucial practice to explore.
b Here maybe I would put empower in quotations. As who are we to say that they have no power already? You can argue that living in relative squalor irrevocably implies a dis-power, a disadvantage. But maybe it's also a form of condescension to assume that they have no power and that it is up to the Other to give them strength. So often, it occurs that these incursions empower the visitor more than the visited.
c Have come across a really interesting term from a New Zealand magazine called The Distance Plan. Resilience rhetoric. In a poster they designed, which included a collection of the latest buzzwords in environmentally-preoccupied art and development circles, they described resilience rhetoric thus:
‘Matthew Allen writes about the widespread use of … “resilience” in post-disaster scenarios in Australia. Adopted by the media, by government agencies, community groups and NGOs, it is often associated with national character: being “tough”, “hardy”, “battlers”, “pragmatic”, “plucky”, etc. In the context of increasingly extreme and frequent natural disasters, the idea of resilience may be instrumentalised by policy makers to offload responsibility for mitigating the causes and consequences of such disasters onto individuals within the affected communities themselves.’
d It is also important to state that fun is an underrated effect and end in itself when doing community work in a country nursing a strong rural to urban migration crisis. Young people leave rural areas because, aside from there being not many jobs to choose from, they are simply bored to death. A rural social practice experiment can, at its most basic level, almost always aspire to breaking the monotony for both young and old, the ennui that accompanies a real lack of variety in contemporary culture programming, in the broadest sense of the term.
Though I resist the spectacle of entertainment, the project as variety show without critical import, the spectacularity of any social practice performance within a far-flung or marginalized environment is not to be ignored. And can be harnessed for its positive effects.
e After the experience of attending the 2016 Gwangju Biennale as a Biennale Fellow, which implied attending a conference for small to medium (and large) collectives and institutions from around the (fringe of the art) world, I'm formulating this idea of the importance of earnestness. Fancier word might be authenticity, but I quite prefer the almost unfashionable nature of one who is earnest instead of ‘over’ everything, not easily impressed.
The biennale, curated by Binna Choi and directed by Maria Lind, raised the question ‘What can art do?’, earnest and innocent and, in a way, almost desperate for meaning. For our group discussion, Choi encouraged fellows to identify where our passions lay in doing the work. But passion, though related to earnestness, can have a certain imperial, phallic or destructive quality to it. One that earnestness lacks, though it may be destructive as well (the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions). I much prefer the quality of being earnest, as it calls to mind a childlike generosity, a relinquishing of power and control, a generous posturing that has not yet been jaded by art's elitism.
In Fernando García-Dory's performance ‘Lament of the Newt’ – by general agreement of the fellows, one of the most moving and significant pieces commissioned for the biennale – the artist worked with urban farmers to create a protest ‘variety show’. The community was trying to stop their farm from being dismantled for the purpose of industrial development, and the artist worked with them to express the significance and history of the urban farm for their tight-knit group. What resulted was a naive romp through a tiny rice paddy slash vegetable garden slash neighbourhood park, replete with costumes and sing-and-dance numbers, outfitted with a happy ending that defied the artist or curator's libidinal (stereotypical?) need for pessimistic realism or ‘critical rigor’. If you can imagine, the performance was kind of like The Act of Killing by Joshua Oppenheimer but without the genocide.
In a one-on-one conversation, the artist spoke of giving up control of certain decisions to community members, half-motivated by a language barrier and fully motivated by the knowledge that, in the end, the story had to be built by the community itself for it to fulfil any sort of cathartic purpose.
The projection of artwork as (community) catharsis in itself is a naive idea, an earnest sort of hope. So it was curious that among this highly critical and demanding group of art practitioners, the piece that most seemed to resonate was the least jaded, the most popular in terms of aesthetics and production value, the most innocent and vernacular.
There brews, prevalent, among us, an exhaustion. We grow weary of irrelevance to the wider community, to the world underserved and removed from high art and cultural production. We want our work to break with instead of reinforce the neoliberal hegemony. We respond to innocence and earnestness more strongly than to passionate revolution, maybe? Perhaps we are also war-weary of the bloodiness of revolt. Perhaps, credulously, we long to repair rather than implode the systems, cities, villages and edifices of valuation we live within.
I am of the belief that, to truly produce an ethical framework for social practice, you must partake of this earnestness Kool Aid. You must, even against your better judgement and against your fear of creating work that is excessively ‘rural’ or optimistic, find the tender beauty in the unsophisticated. You must unfashionably believe, on some level, that a happy ending is worth portraying, worth fighting for, with intelligence, lucid like a razorblade.
f Or supplements!
g Or reinforces!
h :) very pretty
i Though I'm uncomfortable with the word artist, I am using it with a tiny bit less trepidation these days. The art planet really is the only place wherein I can frame the work within the critical, theoretical, aesthetic, even academic seriousness I seek. Its hyper-hybrid approach and its clear pretension of creating something visual/visceral, of an aesthetic that is relational as well as purely visual, means that art is currently the only place where the work can be fully explained, experienced, understood and valued.
But I still balk at curator LOL. I'm still in the middle of understanding how to ‘curate’ in rural contexts without it sounding or feeling douchey. Too many people curating their libraries, sandwiches and playlists, I guess. The word ‘artist’ is much more relatable to a farmer or fisherman than the word ‘curator’. That's where my vocabulary barometer is calibrated, ATM.
j Yes!
k EXACTLY. The human wisdom that fieldwork implies and forges is so necessary, also for those who are writing about social practice and not necessarily doing it. And by fieldwork I literally mean fields, the rural, even the peri-urban. Again going back to García-Dory, his work with Campo Adentro – an abandoned Asturian village that he has purchased as part of a larger, long-term commitment to reviving the community – points to interesting ideas of how the definition of ‘rural’ differs in a developed and developing world context.
l Even when budgets do not allow for a wholistic long-term engagement, what I call repeat tacticality can be used as a tool for extending one's presence in the community. Doing eventual, shorter-term projects but returning to the same community to execute other experiments later on.
m The specific tribal group I worked with preferred the spelling ‘Ayta’. I know that, anthropologically, the de facto spelling is with an E and not a Y. But just thought might be good to have that in there, for information's sake.
n Prefer village-to-table, as the leaf in question bought by Vask, a restaurant in Manila, is not farmed but rather foraged by Ayta villagers.
o I remember here our long conversations when you were in Manila about the ethics of mining information from tribal communities, an act that is always cannibalistic to some extent. You mentioned the idea of whether all knowledge was fair game. And I ask: is visibility given by another, a non-tribe member, always a good thing?
The tribal chieftain I worked with expressed a distrust of and exhaustion with researchers coming, for hundreds of years, to take their customs and put them in books with their name (rather than the tribe's) as author.
The concept of tribal intellectual property is a significant one, and this kind of intellectual property could work differently from regular intellectual property because of the long tradition of exploitation to which indigenous communities have always been subject. Perhaps if we put forth the idea that, no matter how ‘generative’ one's project may be, if it is based on tribal knowledge, a certain revolutionary tax must be paid. And authorship (or co-authorship) should always be attributed to the tribe, as the source of knowledge.
In the cookbook we published about Ayta recipes, Tribal Kitchen – as in many of our publications under the imprint Hardworking Goodlooking – no author is explicitly identified, though all collaborators are mentioned in the colophon. But even with this and other such ethical decisions in place, I still include myself in the ranks of those who have exploited tribal communities. Even with all of the best intentions put forth, the anthropological or ethnographic act in itself is a consumption of an Other culture. It is a violent act, however painful it may be for the explorer-documenter to admit. I cannot fully say I am happy with Lupang (8-channel film) and Tribal Kitchen and its offshoots. Currently taking a break from this multi-morphous project because it was taking too much of a toll on me, emotionally and financially, though the village-to-table route still functions without my intervention. I feel that until I have resolved key issues within the writing of the cookbook and the display of the film, I cannot republish Tribal Kitchen or re-exhibit Lupang in its entirety.
WIPP. Work in Painful Progress.
p Why not both? One does not cancel out the other. I think both are in the same line of importance, yet I agree that a different canon of what is ‘aesthetically’ good might sometimes come in to play.
Relational art might be more about the social interactions than the artistic object-output, but I feel there is a difference in definition begging to be addressed here. What is social practice vs. what is relational art? Perhaps more than a difference in aesthetic judgements (this would serve maybe to distinguish social practice from NGO art?), it is also about a bottom-line contribution to the community. How do you better the quality of life, line of livelihood, or self-worth perceptions of a community (social practice) rather than focusing only on mustering a beautiful, critical or poetic interpersonal exchange (relational art)?
q Reconfiguring! Reorienting the judgement of what is aesthetic! Not devaluing :( Just moving the goal posts, I guess, of what is considered valuable. And not just in terms of the spiritual concept of aesthetics or (dare I say) beauty, but also in terms of what is purely related to visual language as well.
r Why does radicality (necessarily) have to be violent, destructive? It is a very oriental, very Filipino approach even, to choose the creation of harmony, which can be just as radical and political and subversive as surface-level aggravation.
s What to do with dirty money if they don't let you criticize its dirtiness? This is relatable to all fields of artistic production but especially pressing for social practitioners.
Relating to my previous comment, I do agree that to choose harmony often involves a denial of political subcontext. Again, another contradiction. This work is fairly fraught with them.
t Not when you are creating consensus, for example, in pointing out toxic attitudes latent in the social value structure. The pressure to be ‘agit’ can be so cismale, so cisradical.
u The responsibility of proposing revolution: if you manage to destroy the system that subjugates a community, do you have a responsibility to come up with the alternative? I don't know. I'm inclined to answer yes. Let's say: you make a film about how mining corporations are encroaching upon tribal land and then actually accomplish the feat of closing down a mine which may be giving jobs to tribesmembers. Since it was your film and activism that led to the change of status quo, are you beholden to the community for providing alternative sources of income and employment? These questions aren't asked often and loudly enough, in my experience. Partly because the answers might lie outside the jurisdiction of the artist, who may or may not be equipped to deal with the aftermath. Who may or may not have the energy or financial backing to roll out a longer-term rehabilitation program. Or perhaps the ‘artist’ is more concerned with the fireworks in a gallery than the footprint in a community.
Maybe ethical amelioration is pointless in merely activist/political art, but then there may be a difference between that kind of art and social practice, which (ideally, not always possible) is a commitment not just to toppling but to providing alternatives to social injustice. It's no longer enough to just call attention to and destroy what is unacceptable. A photojournalist can do that (sort of). This recalls the fallacious idea that making images of war and disseminating them will end war, something the digital information and mass communication age has proven untrue. Beyond making art for the consumption of the artistic community and its outliers, perhaps social practice should go way further into the process of formulating new modes of living, working, surviving and co-existing. This makes the work doubly difficult, costly, time- and labour-intensive, exhausting, overly ambitious and overwhelming.
I'm so not there yet. I'm more in the dying trying phase.
v Relatively. Maybe more OK with the amount of thought and intention put behind the choices than fully secure that the choices were right in themselves.
w #socialpracticepityparty
#crymeariver
#crymeariverforrealthough
#realfeelz
x Also activism and dissent through art, as seen during the Marcos dictatorship. But I think you talk about this later. Spoiler alert!
y Would mention Silverlens Gallery by name here, as they did start the whole trend with tremendous muscle and will. Also the fact that it's female-owned gives the gallery that much more props value. I may have certain issues with Silverlens and the art fair honeymoon it's spawned, but credit where it's due, always, and especially to women and girls in this patriarchal stronghold. They did professionalize the industry and bring much visibility to current artists. Without them (and the independent film industry) I would not be here. None of us would.
z Sweet baby Jesus, thank you for this.
aa I love this word choice. Shades of bagoong (fermented shrimp paste).
ab Only partially, if at all. Most of the funding comes from my doing white-label service production jobs for foreign documentarists or ad agencies. Sometimes grants, but those are few and far between. Also, charging for residency space and related production/network generation for visiting residents is another important source of income. Hardworking Goodlooking publishing is a hole of financial loss but what has emerged is a graphic design studio practice that is beginning to report income with clients like Columbia GSAPP Books and the Spanish Embassy in Manila.
ac Also, why does social justice (or practice) in Philippine art have to be linked exclusively to Marxism? The CPP (Communist Party of the Philippines) – with their leader, Joma Sison, exiled in Utrecht – seems at times so far removed from the fact that the socialist experiment has failed contemporary society. I am heavily inclined to the left, but do not wish to align exclusively and single-mindedly to the far, far left. It adds a layer of complication that I don't personally feel I want to subscribe to all the time. And because of this decision, I'm often labeled as ‘not activist enough’. There are many forms of social experimentation outside of orthodox Marxism (or constantly being referential to Marxism), though of course its ideals, especially in relation to material and immaterial labor, are attractive and a source of inspiration. This is why, though I do consider the work of my artistic alias, The OCD, a form of activism, I cannot label myself an activist in the Philippine sense, as that would open up the reductive can of worms of are-you-Marxist-enough-for-me-baby. Though I could argue that activism embraces a broader spectrum, here the interpretation is still very much dichotomized into leftist (communist) or not leftist (everything else).
ad It's actually now the West Philippine Sea, by UNCLOS arbitration.
ae <3
af Cry. So true. You have to be a madwoman. Not for the faint of heart or well adjusted to society. Thanks for amplifying and legitimizing a voice that wears thin through the murky waters. Back to the precarious grind. More soon.
1. A neologism integrating ‘hip hop’ and ‘activist’. While hip hop activism has been an important movement in the last decades of the twentieth century and is today becoming linked to the wider Black Lives Matter movement (via individuals such as the artist Talib Kweli), the term as used here is slightly light-hearted.
2. For more on the huge potential of HHBE, see Love (Citation2015).
3. Now the more official bio is over, ‘Balaguer’ will return to ‘Clara’.
4. See http://projectrowhouses.org/.
5. See http://theastergates.com/section/117693_Dorchester_Projects.html.
6. See http://artreview.com/opinion/dispatches_from_new_york/.
7. See http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/chan/welcome.html.
8. As numerous theorists have explored, it is a practice which has many correspondences and historical antecedents in practices such as community art, happenings, relation art, and other similarly participative practices.
9. See Desai (Citation2002).
10. See http://www.officeocd.com/projects/lupang-the-land-that/ for more.
11. See http://officeocd.com/comingsoon/tribal-kitchen-the-aytas/ for more.
12. With Manila restaurant Vask, see http://www.galleryvask.com/Home-Page/ for more.
13. This checklist / manifesto also includes reminders to ‘“look up” at your surroundings … [and] study your own references and landscape’, to ‘embrace criticism by offering it first and pre-emptively unto your own practice or self’, as well as the conviction ‘to build upon old knowledge by contributing new ideas, or getting over the fear of making mistakes’. It also requests that we ‘express gratitude, like for example by acknowledging your sources. In footnotes, in line with the text, in person, via DM’. As such, I should note that this list has been taken from an interview with Tin Dabbay in Pill Magazine: http://pillmagazine.com/culture-shock-clara-balaguer/.
14. Santiago Sierra is the artist most commonly cited here. Yet while he has produced a large oeuvre of practices, many of which are truly outstanding, the focus always remains on Sierra’s most ‘shocking’ of works, in particular his famous tattoo images. Unfortunately, this then serves to reduce the complexity of his position. See http://www.santiago-sierra.com/index_1024.php for more.
15. As Hardworking Goodlooking, Clara has shown at the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 annually since 2014 and more recently the LA Art Book Fair at LA MOCA. As OCD, she was recently invited to participate at the 11th Gwangju Biennale and has also exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum, Casa Asia Madrid, Galeria H2O, New York University, Hangar and La Capella. Clara has also lectured internationally at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rhode Island School of Design, Hanyang University Seoul, Triple Canopy, MoMA PS1, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. In the Philippines, she has exhibited and spoken at the Ayala Museum, Ateneo de Manila and University of the Philippines Diliman, but has not exhibited her work or projects widely at all. There is hence quite a clear national/international disparity in her outputs.
16. Here is not the place for a fuller analysis of the history of art in the Philippines. For more, however, see Guillermo (Citation1987, Citation2001) and Flores (Citation2009, Citation2013).
17. The globally acclaimed artist Norberto ‘Peewee’ Roldan, for example, one of the Philippines’ most potent practitioners and community organizers, worked full-time within the local television industry up until the late 1990s. Only after that point was he able to fully sustain himself through his art. He had been, however, a prominent member of the art community since the early 1980s. See https://www.guggenheim.org/map-artist/norberto-roldan for more on Roldan’s practice.
18. Curated by Patrick Flores, the 2015 Philippine Pavilion was a huge success, both critically and politically. The forthcoming 2017 iteration, curated by Joselina ‘Yeyey’ Cruz, is due to be equally as compelling, and furthermore will be situated within the Arsenale grounds of the Biennale, a significant development.
19. Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez’s ‘Art and the Market: Pining for a Breather?’ (Citation2009) is a superb description of the rock from an insider perspective.
20. In particular, artist-run spaces such as Green Papaya (http://www.greenpapayaartprojects.org/) and 98b (http://www.98-b.org/) have had significant success in terms of community-building (locally and internationally) as well as in terms of creating critical evolutions and movements.
21. I am thinking in particular of the Filipina artist Kiri Dalena. Her ‘Erased Slogans’ series is a particularly pertinent example of powerful politically engaged work.
22. The nomenclature of the West Philippine / South China Sea is a matter of contention. As Clara says, a 2016 arbitration by the Permanent Court of Arbitration under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea found in favour of the Philippines on a number of complex territorial issues (see https://pca-cpa.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/175/2016/07/PH-CN-20160712-Award.pdf). However, China has refused to accept the ruling.
23. Moreover, and even more problematically, this is without mentioning the explicitly neo-colonial manifestations of this practice – not merely the local NGO art, but the social practice as cultural imperialism model: the fact that when more conventional social practice does emerge in locations like the Philippines, it is most often at the behest of artists from the Global North and, even more concerningly, comes funded by foreign governments. It acts in the guise of soft power, a policy of paternalism, a benevolent hegemony. (See, for example Felipe Castelblanco’s work in the Philippines, funded through the US State Department. This is not a critique of the project itself, but simply an insight into the potentially problematic nature of its inception considering the historical relationships between the two countries: http://americanartsincubator.org/artists/felipe-castelblanco).