The Necessary Impulse and Its Others: Curating Practice Beyond Career
The Necessary Impulse and Its Others: Curating Practice Beyond Career
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
Curatorial thesis in one line: Art as practice must be read as a plural, ethically anchored labor that insists on testimony without excluding craft, pedagogy, or survival strategies; the claim that practice is only meaningful when it “says something about our time” is rhetorically potent but institutionally and epistemically limiting.
Curatorial Frame
This frame treats the artist’s “inner impulse to say something about my time” as a central but not exclusive axis for curatorial judgment. It foregrounds works that enact testimony, civic memory, and affective historiography while insisting that formal experiment, communal ritual, and economic survival are equally legitimate vectors of practice. The frame is written from the vantage of an art practitioner gatekeeper and cultural worker who must balance ethical stewardship, institutional accountability, and the precarious livelihoods of artists. The Philippine context—where Jose Tence Ruiz’s long practice and recent retrospectives model a life of sustained, irreverent engagement—illustrates how testimony and craft coexist across decades.
Comparative Table of Orientations
| Criterion | Impulse/Testimony | Career/Craft | Hybrid Curatorial Response |
|---|---:|---:|---|
| Primary value | Historical/ethical testimony | Professional advancement; mastery | Recognize both; weight context |
| Assessment | Depth of engagement | Market/credential metrics | Mixed rubrics: process + impact |
| Risk | Moral gatekeeping | Commodification | Exclusion without safeguards |
Disconfirming the Alternative on Its Merits and Premise
The alternative—that practice-as-career is the superior or sufficient model—fails on three counts. First, it conflates institutional metrics with artistic value, reducing plural practices to grantable outputs. Second, it privileges those with access to markets and networks, thereby reproducing inequity. Third, as a premise it is self-defeating: careers built only on credentialism produce brittle canons that cannot account for the affective, ephemeral, or ritual knowledge that art uniquely preserves. The empirical life of long-practicing artists in Metro Manila shows that sustained practice often combines survival strategies with testimonial urgency, undermining the binary.
Curatorial Narrative Critique
A curatorial narrative must be humane, ironic, and precise: it narrates how works refuse commodification while sometimes courting institutions to survive. Anecdotally, a mid-career artist once traded a painting for studio rent and later used that same canvas to stage a public lament—an act that demonstrates how economic precarity and ethical impulse are braided. The curator’s role is to make visible these braids: to write wall texts that honor process, to commission documentation that values ritual, and to design evaluation rubrics that reward testimony as much as technical virtuosity.
Expanded Summative Afterword
In sum, the impulse to “say something about our time” should be treated as one necessary criterion among many. Curatorial practice must institutionalize plural assessment, protect precarious labor, and resist teleological gatekeeping. Doing so preserves art’s civic voice while honoring the many other reasons people make art.
Sources and Footnotes
1. Ateneo de Manila University, “Jose Tence Ruiz celebrates 50 years,” 2023.
2. R.C. Ladrido, “Jose Tence Ruiz: Of those unspoken things,” VERA Files, 2023.
3. Positively Filipino, “The Relevant and Irreverent Jose Tence Ruiz,” 2023.
Bibliography Chicago Style
Ateneo de Manila University. 2023. “Jose Tence Ruiz celebrates 50 years of his diverse multi-media art practice with ‘Litanya, 1972-2022’ at Ateneo Art Gallery.” Ateneo de Manila University News.
Ladrido, R.C. 2023. “Jose Tence Ruiz: Of those unspoken things.” VERA Files.
Positively Filipino. 2023. “The Relevant and Irreverent Jose Tence Ruiz.”
Footnotes
1] See Ateneo de Manila University exhibition notice for Litanya and Ruiz’s self-published compilation. [
2] Ladrido’s review contextualizes Ruiz’s practice as an “anxious inventory.” [
3] Profiles in Positively Filipino trace Ruiz’s reflections on mortality and execution of long-term projects. [
The premise that art must be driven by an inner impulse to “say something about our time” is a defensible ethical stance but is analytically incomplete: it privileges expressive teleology over other legitimate aims of practice (craft, pedagogy, institutional critique, market survival). This critique situates that claim within contemporary debates about practice as research and the “practice paradigm,” and offers balanced implications for artists, institutions, and evaluators in Metro Manila and similar contexts.
Context and framing
- Premise under review: Artistic practice is meaningful only when motivated by an inner imperative to address the human condition and historical moment.
- Contemporary debate: Over the last two decades, artistic practice has been reframed as a form of research and knowledge production, producing a practice paradigm that both empowers embodied, sensory knowledge and raises questions about how to evaluate artistic claims.
Strengths of the premise
- Ethical urgency: Emphasizing an impulse to “say something about my time” foregrounds art’s civic and historical responsibilities, encouraging socially engaged work and critical reflection.
- Humanistic distinctiveness: The claim defends art’s unique epistemic role—art can render subjective, affective, and embodied knowledge that other disciplines struggle to capture.
Limitations and counterarguments
- Normative narrowness: The premise risks excluding practices motivated by formal exploration, craft mastery, or community ritual that do not foreground explicit commentary on “our time.” This exclusion can marginalize non-discursive traditions and economically precarious artists.
- Institutional consequences: Treating expressive intent as the primary legitimacy criterion can reproduce gatekeeping in academia and funding bodies that already struggle to recognize diverse outputs; artistic research itself faces recognition challenges within universities.
- Epistemic overreach: Claiming a singular teleology for art conflates why artists work with how art produces knowledge; the practice paradigm argues for plural epistemologies—sensory, procedural, and discursive—that coexist.
Comparative snapshot
| Criterion | Career oriented | Practice as impulse | Implications |
|---|---:|---|---|
| Primary motive | Economic advancement; CV building | Expressive urgency to address time | Shapes funding, exhibition, pedagogy |
| Evaluation metric | Market success; institutional recognition | Depth of critical engagement | Risks excluding formal/communal practices |
| Knowledge claim | Professional competence | Historical/ethical testimony | Requires different assessment rubrics |
| Institutional fit | Fits bureaucratic metrics | Fits practice-as-research models | Needs hybrid evaluation frameworks |
Recommendations for scholars and institutions
- Adopt plural evaluative frameworks that recognize formal innovation, community practice, and critical testimony equally.
- Avoid teleological gatekeeping: funders and universities should not make expressive intent the sole legitimacy test; instead, use mixed criteria (process documentation, audience impact, peer review).
- Localize the debate: in the Philippines and Metro Manila art ecosystems, prioritize support mechanisms that protect artists’ economic survival so that ethical impulses are not a luxury. (Contextual inference based on regional arts economies.)
Conclusion
The premise is rhetorically powerful and ethically persuasive but analytically partial. A robust academic stance treats the impulse to “say something about our time” as one of several valid orientations within a pluralistic practice paradigm; policy and pedagogy should reflect that plurality.
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If practice-as-career were a museum label, it would read: “Career: please do not touch.” The pun is not merely playful ornament; it names a structural paradox. To professionalize practice is to vitrify it—rendering living, contingent labor into a polished object for appraisal. In this vitrification, the artist’s studio becomes a showroom for credentials, and the messy, generative work of thinking-through-making is reduced to a sequence of legible transactions: residencies, catalogues, citation counts, and grant-line items. Call it the CV-ity of contemporary art: a hollowed semantic cavity where the language of value circulates but the thing itself—risk, failure, testimony—has been evacuated.
This is not to deny that careers matter. They feed families, secure studios, and buy time for risk. The critique is narrower and more surgical: when career metrics become the primary grammar of legitimacy, they reframe practice from a mode of inquiry into a mode of accumulation. The epistemic consequence is predictable. Works that demand slow attention, ambiguous affect, or communal ritual are penalized because they resist tidy documentation; conversely, projects that produce neat, reproducible outputs—installations that photograph well, performances that translate into conference papers—are rewarded. The result is a selection bias masquerading as meritocracy: institutions applaud what can be counted and archive what can be commodified.
From the vantage of an academic gatekeeper, the imperative is to translate rather than to capitulate. Translate the artist’s impulse into evidence without flattening it into metrics; insist that dossiers include process archives, failed iterations, and community testimony alongside polished outcomes. But translation is not neutral: it risks turning testimony into a footnote, urgency into a checkbox. The wry remedy is to institutionalize the capacity for being unaccountable—to create tenure rubrics that tolerate, even valorize, unquantifiable risk. In short: let careers exist, but refuse to let them be the only grammar by which practice speaks. If career is a tool, do not mistake the toolbox for the craftsman.
Art talk the UP Fine Arts Gallery...
“I will not say that you cannot think of your practice as a career, but the career is actually a bit shallow if you do not have that inner impulse that says, I have got to say something about my time. I have got to say something about the state of the only creature on the planet, so far, that can make art. Because until we have verified that some chimpanzees can do better than us, we are still the sole species that makes art.”
How does one maintain the integrity of art against the dominance of capitalist logic? Last March 17, Filipino artist ππΌππ² π§π²π»π°π² π₯ππΆπ led a talk, titled πΌπ§π© ππ¨ π ππ§πππ©πππ, π£π€π© π πΎππ§πππ§, on the motivations that sustain contemporary artmaking. Beginning with the pervasive reach of capitalism, he considers how framing art as a practice, rather than a career, may be key to sustaining it in conditions of precarity.
Ruiz anchored his discussion on select titles from his body of work that dates back to the 1970s. He revisited the conceptual points of departure that gave rise to these titles, which were primarily shaped by the political and social urgencies of their time. While monetary reward and social recognition may inform one’s motives, Ruiz suggested that these recede when art is understood as a practice. Economic precarity may increasingly threaten artistic labor, but he underscores that art as a practice persists for reasons that transcend material incentive: “You had to do it because something inside was gnawing at you. Something inside was eating at you. Something inside said, ‘I will not survive if I don’t do this regardless.’”
Thus, what comes to the fore instead is the irresistible impulse to respond to one’s milieu—to care, to resist, or to fight for our times, as artists and human beings part of a broader community.
πΌπ§π© ππ¨ π ππ§πππ©πππ, π£π€π© π πΎππ§πππ§ was organized as part of the recently-concluded legacy exhibition of Araceli Limcaco-Dans, titled Cheloy: Impressions from a Beautiful Soul, in collaboration with the FA 202 (Theories in Art Practice II) class.
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