Abstract

This paper attempts to look at the contemporary global condition of Filipino art production by using the term “aestheticscapes”1 as a critical category of analysis. The confluence of the terms “aesthetics” and “-scapes” allows us to stretch the language of aesthetic production in a global scale of interactions, exchanges, contacts, circulations, negotiations, and amalgamations of geo and ethnoaesthetic positions. Significantly, “aestheticscapes” magnify the conditions of epistemic relations between global powers and discourses of the agencies of the artists via history, geography, aesthetic epistemes, and other social narratives. By looking at the installation artworks of selected Filipino diasporic, migrant, and mobile artists; this paper proposes that the conditions of global openness and mobility of ideas and people produce possibilities of reimagining and reworlding art history and art theory using the narrative of diasporic, migrant and mobile lives of artists and their works. This paper also suggests that aestheticscapes construct a platform of epistemic inquiry that fleshes out the different perspectival situatedness and conditions of aesthetic positions in global artworld and world art (studies).



Keywords

Diaspora, Aesthetics, Philippine Art, Marcos Regime, Installation art, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Critical Theory, Globalization

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Kritika Kultura
Department of English
School of Humanities
Ateneo de Manila University

The Philippine Commission on Higher Education (CHED) declares Kritika Kultura as a CHED-recognized journal under the Journal Challenge Category of its Journal Incentive Program.

International Board of Editors

Jan Baetens
Professor
Faculty of Arts
Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven (Belgium)

Joel David
Professor of Cultural Studies
Inha University (South Korea)

Michael Denning
Professor of American Studies and English
Department of English
Yale University (US)

Faruk
Faculty of Cultural Sciences
Universitas Gadjah Mada (Indonesia)

Regenia Gagnier
Professor of English
University of Exeter (UK)

Leela Gandhi
John Hawkes Professor of the Humanities and English
Brown University (US)

Inderpal Grewal
Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies
Professor of South Asian Studies, Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies
Yale University (US)

Peter Horn
Professor Emeritus and Honorary Lifetime Fellow
University of Cape Town (South Africa)
Honorary Professor and Research Associate in German Studies
University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)

Anette Horn
Professor of German Studies
University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)

David Lloyd
Distinguished Professor of English
University of California, Riverside (US)

Bienvenido Lumbera
National Artist for Literature
Professor Emeritus
University of the Philippines

Rajeev S. Patke
Director of the Division of Humanities
Professor of Humanities
Yale NUS College (Singapore)

Vicente L. Rafael
Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History
University of Washington (US)

Vaidehi Ramanathan
Department of Linguistics
University of California, Davis (US)

Temario Rivera
Professorial Lecturer
Department of Political Science
University of the Philippines

E. San Juan, Jr.
Philippines Studies Center (US)

Neferti X.M. Tadiar
Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Barnard College (US)
Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
Columbia University (US)

Antony Tatlow
Honorary Professor of Drama
Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)