Broadsheet 41.4

contemporary visual ar t+culture b r o a d s h e e T

VOLUME 41.4 DECEMBER 2012

CRITICISM | THEORY | ART

SHIFTING SANDS

Rokni Haerizadeh (Iran) Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck (Venezuela) | Media Farzin (USA) Joana Hadjithomas | Khalil Joreige (Lebanon) Khadim Ali (Afghanistan/Australia) Khaled Sabsabi (Lebanon/Australia)

Khadim Ali, The Haunted Lotus (detail), 2011-12 Photo courtesy the artist

CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA 14 PORTER STREET PARKSIDE SOUTH AUSTRALIA 5063 Tel +61 [08] 82 72 26 82 Fax +61 [08] 83 73 42 86 www.cacsa.org.au

the contemporary art centre of sa is assisted by the commonwealth government through the australia council, it arts funding and advisory body, and the south australian government through arts sa and health promotions sa. the contemporary art centre of sa is supported by the visual arts and craft strategy, an initiative of the australian, state and territory governments

I nternode presents

l a v i t s e f s ’ d l or w e h t D A M O W

GrouipnG Bookounts disc + s of e6t p u o r G ick all t types

The Hills Cider Company.

31 JANUARY — 3 MARCH 2013

Daniel Boyd History is Made at Night Mathieu Gallois Wellington Pat Hoffie you gotta love it

Artspace is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.

Artspace is assisted by the New South Wales Government through Arts NSW and by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its principal arts funding body. Artspace is a member of CAOs (Contemporary Art Organisations Australia) and Res Artis (International Association of Residential Art Centres).

43–51 Cowper Wharf Road Woolloomooloo NSW 2011 Sydney Australia www.artspace.org.au

T +61 2 9356 0555 artspace@artspace.org.au Office 10am–6pm, Mon–Fri Gallery 11am–5pm, Tues–Sun

Image: Daniel Boyd, History is Made at Night, 2012, production still courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney and KalimanRawlins, Melbourne

MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART pRESENTS

richard bell 5 FEbRUARY - 13 ApRIl 2013

Ground Floor, Building F Monash University, Caulfield Campus 900 Dandenong Road Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia

www.monash.edu.au/muma Telephone +61 3 9905 4217 muma@monash.edu Tues – Fri 10am – 5pm; Sat 12 – 5pm

Richard Bell, Scratch an Aussie 2008 courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane t

Anna Carey

essay by Andrew Leach and Alexandra Brown 36-page publication available in December

supporting photomedia art in partnership with Queensland Centre for Photography QCP: www.qcp.org.au

PIMCO: australia.pimco.com

Queensland Centre for Photography acknowledges the assistance of the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

QCP

Touring AusTrAliA And new ZeAlAnd 2012–13 8 december – 2 mArch / insTiTuTe of modern ArT, brisbAne 23 mArch – 19 mAY / cAmPbellTown ArTs cenTre 2013 / ciTY gAllerY wellingTon 2013 / AucKlAnd ArT gAllerY Toi o TāmAKi Organised and TOUred by ChrisTChUrCh arT gallery Te PUna O WaiWheTU in assOCiaTiOn WiTh The insTiTUTe Of MOdern arT, brisbane

AccomPAnied bY A mAjor PublicATion AvAilAble mArch 2013 shane Cotton The Hanging Sky (detail) 2007. acrylic on linen. Collection of Peggy scott and david Teplitzky

GRAZIA TODERI

This is a Perth International Arts Festival Event.

Supported by Visual Arts Program Partner Wesfarmers Arts.

5 FEBRUARY - 14 APRIL 2013

JOHN CURTIN GALLERY

In her first solo exhibition in Australia, Grazia Toderi shares her alluring digital visions that are both enthralling and unsettling. Toderi’s monumental video installations have been described as ‘frescoes of light’ that suspend you within the wonder of a luminous nightscape.

Open Monday to Friday 11am - 5pm, Saturday & Sunday 12pm - 4pm.

For more information phone +61 8 9266 4155, email gallery@curtin.edu.au or visit johncurtingallery.curtin.edu.au Grazia Toderi, Atlante Rosso #1, 2012. 166 x 125 cm, cibachrome on Dibond, 1/5.

CRICOS Provider Code 00301J CU-JCG-0044/BRAND CUJCG0035 Curtin University is a trademark of Curtin University of Technology

CUJCG0035-HP(240x135) CVAC Col Press.indd 1

11/14/12 3:30 PM

VCA SCHOOL OF ART

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As a student you will be guided by some of Australia’s most progressive art educators and respected artists within a creative learning environment.

Our programs include: • Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) • Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) (Visual Art) • Graduate Certificate in Visual Art • Master of Contemporary Art • Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art) by Research See our graduating students’ work at the Masters Exhibition, 4-9 December, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, 40 Dodds St Southbank.

Pip Ryan, Master of Fine Art (Research), Happy Orang, 2011. Photograph by Drew Echberg

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For course information, visit www.vca.unimelb.edu.au/art

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Associate Degree of Visual Art | Bachelor of Visual Art | Bachelor of Visual Art (Hons) Be one of the first to join our new campus at Glenside Cultural Precinct in 2013.

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Adelaide Central School of Art offers intensive training for students looking to develop a career as a practicing artist. We are an independent, accredited Higher Education Provider that delivers tertiary degree courses in addition to a range of short courses, workshops and masterclasses. Our studio-based programs focus on art history and theory, drawing, painting and sculpture with an emphasis on structured learning, building practical skills and intellectual processes.

Small classes and one-on-one interaction with our talented lecturers, who are all leading practitioners in the field in which they teach, contributes to an environment where creativity excels. § Full-time or part-time study options, day and evening classes § Extended 34 week academic year § Pro Hart Scholarship open to Year 12 students § Defer fees through FEE-HELP Commencing in 2013 Adelaide Central School of Art will offer a BVA (Hons) for students who already hold an undergraduate degree in visual art and are looking to enhance their knowledge and skills in an intense studio-based program, working with supervisors who are leading contemporary arts practitioners.

Watch video interviews with our graduates and staff by Sasha Grbich at http://vimeo.com/centralschool Applications close 7 January 2013 Classes commence 18 February 2013 Late enrolments may be considered image Adelaide Central School of Art’s new Teaching and Studio Building, Glenside Cultural Precinct artist impression by Grieve Gillett Architects Until January 2013: From February 2013:

45 Osmond Terrace, Norwood SA 5067 226 Fullarton Road, Glenside SA 5065 info@acsa.sa.edu.au www.acsa.sa.edu.au

Affiliated with Flinders University and the Helpmann Academy

i Adela

ival Centre’s Visual de Fest rforming Arts Col Arts and lection prese Pe nt

CREATING THE

CHRISTMAS PAGEANT M AGIC An exhibition celebrating 80 years of Adelaide’s annual Christmas Pageant.

8 Dec 2012 – 27 Jan 2013 Artspace Gallery and Festival Theatre Foyer

fremantle arts centre

we don’t need a map a martu experience of the western desert

17 nov – 20 jan

Free

Family Fun

exhibition opening Join us to celebrate the opening on

Saturday 8 Dec from 2-5pm

on Artspace Plaza, upper level Adelaide Festival Centre.

Creative indigenous partnership More info at adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au

season 2o13

4O

AdelAide

FestivAl Centre C e l e b rat i n g 4O years

Creative indigenous partnership

principal partner

principal partner

JANUARY 2013 THE WRITING PROJECT 9 - 26 January 2013 Opening 6pm Wed 9 January 2013 (gallery floor talk from 5pm) for more info visit feltspace.org/the-writing-project

FEBRUARY 2013 JULIA MCINERNEY | White Air Anatomy SODA_JERK | The Time that Remains 6 - 23 February 2013 Opening 6pm Wed 6 February 2013 UPCOMING YASMIN SMITH + KENZEE PATTERSON / KATIA CARLETTI Open hours: Wed-Sat: 1-4pm 12 Compton Street Adelaide 5000 www.feltspace.org feltspace@gmail.com

created by: sundari carmody

doc page no. 3

FELT-Broadsheet-Dec2012

Image: Soda_Jerk, The Time that Remains (detail), 2012, 2-channel digital video, 11.55 mins, courtesy the artists

DECEMBER 2012 FILL FELT UP | One-night-only auction / gala + program launch 5pm Fri 7 December

1/2 pg horizontal

The basic project of art is‌to close the gap between you and everything that is not you Robert Hughes

S T u dy a rT h i S To ry with the arT GaLLEry oF SouTh auSTraLia

2013 postgraduate courses: Curatorial and Museum Studies, European Art, Modern Art, Modern Australian Art and Indigenous Art online courses: Australian Art, European Art, Indigenous Art and Japanese Art For more information visit www.arthistory.adelaide.edu.au, phone 08 8313 5755 or email lisa.mansfield@adelaide.edu.au Installation view Deep Space: New acquisitions from the Australian contemporary art collection featuring Gemma Smith, Boulder #6 (radiant), 2010; South Australian Government Grant 2010, Art Gallery of South Australia.

Contributors Emma Budgen: Programs Manager/Senior Curator, The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt; previous Director of Artspace, Auckland, and Curatorial Director of Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Auckland; recent curatorial projects include Saskia Leek: Desk Collection, The Dowse Art Museum; Crystal City: Contemporary Asian Artists, The Dowse; and Cao Fei: Utopia, IMA, Brisbane, Artspace, Auckland, The Dowse and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery; has written for publications including Art & Australia, Artlink, Art New Zealand and various artist books and catalogues Rex Butler: Teaches in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queendland specialising in contemporary and Australian art; currently working on a book on Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?

Colin Chinnery: Artist and curator based in Beijing; Director in 2009 and 2010 of ShContemporary Art Fair in Shanghai; Chief Curator/Deputy Director, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), Beijing; Arts Manager, British Council, Beijing 2003-06 Andrew Clifford: Curator, Centre for Art Research, The University of Auckland; curatorial projects include Reuben Paterson: Bottled Lighting, Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland and Peloton, Sydney, 2012; and Living Room: Metropolis Dreaming, Auckland Council, 2011; recent essays in John Reynolds monograph Certain Words Drawn, Erewhon Calling: Experimental Sound in New Zealand, and a chapter on invented instruments for Home, Land and Sea: Situating Music in Aotearoa; recipient of the Creative NZ/Asia:NZ curator’s fellowship to Asia; contributor to many journals including Eyeline, Art Asia-Pacific, Art New Zealand and Art News New Zealand; has general interests in media and time-based arts, particularly sound or relationships between music and art, as well as art of the Asia-Pacific region Natasha Conland: Curator Contemporary Art, Auckland Art Gallery; recent curatorial projects include Made Active: The Chartwell Show, on sculpture and performance (2012), Opening exhibitions Simultaneously Modern: Et Al., Peter Robinson, Dane Mitchell (2011), Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon: The 4th Auckland Triennial (2010); previous exhibitions include Mystic Truths (2007), the 2006 SCAPE Biennial of Art in Public Space, co-curator of the CAFÉ 2 project for the Busan Biennale, South Korea; curated et al.’s the fundamental practice for New Zealand’s representation to the Venice Biennale (2005); writes regularly on contemporary art and is co-editor of Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture published annually by the E.H. McCormick Library, Auckland Art Galler Iftikhar Dadi: Associate Professor, Department of History of Art; Chair, Department of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; has published numerous scholarly works, including the recent book Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (2010), and co-edited Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (2012) and Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (2001); editorial advisory board member BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies; curated or co-curated Lines of Control, Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art (2012), Tarjama/Translation, Queens Art Museum (2009) and Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art (2010); and Anwar Jalal Shemza-Take 1: Calligraphic Abstraction (2009), Green Cardamom, London; as a practicing artist, he collaborates with Elizabeth Dadi and has shown widely internationally; exhibited in Third Asia-Pacific Triennial (1999) Michael Desmond: Independent curator and writer whose publications include ‘Present Tense: An imagined grammar of portraiture in the digital age’ (2010); ‘Imagining Space: Jacky Redgate 1980–2003’ (2005); ‘Leonardo da Vinci: The Codex Leicester’ (2001); ‘Love Hotel’ (1997); ‘Islands: Contemporary installation from Europe, America, Asia and Australia’ (1996) (exhibition catalogue with Kate Davidson); ‘1968’ (1995) (exhibition catalogue with Christine Dixon) and ‘European and American Paintings and Sculpture 1870-1970 in the Australian National Gallery’ (1992) (with Michael Lloyd); as well as numerous articles and reviewss Patrick Flores: Professor of Art Studies, Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines, which he chaired from 1997 to 2003; Curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila; Adjunct Curator, National Art Gallery, Singapore; one of the curators of Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art (2000) and the Gwangju Biennale (Position Papers) (200; Visiting Fellow, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1999) and Asian Public Intellectuals Fellow (2004); among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999), Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (2006), and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008); grantee of the Asian Cultural Council (2010) and member of the Advisory Board of the exhibition The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 (2011), Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe and member of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council (2011) Lily Hibberd: Melbourne-based artist, writer and founding editor of un Magazine; represented by Galerie de Roussan, Paris; recent performances and exhibitions include The Woman in the Bridge, ArtBAR, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2012, and Anti-panopticon, Museum of Freud’s Dreams, Saint Petersburg, 2012, and Seeking a Meridian, Paris, 2011, and Benevolent Asylum (just for fun) with WART, Performance Space WALK, 2011; contributor to journals including Column, Eyeline, ART iT, and to exhibition publications such as Parallel Collisions, 2012 Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art catalogue Pat Hoffie: Brisbane-based artist who has worked in the Asia-Pacific region for the past three decades; curator in the first APTs; artist on two Asialink residencies; as researcher/artist with Dr. Caroline Turner on the Art and Human Rights projects and publications; and as an artist working with other artists in the region on the Fully Exploited Labour projects; currently director of SECAP (Sustainable Environment through Culture), Queensland College of Art, and is UNESCO Orbicom Chair in Communications, Griffith University Ranjit Hoskote: Bambay-based cultural theorist, curator, and poet; author of numerous books on Indian art and artists; since 1993, he has curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions of contemporary art including India’s first-ever national pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, Venice, 2011; co-curated (with artistic director Okwui Enwezor and co-curator Hyunjin Kim) the 7th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, 2008, and (with seven curators) Under Construction, Japan Foundation, Tokyo, 2000-02 Hou Hanru: Director of Exhibitions and Public Program and Chair of Exhibition and Museum Studies, San Francisco Art Institute 2006-12; has curated numerous exhibitions including Cities On The Move (1997–2000), Shanghai Biennale (2000), Gwangju Biennale (2002), Venice Biennale (French Pavilion, 1999, Zone Of Urgency, 2003, Chinese Pavilion, 2007), 2nd Guangzhou Triennial (2005), 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007), The Spectacle of the Everyday, 10th Lyon Biennale (Lyon, 2009); recently co-directed The World Biennial Forum No 1: SHIFTING GRAVITY with Ute Meta Bauer; currently curating 5th Auckland Triennial (New Zealand, May–August 2013) Claire Hsu: Co-Founder and Executive Director, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, widely regarded as one of the world’s leading public collections of primary and secondary source material about contemporary art in Asia Lee Weng Choy: president of the Singapore Section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA); artistic co-director, The Substation Arts Centre, Singapore 2000-09; has lectured at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Singapore, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; his essays have appeared in Broadsheet, Forum On Contemporary Art & Society, Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, Third Text, and Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez: Assistant Professor, University of the Philippines Department of Art Studies; curatorial consultant Lopez Museum (2005-2012); presently a member of the Advisory Board of Asia Art Archive, and guest curator 2011 Jakarta Biennale; her writing has appeared in Forum on Contemporary Art and Society, n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, C-Arts: Asian Contemporary Art and Culture, Metropolis M: Magazine on Contemporary Art, Pananaw: Philippine Journal of Visual Arts, and Ctrl+P: Journal of Contemporary Art Andrew Maerkle: Writer and editor based in Tokyo; Deputy Editor of the Japanese bilingual online publication ART iT, and contributor to numerous international publications Simon Soon: PhD Candidate in Art History, University of Sydney; participated in Japan Foundation JENYSES residency program in Tokyo, Manchester International Festival Talent Campus; written commissioned essays for National Visual Art Gallery of Malaysia and National Art Gallery of Singapore; contributor to a number of journals and blogs including C-Arts, New Mandala and Modern Art Asia; writes broadly on both modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art history

c o n t e m p o r a r y v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b ro a d s h e e T Editor Assistant Editor Advertising Manager Publisher Design

volume 41.4 DECember 2012

Alan Cruickshank Wendy Walker Matt Huppatz Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Inc. Alan Cruickshank, Nasim Nasr

ISSN 0819 677X © Copyright 2012, Broadsheet, the authors and artists.

No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission.

Broadsheet is published quarterly by the Contemporary Art Centre of SA Inc. print post approved PP53 1629/00022 The Contemporary Art Centre of SA is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments Editorial inquiries, advertising and subscriptions may be sent to the Editorial Office: Broadsheet 14 Porter Street Parkside South Australia 5063 Tel +61 [08] 8272 2682 Fax +61 [08] 8373 4286 Email: editor@cacsa.org.au www.cacsa.org.au Subscriptions: Contact the Administrator, Contemporary Art Centre of SA—admin@cacsa.org.au The views and/or opinions expressed in Broadsheet are those of the contributing writers and not necessarily those of the editor, staff or Board of the CACSA

Editorial Advisory Board International:

RICHARD GRAYSON UK Artist, lecturer and writer, London BORIS KREMER UK Curator, translator and writer, London ASTRID MANIA Germany Editor, writer and curator, Berlin CHRISTOPHER MOORE Czech Republic Writer, Prague; Editor-in-Chief, Randian online VASIF KORTUN Turkey Director SALT, Istanbul JULIE UPMEYER Turkey Artist, Initiator, Caravansarai, Istanbul RANJIT HOSKOTE India Curator, writer, Mumbai COLIN CHINNERY China Artist, writer and curator, Beijing BILJANA CIRIC China Independent curator, Shanghai JOHN BATTEN Hong Kong Curator, art critic, writer PATRICK FLORES Philippines Professor Dept Art Studies University of Philippines, Manila SUE HAJDU Vietnam Artist, writer, Ho Chi Minh City RAY LANGENBACH Malaysia Artist, curator, writer, lecturer and critic, Kuala Lumpur LEE WENG CHOY Singapore Writer and critic EUGENE TAN Singapore Director Special Projects, Singapore Economic Development Board TONY GODFREY Singapore Gallery director, writer GOENAWAN MOHAMAD Indonesia Essayist, journalist, poet and cultural critic, Jakarta NATASHA CONLAND New Zealand Curator Contemporary Art, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tämaki, Auckland

Australia:

ROBERT COOK Perth Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia RUSSELL STORER Brisbane Curatorial Manager, Asian & Pacific Art, Queensland Art Gallery REX BUTLER Brisbane Writer, editor and senior lecturer, University of Queensland BLAIR FRENCH Sydney Curator, writer, editor and Executive Director, Artspace ADAM GECZY Sydney Artist, lecturer and writer CHARLES GREEN Melbourne Artist, curator, art critic and historian; Associate Professor, University of Melbourne IAN NORTH Adelaide Artist, writer and Adjunct Professor, School of Art, University of South Australia

c o n t e m p o r a r y v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b ro a d s h e e T COVER: Simon Goiyap, Koromb, 2012; from the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 8 December 2012—14 April 2013 Photo courtesy the artist

233

235

REVISITING TRADITION AND THE INCOMMENSURATE CONTEMPORARY Patrick Flores

241

twenty years on Pat Hoffie

244

THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL AND THE NOSTALGIA OF THE NINETIES Lee Weng Choy

247

DOUBLE CRISES: REGIONAL COMMENTARIES ON SIGNIFICANCE AND CONTRADICTIONS Hou Hanru, Ranjit Hoskote, Chaitanya Sambrani, Adam Geczy, John Clark, Claire Hsu

251

244

LABLE / BABEL Andrew Maerkle

254

CHANGE OF APTITUDE Colin Chinnery

258

WAGER ON COSMOPOLITANISM: ON THE 7TH ASIA PACIFIC TRIENNIAL Ranjit Hoskote

262

I FELL IN THE PACIFIC RIM. I FALL IN THE PACIFIC RIM. I WILL BE IN THE PACIFIC RIM. Natasha Conland

266

REFLECTIONS ON THE FIRST DECADE Iftikhar Dadi 254

270

MIDDLE AGED AT TWENTY? Michael Desmond

274

largesse Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez

276

ALL OR ANYTHING AT ALL Rex Butler

280

APT7 FOCUS TOPICS: PACIFIC STRUCTURES TIES THAT BIND Andrew Clifford

282

266

setting the stage Emma Budgen

284

FUTURE ARCHIVISM IN THE OPEN AIR OF HISTORY AND THE APT7 20 YEAR ARCHIVE Lily Hibberd

287

URBANISATION AND THE SHIFTING ART WORLDS Simon Soon

274

volume 41.4 DECEMBER 2012

Page 232: Michael Cook, Civilised #1, 2012 Opposite: Michael Cook, Civilised #5, 2012 Photos courtesy the artist

2 3 3 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 4 2 012

TWO DECADES OF THE ASIA PACIFIC TRIENNIAl This issue of CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART+CULTURE BROADSHEET essentialises the history of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art since its vanguard inception in 1993, to coincide with the 7th edition of the APT, 8 December 2012—14 April 2013, at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) and Queensland Art Gallery (QAG), with national and international perspectives on its original aims and subsequent changes of direction, and its status and relevance to the greater Asian (and Pacific) cultural arena. Such a focus is timely given the Australian Government’s recent release of its ‘Australia in the Asian Century’ White Paper that proposes (albeit contentiously) the next century as ‘The Asian century’ and “an Australian opportunity”. While a supporting media release from the Minister for the Arts Simon Crean, stated that “the ‘Australia in the Asian Century’ White Paper sets a clear objective for cultural diplomacy and exchange to drive a stronger, deeper and broader engagement with Asian nations”, this year’s APT7 marks the twentieth anniversary of its cultural engagement with Asia’s art and artists, notwithstanding other levels of the national visual arts and publishing platforms that have similarly been interacting with the region through extensive cultural activity for a similar duration.

REVISITING TRADITION AND THE INCOMMENSURATE CONTEMPORARY

2 3 5 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 4 2 012

Patrick Flores In 1993, the First Asia Pacific Triennial opened in Brisbane with the theme ‘Tradition and Change’. To mark the first in a cycle of exhibitions in the region, the Queensland Art Gallery published an anthology on “contemporary art of Asia and the Pacific” bearing the same title. It might be worth thinking about today how a triennial enterprise of contemporary art would begin with tradition as a foundational paradigm. The aspect of change being part of the formulation is not at all unusual, given the prospective iteration of the moment of the triennial across time: its “again-ness” is guaranteed by the condition of change. It is rather the idea of “tradition” that complicates the project that purports to be contemporary. What is the compelling motivation to invoke tradition within the practice of the contemporary? Is tradition a mediation of locality or regionality?

Is the particularity of the locus of “Asia-Pacific” contingent on its being local and regional in relation to its possible negations: the national, the international, the Western, the global? How much of this anxiety is informed by nineteenth-century Orientalism, under the aegis of colonialism and imperialism, and twentieth-century Cold War operations? Is tradition not change and, therefore, not contemporary?

Is tradition by itself inadequate and needs working on to become contemporary?

Or is the contemporary forged in the conjuncture of “tradition and change,” an assemblage that may well be cognate of Asia-Pacific? If so, might it be more productive to hyphenate it as well, making it tradition-change to render itself co-incident with the place of contemporary art that is Asia-Pacific? Six years after the first APT, the Thai curator and historian Apinan Poshyananda curated an exhibition at the Asia Society in New York with the title Traditions/Tensions; the presence of the slash is a symptom of the unease of the conjunction that succeeds the term “tradition.”

Caroline Turner, Deputy Director of the Queensland Art Gallery and chief architect of the first three Triennials, reveals that the intention of the inaugural exhibition was to bring “the past into the present”.1 This is a persevering, tenacious, inveterate past in her estimation that maps out the region in terms of nation-states (e.g. India, Southeast Asia, East Asia, South Pacific) and structures contemporary art; it would be safe to speculate that without tradition, the entity “Asia-Pacific” would be meaningless within the contemporary and the contemporary within Asia-Pacific would not make sense without tradition. In both cases where tradition would be denied, it would just be neo-colonialism. According to her statement in 1993: “Today’s contemporary art is a product of tradition, historical cultural encounters, the confrontation with the West in more modern times, and the recent economic, technological and information changes which have pushed the world towards a global culture and greatly accelerated those interactions.”2 She elaborates that three years later “the survival of cultural identities thought lost emphasises the resilience of traditions, memory and history.

The consistent desire to revitalise and reinvest traditions and to celebrate those traditions anew is a consistent feature of artistic endeavour. Some new approaches reject Western imperatives; while others integrate and synthesise Western art and ideas with local cultural traditions”.3 The overriding discourse of Turner seems to be “syncretism”, which stresses some kind of admixture and appropriation and interrogates any pretension to purity or authenticity. Poshyananda for his part underscores tension as reinscribed in tradition; he explicates his curatorial foray in Asia Society in New York thus: “The slash in ‘Traditions/Tensions’ may cut across the boundaries of these nations, which share an overarching theme regarding problems of tension and hierarchisation in relation to cultural and traditional fixity.”4 For Poshyananda, it is inadequate to rely on hybridity as the encompassing theory of the Asian contemporary; the tension is intrinsic, that is, within tradition.

A contributor to his exhibition’s catalogue, Marian Pastor Roces, in fact, altogether forsakes the slash: “Tradition has always grappled with tension. Indeed, tradition is a discourse on tension. Otherwise, it would not be a tradition, a structure of continuity”.5

This reflection on the Asia Pacific Triennial revisits the trope of tradition solely based on texts generated by the exhibition, prompted by both aesthetic and theoretical propositions surrounding a period when the effort to explore and consolidate an episteme, as it were, was at its most intense. The alternating polemical and scholarly register inflecting them characterises the relatively early phases of knowledge production in the region that understandably invested in the critique of the West and the ratification of a living and vital tradition as an index of entitlement to a range of obsessions: the ever-renewed and inexhaustible identity, locality, nation, history, memory and culture. The faith in tradition is so fervent that tradition is assumed to survive even the most overwhelming rupture and refunctioning; it may be compromised, but it can never be diminished because of its metabolic, ever-evolving nature, very much like modernism itself as grasped by a normative museum of modern art, like the Museum of Modern Art in New York.6 The braid of tradition-modernity-contemporaneity is exceptionally intricate.

The most cogent provocation that sets off this reconsideration of tradition in light of the contemporary comes from the anthropologist Nicholas Thomas, in his essay in the catalogue of APT2. He argues:

The traditional/contemporary dichotomy subsumes cultural expressions and histories to a narrative that is untrue to the uneven and problematic extension of modernity across regions such as Oceania. The cultural heterogeneity that persists through globalisation—and has been reinforced in reaction to it—is marked not by simple variety or diversity in contemporary art, but by almost incommensurable differences among contemporary aesthetic expressions.7 Thomas foregrounds two examples: the woven pandanus basket from the village of Melsisi on Pentecost Island, Vanuatu and John Pule’s painting Atepeli moe tuagafale (The heart and foundation of the house). He then explains how both works are “intimately connected” to their locales, but cautions that it “would be entirely wrong to suppose that they are ‘traditional’ artifacts”.8 In the case of the basket, it forms part of a complex system of things shaped by quotidian use, a handicraft industry, tourism, and the inclusion of such details as Christian crosses.

With regard to Pule’s painting, he contends that the artist “creates a shamanistic iconography, full of pain and anger, as well as sexual joy. His work draws loosely on Niuean barkcloth, but does not emulate traditional Polynesian genres in any rigid way”.9 In conclusion, he makes the point that both are “contemporary” but not “traditional”. It is worth quoting him copiously at this point: The basket is produced outside the art world and the global economy yet in close articulation with it. Its novel colours and words manifest the very interweaving of kinship, modernity, the tourist market, and the nation. Pule’s painting, on the other hand, is produced within the art world, yet speaks from and of a culture and sense of history that lies beyond both.

These are not simply differences in the content of art works of the kind that might be detected anywhere and everywhere, but distinctions between the forms that cultural expression can take.10 The stress on “differences in the content” and the “distinction between the forms” leads us to ponder some implications in what may well be an anthropological reckoning of art as constituted by form and content under the rubric of the contemporary. That said, the idea of the “social life of things” within the discipline has transcended such an antinomy and recent theory on the “image” conceived within an anthropological perspective might further reconstitute the materiality of art. If we kept this ongoing discussion in mind, we would be in a better position to appraise Thomas’ remarks about the “contemporary”, which speaks of the “present” and therefore is significantly ethnographic and at the same time of “art”, which is significantly aesthetic and art-historical. According to him: It could be suggested that the term “contemporary art”, if stretched across these differences, incorporates incommensurable things, and becomes meaningless. My view is rather that incommensurability is its meaning. Global relations of cultural exchange create frames in which heterogeneous cultural expressions are placed together in fora such as the Asia Pacific Triennial. The challenge the Triennial offers is that of seeing beyond the superficial equivalence implied by this framing. To appreciate the works’ incomparability is to respect the limits of globalisation itself.11 At this point, the condition of globalisation is deconstructed as a structure that has its limits, and inevitably, as a structure of limit. Corollarily, the condition of contemporary art renders possible the nature of incommensurability and finally of meaninglessness. The heterogeneity that a triennial of contemporary art convenes, according to Thomas, should not uncritically accept “equivalence” but rather recognise the possibility of incomparability as a contingency of the contemporary and the global. This said, we turn to the prospect of translation within contemporary art and the usefulness of proposing the cultural or the aesthetic as the mediating categories of this comparison or commensuration.

Is this possible?

The term “tradition” has been rearticulated in several declensions in the discourse of the Asia Pacific Triennial. And this text wishes to revisit these articulations in relation to the emerging but rather underdeveloped theory of the contemporary in the context of the intersecting demands of location, which is often haunted by the spectre of the traditional.

Opposite: Bruno Akau, Tabuan Kamut Mut, 2011 Photo courtesy the artist Pages 236-7: Greg Semu, Untitled (from ‘The Battle of the Noble Savage’ series) (detail), 2007 Photo courtesy the artist and Galerie Metropolis, Paris

2 37 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 4 2 012

CIVILISATION First is the place of tradition in the constellation of antiquity in which a region such as Southeast Asia, for instance, figures as a dispersion. In the catalogue of APT2, the art historian Kanaga Sabapathy critiques the manner in which the modernity and art of Southeast Asia has been cast as a diffusion of the “Great Tradition” of India and China. Here, “tradition” assumes the magnitude of a civilisation. Sabapathy probes such oft-cited texts as ‘History of Indian and Indonesian Art’ by Ananda Coomaraswamy and ‘The Indianised States of Southeast Asia’ by George Coedes and reasons that Southeast Asia gains the privilege of identity through India; in fact Coomaraswamy calls the region “Farther India”. Coedes for his part would reduce Southeast Asia to the process of Indianisation or Sankritisation, imposing “a programmatic design of Indian influence onto Southeast Asia… tantamount to propounding a colonial doctrine”.12 Here, the true tradition is Indian, co-opting the Kunstwollen of the Southeast Asian, as may be intuited in the interpretation of the image of Harihara from Prasat Andet in Cambodia. Coomaraswamy describes the latter in terms of its diffusion of Pallava art of the same period in India and not in terms of its peculiar translocal form. By staging this grand narrative, Sabapathy draws our attention to the curious relationship between so-called pre-modern Southeast Asia and its modern and contemporary configurations in art, such as those manifesting at the Asia Pacific Triennial. The problematic of identity based on an ecumene like India may be cognate with efforts to define a “region” or a regional art world, and extensively of a global art world. According to him: The unease generated by these representations and manoeuvers is comparable to that which surfaces in discourses in modern art which tend to deal with or resist paradigms from the West as being sovereign. While these engagements are necessary and therefore applauded, critical attention and enterprise appear to stagnate, even atrophy, along these fronts; the situation has led to an ironic twist in the state of art historical scholarship.13 This art historical scholarship of the pre-modern has acutely hewn the possible art historical scholarship of the contemporary turn through the mediation of the “traditional”, which largely translates as the quest for locus or origin in postcolonies. Furthermore, it is important to note that this “tradition” has usually been seen on the world stage via the universal exposition paradigm and therefore within a colonial and Orientalist schema in the nineteenth century and the first half of the succeeding century. It is, therefore, important to view Sabapathy’s commentary in relation to more recent treatises such as Marieke Bloembergen’s Colonial Spectacles: The Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies at the World Exhibitions, 1880-1931 (2006) that chronicles how Indonesia and its coloniser the Netherlands have been represented in world expositions—implicating the traditionality or ethnicity of the colony within a world context and bringing into the frame the disciplines of archaeology and historical anthropology in the explanation of the presence of so-called “art” in social life before what Hans Belting would call the “era of art”. It should be noted that collections of Southeast Asian artefacts in the West may have been partly gathered from these expositions, which never returned those objects. In this instance, the “great tradition” plays out within a colonial context and alludes to the theatre of imperialisms in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In other words, this “great tradition” in Southeast Asia is perceived through colonial discourse and post-colonial critique as indicated, for instance, in Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s work Monuments, Objects, Histories (2004) on the colonial and post-colonial institutions in India. Art in this situation is in a way burdened by the demands of civilisation, antiquity, and orientalism. How a tradition is traced to an ancientness that is fleshed out through the discourse of the civilisational and the monumental and the universal exposition should finally be viewed in the context of the contemporary quotidian, or the global everyday, the impulse that makes an art historian like Nora Annesley Taylor take refuge in anthropology to write the history of art of Vietnam in Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art. FOLKLORE The vexing predicament of tradition finds its sharp cleavage in 1999 at APT3 when the curators invited Sonabai from India to be part of the exhibition. Sonabai is a woman from the Rajwar community of Sarguja; they are a “cultivating caste” of Bihar and Madya Pradesh. When they commemorate Hindu festivals like the post-harvest chherta, they spruce up their houses and adorn them with clay paintings and clay relief work. Sonabai is a pioneer in this endeavour, according to the esteemed historian Jyotindra Jain, whose “innumerable painted clay figures, relief work panels and decorative screens… have revived and developed this tradition with exuberance”.14 He continues: “Sonabai built a great edifice of this art form through her individual talent, on the meager foundation of the rudimentary tradition of making patani and dodki.”15 Her biography is intertwined with this production in her own words: “It was a large house, my son was small, my husband was away the whole day and I was terribly lonely. I had no one to talk to. To occupy myself and to have company, I began to construct clay figures of human beings, deities, birds and animals all over the house. They became

my companions.”16 Jain speaks of this production as a “tradition”, but one that Sonabai herself generated as an innovating agent, an author of innovation and not just its recipient: “Through her innovative work, Sonabai has revitalised and built upon an inherited convention and thereby initiated and established her own artistic tradition, which again has become a ‘collective’ tradition—but with a difference.”17

I personally saw Sonabai in the premises of the exhibition. She seemed to be always beside her work of wondrous figures, conversing with what I was told was a relative. She was like any other artist on the gallery floor, except that she was not really mingling with the rest of the art world. One would be tempted to regard this scene as a reprise of a universal exposition moment in which a live ethnic person was conscripted to represent a culture. But one might also perceive this as the way for the Triennial to confront the predicament of contemporary art and the worlds contemporaneous with it, the myriad temporalities it inhabits.

In this situation, one surely recalls the seminal 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre in which the curator Jean-Hubert Martin presented contemporary art and folk artists in one event at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, with a semblance of equivalence and reciprocal interlocution. Martin was at the APT3, in fact, and in the conference defended the museum, through a discussion of an exhibition on skulls, as an exceptional site for this fraught convergence to take place. According to him: “Over the two centuries of its existence, the museum has infused an immense number of objects, and thus ideas and beliefs, with new life.”18 He extols the museum, and by extension the contemporary art triennial it houses, as hospitable to old things and are wellsprings of new life, making them revivifying institutions of things deemed static or dead. Curiously, the perceived stasis or death of things partly stems from the museological discourse of preservation and exhibition in which the primitive and the provincial liaise with the spiritual and the secular.

This folk question has a particular resonance in India. The folk question thus also becomes at some level an India question. Jain has pointed out in the same conference that tradition in contemporary Indian culture is reprographically mediated, that its potency derives from mechanical reproduction in the present: “The bazaars of India are busy producing images for textbooks, trucks, calendars and cinema billboards, casting in plaster and plastic politicians, film stars and deities with a sense of ease and humor, and without carrying the burden of tradition-modernity discourse on their shoulders. Perhaps to the distress of many classicists, these images command the same reverence as did once upon a time the celebrated Chola bronzes or Sarnath Buddhas, and in many ways come closer to what the classical arts would have looked like when first created.”19

This said, the “popular” or “populist” recuperation of the traditional by way of the “spiritual” or the “supernatural” has political ramification.

As Deepak Ananth in the conference of APT2 warns: “But more darkly, the climate of religious fundamentalism—from which India is hardly immune—calls for a particular vigilance on the part of artists interested in recovering something of the aura once attached to ritual or cult objects that, in the Indian tradition, were also works of art.”20 Ananth further makes the point, as he discusses the work of Vivan Sundaram in the exhibition, that if tradition were the marker of a creative formation, “artists belonging to post-colonial cultures are involved in negotiating both Western modernism and the indigenous traditions of art”. And if tradition were the index of being in time and in place, the “predicament of latecoming is, for artists working in a post-colonial context, a bifurcated or forked one—a latecoming both to their own traditions and to the foreign one”.21

Juxtaposed with the great tradition is its other: the so-called little tradition of the folk. Therefore, tradition may also connote the miniature, a reference of scale that is set against the largeness of the biennale infrastructure as well as the spectacular nature of some installations required for this agglomeration. David Clarke, for instance, points to APT3 as an instance in which “more intimate work… tends to lose out to showy large-scale installations with an immediate impact”.22 He identified Wilson Shieh’s ink paintings, “made in meticulous gongbi manner and offering ironic commentaries on contemporary mores”, as being “hidden away in a badly lit corner… at Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery… while Cai Guoqiang’s rather banal bamboo bridge took up a large part of the main hall”.23

In this situation, tradition may be reckoned in terms of the figurine, a trope that leads us to how the form of tradition becomes sensible as an intimate figure. The latter is related to the notion of the picturesque or the quaint and is privileged in terms of its facture by hand, its being time-consuming, and the devotional commitment of its maker. Tradition is the scale of the folk that may ultimately reference the local and the national, or nationalism, which is in itself a form of folklore. That APT1 strongly pivoted on the national as the basis of representation and the critique of underrepresentation and the failure to comprehensively survey or scope out the region that is Asia-Pacific is evidence of the potency of the “national” as well as the internationalist reflex to gather nations under an exhibitionary aegis in Australia. It is the category of the latter, “Australia”, that finally troubles this agenda of representation.24 As a representing subject, the country and continent Australia foregrounds itself as the curatorial

2 3 9 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 4 2 012 agency that is bedevilled or confounded by its own tradition, which is marked as aboriginal. How does Australia position itself in the context of this tradition and its history of settler colonialism and the manner by which it claims a certain ground to collect art from heterogeneous traditions across the globe?

The Campfire Group (Aboriginal Corporation), an “artist’s collective of (essentially) indigenous representatives initiating contemporary art project”, enacts this crisis at APT2 when it set up a truck as a “platform for artists to sell their work from” and as an allusion to “a recent past where cattle trucks were used to herd Aboriginal people onto reserves to be processed for assimilation into the white world”.25 According to the group, the performance outside the museum investigates three contentious processes: “an international perception of Aboriginal art and culture as a ‘takeaway’ product; a national agenda where Aboriginality becomes a convenient flag-bearer; and the regional realities of producing art for cash and cultural survival”.26 It is reported that two-thirds of “indigenous Australian art, from so-called souvenirs to fine art pieces, leaves the country”.27 The group believes that “artists play cultural brokers involved in transactions across cultural boundaries”.28 This persistence of the rubric “cultural” is, indeed, salient: it ensconces tradition and at the same time strives to transcend it.

CULTURE Finally, tradition homes in on the category of culture. At APT3, Marian Pastor Roces drew a line between the nineteenth century and contemporary art by proposing the term “expo art” as an analytic term that may help explain the condition of the products on display in global events like the Triennial. In her mind, the nexus clarifies if only we acknowledge “that our works here are, more authentically, or more precisely: phenomena of the international exhibition/universal expo than they are about, or of, wherever it is we think we come from”.29 The disjunct between locality and the global exhibitionary creates a gap that militates against the transcendence of culture as the idiom of subjectivity and origin. It is culture, according to Roces, that is the problem and that the search for tradition in the nineteenth century has not ceased to permeate the search for tradition in contemporary time. The intransigence of the concept, according to her, has bred the notion of essence, which has become a precondition to racism and genocide.

It has posited a sense of “profound localness” that has severed the allegedly local from the allegedly global. And it has invested in invention, which has conjured the world picture of the future and of ceaseless progress. Moreover, it is the tension between the cultural and the curatorial that complicates the production of the contemporary. If the cultural conceives of difference and the curatorial of distinction, then the contemporary can never be all-inclusive. It can only be discriminating and, for good or for ill, discriminatory. The words of Susan Cochrane on the art of the Pacific for the APT2 catalogue are instructive: However remote village communities in the Pacific may be from Sydney or Brisbane, San Francisco or Bangkok, wherever the international contemporary art scene is flourishing; and however different a Pacific Islander artist’s knowledge and skills may be from contemporary (Western-style) arts practice; what the Islander artist produces has validity, integrity and sophistication within the terms of their own culture.30 Once again, it is culture that arbitrates “validity”, “integrity” and “sophistication”.

This series of terms cuts across the anthropological, the aesthetic, and the curatorial to carve out a specific status of “art” in contemporary time. Surely, the implications are cogent, and that it is culture that accesses this “tradition” of the creative.

It is through the meditations of Roces on the term “culture” that we are able to revaluate the consequences of the theory of tradition and co-extensively of the constantly re-negotiated and re-appropriated neo-traditional and the neoethnic, a subject that deserves a separate discussion. The first three editions of the Asia Pacific Triennial were afflicted with this malaise of tradition and simultaneously were thrilled by the chances of recovering some origin(ality) in the “sudden vicinity of things” called contemporary art. To a significant extent, this revisit to tradition gives us the opportunity to reconsider a theory of transculturality or equivalence, or the exasperating problematic of a contemporary “crossculturality”.31 The APT has prompted us to reconsider the agencies of persons and things within, through and beyond the latitude of art, the contemporary, the exhibition, the Triennial, and the ever-elusive address of the local. And in this initiation, the APT may well have faced an aporetic condition of what Nicholas Thomas has intuited as incommensurate, as radically particular, with difference itself as limit, or better to say, as that which renders the limit real but hopefully not insurmountable.

The first moment of locality sparks frisson with the second moment of the outside—the non-local that flares in many ways (Western, national, regional, international, and so on). It is the third moment through and beyond tradition that the contemporary must be able to evoke. And tradition offers a productively repossessed technology because it presupposes facture, the making of things by persons and the generosity of sharing them with others, the sensitivity to craft

and the well-being with which it imbues the faithful agent—and patient—of art.

Moreover, it gestures towards a “critical inheritance”, a past or a passing that is always present, importuning as well as humbling. And in the end, it demands a standard, an ethical responsibility for aspiring to, at last, a commensurate talent within the most breathtaking asymmetries of the world before us that is the “patrimony of all”.

Notes 1 Caroline Turner, ‘Present Encounters: Mirror of the Future’, The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (exhibition catalogue), Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1996: 11 2 Caroline Turner, ‘Internationalism and Regionalism: Paradoxes of Identity’, Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, Caroline Turner (ed.), Brisbane: University of Queensland 1993: xiii-xiv 3

ibid: 12

4

Apinan Poshyananda, ‘Roaring Tigers, Desperate Dragons in Transition’, Traditions/Tensions: Contemporary Art in Asia, Brisbane: G + B Arts International and Craftsman House, 1996: 26 5 Marian Pastor Roces, ‘Bodies of Fiction, Bodies of Desire’, Traditions/Tensions: Contemporary Art in Asia: 90 6 The Museum of Modern Art has the same argument: that modernism is a still-evolving tradition and that it is self-renewing, too. See Modern Contemporary: Art at MoMa Since 1980, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000 7 Nicholas Thomas, ‘Contemporary Art and the Limits of Globalisation’, The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art: 17 8

ibid: 18

9

ibid.

10

ibid.

11

ibid.

12

T.K. Sabapathy, ‘Developing Regionalist Perspectives in South-East Asian Art Historiography’, The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art: 16 13

Sabapathy, ibid: 17

14

Jyotindra Jain, ‘Sonabai’, Beyond the Future: The Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (exhibition catalogue), Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1999: 222 15

ibid: 222

16

ibid.

17

ibid.

18

Jean-Hubert Martin, ‘The Museum, A Lay or Religious Sanctuary’, Papers from the Conference of the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2000: 92 19

Jyotindra Jain, ‘Cultural Transformations and the Recasting of Imagery in India’, Papers from the Conference of the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art: 82

20 Deepak Ananth, ‘Profane Illuminations’, Present Encounters: Papers from the Conference of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1997: 82 21

ibid: 82

22

David Clarke, ‘Contemporary Asian Art and Its Western Reception’, Third Text Asia, Issue 1, 2008: 43

23

ibid: 43

24

For elaboration see Francis Maravillas, ‘Cartographies of the Future: The Asia-Pacific Triennials and the Curatorial Imaginary’, Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience, and Practice of Modern Asian Art, Sydney: University of Sydney and Wild Peony, 2006: 244-270 25 Margo Neale, ‘Campfire Group: All Stock Must Go!’, The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art: 110 26

ibid: 110

27

ibid.

28

ibid.

29

Marian Pastor Roces, ‘Consider Post Culture’, Papers from the Conference of the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art: 35 30 Suzanne Cochrane, ‘Pacific Peoples: Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Torres Strait, Indigenous Australia’, The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art: 55 31

See Wolfgang Welsch, ‘The Return of Beauty’, Filozofski Vestnik, Volume XXVIII, Number 2, 2007 and Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002

2 41 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 4 2 012

TWENTY YEARS ON Pat Hoffie Without a knowledge of the social and cultural context… a true understanding is impossible.

Fumio Nanjo1 At this very moment, in the encroaching heat of a Brisbane summer, it’s difficult to believe that an event like the Asia Pacific Triennial ever emerged from this city.

In Queensland we are trapped in (premier) Campbell Newman-time, where, after a “surreal landslide victory” (March election this year), one of the new LiberalNational Party’s first undertakings flushed out some memorable little harbingers of the regime we’re all currently ensconced in. The knee-jerk shut-down of the David Unaipon Literary Awards for unpublished indigenous writers was followed soon after by the presence of some two hundred police in West End’s Musgrave Park, mustered ostensibly in response to the need to evict a group of fifty local Murris who had set up a Sovereign Embassy in a place that has been occupied by indigenous presence since long before any of us can remember.2 And for those of us old enough to remember a more recent past, the rising fear of these days seemed all-too-familiar; almost overnight the ghosts and spectres of the BjelkePetersen years re-constituted to transmogrify what had begun to look like a more liberal, informed society back into one crippled and ruled by fear.

This year will also mark twenty years since the first Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, the only major exhibition series to focus exclusively on the contemporary art of Asia, the Pacific and Australia. Twenty years ago the Triennial emerged on the national scene to be initially greeted by a reception of overall implausibility. The likelihood that critically challenging, socially engaged contemporary art might emerge from countries nearby in the Asia-Pacific region seemed inconceivable at the time in Australia, where poorly translated versions of French theory still had a strangle-hold on most contemporary art debate.

The Australian art world was undergoing another iteration of The Cringe, one that manifested in a tendency to laud the arcane and minimal for their capacity to provide a tabula rasa for obscurantist density (and this sentence itself reads like a bruise from the past).

But, even more fantastically to the cultural cognoscenti, the exhibition emerged from Brisbane, a regional outpost known for little more in the ‘art world’ than spurious minor confabulations connecting sub-tropical heat to a tendency to favour thick juicy oil paint laid on with ersatz aplomb. The heroes associated with this particular trajectory modelled themselves on a version of early-modernist bohemianism that cherished a kind of unkempt, sexualised abandon and who mouthed an inarticulate mantra that somehow combined libido with ‘creative juices’ and mixed that with a practised disregard for theories and institutions in general. Of course the unctuousness of myths like this required an equally strident antidote in a regional outpost, and Brisbane cooked up its own version of an alternative sub-group that linked a stylistically demanding posture of artificial archness to minimal and conceptual reductionism. Committed to a simplistic slavishness to anything black (so long as it wasn’t indigenous), transfixed by the peculiar antipodean myopia that Melbourne WAS style, and blindly devoted to the arcana of semi-translated theory, Brisbane’s tiny bastion of aesthetic pundits appeared grimly determined in their refusal to give in to the vagaries of the small, sleepy, semi-tropical city in which they found themselves marooned.

Each of these tribes depended on their difference from each other in order to feel secure in their identity, but each of them shared roots in a staunch commitment to modernism. Neither ‘group’ had entertained, pre-1993, the possibility of imagining that a dynamic contemporary art scene might exist much closer to their shorelines. The history books traced a legacy of inheritance that linked the development of European modernism to its apogee in post-war USA minimalism, and from there, in a reduced, dissipated form, to the regions; in terms of this trajectory non-indigenous Australian art could only be included as an irrelevant footnote.

Beyond the tiny pools of the art scene, the greater part of the general public of Brisbane had very little understanding of what any kind of contemporary art might look like—let alone any from the region just beyond the shorelines.

And while the 1988 celebrations of Expo in Brisbane had brought the sensation of being in touch with the rest of the contemporary world to the city, the possibility of day-to-day engagement with cultural outputs from elsewhere were still more or less limited to the odd exhibition, performance or a Sunday night meal at the local Chinese restaurant.

But real changes began the following year in 1989 when the government of Wayne Goss toppled a Coalition/National party rule that had held power in the State since 1957. The change in the social climate was immediate—prior to developing his own legal practice Goss had worked for the Aboriginal Legal Service; in the run-up to the election he had championed the decriminalisation of homosexuality and once he was elected the premier undertook the role of Arts Minister. Prior to this, changes had already been percolating—the Queensland Art Gallery was the first major institution to be built on South Bank—a ‘cultural precinct’ that now houses a range of purpose-built “emporia for the arts” that extends along the river from GOMA to the Queensland College of Art. In 1987 Doug Hall began as director of the Gallery; and with the Mandjad or Balance 1990: Views, Visions, Influences exhibition it became apparent that the gallery was not only committed to thinking differently about the development and significance of art in Australia, but was prepared to take on curatorial experimentations that were radical if not risky.3 This exhibition was remarkable for its focus on Aboriginal and White Australian collaboration in the visual arts. While larger exhibitions like Magiciens de la Terre had also sought to address the ethnocentricity of modernist curatorial practice4, the Balance 1990 exhibition was underwritten by a far more profound approach, incorporating collaborative curatorial practices that were crosscultural, potentially messy and critically challenging; such as hand painted beer bottles considered not as artefacts, but as art.5 And most importantly, the Gallery was filled with indigenous people. They were there to see their art and to talk about it, in forums and meetings which they had organised themselves and were hosted by the Gallery.

This was a landmark exhibition in many ways—while its aim was ostensibly to look at the shared influences and a united vision between indigenous and nonindigenous Australians, the way it illuminated the differences and disjunctures between cultural worlds emerged as one of its most important aspects. The most profound legacy, however, lay in the level of consultation with and participation of indigenous people, and the way the exhibition laid down a curatorial pathway for engaging almost the entire Gallery staff in a project that was shared by an outside community, and that depended on almost unreserved commitment to a shared ideal. This approach was to provide a lasting impact on the operations of the first three Asia Pacific Triennials, where the model of cross-cultural curatorship provided an essential pathway to generate acceptance of the exhibition in the region.

At the time Australia’s profile in the region was far from a shining example of outstanding cultural diplomacy. In order to open the doors to participation and understanding, it was important to make consultation a priority.

The decision to involve teams of curatorial advisors from across the region in the research and selection gained the Gallery some vehement criticism from within the country, where jibes about there being more curators, directors and ‘experts’ involved than artists continued in the lead-up to the first presentation.

The exhibition’s aims were unapologetically ambitious. Caroline Turner’s broad vision that the APT would become recognised and embraced by the region as the major artistic project of its kind was matched by equally aspiring aims that the exhibition would not only change the way Australians came to recognise and understand the contemporary societies of the Asia-Pacific region, but also that it would challenge the very foundations of how Australians had come to understand the development of art in their own country. In this sense the exhibition aimed at not less than an examination of the paradigms of Euro-American art history.

The question about the degree to which this has been achieved is timely.

The curatorial strategy for the first three Triennials involved a team of Australian experts, many of whom worked beyond the Gallery: the national advisory body involved David Williams (former Director, Canberra School of Art), Alison Carroll (former Director, Asialink Arts), Neil Manton (former Director South-East Asia and the Pacific Program, Cultural Relations Branch Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) and Ian Howard (currently Director, College of Fine Arts, Sydney) to work alongside Doug Hall and Caroline Turner to shape the overall feel and focus of the exhibition and to advise. Beneath this team was a network of curators, gallery directors, critics, writers and artists from across the region.

The broad interactive nature of the first APTs was influenced in no small measure by the five Artist Regional Exchanges (ARX) that took place in Perth between 1987 and 1999. Steered by the iconic and lateral thinking artist Adrian Jones, ARX had begun as a site-specific artists’ exchange with New Zealand, and from there had broadened out to encompass a broader understanding of “the region” that drew artists together in relationships that have now spanned decades.

The first ARX events were exercises in more-or-less careful enthusiasm seasoned with a genuine fascination with what artists from other places might be interested in. In 1987 there was very little in the way of shared spoken language among groups from other countries; instead, visual language suggested how modernist influences had been cajoled and counter-informed by the specifics of place in the region.

It was often deliberately messy and anarchic, and the sheer inventive exuberance of it was almost over as soon as it had begun, as Pamela Zeplin describes; It wasn’t just the size and spread of ARX that marked it as distinctive in the (as yet unwritten) annals of Australian art; the spirit of dialogue, collaboration, heterogeneity and its downright daggy DIY ethos set it apart from mainstream art concerns. By 1987 these ideals had become passé within a newly professionalised Australian art world that was increasingly influenced by Francophile theorisation and industrial rights for cultural workers.6 And by 1993 this regime, infected by a certain strain of bureaucratic professionalism that was already exhibiting symptoms of selective rigor mortis, had taken an increasingly firm hold. Into this milieu the Queensland Art Gallery wilfully pitched an exhibition concept that was as radical as it was daring: here was a State gallery that was prepared to involve artists on all levels, and to even shape the look of the exhibition according to what the artists presented, that was prepared to listen to voices beyond the institutions, and to go against the current of any orthodoxies at the time. Looking back, that commitment only seems all the more audacious, and those involved at the helm just that bit more impressive.

Once any sense of the ‘heroic’ creeps into a text it’s easy to slide sideways into a retrogressive “back in the days” sentiment. But in the current climate of fiscal and imaginative austerity, it’s hard not to see such initiatives as belonging to halcyon years. The first three APTs were a trial zone—the Queensland Art Gallery was almost open house to artists and opinions, to a diversity of approaches and practices and it operated with the approach that there might be something new to learn, something that might surprise, things that might not fit into canons, and processes that might require the Gallery to bend its ways, rather than bend them to fit the Gallery’s standard practices. The first three Triennials profiled the work of two hundred and twenty artists from twenty different countries, and left no doubts about the creative and critical diversity of the region.

Since then the APTs have strengthened in terms of audience participation and funding. In 2006, with the opening of GOMA, the largest modern art gallery in Australia, the showcasing of contemporary art from the region looked even more illustrious. In terms of attendances, the figures have approached block-buster proportions; since the first Triennial, more than 1.8 million visitors have attended, with a record-breaking estimation of 4,400 visitors a day attending APT6 in 2009.

One of the most important areas of the Triennials was the Gallery’s decision to imbed a commissioning agenda and acquisition program as part of the overall plan. The result has built an impressive collection of contemporary art from the Asia-Pacific region that is selectively on show throughout the in-between years. These acquisitions form the heartland of the combined Galleries’ (now titled QAGOMA) collection and identify it from other State and national galleries in the country. The decision to sidestep comparison and inevitable competition with other State and national galleries that held better and older historical collections with a stronger Euro-American focus has proved to be sound as Australia rises to its role in moving into “The Asian Century”.7

Yet it would be remiss to assess the value of the APTs on the basis of the exhibition and collection alone. A complex infrastructure that includes a Kid’s APT program (that has become a world benchmark since its introduction in 1999), workshops, touring programs, publishing programs, educational programs to regional and remote Queensland, residencies, internships, the Australian Centre of Asia Pacific Art (ACAPA) and (since 2006) the Australian Cinémathèque have bolstered the APT project to leviathan proportions. But infrastructure and number crunching are not the only ways to assess the success of a project; an early aim of the Gallery was that the Triennial would not try to dominate the debates and diverse views around the Asia-Pacific region; that instead, the forum would provide a platform for listening and responding to diverse voices and opinions.

The Gallery invested money into backing that aim—extensive cross-cultural negotiations and dialogue required significant expenses and demanding logistics in terms of freight, conservation and interpretation; and limited budgets meant that that investment took a great deal of resourcing away from other areas and projects.

At this stage of the APT’s development, any reviews of its success have to take into account the fact that, initially, the project was a leap into the unknown, and as such it had to be committed to much convincing: not only artists, curators, writers and critics, funding bodies and governments, but

also of audiences in a country not recognised for its embrace of the region.

And there wasn’t—there couldn’t be—one overarching cultural or curatorial point of view. It was a recipe for chaos. But it wasn’t. It was sensationally risky, cheekily fantastic. There were many fall-outs and much blood-on-the-tracks, but the commitment of many who shared Caroline Turner’s hope that, “the Triennial then stood, many of us hoped, for a new Australia—a multicultural country seeking to engage culturally with the region in which we live”8, carried the energy and enthusiasm along apace.

Looking back on some of the aims of the first Triennials, it seems that it has progressed towards achieving them, even to the point that some could be seen as counter-productive. One of these, the commitment “to contribute to new international networks of artists, curators and scholars” has been so successful that they have created a virtual global biennale/triennale tribe, moving from gig to gig and rarely stopping long enough to ingest enough sense of place that might be capable of reflecting the country they purport to ‘represent’. But the APT is only one among a myriad of international survey exhibitions that have fostered this phenomenon.

Other aims, such as the focus on “enriching local societies through the creative interaction with other cultures” could be judged to have been far less successful, even with the aforementioned attendance figures and educational programs. Australia still lags behind in any attempt to embrace deeper understandings of cultures in the region, and all-too-often the interpretation of “The Asian Century” is reductively interpreted as meaning engagement with China, over and above understandings of the diversity of other cultures. Tertiary education offers few courses focusing on contemporary art in the region, and few other State and national galleries have exhibited the commitment to understanding regional contemporary art that might have been expected, given the twenty years of the Triennial’s undertakings.9

Although the APT’s aim that the exhibition might challenge the paradigms of Euro-American art seemed almost possible in the first three Triennials, the elegance and seamlessness of much of the art exhibited in subsequent years has moved steadily closer to looking perilously like art from everywhere and nowhere. However, this can be said of international survey exhibitions globally.

As funding becomes tighter, the possibility of curators contacting artists who are working beyond the known domains is less likely. It is interesting to note that the forthcoming Singapore Biennale is adopting a multi-curatorial approach that closely resembles those of the first three Triennials.10

Twenty years on, this year’s media releases claim that the APT will showcase new and recent work by over one hundred and forty artists from twentyfive countries. Whereas the initial three Triennials were slow to acknowledge the rich complexity of much of the ‘Pacific’ side of the hyphen, its inclusion has steadily grown, and indigenous art from Australia, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific will be shown. The regional scope has been broadened to encompass the Middle East, Turkey, Iran and Central Asia; relationships to place in a rapidly changing world will be looked at in relation to a range of traditional genres and contemporary themes.

It could be argued that the extent of the Triennial’s unequivocal embrace of the Pacific is in full evidence, with the unveiling of a sculptural commission

by New Zealand artist Michael Parekowhai to mark the fifth anniversary of GOMA in November. This ‘acknowledgement’ has not gone un-criticised by local indigenous artists, who have not only been critical of the amount of money spent on a sculpture by an artist from elsewhere, but who have also raised doubts about correct protocols and procedures in the selection process leading up to commissioning. Additionally, there is controversy about the fact that the bronze titled The world turns features a huge upside down elephant addressing a tiny kuril (the indigenous name for the native marsupial water rat after which Kurilpa point, the ground on which the gallery stands is named) and has raised questions about the representation of indigenous history and culture in public places.

Brisbane is a place of complex, often conflicting political layers; the controversy surrounding this acquisition has recently spun into overdrive by the additional input of the new Liberal-National Party Arts Minister who claimed that the sculpture was a “shocking misuse of taxpayer dollars” and evidence of the “kind of reckless spending that drove Queensland into a spiral of debt”. It could be perhaps mistakenly, certainly mischievously argued that a tiny corner of the focus on Asia-Pacific contemporary art focus has joined local indigenous voices together with Liberal-National Party opinions in a discordant symphony of criticism. And if this is indeed—even partly—true, then perhaps it could also be argued that the seemingly impossible has been achieved, and that two of the original aims of the Triennial to “connect with the world and build cross-cultural understanding” and to “enrich local societies by creative interaction with the art of other cultures” have reached an improbable apogee.

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Notes 1 Fumio Nanjo, ‘A book that is never finished’, in TransCulture La Biennale di Venezia (exhibition catalogue), 1995: 13

6

2 The Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards were established in 1999 by Peter Beattie, the then Premier of Queensland and closed in 2012 by the Campbell Newman government

7

The ‘Australia in the Asian Century’ White Paper was recently relaese by the federal government

8

Caroline Turner in correspondence with author, October, 2012

9

cf. Alison Carroll and Carrillo Gantner, May 2012, Finding a Place on the Asian Stage

3

Balance 1990 was curated by Marlene Hall and Michael Eather

4 cf. Third Text Vol. 3 No. 6 (1989): Hubert-Martin’s aim in the exhibition was to challenge the aestheticisation of non-Western art and as a critical engagement with neo-colonialism. Despite this, the identification of half the artists as coming ‘from the margins’ has been widely criticised as being “deeply flawed” 5 “The landmark Balance 1990 set the scene for the emergence of Campfire, and then Fire-Works Gallery in the 1990s. It emerged from a twenty-year epoch of political dispute and turbulence in Australian race relations. From the 1968 referendum, which conferred Australian citizenship on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples until the 10,000 strong march on the 1988 Bicentenary of Invasion (otherwise known as Australia Day), there was a persistent and resounding call for sovereignty, justice and land rights. Balance was connected to this movement, adding its voice to those many others who sought to provide points of connection and exchange across cultures. This event was both timely and of its time.”

Linda Carroli, 2002, Open Hearted, Open Handed, Open Minded; http://www.kooriweb.org/bell/article11.html

Pam Zeplin, The ARX experiment, Perth, 1987-1999: communities, controversy & regionality; http:// acuads.com.au/conference/2005-conference/article/the-arx-experiment-1987-1999-communitiescontroversy-and-regionality/)

10

The fourth Singapore Biennale (SB2013) titled ‘If The World Changed’ will be held from 26 October 2013 to 16 February 2014. The press release claims that it intends to “adopt a bold new collaborative curatorial structure comprising a team of co-curators. More than 20 art professionals with distinct local knowledge of regional art practices are on board to offer their viewpoints and local knowledge.”

Page 240: Michael Parekowhai, The World Turns (artist’s impression) (detail) 2011–12. Commissioned to mark the fifth anniversary of the opening of the Gallery of Modern Art in 2006 and twenty years of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art; photo courtesy the artist, Michael Lett, Auckland and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Above: Gimhongsok, Canine Construction, 2009 Photo courtesy the artist

THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL AND THE NOSTALGIA OF THE NINETIES

Lee Weng Choy The fantasy of time travel is one of those quirks of modern culture which reveal so much more about ourselves than we realise. Indeed, one is tempted to exaggerate and say that our innermost nature as denizens of modernity is laid bare by the self-consciousness of time these fantasies encapsulate. One of the tropes of such temporal adventures is the scenario of meeting one’s self from a different point in life. In some cases, the encounter is presented as a potentially catastrophic paradox, something that might tear apart the very fabric of space-time. In other cases, the moment is surprisingly casual, like when Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, bumps into his younger self, played by Zachary Quinto, at the dénouement of JJ Abrams’ reboot of the Star Trek franchise. From a distance Quinto calls out to Nimoy, misrecognising him as his father. Nimoy, who of course originated the iconic character, corrects the young man but nevertheless dispenses some fatherly advice.

Then there are the situations where the confrontation between selves is the very source of drama. For instance, in Rian Johnson’s Looper (2012), assassins in the year 2044 dispatch victims from thirty years into the future. At the end of their careers, these killers have to terminate their own older selves, closing the loop, as it were. In the film, the young looper is played by Joseph GordonLevitt, while Bruce Willis plays the senior. Gordon-Levitt betrays no angst over his assignment; that’s what he signed up for when he took up the well-paying gig.

But Willis has a change of heart, for reasons we don’t need to get into here, and foils his execution. This is highly problematic for Gordon-Levitt, as the mob bosses cannot abide unclosed loops. The action revolves around the one looper trying to evade the other, while the mob closes in on them both. There’s a scene in a diner where the two have their only extended conversation. I mention Looper because, aside from the life and death struggle that pits an assassin against himself, there’s the comparatively trivial issue of the two versions disliking each other personally.

I don’t know about you, but if I turned out to be Bruce Willis, I might not hesitate to kill myself either.

The film raises the existential question of how one might feel about oneself as a result of a time travel confrontation. Would your younger self respect or admire the older person, and would the older self be able to tolerate the younger one? How will the younger person feel about his present self, now that he’s seen what he will become? And how will the older self feel now that he’s been brutally reminded about who he used to be. We often tell stories about our lives with a presumption of continuity. Our past selves become our present selves and evolve into our futures, not in spite of, but because of all the life-altering drama along the way. These time travel scenarios, however, put this presumption to the test.

The conceit of this text is a conversation between two versions of the same self, separated by twenty years; the wager is that such a thought experiment might offer some perspective on the task of looking back at two decades of the Asia Pacific Triennial. The APT started off as an adventure into uncharted territory.

It quickly grew into an important platform, and the exhibition has become an established institution in itself. Would these two APTs, the 1993 version and the 2012/13 version have trouble reconciling with each other if they were two selves meeting in a time travel movie? (As the reader can see, I’m indulging in a conflation between the institutional and the personal, albeit within the realm of the fictional; I’m aware such a ploy is risky, but I’m also operating with the view that we shouldn’t take art and ourselves too seriously all the time.)

Opposite: Dayanita Singh, Nalin and Natasha (from What happened is this series), 1996 Photo courtesy the artist and Nature Morte, New Delhi

It’s hard to escape contemplating a twenty-year span of APT without a bit of personal reflection about one’s own life. Twenty years ago, I moved to Singapore, an arrival which also marked the beginnings of my professional involvement in the arts. In the 1990s, I started writing for ART AsiaPacific when it was still based in Sydney; the magazine later relocated to New York, and is now published from Hong Kong. In 1998, I started working with Suhanya Raffel, currently the acting director of the Queensland Art Gallery, as the co-curator for Singapore for APT3.

The third Triennial, which opened in 1999, was the first biennial-type exhibition I ever attended. Biographical coordinates such as these are fairly typical for a number of us in Southeast Asia, especially for those of us who came up in the 1990s—often in conversation with the APT and other Australian initiatives which looked to their near West, instead of, as usual, the far West.

Soon after I settled into Singapore, a friend recommended VS Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987). The autobiographical novel takes its title from a painting by de Chirico, and is about a writer who has rented a countryside cottage in England. As the narrator contemplates his idyllic surroundings, he reflects on his own journey from humble beginnings in Trinidad to his present situation.

Singapore, or so its own story goes, was kicked out of Malaysia in 1965, and the small island, all by itself, had to struggle; but it thrived, developing from a ‘Third World’ to ‘First World’ nation within a generation. By the mid-to-late 1980s, however, its society was no longer so single-minded in the pursuit of economic growth, and a noticeable number of individuals turned to the arts. Important organisations like TheatreWorks, The Necessary Stage and The Artists Village were started in the 1980s; The Substation Arts Centre opened in 1990. By the early 1990s, the government came into the picture in a big way, forming the National Arts Council, and pushing for the development of the local arts scene, recognising its potential for nation-building, for contributions to the economy, and as an attractor of “foreign talent”. The government framed the arts as essential for Singapore’s arrival as a prosperous and “gracious” society.

In the rest of this text, I will present three topics for a hypothetical conversation between two selves: a 1990s version and a present-day version of an art writer from Singapore. In looking back and contemplating what a platform like the APT has meant for the arts communities across Southeast Asia two decades ago, there’s a temptation to wax nostalgic. But what I hope to do here is not so much to explore my own nostalgic feelings for the past, but to begin to theorise a nostalgia of the past—what that could mean I’ll try and explain along the way.

BEYOND THE FUTURE If one did have a time machine, would you travel forward in time, or backward?

Should we imagine our younger selves projecting into 2012, or our present-day selves going back to the 1990s? Both journeys, in either direction, are conceptually more alike than one might think. In imagining the future we’re well aware that invention is inherent in our speculations. But we’ve come to realise that remembering the past is an endeavour also partly related to constructing fiction.

When faced with the uncertainty and open-endedness of the future, one can be overwhelmed, like an author with writer’s block staring at the blank computer screen. But confronting the past can also present us with another kind of abyss: the anxiety of trying to recall everything important, coupled with the conflicting desire to forget it all and become unburdened. The first topic for our discussion would aim to get at the heart of what it means to remember the past as well as to imagine the future, and to explore how these two assignments are not so much the same, but bring us to the same place: a better understanding of our selves in time.

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From the vantage point of the present, the 1990s seem to have a shape to them; it’s harder to get a fix on the decade of the 2000s, because there isn’t enough distance yet. So, with the benefit of some distance, I would suggest that one of the defining characteristics of Singapore culture in the early 1990s was that the burgeoning arts scene coincided with the opening up of civil society. Artists, from diverse backgrounds and practising across the range of the performing and the visual arts, were experimenting with new ideas and methods, just as civil society was becoming more active and carving a space for itself in the political sphere. Relative to the 1970s and 1980s, the government’s grip seemed to have loosened somewhat in that decade, notwithstanding the occasional conflict over the arts, such as the proscription against performance art and forum theatre.

The possibilities of that particular convergence of Singapore art and civil society now seem foreclosed. Both art and civil society survive, of course, but again, speaking in hindsight—and as someone who has weathered a few controversies in the arts—there was a certain optimism twenty years ago that I find lacking today, no matter how bullish the markets may be about Asian art. To adequately represent this history as well as the current situation would require much more space than I have in this instance.1 Suffice to say that mourning the past’s possibilities is not what I want to recommend here. Rather, the task, and a difficult one at that, should be to arrive at a clearer view of that lost horizon, now that it is irretrievably distant.

Singapore is often caricatured as a society of total centralised control —the only gaps here are between the subway trains and the platforms. As with any good caricature, there can be a grain of truth in such overstatements. In his book Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation, Cherian George observed that the government “has provided rich incentives for Singaporeans to work hard, and create wealth. But its exercise of illiberal controls to maintain ownership of the public sphere adds up to a heavy tax on thinking socially and acting politically.

The public has become privatised.”2 As I’ve argued many times, rather than thinking of the public as the general populace, which is all too often conjured in Singapore (and elsewhere) in terms of lowered common denominators, I’d argue for thinking of publics as spaces: open and varied, where one can listen to individual and independent voices speak in public; voices that are diverse and disparate. Sadly, these spaces are rare, fragile and often endangered in Singapore.

But, remarkably, local arts groups have occasionally stepped up to create such publics.

So what kinds of horizons did the APT represent for the local arts communities from places like Singapore and the other countries of Southeast Asia?

‘Beyond the Future’ was the title of APT3 and the ‘Crossing Borders’ of artists and art practices was one of its central themes. If the third exhibition was something of a culmination of the first two, then I’d say that one of the important things that the APTs of the 1990s represented was a horizon of a regional public. The publics I’ve idealised for Singapore are local. But a local public in-and-of-itself is not enough for the development of even a local arts community. These publics are often too small to be sufficiently stimulating. The APT from the onset has recognised this need for wider cultural interactions. And the ideal of “Crossing Borders” aspired to go beyond the existing discourses of internationalism, which as the name suggests, still privileges the nation as the organising principle of society. As Caroline Turner in her APT3 catalogue essay argued, her hope was for a regional community constructed not in terms of the relations between nations, but instead through individual encounters.3 It could be argued, however, that those three APTs did not live up to this intention, and still functioned to geo-graph the arts and cultures of the Asia-Pacific in ways that maintained rather than undid boundaries: the promise of a regional network of local publics—an interlocalism instead of an internationalism—did not quite materialise. Who were some of the stars of APT’s first decade? One could reply not with the names of individual artists, but of a country: China. The nation could be rhetorically disavowed, but it nonetheless returned.

At the same time, during the first decade of the APT, there was no small amount of anxiety about the privileging of art from Asia and the Pacific in Queensland. QAG was often pressed by local audiences to defend its substantial spending on things non-Australian. But when one reflects on all this now, this precariousness was partly what made the APT available to be claimed by nonAustralian participants like myself. The varied Asian and Pacific perspectives may not have all come together to form some larger community, but I am sure many participants felt excited to claim a stake in imagining this horizon of an interlocal, regional public to come. There was a socio-political accent to much of the art on display, and not just because the audiences might read the art works back into their original contexts, but their very presence in Brisbane was charged by a feeling that this assembly of art somehow shifted the cultural landscape of Queensland and Australia, and the Asia-Pacific as well. Today, the APT is far more confident in expressing its multicultural mission, but that is a result of the platform having become established. The consequence is that participants today may feel they have less agency in shaping the APT, and instead are being framed by it. Which, as one would expect, is typical of the evolution of the large cultural institution.

DISCURSIVE DENSITY It is easy to criticise the present against an idealised version of the past. So I would remind myself (this is the wise-beyond-his-years younger version speaking to the older self): be more reflexive about how the APT has aged from its idealistic youth to its middle age; find a more nuanced critical position. It’s not like you yourself have become the person you thought or hoped you would be.

A history of the APT should, no doubt, include a discussion of the relationships between exhibition, museum, discourses and networks. But for our time-traveller’s discussion, perhaps we could focus on just one particular aspect of this field of relations: the question of discursive density. It’s not enough that there be art writing. Twenty years ago, there wasn’t much writing about art from Asia and the Pacific. Today, there is a lot; indeed, the volume may very well be turned up past “ten” to “eleven” à la This is Spinal Tap. What we are witnessing is the rise of art news, and at the expense of art criticism. For “discursive density”, what there needs to be is writing that refers to other writing, that creates conversations that are diverse and deep, that enfolds one context into another.

It’s a term that Marian Pastor Roces has used; she was one of the keynote speakers at the APT3 conference, which, if I’m not mistaken, was the largest public talk program that the APT has ever convened, and since 1999, the APT hasn’t organised anything comparable. Is it fair to ask that the APT should have tried to do more: exhibition, conference, and why stop there—what about publications?

By the opening of the third edition, the platform seemed destined to become an established institution, if it wasn’t already. Yet this narrative is complicated by an interruption—the change in format and scale of APT4—but then came APT5 and APT6 and the “triumphalism” of the new GoMA building (as a number of critics might complain). Would a well-developed conference and publication program have made a difference in developing a discourse around the APT that could have sustained a sense of critical agency on the part of participating artists and other stakeholders?

BIENNALE SCEPTICISM In Harold Ramis’ 1993 film Groundhog Day weatherman Bill Murray keeps reliving the same twenty-four hours over and over, all the while trying to change the depressing outcome of that same day. While Murray does not have the benefit of knowing his destiny, as a time-traveller from the future would, he does remember each separate repetition of the day, and can thus learn from his past mistakes.

Imagine being a curator of APT3 experiencing his or her own groundhog exhibition.

Although, come to think about it, the Triennial to repeat would be the fourth one. That was when the Queensland Art Gallery attempted to review the past three exhibitions, and rethink the direction of the Triennial. In our groundhog fantasy, as the repetitions accumulate, how would this APT4 curator feel? By the nth repetition, what sense of perspective might he or she have acquired on the first three exhibitions? Would she start becoming nostalgic for the shows from the 1990s, which, even though they weren’t too long ago, would begin to seem ever more distant, because so many versions of the fourth would have come and gone.

A nostalgia of the nineties suggests a decade that is nostalgic for itself, when one is living the very moment that one mourns the loss of.

One of the changes that took place after the third Triennial was that the co-curator model was abandoned. In the first three APTs, most of the countries represented in the exhibition were the responsibility of a curator from QAG and a co-curator from within the country itself. This model was both applauded and criticised. The Singapore Biennale, which was launched in 2006, employed the artistic director model for its first three editions. Interestingly, for the fourth edition, which will open in 2013, the organiser, the Singapore Art Museum, has employed a co-curator model of its own. I’m not planning to attend the opening of APT7, but hope to catch the exhibition later next year. And I will certainly be present for the fourth Singapore Biennale. Seeing these two shows in juxtaposition might be like stepping into a time machine and going back twenty years.

Notes 1 For more about the cultural history of Singapore, see C. J. W.-L. Wee, The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore, Singapore: NUS Press, 2007 2 Cherian George, Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation: Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, 1990–2000, Singapore: Landmark Books, 2000 3 Caroline Turner, ‘Journey Without Maps: The Asia Pacific Triennial’, in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (exhibition catalogue), Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1999

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DOUBLE CRISES REGIONAL COMMENTARIES ON SIGNIFCANCE AND CONTRADICTIONS

Broadsheet has over the past decade presented numerous interviews with APT curators, and critical evaluations and perspectives from international and national commentators on the APT’s engagement with Asia-Pacific art and artists. To complement this issue’s focus upon the twenty year history of the APT, a selection of assessments and views presented in ‘Asia Pacific Triennial: A Dialogue’ from Volume 38.4 (2009), that remain both apropos and timely, are reproduced here, book-ended by additional perspectives by Hou Hanru, one of the most renowned and highly regarded curators working globally today and curator of the 5th Auckland Triennial, and Claire Hsu, co-founder and Executive Director of Asia Art Archive, the world’s first public resource for contemporary Asian art.

HOU HANRU: The Asia Pacific Triennial has formed what seems so far to be an irreplaceable platform for the representation, production and networking for Asian, Australian and Pacific art. More recently, the Triennial has made extensions into Central Asia and West Asia/the Middle East, with the apparent intention of creating something of a globalised, pan-Asian art scene. Notwithstanding its important accomplishments, a number of observers and followers of its exhibition platform have pointed out that the APT, now that it has become established, may be experiencing something of a double crisis, concerning both its representational and geo-political positionings.

Previous criticisms and suspicions of the Triennial raised the question of whether the APT was a both symptom of Australia’s complex relationship with Asia and a manifestation of some agenda to integrate Australia into the region and establish itself as new power centre of the Asia-Pacific; indeed to assert a leadership position in the cultural sphere. But is this, has this been, its real intention, not just its expressed intention? What is more important is the question of how its intentions have evolved over the last twenty years. Must a desire to represent or co-present the ‘Other’ implicitly entail a desire to control this ‘Other’? Can it move beyond these neo-Orientalist positionings, or will the APT always be limited by such a framework?

The APT has evolved from its more generic representations of the various regional scenes—often categorised by the old nation-State framework—to more individual oriented, artist-centric representations, and this marks an interesting progression towards a more aesthetic and globalised logic. (To complicate this picture, however, in the early years, participating individuals resisted the curatorial frameworks of national identity.) But is it today really a site of production for emerging artists and for the production of major works beyond the fashions of political correctness? What are the real roles of art in the Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art’s processes of exhibition making? What are the political motivations and frameworks—both conscious and unconscious—and what are the implications? What is APT’s relevance today in terms of its representations of “Asian contemporary art” when that category has become completely globalised and has gained great visibility in other platforms, especially in Asian countries themselves with their new biennales and museums?

For someone like myself who has followed the APT over the years, I anticipate the upcoming exhibition with many unanswered questions. Especially now that I am involved (as curator) with the Auckland Triennial, what I am most interested to learn is the impact that Asian and Pacific art has on the local Australian art scene and audiences. For instance, the European-Aboriginal tensions in Australian art as well as the complex cultural negotiations that newcomers, especially the immigrants from Asia, have to contend with. The APT may have established Brisbane as a new centre within the Australian art world (after Sydney and Melbourne), but being that it was established with the arguably more diverse and alternative approaches of Asian and Pacific contemporary art production, how has this diversity influenced the making of the institution of QAG/GoMA/APT in terms of its institutional identity, structure and organisation?

RANJIT HOSKOTE (Broadsheet 38.4) I would like to begin by focusing on two of the many mandates that a biennale or triennale serves: it can be an atlas, and it can also be an almanac. As an atlas, it maps the specific, often emergent and not fully elaborated set of geopolitical relationships that sustain its location or purpose, using cultural tracers to bring these to light. As an almanac, it can predict certain emerging patterns and tendencies in global art-making, often acting as a laboratory or production site.

The APT has its origins in an early-1990s recognition, which dawned on some

sections of the Australian cultural system, that Australia had radically to renegotiate its place in the world: very literally, as a nation-state that had long believed itself to be in the West though anchored firmly in the East. I am aware that I tread dangerous ground here, as an outsider reviewing recent Australian history, but present these remarks in a collegial and not a corrosive spirit. If there was compelling reason for Australia to confront the historical freight of racial asymmetry internally, there was an equally vital need to develop a new relationship of dialogue, mutual investment, and strategic partnership with Asia, especially the Southeast Asian neighbourhood in which many Australians who came of age in the early 1990s suddenly found themselves. It seems clear that the APT is an outcome of the opportunities that Brisbane particularly and Queensland more generally saw for themselves, in this period of productive and self-critical transformation.

As an atlas, the early editions of the APT generated, for its contributors and participants—curators, artists, theorists, critics, viewers at large—a way of thinking about the new relationship with Asia. It could be seen as one of an array of initiatives that served to make the geopolitical abstraction of an ‘Asia-Pacific region’ more palpable to the public consciousness at home. As an almanac, it evolved a series of proposals about the most urgent artistic concerns and most critical art practices in the region. Sixteen years down the line [2009], the APT seems to have exhausted its functions both as atlas and as almanac.

New geopolitical developments in the global South have generated a very different set of affiliations and alignments to those that prevailed in the early 1990s. Japan began to re-engage with Asia in the late 1990s, China has emerged as a key if sometimes overwhelming player, ASEAN is charged with a renewed sense of purpose, India has been exploring its soft-power options.

In the context of an Asia waking up to itself, the APT project, however well intentioned it may have seemed originally, begins to come across as a faintly late colonial rather than a firmly post-colonial enterprise. Correspondingly, the advent of self-conscious and energetic discursive initiatives in many Asian centres has taken away much of the APT’s predictive power—and indeed it was always both power as a faculty of the self and power as a form of control over the other.

Parenthetically, in an Indian context, I recall vividly the anguish expressed by artists who had been ‘left out’ or ‘passed over’ by the APT curatorium during the 1990s, a situation rich in pathos of various kinds, for it demonstrated that a great element of the APT’s power was conferred on it by those who saw it as a forum of international recognition, a means of transiting from the provincial backwaters to the global metropolitan centres. Such a situation is no longer even imaginable in India, with a diversity of modes available for artists to engage with the global art system. I would speculate, and this is only a provisional suggestion, that such a weight of attributed responsibility may have hampered, from the beginning, the more utopian possibilities of trans-cultural exchange implicit in the APT. And did the APT not, soon enough, begin to speak for those it represented, instead of producing a platform where they might articulate their own predicaments and hopes?

CHAITANYA SAMBRANI (Broadsheet 38.4) Picking up on the first of two functions ascribed by Ranjit Hoskote to the triennial/ biennial type event, the atlas: cartographical schema are always exercises geared to profit. Maps are made as part of processes of exploration, survey, classification, and so forth, much in the way of Bernard Cohn’s theorisation of the operations of colonial epistemology. We in Australia have been eager in if not inventing, then at least marketing—or is it hawking—the term “Asia-Pacific” into common currency.

The first two APT catalogues carried maps of the region showing locations, and countries, from where the art had been sourced, presumably to an audience in need

of such education. The maps disappeared in the 1999 catalogue, either because they had become too complicated and involved deeply contested boundaries across much of Asia, or because the audience could by then be assumed to have been educated sufficiently not to need them. Whichever way, it still makes for an impossible hybrid, this creature of the imagination that sprawls across half the world, from circa 50 degrees East to about 130 degrees West, defined according to the ‘gound zero’ of Greenwich, England. What, other than Australia’s longitudinal centrality in this conglomeration, allows us this presumption of the “Asia-Pacific” as a geopolitical entity? If we think of the Asia-Pacific as stretching for about 180 degrees of longitude from Iran to the Marquesas, the line bisecting this spectrum would pretty much go through the middle of Australia. So then, if a particular geographical fiction allowed us to assume a position of centrality as opposed to the historical perception—bemoan it as Terry Smith’s ‘The Provincialism Problem’ or sing about it with the Split Enz as “the tyranny of distance”—of being a backwater, would we not celebrate it? Hey, hey, we are truly in the midst of this one!

In another vein, perhaps we should also be asking, is it relevant that the APT positions itself as a vanguard event? And if so, why is such a position of leadership desirable? Certainly, in terms of the funding and marketing of major events in the context of the ruling economic conservatism that we have lived under for more than a decade, it has become important to keep repeating ad infinitum that the APT is unique, that it has registered constant increases in visitor numbers, and since 2006, bigger spaces too, and so on. Exactly the kind of thing we would like to hear from our export earnings, and from our national statistics in all matters. In our increasingly over-administered exhibitions, publications, research and creative activity, all operate in a network that is harder and harder to distinguish from other spheres of commercial activity. The APT then should be seen as one constituent of a growing international network that focuses on contemporary art from Asia and the Pacific. Having said this, it remains true that in respect of the second region that the APT addresses, the international art world remains largely ignorant and less than enthusiastic. Notwithstanding the presence of Asian superstars in international exhibitions, in this one respect at least, there is still work to be done. In this, I applaud the basic idea behind Blair French’s suggestion [elsewhere in volume 38.4] that we seek to make sense of the APT in an economy hinged at least in part, on such events as the Auckland Triennial or the Festival of Pacific Arts. On the other hand, there are in the Asian field at least three recurring art events—the Asian Art Biennale (Dhaka, Bangladesh, which has been running quietly since 1981), the better known Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in Fukuoka, Japan, (the Triennale has been organised since 1999 by the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum since 1999, though its predecessor, the Fukuoka Art Museum, had initiated a recurring Asian art exhibition with its Asian Art Show in 1979, featuring artists from India, China and Japan in the first instalment).

More recently, the National Taiwan Art Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung, Taiwan, has initiated its own Asian Art Biennale in 2007, the second edition of which must have just opened as I write this. Having said that, none of these should be reasons for the Queensland Art Gallery, or indeed Australia, to exit from the field of contemporary art practice in Asia. Whether or not we like it, we are here: not a part of Asia, and not entirely of the Pacific either, but certainly on the edges of both. Edginess is a good thing in contemporary art, one would have thought, and with our increasing exposure to the phenomenal growth of contemporary art exhibitions in major institutional contexts across the world, we in are perhaps keenly aware of a general impoverishment in conceptual depth while a uniform slick of post-conceptual glibness inundates the still waters.

As is by now well established, contemporary Asian art—whichever way we define it—has become part of the firmament in terms of the contemporary art market, and consequently, of the contemporary art ‘festival’ or ‘expo’ in different parts of the world. The biennale/triennial is not so much in competition with others of its ilk, as with the increasingly ubiquitous art fair (is this the necessary corrective that we need in an age of hyperreal values and institutionalised piety?).

Where then, stands the APT? To my mind, the APT needs to renew its commitment to the need for new scholarship and theorisation on diverse trajectories of modernity in Asia and the Pacific, and treat with a healthy dose of scepticism the burgeoning tendency to valorise, if not fetishise, the spectacular contemporary.

As part of a project undertaken by several Australian institutions since the late 1980s, the APT has sought to redress the imbalance in global art histories with their assumption of Euro-American priority. But this inquiry is by no means complete.

If anything, the spectre of a fetishised contemporary art that can presumably be sourced, at the one moment, from Kazakhstan as well as Kiribati, hinders this project, and lulls us alternately into a false sense of accomplishment, or an equally disingenuous righteous indignation.

Opposite: Cevdet Erek, Circular Week Ruler, 2011 (from Rulers and Rhythm Studies series), 2007-11 Photo courtesy the artist and Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam

2 4 9 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 4 2 012 ADAM GECZY (Broadsheet 38.4) I think this questioning of whether the APT is still necessary and the extent to which it might offer a new perspective is both timely and apposite. This question will become more widespread, especially given the burgeoning of biennales in China and events and institutions elsewhere throughout Asia, that if they continue to grow, will cement their own terms of reference. As any sensible and liberalminded person will affirm, it is essential that a culture be in charge of shaping its own vision of itself, it needs to be in charge of its own conditions of possibility.

The motivations for the APT when it was established in 1993 were self-evident: namely, to recognise Australia’s status as an ‘Asian’ nation, while providing a forum, or platform, for Asian art whose status was still uneven in Europe and the USA. As such Australia’s support of Asian art had the particularly double-edged character of patronage. By giving support to a certain group of artists—in this case Asian—it in return enjoyed a special status as cultural benefactor, with all the economic and ideological implications that subtend from this concept. For to name Australia as the patron of the APT is more than partially inadequate—it is Queensland.

Like so much charity and sponsorship, it serves to assure the prospective consumer of the benevolence of the company patron and thereby brings more goodwill to the products that the company produces. Similarly, the APT was an ingenious strategy for bringing Brisbane’s artistic ambitions into sharper focus and to show the rest of Australia (the rest of the world would hardly weigh into such parochial concerns) that it saw itself as a serious cultural contender that would eventual vie for parity with Sydney and Melbourne. The success of (QAG’s) Gallery of Modern Art is proof of this. From a cultural point of view, healthy competition between cities and States is a good thing, as it gives birth to more art and hopefully also a greater cultural sophistication. The APT was unique to Brisbane and served to make it a hub of Asian art just at the time when it was receiving growing international attention. It marshalled a large group of artists, exposed them to a wider, non-Asian public, while also giving these artists access to new and different markets and critical discourses. It is because of such large enterprises like the APT that Australian artists and its art-going public feel entirely at home with Asian art; many of the artists exhibit regularly in Australian commercial galleries and some have migrated here.

But it would also be worthwhile to ask about the grounds for the interest in Asian art. The answer is simple, and has to do with the vast and venerable notion of the imperial consciousness searching for novelty. As thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, Richard Barnet and Edward Said have repeatedly advised, the West survives off a concept of the ‘Orient’—which can include one or both of the Middle East and Asia—to which it is in constant opposition. While I am in no way assigning any nefarious intent to the APT, it can however still be said to be acting under the same instinct, in a culturally subconscious way, so to speak. Now that its interests have been served, and that Asian art is now becoming increasingly recognised in a particular way—that is, Korean art, Japanese art etc., rather than generically Asian—it is perhaps time to hand over the mantle.

It is worth remembering the credit that needs to be given to the USA for nurturing the idea of contemporary Chinese art, especially since many Chinese artists immigrated to America in the 1980s and once established made most of their artwork there. This is not necessarily an ironic or paradoxical affair; it was in the far less restrictive and permissive atmosphere of the USA that the émigré Chinese artists were able to reflect upon their Chinese experience with a freedom that they would never have been allowed in their homeland. But there remains the question of the next generation of Chinese artists, where and how they find adequate expression. While they may seek out Western support, this is now more viewed from the standpoint of globalisation, and less—now that the spectre of Tiananmen Square is slowly beginning to fade, generationally, as with any other catastrophe of justice—as necessity from self-imposed (or imposed) exile.

The partial independence of Hong Kong for instance, shows that China is not easily generalised about, although there it shows no signs that it seeks to rethink its repressive governance. A question we need to ask is to what extent are we (or the USA or anywhere else) an adequate safe-haven for a freer form of expression.

Was the APT chosen and organised by Asians? No, and indeed had it have been a solely Asian initiative for the purposes of serving Asian interests it would never have gotten up.

And this is the point I think that we need to reflect upon now. Australia has used its ‘Asian’ status to considerable effect, but we all know that Australia likes to have it both ways, it casually calls itself both Asian and Western. Could we imagine a forum for Australian art elsewhere? What would be our reaction to a triennial of Oceanic art organised in Shanghai? A measure of the Orientalist value system is to imagine the obverse. The East has no equivalent of what the Orient is for the West, all it sees is superior Western luxury and power. But it would be useful to ponder the case of a Chinese biennale of European art and what they would cook up. It would be very enlightening to see the Chinese (or anther Asian country’s) image of what is archetypically European. We need to take pause by this idea, lest the good service that the APT has caused becomes a caricature.

But the question is, can they let go of a good thing?

Returning to my point about the Orientalist bias inherent within the APT, while at present an erstwhile Middle Eastern nation like Turkey is vying to enter the European Economic Union, proving yet again the fluid and notional boundaries of the Orient, it would be helpful to speculate about the precise contours of the Asian region. We know that “the Orient” began to be dreamed up in the mid-seventeenth century and what it encompasses has always been a matter of taste on the part of the Western traveller, artist, philologist or intellectual.

Its location is more imaginary and aesthetic than geographic. We might recall that by the end of the eighteenth-century Great Britain had supplanted India’s dominance in the cotton trade and Lyon in France overtook China in quality silks.

In short, the imperial powers had become better at producing Oriental textiles than the countries whence they came. Asia, like the Orient, is not a concept grown voluntarily from Asia; it is a name or a designation that it has chosen. Nationalists within Japan, for instance, balk at the idea of being grouped in with China.

This gives rise to a series of double standards and ironies. Just as Oriental textiles are defined according to how they look rather than where they originate, I would emphasise that Asian-ness is arbitrated according to degrees of difference from a generic Western, and vaguely Aryan standard. If Australia is acceptably a nation that is Asian-Pacific, then every artist within Australia ought to be included and enter the dialogue. Is the APT interested in investigating what this region means or represents, or is it interested in a public relations exercise?

For all the good work it has done, we cannot discount the latter. And I would also up the ante here to ask why European and USA artists, i.e. non-‘Asian’ living within the region are not included? The answer is simple, because they do not fit the requisite bill of exotic cachet. They are not sufficiently different. While I am on this point we might also look at the way in which certain Australian artists of Asian backgrounds reoriented their identity in the early 1990s, emphasising their Asian-ness to their considerable professional profit, when before it had been strenuously downplayed. Does being Asian consist in either looking Asian (whatever that means) and/or having an Asian name? Thus a critical flaccidity stems from these conditions: first that the concept of Asia that the West has is different from that of Asians; second that Asia adopts the concept of Asia as a matter of convenience and it is far from homogeneous; third that what the West (are we that too?)—within the ambit of art and the aesthetic—wants compliance with an imagination that is fundamentally European, and for the sake of profit and exposure, understandably, many Asians are happy to go along with this. The best way out of this mess is to remove the word “Asia” from the APT. This would elide a whole lot of tendentious presumptions and would allow for a more wide-ranging and therefore critical perspective of the art of this region.

JOHN CLARK (Broadsheet 38.4) For me the problem is that the APT started off creatively as an interactive dialogue over a broad range of artistic possibilities and then narrowed itself down to a much closer and less imaginative set of Queensland, Queensland Art Gallery, and implicit but not full articulated Australian national(ist) objectives.

Maybe these were always at the unadmitted core. The air of contradiction and disingenuousness never quite dissipated despite some good intentions. Why this happened can be best understood by the institutions involved, from QAG to Queensland tertiary educational bodies, State politicians and national funding bodies like the Australia Council and Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, being much more transparent about their actual goals and how they chose to realise them. They could examine more closely the relationship between the kinds of policies and funding they sanctioned and the outcomes in range and kinds of art exhibited and the knowledge about it. This had implications for resource distribution across the museums’ and tertiary educational sectors which do not seem to have been included in Queensland State or QAG positions.

Those who like myself have occasionally been allowed to raise and more rarely communicate criticisms about method and choice of artists or works, and the obvious contradictions in public relations copy being confused for understanding or artistic appraisal, have found themselves abused or ignored for largely petty local political reasons instead of the substance of the issues they raised being addressed. This may be a symptom of more broadly difficult relations between academic knowledge and the need for spectacular, audience-driven art gallery performance, or merely a difference in professional techniques and objectives.

But I doubt if even the most populist view of art gallery audiences and the art they are though by curators to prefer, could see the choice of works for this year’s and the last two APTs as anything other than conventional, safe, and its criteria of choice with a few exceptions as mostly provided by the art market, whatever the particular qualities of work shown.

APTI was important because a new area of work and artistic crossnational relations were being undertaken by a major institution in a hitherto unseen geographical zone for the first time. It was also significant because the exhibition by its very exploratory nature in many ways escaped the controls of the institutional and national cultural positions from which it set out. That these institutional and conflicted cultural agendas became more evident and imposed

over time with later APTs, particularly APT4 and APT5, meant that APTI was a significant if momentary opening in artistic and exhibition discourse. If the exhibition was meshed with still unresolved contradictions about Australian cultural perceptions of itself, of cultural others, and a certain naïve clumsiness in understanding how cultural others could relate to Australians, nevertheless this was a liberatory gesture which responded to a far deeper and longer term reenvisagement of Australian culture than is normally credited.

That some of these contradictions, particularly the place and status of those who were of Asian-Australian hybrid identity within Australia, became clear through the structure of the exhibition and the public statements of some of the curatorial actors, did not mean the effort was unworthwhile. Their resolution will await future re-articulation but this was genuine and it would appear for many artists, curators, and viewers alike, a refreshing opening up of artistic and broader cultural discourses on many levels.

CLAIRE HSU: The critical discussion of how the APT emerged from a specific moment in Australian nationalism has been well documented. Similarly, the praise for the APT’s attempts to re-chart a cartography of Australia in relationship to its neighbours has also been well recorded. The APT’s timely arrival as a first of its kind, its geographical remit, and its decade of cross-cultural co-curator collaborations, these circumstances and approaches offered a glimpse of how an institution might be able to create a thoughtful space from which ‘Asia’ could be considered and debated. Twenty years later what is evident is that the conditions from which the APT were born have changed considerably. Since the 1990s there has been a proliferation of biennials in Asia in particular, as well as around the world, more generally. A different set of geopolitical alignments and associations also prevails. And there has been a rise of institutions in Asia, which collectively act to establish multiple locally specific reference points for the continent: from Khoj in Delhi to Cemeti in Yogjakarta, from the Singapore Art Museum to the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, and not least of all, the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong.

I would like to offer some reflections coming from a perspective based in Hong Kong. Seven years after the launch of the APT, the Asia Art Archive was founded. Acutely aware of the work of the Triennial as one of the forerunners for thinking about contemporary art from the region, AAA might in some ways be seen as a relative to the APT in its remit to shine light on the otherwise overlooked and often misrepresented histories of the region. Organisations like AAA are indebted to the paths opened up by the APT. Yet in many ways, AAA is very different from the APT, given that the one is a major exhibition presented by a large State organisation in Queensland, and the other is an independent nongovernment platform in Hong Kong.

While a few of my colleagues at AAA have closely followed the exhibitions in Brisbane, I regret to say that I haven’t yet been to an APT, although I am planning to get there for the current edition. I regret especially that I have missed the first decade of exhibitions. To be honest, I feel that I have missed a moment. While one might argue that the nationalist framework from which the APT emerged ensured that the first exhibitions were fundamentally flawed, the early editions, because of their emphasis on the process as much as the outcome, proposed a lifespan beyond the institution, the exhibition and its catalogue.

The emphasis on research, professional exchange, a multiplicity of voices, as well as the building of an archive, offered a very different model to the single-curator perspective that has been most commonly adopted in biennials in the last two decades.

This privileging of process in the early APTs finds a parallel with the Asia Art Archive’s own work and practice today. AAA has since its onset been dedicated to documenting as well as increasing access to information on recent histories of art in Asia. Our goals have been to complicate, multiply and re-balance the way in which a global art history has up until now been written. Ideals and goals are of course contradictory. The APT is exemplary of that.

As AAA enters its thirteenth year, and the growing pains associated with being a teenager firmly take root, AAA must further consider its responsibility as not only accumulators and disseminators of this material, but also its role in how the material will be interpreted, inflect and built upon. While countless internal debates may take place within the Archive, it is how we think out loud with our communities that will in many ways determine the influence AAA will have in shaping the discourse of the region. How do we avoid the pitfalls that many institutions have tumbled into in mirroring and conforming to prevalent perceptions rather than being able to predict and contest?

While the APT will continue to occupy a central position historically around the early exhibition of contemporary art from Asia, what is its future?

While it is no longer possible, if it in fact ever was, for one event to represent the entirety of Asia, let alone the Asia and Pacific, how might the APT with a renewed sense of place, reclaim its original goals as a platform for dissonance? It is only then that it will be able to challenge the lens from which it is often otherwise being read—described, for instance, by Ranjit Hoskote as “faintly late colonial”.

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LABLE / BABEL ANDREW MAERKLE In the introduction to his book of reflections on his activities with the postwar avant-garde group Hi Red Centre, Tōkyō mikusā keikaku (Tokyo Mixer Plan, 1994)1, the artist and novelist Genpei Akasegawa describes how he and his peers consciously positioned their activities in opposition to art. The word “art”, he wrote, is something like a canned preserve, which begins to go bad as soon as the can is opened. The members of Hi Red Centre stated that their activities (which included staging happenings on the Yamanote rail line circling Tokyo, and a tongue-in-cheek campaign to clean up the streets of the Ginza retail and nightlife district) were not art, because as soon as they were revealed to be art, they too, like canned preserves, would begin to go bad. Seeking to work with a “secret art”, an essential art, Akasegawa idealised the image of the “unopened” artist’s studio, but expanded this image to encompass the entirety of Tokyo. In other words, Hi Red Centre’s events in public were not presentations of art, as might be encountered in a gallery or museum, but rather were conceived and executed as art in an unrecognised state.

It seems likely that when he developed this extended metaphor on the relations between studio, art and public, Akasegawa was in part thinking of his work Universe in a Can (1964), for which he removed all the labelling and contents from an opened can of crab meat, and then reattached the labels onto their corresponding surfaces of the can’s interior. Viewed in person the work is disarmingly simple. In order to “get it”, one has to undergo a momentary disembodiment, simultaneously viewing the world from within the can, which because of the inverted labelling is now the “outside”, and remaining aware of one’s subjective position outside of the can, which is now the “inside”. In a sense, Universe in a Can asks viewers to identify with that which excludes them in order to confirm their place in the universe.

One of the underlying points of tension throughout the discourse of modern and contemporary Japanese art has been the dialectic between foreign influence and native genius. The words “fine art”, “bijutsu”, were coined in 1873 as a translation of the German “schöne Kunst”, prompted by Japan’s participation in that year’s World International Exposition in Vienna.2 As Western art techniques and methodologies were institutionalised during the Meiji-era social reform and Westernisation campaign, Japanese intellectuals called for a school of practice that could uphold “nativist” principles, resulting in two academies, Nihonga Japanese-style painting and Yōga Western-style painting. Entering the twentieth century, artists returned from study in Europe with experience in movements from Cubism and Futurism to Dada and Surrealism, upon which they elaborated and shared with their peers, creating an avant-garde that operated in distinction to both the “traditional” and the conventionally “Western.”

Following the close of World War II, when avant-garde practices were suppressed, Japanese artists quickly began making new international connections.

Partly inspired by the paintings of Jackson Pollock, the Gutai Art Association, based in western Japan, explored new relations between artist, work, site and audience, and was acknowledged as a precursor by American and European artists exploring happenings and site-specific installation. In Tokyo a fluid milieu of experimental artists and musicians, including Akasegawa and Hi Red Centre, as well as Yoko Ono and the composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, had connections with the international Fluxus network and figures like John Cage and Nam June Paik.3 The year 1970 saw two landmarks in the history of exhibitions in Japan, the Osaka World Expo and the Tokyo Biennale. The former showcased the utopian vision of the Metabolist group of architects alongside new media projects by artists like Katsuhiro Yamaguchi and Fujiko Nakaya, as well as by Experiments in Art and Technology. Entitled ‘Between Man and Matter’, and directed by the critic Yusuke Nakahara, the latter included artists like Daniel Buren, Christo, Hans Haacke, Giuseppe Penone and Richard Serra, who all made works in Tokyo alongside Japanese peers.

Counter to this drive to engage with the West has been a movement to identify a mode of Japanese art that is both contemporary and distinct from “artistic models imported from the West”.4 Emerging at the end of the 1960s, the artists, who came to be known as Mono-ha articulated their brand of minimalist situation-as-sculpture partly in terms of East Asian metaphysics, while still working within the methodological framework of art. But there have also been more outwardly revisionist formulations of this discourse, which builds upon the condition that, as an imported concept, the idea of art itself exists in Japan

relative to other forms of expression, rather than as the result of a continuous historical progression. In recent years these include critic Noi Sawaragi’s Ground Zero Japan, held in 1999 at the Contemporary Art Gallery at Art Tower Mito, artist Takashi Murakami’s Super Flat trilogy of exhibitions held between 2000 and 2005 in Tokyo (and also toured to venues in the USA), Paris and New York, and critic Midori Matsui’s The Door into Summer: The Age of Micropop, held in 2007 at Art Tower Mito.

Addressing the geo-political fallout of the end of the Cold War, Sawaragi in Ground Zero Japan proclaimed a new, post-historical condition in which all genres of artistic practice are equivalent, enabling the formation of a new “contemporary art” that could accommodate everything from Nihonga and Yōga painting to manga illustration, design and other practices emerging from (both) all spheres of cultural production.5 In Super Flat, Murakami traced a lineage of eccentricity that connects painters from the late Edo period (1603-1868) to the aesthetics of animated TV programs and the eroticism and fanaticism of Japanese subculture, concluding that, “Super flat, one form of ‘Japanese’ ‘avant-garde’ ‘art’, is an ‘–ism’—like Cubism, Surrealism, Minimalism, and Simulationism before it—only this is one we have created.”6 Giving voice to a generation of artists who came of age after the collapse of the post-war bubble economy, Matsui established as the foundation for “The Door into Summer”, a Japanese art, beginning with the work of artists like Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tatsuo Miyajima and Yasumasa Morimura, who “responded to the specific problems of the postmodern age in Japan… to suggest an indigenous Japanese sensibility”.7

To the extent that these exhibition frameworks heroically attempt to establish a space of resistance to the international narrative of modernism, they also somewhat negate Japan’s history of exchange with the West, and the sophistication with which Japanese artists approached this engagement. And in this sense they are also indicative of the state of Japanese art history itself as being incredibly conflicted and unsettled.8 As the film critic Inuhiko Yomota wrote in the catalogue for Zones of Love: Contemporary Art from Japan, organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney: “Is not this the cultural condition, where the demise of modernism can only be questioned within the overwhelming authority of modernism, peculiar to Japan?”9

This is a lengthy preamble to discussing the legacy of the Asia-Pacific Triennial, but it is presented here partly as a means to dramatise the ambivalence that underlies any international exhibition organised from within an ostensibly geographic framework. What is the interaction between the national and the international in such an exhibition, and to what extent are local narratives, with all their ambiguities, retained or lost when they are brought into an international field? What are the stated and unstated equivalences that draw artists from broadly diverse backgrounds into a shared space? These are recurrent questions that have taken upon fresh relevance in light of the unprecedented globalisation and capitalisation of contemporary art that has more or less occurred concurrent to the twenty years that have passed since the APT was founded.

Conceived from the very start as a forum for ideas and dialogue, as much as a presentation of different artistic practices, the APT throughout its history has both supported important theoretical work on just such questions and also received its share of critique for its ideological ambiguities. Having only visited one edition of the Triennial, APT6 in 2009, it is inevitably as an idea—a sustained and evolving discourse—that the exhibition holds the most significance for me, and it is in its demonstrated willingness to reinvent itself with each edition, while maintaining its core identity that it connects to a broader regional impetus to invent new paradigms of exhibition making.

Certainly, one fully respects and supports Caroline Turner’s statement in the catalogue of APT1 that the exhibition’s guiding thesis is “that EuroAmericentric perspectives are no longer valid as a formula for evaluating the art of this region”, and that “the opportunities for intraregional interchange generated by forums such as the Triennial will, it is to be hoped, provide new ways of looking at art on the basis of equality without a ‘centre’ or ‘centres’”10 But the initial theorisation of the APT also reinforced “Euro-America” as the unifying gaze that determined, through the assumption of their shared lack of visibility in the West, the underlying commonality of the diverse artists and practices grouped together in the exhibition.

Two essays by Nicholas Thomas, in the catalogues for APT2 and APT5 respectively, and both written at times when the Triennial further deepened its engagement with art from the Pacific Islands, refine this initial premise and provide for me the most cogent and powerful arguments for the exhibition’s potential to disrupt the pervasive assumptions of modernist ideology. On the occasion of APT2, Thomas dealt with the false dichotomy between traditional and contemporary.

Even where “a continuum of cultural expressions is presented [in art institutions], with the implication that all possess value and validity”, it is this dichotomy that buttresses the understanding of “the contemporary” as being “of the international art world”, rather than “of the present”. Comparing a woven pandanus basket from the village of Melsisi, Pentecost Island, Vanuatu, and a painting by John Pule, Thomas writes: It could be suggested the term “contemporary art”, if stretched across these differences, incorporates incommensurable things, and becomes meaningless. My view is rather that incommensurability is its meaning. Global relations of cultural exchange create frames in which heterogeneous cultural expressions are placed together in fora such as the Asia-Pacific Triennial. The challenge the Triennial offers is that of seeing beyond the superficial equivalence implied by this framing.

To appreciate the works’ incomparability is to respect the limits of globalisation itself.

Returning to write for the APT5 catalogue, Thomas expands his earlier position.

For Thomas, at a time when art appears to be entering a shared present, history provides a way to interrogate the presumption that “modern and contemporary art is commensurable and translatable… that it is all part of one world, one system of meaning”: Does an abstract or expressionist painting from Malaysia or the Solomon Islands, made in the first decade of the 21st century, really belong to the same history as abstraction or expressionism in Europe? Perhaps what we need to do is ask what these styles, genres, and practices represent locally.

What salience do they possess and why might they be part of the present in one part of the world, yet not in another?

To the extent that the Asia-Pacific might already be considered to be positioned within the West, these essays move the exhibition’s orientation closer to an undefined not-West, and in hindsight APT4 presents itself as a bridge between the two. Focusing in depth on individual artists and groups, rather than attempting a broad survey, APT4 explicitly confronted modernity and the space of the international as a necessary, but contested point of commonality. Overseeing her first Triennial, Suhanya Raffel wrote that for the artists in this edition, “modernity is both a condition that is resisted and a constant source for experiment [sic] and invention”, and that these artists “have fully achieved the recognition of international status—a recognition that embraces the specific cultural frameworks in which the practices of these artists evolved”. In his essay, Wu Hung further articulated this view through the concept of contemporaneity, “recognised as a particular artistic/theoretical construct that self-consciously reflects upon the conditions and limitations of the present, thereby substantiating the present—an unmediated time/place in commonsense—with individualised references, languages and points of view”.

Writing about the woven textiles and fabrics from the Pacific included in APT5, Thomas implied in the conclusion of his second essay that every work maps its own history, and thus its own relation to the present, and helping to establish broader recognition for this idea is surely one of the Triennial’s lasting achievements. But it’s not enough to assert the autonomy of specific histories if the imaginary that connects them—call it modernity, call it the contemporary, call it art, call it the Asia-Pacific—is not also particularised. Doing so is of critical importance at a time when, thanks to communication technologies and relative ease of travel, our imaginaries of the local, national, international and the world —even of ourselves—are more digitised, more diffuse, more individuated and more conflicting than ever before. Doing so is also critical at a time when, as evidenced by the establishment in Hong Kong of a branch of the Art Basel art fair, as well as outposts of multinational galleries like Gagosian and White Cube, “Asia” (if not yet the Pacific) has become a branded entity, and Western dealers routinely express their confidence that Asian collectors will “learn” to appreciate contemporary art.

Without the foil of “Western and Cold War shibboleths”11 (and it is by no means certain that we have fully worked our way through these shibboleths, even if they are no longer as prominent as they once were), the particular must offer itself up as the provisional commonality, as well as an implicit subject of critique and dissent.

In this sense I have to admit that when I finally made it to see the Triennial, the most disorienting aspect of APT6 was not any juxtaposition of “traditional” with “contemporary”, but rather the juxtaposition between the “contemporary” and the “contemporary.” There were clearly several veins of correspondence that ran through the exhibition, such as the works made

of scores of component parts to create visual impact, ranging from Subodh Gupta’s monumental mushroom cloud made of pots and pans to Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s mosaic panels of mirror shards, Kohei Nawa’s taxidermied elk encased in baubles and Gonkar Gyatso’s collages of stickers shaped into Buddhist iconography; or works using architecture like those by Chen Qiulin, Ayaz Jokhio, Yoshitomo Nara + Graf and Shooshie Sulaiman. Cumulatively (in relation to each other and in relation to all the other artists who might have been chosen), could these not be considered a comment on art now, or on art in the Asia-Pacific?

If the exhibition refrains from imposing a definition on contemporary art, neither does it not not make a statement about what art is. How could the selection of Yoshitomo Nara + Graf, Kohei Nawa, Shinji Ohmaki and Hiraki Sawa (in relation to each other and in relation to all the other artists who might have been chosen) not be interpreted as some kind of comment on art in Japan, assuming that from the global pop culture icon Nara to the London-based Sawa, to the relatively domestic Nawa and Ohmaki, their “Japaneseness” is necessarily a precondition for their “Asia-Pacificness”? If the artists are not chosen as representatives of their nations, neither are they not not representatives. Does this ambiguity in what the exhibition represents not put a burden on the self-evidence of the work, and does it not limit the viewer’s possibilities to speak back to the exhibition, or even to the works themselves? Does the ambiguity of the exhibition’s structure actually make it more prescriptive, and perhaps more totalitarian, than less?

But these questions also challenged me to redefine my own place in the contemporary. In a review of APT6 I wrote for Art & Australia, I found Tracey Moffatt’s video montage Other (2009) to be emblematic of the exhibition. “On its surface, Moffatt’s work is a deconstruction of how in the Western media other races have routinely been objectified, imagined as sexy singing and dancing natives.

Yet there is a subtle, comedic humanism to Moffatt’s selection of clips, which more often than not reveal the vulnerability that the Western protagonists experience when confronting difference, the expressions of doubt and confusion that play across their faces as they confront unimagined feelings and attractions.”12

By its nature the APT is always in more than one place at once. It is both in Australia and outside of Australia; in Asia and the Pacific and outside Asia and the Pacific; in the international and outside of the international. The same must be said for its audience as well. The continued popularity of the APT, measured both in visitor numbers and in less quantifiable factors such as the willingness of artists and curators to contribute to the exhibition, suggests that there is a general agreement in the desire for continued regional exchange. I think we should not lose sight of the emancipatory promise that informed the Triennial’s establishment, precisely because it entails revisiting familiar contradictions.

Notes 1

Tōkyō Mikusā Keikaku: Hai-reddo sentā chokusetsu kōdō no kiroku, Chikuma Shobō, Tokyo, 1994

2 See Chiaki Ajioka and John Clark, ‘The New Mainstream’, in Modern Boy, Modern Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art 1910-1935 (exhibition catalogue), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1998 3

The exhibition catalogue Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (HN Abrams, New York, 1994) remains an indispensible overview of this period. More recently, Ming Tiampo’s Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) adds to the discussion of Japanese postwar art in terms of contemporaneity with developments in the West 4

Midori Matsui in The Door into Summer: The Age of Micropop (exhibition catalogue), Parco, Tokyo, 2007

5 See Nihon zero nen (Ground Zero Japan) (exhibition catalogue), Mito Geijutsukan Gendai Bijutsu Sentā, Mito, 2000. The catalogue includes an introductory overview of the exhibition by Sawaragi in both Japanese and English, with a more comprehensive thesis presented in Japanese only. The latter is developed from the essay ‘Nihon/mirai/bijutsu–so no saki ni aru “bijutsu de nai mono”’ (Japan/Future/ Art–Toward a coming ‘non-art’), published in the November 1999 edition of the art journal Bijutsu Techo, and which is now available in English in the catalogue Double Vision: Contemporary Art from Japan, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, 2011 6

From Takashi Murakami’s Super Flat (exhibition catalogue), Madra Publishing, Tokyo, 2000

7

Midori Matsui, op. cit.

8

As the artist Koki Tanaka remarked in a recent interview, “Ultimately in the Japanese art scene, art history, and particularly Japan’s contemporary art history has yet to be consolidated. Whether it’s Shigeo Chiba’s Nihon gendai bijutsu itsudatsu-shi (A History of Deviations in Japanese Contemporary Art, 1986) or Noi Sawaragi’s Nihon/Gendai/Bijutsu (Japan/Contemporary/Art, 1998), history is always written in opposition to a perceived canon, but we actually have no canon. For some reason those who are best positioned to write a canonical history tend to set themselves up in an outside position and write an alternative history. This contradictory and ironic situation only serves to obfuscate the history.”

Published in the online journal ART-iT, Tokyo, November 9, 2012: http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_ed_ feature_e/Id8a9BwZiNSuYfG6mv3M 9 From the essay ‘Speed and Nostalgia’ by Inuhiko Gorky Yomota in Zones of Love: Contemporary Art from Japan (exhibition catalogue), Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1991 10

From the catalogue of APT1

11

Caroline Turner uses several variations of this phrase in her essays for APT2 and APT3

12

Art & Australia, Vol 47, No 3, 2010

2 5 3 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 4 2 012

Page 253: MadeIn Company, Spread201009103 (installation view), 2010 Photo courtesy the artists

CHANGE OF APTITUDE

Colin Chinnery Being based in China, the Asia Pacific Triennial should be familiar to me, but in fact I have never visited the APT. This is not something that I am proud of, but it’s not something that I’ve had to think too much about either. Why is it that a project of seminal importance to Asia hasn’t managed to reach China in a significant way? This is not a rhetorical question aimed at APT; it raises questions as to why the APT is more necessary than ever because of the perspective it represents.

The word “perspective” is particularly useful for considering the importance and meaning of the APT project. One definition of “perspective” (as quoted from the Apple Mac dictionary) is “the appearance of viewed objects with regard to their relative position, distance from the viewer etc.”, which is actually more pertinent with regard to the APT than its other important definition that denotes opinion.

Of course the opinions of QAGOMA and guest curators matter, but what interests me here is the relationship between distance and ideas, and how this affects the creation of meaning in exhibition making.

There is no doubt that the APT was a trailblazing project when it began not long after Jean-Hubert Martin’s seminal show Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in 1989. While Magiciens was arguably the first major museum show in the West introducing audiences to the contemporary art of non-Western countries, it was unabashedly Western in its perspective, selecting artists from Martin’s own history and sensibilities.1 While the Pompidou instigated the first such major show of its type, it had no reason to continue in that direction, as the

aim was not to engage other cultures per se, but to use alternative content to reanimate Western concepts. The geopolitical situation of Australia in the early 1990s was quite a different matter. Paul Keating’s strategic drive to link Australia with Asia was part of a broader recognition of a transfer of influence from the traditional hegemonies of the West to the emerging powers across Asia. Here, the idea of perspective comes into sharp relief as Australia began to acquire a sense of physical distance between itself and its Western allies versus the proximity of its Asian and Pacific neighbours.

The initiation of a major State-sponsored exhibition of contemporary Asia-Pacific art was not only the product of cultural policy or even intelligent curatorial strategies, but was perhaps part of an urgent need for Australians to discover new ways of looking at themselves. There are not many exhibitions in the world with both the opportunity and possibility of addressing such a need, and in this sense the APT’s raison d’être feels very similar to that of documenta which was launched in Germany after the Second World War to heal and redress a broken European identity. Rather than being broken, Australia’s identity may have been more akin to a work in progress, shedding its colonial skin and growing a new one more attuned to its actual surroundings. From this perspective, the APT had a far more important role than to entertain and educate local audiences, or to give a platform to artists from regions peripheral to the contemporary art world. The APT needed to make art matter for people, and for that to happen, the art presented also had to matter. Herein lies all the tricky curatorial questions that have made APT such an interesting project over the years. Yes, the exhibition had to avoid

2 5 5 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 4 2 012 cultural imperialism, promote cultural diversity, and debate the relative merits of a democratic curatorial model vs. coherent vision; but the way I understand it, all of this debate was in order to produce an exhibition with as much meaning as possible. As the self-reflexive nature of conferences, advisory committees, and complex curatorial structures that defined the first three editions of the APT demonstrated, there was no magical formula for this.

This brings me back to the issue of perspective. In order to create an exhibition that among other things allowed people to see themselves more clearly in a changing geopolitical context, it needed to understand what changes other cultural scenes were going through. The situation in China, as an example, was quite similar to that of Australia in this regard. In the 1980s, after decades of isolationism, Chinese identity was in dire need of renewed cultural definition.

Regardless of the length of Chinese history and of the damage to its cultural heritage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, China didn’t look to its past to rediscover itself, but instead looked outwards. After an intense crash course in what China had been missing in literature, philosophy, art etc., Chinese artists organised themselves into dozens of artist groups all over the country and staged hundreds of exhibitions in a creative outburst now known as the ’85 New Wave.

This culminated in 1989 in a seminal exhibition at the China Art Gallery2 titled China/Avant-garde, featuring nearly three hundred artworks that defined the urgency of China’s need to grow a new soul. This is arguably the kind of art suited to the context of building the APT.

However, with the amount of curators and advisors involved, competing interests had to even themselves out to produce a Chinese artist list that had little to do with the energy of China at that time. That is an inevitable complexity when attempting to encompass “the diversity of practices across Asia, the Pacific and Australia”, which Jennifer Higgie quipped in her Frieze review of APT6 “has a combined population of roughly four billion people. Why not cut your losses and simply use planet Earth as a curatorial guideline?” Similarly, Adam Jasper exclaimed in his Frieze review of APT5, that the APT “is a show whose regional scope and largesse could be considered grounds for suspecting Queensland of geopolitical ambitions”. What lies behind these two lightly cynical comments in otherwise positive reviews is the suspicion of a curatorial remit based on geography so large as to become almost meaningless.

I feel it is relevant here for a comparison between the APT and documenta, because of the geographical nature of these two projects. documenta is basically a European project, and any previous doubt on this point has been answered eloquently by the scope and intricacy of Carolyn ChristovBakargiev’s dOCUMENTA (13). Although artists from further afield were selected for participation, the choices felt somehow arbitrary and separate from the core issues the show sank its intellectual teeth into. What for me gave this year’s documenta its gravitas was not any particular theme, but the distinct feeling that the art exhibited was something we really needed to see at that moment of time in order to regain a sense of faith in culture or perhaps even in ourselves.

This would not have been possible to achieve by simply showing recent work by the most successful artists, which often proves more depressing than enlightening, but by in-depth research into a cultural situation, and responding to that situation with unexpected choices that can only be made through an understanding brought about through that research. It is the proximity of perspective that allowed such research to be possible for documenta, so what perspective can be employed to research the vast area the APT encompasses? While there is something essential about documenta as a European cultural project, what makes the APT essential?

My analysis of the APT above may appear critical, but it is not intended to be negative. From what I have read, both local and international impressions of the APT have been predominantly positive, and as I have never actually visited the APT I will take these reviews at face value. It does seem essential that an exhibition encompassing the various cultural regions included in the APT can be seen in one place, and as I explained above, I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that Australia is the place where such an exhibition was conceived.

Perhaps what is even more important than the needs of local audiences is the need for different parts of Asia and the Pacific to have an opportunity to come together and communicate. East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia: each a cultural continent in its own right as complex as that of Europe, and each still shares roots that are maintained today in terms of language, religion, trade, or even common enemies. Although the degree to which contemporary culture flourishes in each region is very different, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say there is more contemporary dialogue between each region and the West than between the regions. This is certainly the case in China, where the domestic art market keeps much of the art world focused on itself, while eyes on the outside world focus on artists, museums, and galleries from Europe and the USA. While this is a natural state of affairs, given that the West is still the central driving force of contemporary practice and discourse, it appears short-sighted not to look at other regions, which like China face similar issues in navigating the sticky terrain that links or divides local traditional culture and global contemporary ideas. If there used to be a vehicle for binding Asia together is was the Silk Road and other trade routes that crisscrossed Asia, transporting commodities like tea and silk at the same time as art

and religious ideas. Globalisation has behaved in a very similar way across the world, but now that we can fly or Skype across continents, we seem to have left our neighbours out of the equation. It is my belief, however, that our neighbours are still very much part of the cultural equation, and by leaving them out we are missing important ideas that link our past, present and future in different parts of Asia. By initiating the APT, Australia began a process not just for itself, but for all the regions encompassed by the project.

However, the contemporary art world in Asia is quite a different place than it was in 1993, and it appears that while the APT still mounts ambitious exhibitions, there seems to be less and less that differentiates it with other Asian biennials and triennials of which there are now many. So, while it may have been essential for me to travel to the first three APTs, what makes the APT essentially different from Taipei, Sydney, or Gwangju that I must travel five thousand miles to visit it from Beijing? After all, most of these exhibitions now also show artists from all over Asia and the Pacific, perhaps only leaving out the lesser-known nations of the Pacific Islands. The answer is perhaps not so important for QAGOMA, which has now settled into a comfortable rhythm of increasing local audiences with each edition, while using that to build on its collection of Asian and Pacific contemporary art. But that would be a shame if it were the case, as the APT can still be something with a vision quite separate to that of broader biennial events. I still believe that perspective is crucial. The APT can be the international contemporary art event that consciously brings all of Asia and the Pacific together not just to showcase, but to discuss and debate issues that affect us all. But in order to better understand and curate the content for such a show, the APT needs to avoid the cumbersome system of delegation that plagued the first three editions at the same time as going into greater depth of research that an in-house curated exhibition requires. The organised discussions that need to be expanded at QAGOMA can start in each region, replacing fly-by research visits that plague all tri-bi projects. Only with such a level of engagement can the APT dig into the issues that matter and create exhibitions that matter.

Returning to the beginning of this text, it is striking how little information reaches us here in China on the APT, and yet it’s also remarkable how much more important the APT could be for Asia than it is. Perhaps “Asia-Pacific” is too big for the APT to have the depth of focus that has defined documenta, but a different style of engagement has the potential to reflect the real complexity of these regions. Just like Australian audiences needed the APT at the outset to change their perspective on themselves, as much as the cultures represented by the show, audiences have caught up and perhaps overtaken the APT. Maybe it’s time for the APT to change gears and surprise us once more.

Notes 1 Benjamin Buchloh, and Jean-Hubert Martin ‘The Whole Earth Show’, Art in America, 77 (5) 150-59, 1989: 211-13 2

Now known as the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC)

Opposite: Parastou Forouhar, Lion, From Persian for beginners, 2012 Below: Parastou Forouhar, Written room, 1999-ongoing Photos courtesy the artist

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Oraib Toukan, Reworking Ammar (from The Equity is in the Circle 2007–09) 2009 Photo courtesy the artist

WAGER ON COSMOPOLITANISM ON THE 7TH ASIA PACIFIC TRIENNIAL

RANJIT HOSKOTE REVISITING THE FOUNDATIONAL MOMENT We have come, increasingly, to describe biennials, triennials, quinquennials and other mega-exhibitions of global contemporary art as “perennials”. While the term covers a multitude of periodicities, its horticultural flavour is peculiarly apposite; one of the grandest examples of the species, documenta, has its modest origins in an art exhibition intended as an adjunct to a flower show in the bombedout, post-World War II German city of Kassel in 1955. Four decades later, on the other side of the planet, another perennial emerged from a quite different matrix of political and cultural factors: the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane. When the seventh edition of the APT opens this December it will mark the twentieth anniversary of the foundation of this initiative. Since this twodecade period maps rather precisely onto the turbulent epoch of globalisation, with its opportunities and deficits, its volatile encounters and glaring discontents, this would seem to be the appropriate moment to reflect on whether or not the APT has proved itself to be, to carry our figure to its logical terminus, a hardy perennial.

When the Queensland Art Gallery inaugurated the APT in 1993, Brisbane as a city and Queensland as a State were in the process of repositioning themselves as sites of the future, places where the outplayed colonial past could be moulted and new visions of internal reconciliation and external dialogue could be developed. The political context for the APT was surely provided by Prime Minister Paul Keating’s early-1990s policy of fostering an active engagement with Asia, based on a recognition of changing geopolitical realities. In consonance with this stance, the Queensland government hoped to explore the possibility of a new economic and political relationship between Australia and Asia, marking a programmatic move away from Australia’s traditional alignment with the UK and the USA. This recalibration of political priorities had a powerful resonance in the cultural sphere. Doug Hall, then Director of the QAG, wrote quite candidly of this paradigm shift in his Preface to Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, a benchmark publication edited by Caroline Turner to accompany the first edition of the APT: In government, diplomatic and trade terms, Australia has always placed emphasis on Asia, but it has never been more openly articulated than now. In the context of this extraordinary public discussion about Australia’s place in the Asia-Pacific region... lay the challenge in developing the philosophy of the Triennial. Firstly, it was not to be seen as an Asian/ Australian dialogue. It was to be a facilitator for a number of debates and ideas (of which this book is a part) through which Australia could legitimately be seen as a participant. It was to be undertaken on the basis of intellectual equality, to be seen as a revelation of art from each of the countries [included in the Triennial], and to be an examination of the dynamics of concepts of tradition, identity and change in those countries.

As distinct from the [Queensland Art] Gallery imposing a fixed and closed curatorial position, this required a close association with a range of artists, writers, curators, academics, cultural institutions and arts bodies in each of the countries.1 The curatorial perspective of APT1 was consonant with the spirit of the early 1990s, when scholars, artists, critics, theorists, curators and activists had all recognised that the global order of the Cold War had been conclusively overthrown, but the system that would replace it had not fully revealed its contours. That system, polarised between the rapacious neoliberal process of economic globalisation and the equally violent neo-tribal reactions of regional, ethnic, religious selfassertion to it, would unfold over the next two decades. In 1993, Caroline Turner and her contributors testified presciently to the radical changes that would soon overturn their world and identified the discursive fault lines of the encounter between various societies in the Asia-Pacific region. However, and this is perhaps symptomatic of no more than the ideological preoccupations and biographical

horizons of a particular generation, they formulated their themes and questions through what seems, in retrospect, a Cold-War-period area studies world-view, with its tacitly essentialist vocabulary of nation, tradition, identity, change, adaptation and the universal/local divide. As Turner wrote in her introductory essay to Tradition and Change: At the end of the twentieth century the concept of the nation-State at the heart of defining cultural identity seems to be under attack. Have concepts of pluralism and cultural syncretism made ‘national identity’ irrelevant? We seem to be entering a new world era of regionalism and even tribalism (as, for example, in Europe) where regional and local identity is a vital factor in the face of attempts to find or force commonalty. In the end, however, there seems no other way of approach except through national definitions.2 She continued: “The debate over identity frequently draws its focus through counterpoint: East and West, Occident and Orient and, in the case of Asian nations, in rejection of Asian values. So often the definition of cultural and national identity has been in terms of a counterpoint—defining what we are not rather than what we are—the myth of otherness, the unreality of orientalism or occidentalism, the lure of exoticism and the necessity of otherness.”3 BEYOND NATIONS AND REGIONS The reliance on cultural anthropology as a mode of curatorial encounter and production, latent in the formulation of APT1’s agenda, has long been abandoned by the institution in the face of a greatly transformed world. On the positive side, the contributory methodology delineated by Hall and Turner has been refined and expanded through successive editions of the Triennial, and has grown in relevance as a response to the world’s growing and entangled complexity. When Tradition and Change was published, the multilateral arrangements and regional alliances of the Cold War were in disarray, but nation-States and corporations occupied fairly localised positions; access to the internet was confined to a few military, academic, research and corporate networks. This seems, even to those of us who have lived through the transition, an almost mythic age of innocence when compared to the unpredictably networked present, characterised by a high degree of mobility among people, ideas, goods and services. The internet has accelerated communication to exponential levels yet the levels of conflict across the planet have soared. The neoliberal economy, even in its post-Lehman Brothers precariousness, continues to straddle the globe; meanwhile, regional mobilisations based on ideologies both of inclusiveness and hatred now spread rapidly across a public sphere that is as concretely local as the street and as potentially global as social media like Facebook and Twitter will allow. Crucially, the digital and the telematic are no longer an adjunct to ‘normal’ experience; they are fundamental to normality.

Correspondingly, a major and vital conceptual shift from the ‘intercultural’ to the ‘transcultural’ has taken place between 1993 and the present across art history, cultural anthropology, the humanities, the social sciences and curatorial practice. As cultural producers, we no longer talk of intercultural dialogue; the very idea, which once exercised many of us, now seems quaint.

Instead, we accept and study the ‘transcultural’ condition, and we are aware that it describes our lives, relationships and the shape of our thought, affect, affinities and choices. We have put behind us the essentialist, static characterisations of people, regions, cultural practices and artistic production on the basis of such entities as ‘civilisations’, ‘traditions’, ‘blocs’ and ‘identities’. Instead, we attend to the dynamics of the intensely networked, migratory, layered global present.

We grapple with it, in the atlas-resistant, lexicon-eluding fullness of its unexpected adjacencies and interstitial hybridities; we probe its unsought intimacies and unexpected estrangements; its circulatory paths along which economic migrants, proscribed refugees, technocratic itinerants and cultural pilgrims travel; and the continuous renegotiations between people and places, between interpretation and location, between position and predicament, between citizenship and alienation, that it demands.

2 5 9 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 4 2 012 Such a historic shift necessitates a renunciation of the nation-State-based approach that had seemed, to the curatorium of APT1, to be not only reasonable but unavoidable. Rather, given the multiple modes, thresholds and locations of cultural production, it would be far more rewarding to address what we might, following Stephen Greenblatt, regard as the self-fashioning of subjectivity by artists and other cultural producers wrestling with the specificities of their situations.4 Accordingly, in the context of biennale-making, and the making of transnational exhibitions more generally, the emphasis has shifted decisively from the ‘representation’ of cultures, regions, continents and other such conscriptive aggregates to the ‘translation’ of diverse forms of cultural production and art practice and the kaleidoscopic ‘assembly’ of such positions, with the various mechanisms of dialogue, mutual engagement and production of fresh and shared knowledge that the tropes of translation and assembly imply. Kathryn Weir, Curatorial Manager, International Art and Australian Cinémathèque at the QAG, a key curatorial contributor to APT6, underscores this shift when she observes, undoubtedly in autobiographical mode: The model of exhibitions centring on geo-cultural regions is largely outmoded and many curators and theorists are searching for other ways of defining fields of practice and international conversations. Geo-cultural regions are not what they once imagined to be; they are more clearly recognised as historical and political constructions bolstered by particular systems of thought... [It is important] to think in terms of changing, generative relationships, rather than established identities.5 Having adopted the mode of translation as a way of initiating this project of understanding the world, Weir acknowledges—and this is a key element of what I can only describe, after experiencing APT6 and discussing its preparatory processes with some of its curators, as the APT’s dignified and receptive humility in the face of the Other—that some surplus or remainder will remain unassimilable, resistant to translation, and must be respected as such. This calls for the development of a specific curatorial ethic; as Weir writes: “In a conversation or an exhibition, this means cultivating an openness to what is not known or cannot be known. The question is how to listen, observe, pause and be silent on the ground of ‘elsewhere’.”6 This is a curatorial ethic that has, on the evidence of successive editions, come to inform the APT’s world-view, which is periodically subjected to critical self-assessment and renovation.

BETWEEN PERENNIAL AND MUSEUM In reflecting upon the manner in which the APT has recrafted its relevance over the last two decades, we must consider in some detail the role that a perennial plays in the mediation of global contemporary art. I deploy this word, “mediation”, here in both a diplomatic and a philosophical sense. In the first, diplomatic sense: a perennial must negotiate between two positions that, though not necessarily hostile, come into a common arena from opposite directions and must develop forms of mutual accommodation (I picture the protagonists of the domain of art on the one side, artists, curators, theorists, critics, and so forth; and, on the other side, the intended recipients of their activity, the viewers). In the second, philosophical sense: a perennial must act as an institution that helps individuals locate themselves in the world, to form a sense of relationship with the world by means of connection to some larger world-view, theme, question, mandate, sense of purpose, or articulated goal. Perennials achieve this twofold mediation in many ways: through the conceptual organisation of works in the exhibition, the exhibitionary and discursive environments created to engage viewers; or via the itinerary of ideas that inform the making of the perennial and are disclosed to viewers during their experience of the exhibition, by reference to the contours of ongoing debates that shape and shade the perennial; and by the expansion of the historical ground on which perennials build their temporary arrangements, the fresh characterisation of planetary urgencies. Whatever the mediatory strategy of choice, every perennial—and every edition of every perennial—must develop its own narrative, a curatorial dramaturgy by which histories and subjectivities are brought into interplay, and responsive citizens are brought into open-ended encounter with the articulations of artists. Ideally, what is hoped for is the transformation of provocative artistic and curatorial labour into critical cultural value in the experience of viewers.

Nancy Adajania and I have written of how two unfolding logics intersect in every perennial: the logic of editionality, which incarnates the ongoing ideological, administrative and institutional concerns and methods of the organisation that has conceived and hosts the perennial; and the logic of selfdisruption, which is brought in by the curators of each edition, whose narrative, thematic, choice of contributors, conceptual topography and mise en scene may enact a rupture with previous editions as well as the host organisation.7 In the case of the APT, which is both hosted and curated by the QAG and its more recent extension, GOMA, the two logics must be performed, so to speak, by the same team of individuals. The potential occupational hazards of such an arrangement are manifest: conformity from one edition to the next, with editionality in the

ascendant; or schizophrenia, with a self-conscious, compensatory and deliberate self-disruptiveness from one edition to the next.

To its credit, the APT has worked with a sense of responsibility to its institutional mandate and sensitivity towards its interlocutors and collaborators to sustain a continuous process of self-critical yet gradual evolution. In this, the APT builds on what now seems to me to be an inestimable advantage, although I once saw it as a negative factor: the fact that the Triennial is situated at another productive intersection of logics. It marks the mutually replenishing cusp between the perennial and the museum, between biennale practice and museum protocol.

This has vital consequences for the two drives that, to my mind, inspire and impart to the APT a special place among perennials: pedagogy and collection.

Pedagogy is an imperative for the APT, and it benefits from the QAGOMA’s understanding of the importance of dialogue with an audience to considerable effect. While this is admittedly anecdotal evidence, gathered during a visit to APT6 in March 2010, I was strongly impressed by the APT’s commitment to its engagement with an audience that ranges across varied demographic profiles based on age and ethnicity, and to the discursive relay of possible interpretations between artists, art works and audiences. The APT curatorial team and the GoMA education department had crafted a special model for effective and sensitive didactics, in the wall texts meant specifically for children and young adults.

These texts prompted cognitive and visceral connections between particular art works and the experience of young viewers, especially with regard to potentially vexed issues such as identity, hybridity, migration history and religious belief.

These exchanges rendered palpable the transformative energy of art.

I was struck by the serious, non-patronising attitude towards children and young adults. They were treated seriously as visitors; the wall texts meant for them prompted curiosity, opened up a field of questions, catalysed a critical understanding of and an inquiry into difference, affect, varying criteria of aesthetic judgement, and the relationship between images and their contexts.

While this approach may well run the risk of cultural and aesthetic relativism, it certainly counteracts the limitations of ethnocentrism and bigotry, and helps every succeeding generation to address the fact of alterity. This is surely an important device of self-fashioning in a multiethnic society, and contributes to a liberal socialisation. The definitive moment came, not in the galleries, but in the riverside cafe, when we overheard a child of no more than six or seven tugging at his mother’s sleeve, saying, “Let’s go to the art gallery, mommy!” This unforced assimilation of receptiveness towards art in a child marked, for us, the enduring success of the APT as pedagogic experiment. The eternal debate over the relevance of perennials to their local audiences finds an answer in Brisbane, where the local audience appears to have grown in dynamic synchrony with the APT.

The other drive that impels the APT is that of collection, the integration of commissioned works from every edition of the APT into the permanent holdings of the QAGOMA. I would contend that this has less to do with a traditional notion of acquisition and more to do with the dynamic relay of fresh ideas into the mental world of the QAGOMA’s visitors, the body of citizen-viewers who are its continuing audience. Many, perhaps most perennials evaporate once they are over. What residues do they leave behind? The memory of viewers and the debates of critics, scholars, curators, detractors; such residues as the images and texts in catalogues and visitors’ guides; installation views in journals, a few reviews, notes in blogs, traces on Facebook and Twitter. By contrast, the APT (again, because of its cusp location between biennale and museum practice) does not wholly evaporate.

Through the works that it commissions for eventual acquisition by QAGOMA, enough remains from every edition of the APT to become part of its institutional memory and its ongoing narrative. The works that remain in the collection act as reference points, energisers of sensibility, prompts to meditation, calls to renewed attentiveness, which can be invoked and demonstrated in various curatorial projects beyond the moment of the perennial: through them, alterity, distance, difference and incongruity become, I would like to think, part of the normality of the citizen-viewer in Brisbane. In a word, the APT is an articulation of that invaluable mode of being in the world and being with others: cosmopolitanism.

TOWARDS A SELF-RENEWING COSMOPOLITANISM A few words in conclusion. Admittedly, I have chosen to interpret the APT in seemingly utopian register, emphasising its gift for incarnating cultural receptivity and its ability to amplify and productively complicate the existential contexts of its local, primary viewership. However, I must insist that this is not a utopian so much as it is a robustly practical reading of the APT’s possibilities. It seems to me that the APT can, at its best, act as a platform for a vigorous and selfrenewing cosmopolitanism, as it brings artists, art-works, interpretations and viewers together. It embodies that delicate, constantly scrutinised and revaluated relationship between the ‘sovereignty’ of the self and its ‘hospitality’ towards the ‘Other’, which forms one of the main strands in Nikos Papastergiadis’ brilliant, thoughtful and important new book, Cosmopolitanism and Culture. To be a host (as perennial and museum) is to serve an ambiguous, demanding, double-edged vocation, subjecting oneself, as much as the stranger (the artist, the art-work and its contexts) seeking entry, to sustained ethical attention and empathy. As Papastergiadis writes, annotating and adapting Derrida’s thoughts on the subject:

Page 260: Takahiro Iwasaki, Reflection Model (Perfect Bliss) (installation view), 2010–12 Photo courtesy the artist Opposite: Nguyen Manh Hung, Living together in paradise (detail), 2009 Photo courtesy the artist

By keeping open the space of encounter... every culture has the capacity to be hospitable to the other (to receive them without question) and also to colonise the other by receiving them as a guest (to confine their admission to ways which confirm the authority of the host). This tension cannot be resolved in an absolute way, and Derrida recognises that ‘unconditional hospitality’ is impossible... The right to mobility must be positioned alongside the host’s right to authority over their own home.8 Further, Papastergiadis argues: “Find the gesture of hospitality and there lies the place of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism does not wait for emperors to impose forced marriages, nor does it descend like the grace of a higher deity. It starts in every small gesture of reciprocity... Hospitality on the basis of no expectations may sound rather idealistic, but it also rests on the more pragmatic principle that one should receive a stranger with the presumption that he or she may be a god in disguise. I would like to propose that art keeps open the mystery of the stranger’s identity.”9 It is through the gesture of hospitality, its responsive reception of the stranger and his or her mystery through plural readings, its critical awareness that it could equally lapse into constraining the stranger within a conceptual or curatorial frame, and therefore what I read as its wager on cosmopolitanism, that the Asia Pacific Triennial finds its continuing relevance.

Notes 1 Doug Hall, Preface to Caroline Turner (ed.), Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, St Lucia: Queensland University Press, 1993: xi-xii 2

Caroline Turner, ‘Internationalism and Regionalism: Paradoxes of Identity’, in Caroline Turner (ed.), Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific: xiv-xv 3

ibid: xv

4

See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005

5 Kathryn Weir, ‘News from Elsewhere: Gesturing in Another Language’, in Kathryn Weir and Mark Nash eds., The View from Elsewhere, Sydney & Brisbane: Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation & Queensland Art Gallery, 2009: 16 6

ibid: 23

7

See Nancy Adajania and Ranjit Hoskote, ‘Notes towards a Lexicon of Urgencies’, in DISPATCH, the online journal of Independent Curators International (October 2010), online at: http://www.ici-exhibitions. org/index.php/dispatch/posts/notes_towards_a_lexicon_of_urgencies/

8

Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012: 58

9

ibid: 196-197

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I FELL IN THE PACIFIC RIM. I FALL IN THE PACIFIC RIM. I WILL BE IN THE PACIFIC RIM,

Natasha Conland The concept of a rim of connectedness across the Pacific Ocean linking the artistic practice of Australasia to Asia and the West Coast of America emerged in New Zealand in the 1970s. Quite apart from the political and economic imperatives of the time, ‘the Rim’ was a means of forging artistic ties in a new latitudinal direction, diffusing the magnetism of the North, focusing instead on the poles of the South. The Rim maintained ties across, in spite of, over the top of, the mass of the Pacific Ocean. It spoke of relationships borne within the contemporary rather than the historic mode. However, the notion of a Rim between the Asia Pacific has all but slipped from contemporary use. Even the Asia Pacific Triennial, which takes up this territory most boldly, has dissolved the hyphens and grammatical linkages between these meta-territories, Asia and the Pacific. The connections are to an extent up for (re) consideration. Rather than tackle the whole, I will digest in some part here how New Zealand intersects with this space.

In a now familiar story to local art history, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand’s first dedicated contemporary art museum, was inaugurated in 1970 with an identified focus on “art of the Pacific Rim”.1 These were mechanisms for being cannily international within limited means, for shifting the power base and centric tug of Europe, for reshaping artistic genealogies closer to home, but they did not necessarily herald new platforms for art of Pacific peoples. In 1976 the Auckland Art Gallery programmed the Pan Pacific Biennale, under the leadership of John Maynard (the first director of the Govett-Brewster). A second instalment of the Biennale did not eventuate, although it was intended to be the first of a series.2 The catalogue was a staple-bound list of works by twenty artists from Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the USA. In keeping with the times and due to the Biennale’s relative isolation in the Gallery’s program, there is little if any institutional argumentation or statement of objectives attached to its exhibition record. It was a comparatively small-scale affair and by today’s promotional standards it barely warrants the “biennial” placard. The exhibition carried a further sub-category, ‘Colour Photography and its Derivatives’. John Maynard, the curator in today’s terms, described the exhibition as an opportunity to bring together artists using new colour reproductive technologies to showcase examples of “a substantial alternative movement” to “photographer’s photography”. His loose and sometimes ‘trippy’ exhibition was in tune with residing interests in art’s transience and accessibility by distance, and contemporaneous with a suite of newly adaptive art mediums.3 Here, the Asia-Pacific Rim was encoded on the whole through a set of artistic forms and networks, which linked practice across their geographic bases.

Two decades on, in the 1990s, it is easy to see and say that the cultural agencies in government were increasingly taking charge of the terms for regional exchange. From New Zealand into Australia at least, a critical signpost of that exchange was the Headlands project, formed by a curatorial collaboration and supported directly through the government agencies of both countries. Headlands: Thinking Through New Zealand Art (1992) was the first exhibition at the newly established Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. It was a review of New Zealand’s art history from the perspective of the contemporary, which sought to re-examine the framing of national art histories through an exhibition project. The curatorial team chose fairly from among modern and postmodern contenders, then radically destabilised their historic lineage. The exhibition (by review) had a mostly positive account in its home base, Sydney, and a somewhat catastrophic effect on the local in New Zealand. Many contextual events led to the crisis (a heated discussion on cultural and artistic appropriation, the national tour of Headlands was all but abandoned, friendships fell, artistic and curatorial alliances dissolved, trust was abused), and suffice to say that within this curatorial juggling act, the spirit of celebration did not co-mingle easily with the spirit of reappraisal in cultural nor artistic terms, and the ‘bi’ of New Zealand’s cultural terms was further split on this basis, between reverence and disquiet.

Twenty years have elapsed since Headlands, and despite one Masters thesis, and a few critical mentions, very little has been written on the Headlands episode of New Zealand’s art history outside its moment of immediate review and reaction. In many ways Headlands has come to represent in New Zealand a breakdown of goodwill around the purposing of national representation, which

results in both a sensitised condition to art’s representation or usurpation into any kind of national frame.4 At least the synthesis of ideas under the rubric of bi-culturalism did not fall easily within the contemporary at that moment; they raged in a manner that invigorated and froze discourse.

By relative comparison, during the same development cycle New Zealand emerges uncomplicatedly in the context of the First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art as a Pacific nation, represented by seven artists, four Pākeha, three Māori, and one Samoan New Zealander; four men and three women (counting has become important). To audiences of the contemporary in New Zealand such assertion of categorical national positioning must have seemed anomalous given the state of its disruption at home, however little disquiet was heard. In his review for Art New Zealand Michael Dunn merely commented that; “Whether intentionally or not Kirker’s selection of works pointed to a great divide between the Maori and Pakeha dimensions of the exhibits.”5 It was as if these individual artistic positions simply sat individually and easily within the categorical definition “New Zealand”.

By contrast, much has since been said, written and re-written about the Asia-Pacific Triennials over their twenty-year history. Without a crisis as such, the goodwill on the whole around the positive effects of such a landmark exhibition project is palpable through the words alone—yet consistent through the most positive and critical, yet optimistic of these, is a familiar split personality. Firstly an admiration for the territory it carves out—setting out a place, a home for the Asia-Pacific even in the most begrudging reminders of the associated economic and political incentives; then a request, or a query, or a cry, despite the differing episodic formats, for some curatorial direction upon which one might determine some level of justice of this reappraisal of art within the formula of regional logic.

I must confess, in reading retrospectively within this space it has an eerie realism. My first year as a tertiary student of art began in 1992, and the potency of the post-Headlands debate made contemporary New Zealand art one of the liveliest places to be. For no tutorial room had the capacity to resolve or even offer conjecture at that time, as to where we might go from here with the contemporary. Artists offered a series of witty exchanges that caricatured postcolonial rhetoric in comic, acerbic tones. All too quickly we were irreverently post-post-colonial.

Twenty years on again since the 1990s the early press material on the APT7 makes a subtle shift in its spatial demarcation, which in turn seeks to counter or address one of the core concerns and confusions of this exhibition format. Having already dropped its hyphen to allow a separate Asia and Pacific, the APT now acknowledges the less transparent role of the host country in former times. The APT7 is announced as the “only major series in the world to focus exclusively on Asia, the Pacific and Australia”.6 Here Australia separates out from both Asia and the Pacific in its unique position as host and choreographer within the region. Seen in proper terms as an idea and a construction therein, there is perhaps less need to worry about the actualities of its territory. The “AsiaPacific” can now more or less be as it is described each year. As Julie Ewington wrote at the APT’s opening; “This is not an ‘all-Asia’ exhibition. On the contrary, it brings together an assertively unstable collection of cultures from a loose geographic region, assembled through Australian curiosity to learn more about the contemporary cultures of Australian’s neighbours, an ambition to act as cultural broker in the region…”.7 With less patience in 1999 after the third APT, Melissa Chiu called for transparency around Australia’s role in the APT. Going on to talk of the thematic prevalence of Western definitions of time in all three Triennials, she wrote that “one manifestation of this level of control is that Australian interests and perspectives provide the framework for the interpretation of artwork”.8

While a useful pointer towards the political structures underlying the occasion, what seems odd here is the likelihood of a misunderstanding. That is, the structural frame of the APT is that of an exhibition rather than a quantitative survey of arts of the region. It is a highly authored event—whether that authorship is made apparent or not—issued by the institution under its edifice Queensland Art Gallery. Its fiction is however made ever more potent for its ability to reflect experienced conditions within the political-spatial arena outlined by its title.

It is possible too, that in keeping the authorship of the event framed by the

2 6 3 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 4 2 012 institution, rather than a singular curatorial agency, it has kept the APT active as an exhibitionary ‘site’ rather than exhibition by diegesis. Certainly if it makes any logical comparison, Headlands, in its effort to effect the construction of New Zealand art made a strong, singular, explosive statement, and suffered the consequences for those nearest the target. Perhaps as a ‘site’, as opposed to a curatorial statement, the APT develops the possibility for continuation. Within this site therefore and its broad set of ambitions to think about a region, its particularities and problems, do these individual iterations of an exhibition cohere with certainty into story, case, proposition? The question is, how do you author a perspective from a site, rather than an exhibition as such with a known agent?

I want to take another comparative exhibition model from the Pacific, because it is recent and tracks not only some similar concerns, but also included three of the five New Zealand artists due to show in APT7. Home AKL, or Home Auckland, was an exhibition of Pacific art, the largest survey to date held at the Auckland Art Gallery. It was a selective representation, which in covering three generations of practice, by no means covered all the artists now familiar to New Zealand’s art histories. While curated by Ron Brownson, there was a selection of curatorial patrons (or advisors) and associates who worked on shaping the exhibition. Borrowing from an airport acronym, the title attempts to forge a “brand Pasifika”, while in turn adopting a strategy to shorthand the familiar, the intimate or colloquial experience of Pacificness. In probably the most thoughtful review of the exhibition to date, young Pacific writer Daniel M. Satele describes the lack of conversation—either critical or informal—around the inclusion of objects of traditional ‘craft’ within the context of the contemporary, which he speculates comes from the contemporary’s inability to read tradition, and/or an audience which cannot read these so-called traditional objects for their nuances of contemporaneity—their adaptation and expansion of traditional forms. Satele writes; “Auckland is the site of new syntheses of Pacific thought and technique, innovatively adapted to local circumstances. While it has become customary to observe that Auckland has the largest Pacific population of the world’s cities, the significance of this is that it produces new dialogues and interactions between diverse groups of Pacific people. Such interactions generate completely new forms of person, object and idea. These are historically unprecedented forms, impossible to imagine originating elsewhere in the world, invented by Auckland’s Pacific population”.9

With the upcoming APT in mind, this statement struck a chord on a number of levels. The best of these intentions—of new interactions, dialogue between peoples, an exploration of diversity at home rather than at a distance—is what lies at the core of much of the APT project (its site). However it seems to Satele, as with some viewers of the APT historically, that something is failing expectations. His description of the ‘site’ of Auckland and the interplay of Pacific communities within comes close to offering a description of the Pacific in its active contemporaneity, something not captured he seems to suggest by the exhibition’s viewers, who are delivered the sloganistic effect of that experience, its reverential or branded success. That is, by the time audiences arrive at the exhibition they are seeing work that is already ‘Pacific’, already rooted or at ‘Home’, so nothing is at stake or under enquiry. In Boris Groys’ terms they are thematising “existing differences”.10 Or, is it that the exhibition’s organisers fail to find a mechanism or a form within the exhibition experience to contemporise the items on show, so that they are not separate from that interchanging contemporaneity, but continuous with it? As an exhibition maker how does one meet these expectations? Within an institutional frame this typically occurs through the application of performative dimensions and public programs—the talk series, the real-time presence of those artists and communities—but with an already defined exhibition structure these events exist as mere addenda to the overarching exhibition’s modus.

Perhaps what we face here is the mismatch of the contemporary with a celebratory or reverential mode, in which difference is celebrated but not enabled.

A fiction need not celebrate itself. It might attend to the development of an idea and its characterisation, but it doesn’t celebrate its subject. Yet a government agency faced with meeting successful outcomes and various stakeholder accountabilities might need to. On the other hand an irreverent idea does not necessitate, a priori, snubbing the institutional nose. The irreverent contemporary might however embrace the possibility of failed dialectics, disagreement, a less majestic turn of phrase and conflict might be there at least as a possibility. In the first three APTs the symposia were widely felt to own this position, but in the absence of more sustained formal dialogue, how does an exhibition hold this state while assuredly celebrating and owning its outcome—to provide the world’s premier location for viewing art of the Asia Pacific?

Within Auckland’s heart—its central suburbs of a modest 1.4 million—lies a much undiscussed forty percent Asian populace. Coupled with this is a twentypercent first generation Asian immigrant population throughout the city. Statistics and census tell us the demographic shape of the city is radically altering, and has been for some time. This is Asia within the Pacific. The growing population of mainland Chinese and Korean graduates of Fine Arts are already altering not just the location of the contemporary, but how it is taught and articulated with respect to AKL. The Rim is closing in. It is by now an obvious question, will Asian New Zealanders fit easily into the discourse of place and identity established by

the APT at its outset within our role as a Pacific nation, especially if as it seems, their practice seems not to attend to those narratives? The growing complexity of these transversant narratives within any one nation-State, makes the idea of illuminating these in the context of one exhibition, with a spread from West Asia to the South Pacific seem futile. Yet none of this explains why I still look forward to the APT. Looking at APT6 alone was a bewildering occasion—travelling through the moods, tones and artistic content of the exhibition with something like a spider’s web, trying to catch or attach these registers together into an aligned thesis was a redundant enterprise. But staying within the site, working into this problem, this area, our area, its problems, was and is rewarding, stimulating and meaningful in a manner that escapes many other exhibition trails.

New Zealand artist Michael Parekowhai is a favourite of the APT, unlike his near cousin of the 1990s Peter Robinson. For 2012 Parekowhai appears again with a major commission The World Turns, and previewing the work’s arrival has been a television-scale controversy. Inevitably the weight of expectation around the work will be too much for it to sustain; that it prove its relationship to the site and its significance to the indigenous population, that it acknowledges the APT’s past and future, that it signal a considered relationship to GoMA’s strategic aims now and in the future. The primary component of The World Turns is a single enlarged bronze elephant, isolated and extended upon following an exceptional show Parekowhai made in late 2009 at Michael Lett Gallery. That exhibition was called The Moment of Cubism and provided something of a critical moment in the artist’s career. Here he made redolent the persistent problem and attraction to Modernism for himself and others as an artist, its luxury and its celebratory excess. And, yes, perhaps even more so for an artist who managed at a very young age to author contemporaneity for Māori and break the back of tradition.

The elephants in The Moment of Cubism were milky white, upturned and obviously related to their miniature ceramic forebears. Squashed into the small white rectangular space with its glass street front they looked deliberately contained and restricted, commercially savvy and desirable, and majestic to the point of deliberate embarrassment. I do wonder for The World Turns what fiction it will sustain. Perhaps for Parekowhai to be again inciting something close to a crisis is a good thing, and the neighbours from ‘Home BNE’ work through the implications of this exchange.

Notes 1 This phrase comes directly from the Govett-Brewster’s acquisition policy adopted in 1968. The key clauses state “1.1 That it be general policy to purchase works of art which are representative of current ideas and are significant in the development of contemporary forms in the plastic arts from New Zealand, Australia, Japan, United States of America, Mexico and any other countries in or around the Pacific Ocean where a body of work of substantial artistic merit is to be found.” Cited by R N O’Reilly, Director, in his Introduction to The Govett-Brewster’s Great Show of its Purchases over Ten Turbulent Years, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 1978: 1 2 The only allusion to this series of exhibitions is in the opening remarks in the slide catalogue which states; “[T]his first exhibition in a projected series of Biennales gathers the widest possible range of works which at some state use a colour photographic process. Within the conditions laid down no limit was set, and the resulting exhibition vindicates the idea on which the exhibition was based–that there is a substantial alternative movement to that of ‘photographer’s photography”, ‘Checklist for set of 24 slides First Pan Pacific Biennale’, Auckland City Art Gallery, 1976 3 The artists included presented photo-text pieces, photo-sequences, video and film installation, electronic video, large-scale colour photographs, polaroids, pin-hole camera works and holograms.

The description of the Pan Pacific Biennale as a ‘trippy’ exhibition experiences comes from Christina Barton’s unpublished paper, ‘Split Vision: Figuring the Pacific in New Zealand in the 1970s’ 4 I should say here that this ‘breakdown’ has a relatively limited field of reference nonetheless, to those involved or immediately influenced by the debate and its discourse 5 Michael Dunn, ‘National Identities: The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’, Art New Zealand, No. 69, Summer 1993-94: 36 6

Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, October 23 2012, e-flux journal (accessed 23 October 2012)

7 Julie Ewington, ‘A Moment in a Journey: The First Queensland Art Gallery Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ in Art Asia Pacific, Vol. 1 No. 2, 1994: 11 8

Melissa Chiu, ‘Duplicitous Dialogue: The Asia-Pacific Triennial 1993-99’, in Art Asia Pacific, No. 27, 2000: 25

9

Daniel M. Satele, ‘Who’s Home? Home AKL at Auckland Art Gallery’, in Art New Zealand, issue 143, 2012: 42

10 “Existing differences” is a phrase that Groys comes back to again and again, but perhaps most relevant here are his comments in ‘Critical Reflections’: “The critics demand that art thematise existing social differences and position itself against the illusion of cultural homo-geneity.”

Pages 264-5: Atul Dodiya, Meditation with open eyes, 2011 Photo courtesy the artist

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REFLECTIONS ON THE FIRST DECADE

2 67 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 4 2 012

Iftikhar Dadi Sufficient time has passed since the founding in 1993 of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art to reflect on its historical significance. I will focus here on the formative role the APT has played in the development of contemporary Asian art during the 1990s. I begin with a narrative of my involvement with the APT. I grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, went to the USA for higher studies, and returned to Karachi during the 1990s, working and living as an artist. I was aware of contemporary art in the USA and Europe, and was beginning to become cognisant of contemporary practices emerging in East, South and Southeast Asia. But from Karachi, there was very little knowledge of awareness of artistic developments in neighboring India, not to speak of other areas in Asia. Karachi during the 1990s was facing a very difficult time, a depressed economy and deteriorating law and order, with the result that due to lack of journals, magazines and visitors and before the age of the Internet, one felt cut off from developments outside and remained isolated.

One sensed that learning about the challenges and breakthroughs that contemporary Asian artists were making at that time was far more salient than the more remote social and institutional context in which Western contemporary art flourished. But this was not possible. Indeed, it was not until about 1996 that I became aware of the scope and ambition of the APT project, and this recognition came about through discussions with Thai curator Apinan Poshyananda, and Indian artist Nalini Malani, whom I had met at an exhibition in Europe that year.

It must be stressed also that the question of multiculturalism in contemporary art was just beginning to emerge as a significant issue globally in the early 1990s, as exemplified by Rasheed Araeen’s curated exhibition, The Other Story in the UK in 1989, and the controversy surrounding Magiciens de la Terre held that same year. So the fact that APT1 was mounted as early as 1993 is significant. Although Japanese institutions had played an important institutional role in examining the question of Asia and its modern art from the 1970s—as I have learned subsequently from the scholarship of Wan-ling Wee and others —nevertheless, in its scale, criticality and its timing during the critical decade of the 1990s, the APT emerged as a key force in formulating an understanding of emergent practices in much of the Asian region.

One of the challenges facing the APT in its first decade during the 1990s was nothing less than mapping emergent currents in its contemporary art, in many ways, an impossible charge. It must be remembered that Asia was never, and is still not, a stable construct, and its valences change, depending on where one is situated. For example, East Asia is often privileged in many discussions about Asia to the degree that it stands in for Asia itself. At other times, the developed emerging economic giants such as China, India and Japan wield silent discursive privilege, so that artists from these nations enjoy far greater opportunities in the international arena as compared to artists from smaller or less developed regions.

And finally, the more one moves westward, the less secure the appellation of “Asia” appears to be, so that even today, despite the conception of Central Asia and West Asia, many informed people remain puzzled by the inclusion of Turkey and Iraq as being fully Asian, for example.

Furthermore, as a continent, Asia contains well over half of the global population, and is home to probably more diversity in terms of languages, cultures, religions, as well as in the unevenness of its development, than possibly any other continent. Asia has also produced an enormous diaspora scattered across the world. So how useful can the term “Asia” possibly be in characterising such scope and heterogeneity? Asia is undoubtedly on one level the emptiest of categories and a juicy target for deconstruction, but I believe we must nevertheless continue to wrestle with its connotations—if only because it is an established social fact —and to repurpose its meanings towards more equitable and just significations.

I believe the APT project, by grappling with these issues of discrepant geographies in a sustained and engaged manner, has made a substantial contribution in helping to think through these puzzles as well.

From its beginning the APT as an institution positioned itself to avoid a number of pitfalls, and sought new modes of understanding the Asian region: it avoided reliance on official national representation; was very open to critique, which was structured and invited through discursive platforms; and strove to create new curatorial modalities. All of these were innovative and significant positions in showcasing Asia, and when combined with the scale and ambition of the APT project, have led to a productive first decade. I see the APT itself as an ambitious agenda to track and promote contemporary art in a region that continues to experience dizzying social dislocation and indeed, nothing less than a thorough, world-historical transformation.

The APT began by mapping a handful of countries located in East and Southeast Asia, but did not rely on official representation. This may seem commonsensical today, when the notion of countries being showcased by official national representatives appears to be somewhat ridiculous, but one must remember that in 1993, this was not the case, and even today such representation remains firmly in place in major venues such as the Venice Bienniale. The denial of official representation necessarily led the APT to conceive of other experiments in framing its goals. An institutional form that the APT adopted was the creation of a

critical and discursive platform as a necessary supplement to the exhibition, and this included publications, as well as conferences and meetings, many of which were contentious. The APT has been the target of sharp critique from a variety of positions, which has productively transformed its curatorial and institutional agendas. Furthermore, the APT wished to promote contemporary art in the diverse Asian region by also understanding and galvanising localised curatorial and critical work, rather than offering a panopticon vision centred only from within Australia.

It partnered Australia-based professionals with localised critics and agents, a process that was uneven and not without problems, but nevertheless significant in its effort and reach.

APT1 was unveiled publicly in 1993 with the inclusion of artists based on a national framework but in which a relatively small number of countries were included. It quickly became evident that this mapping of Asia created a jigsaw puzzle-like cartography with numerous missing pieces, which not only created glaring geographic discontinuity, but also tracked visibility and privilege, despite itself. This began to be critiqued and remedied in APT2 in 1996, which included additional countries. By 1999, in APT3 much of East, Southeast and South Asia had been included, as well as a section of diasporic and peripatetic artists and practices under a “crossing borders” rubric. By APT4 in 2002, the need for a full map had attenuated, partly because of gallery space reorganisation, but more fundamentally, due to the very success of the earlier APTs in bringing much of Asia to self-visibility (but which still excluded Central and West Asia).

As a participant artist in the APT3 exhibition, as well as the associated conference held at its opening, I witnessed some of the tensions associated with the project and the justifiable critiques levelled against it, such as the over privileging of mainland Chinese artists in terms of space, resources and commissions over all others. There was also a sense of uneasiness for many participants, that the APT project was a way for Australia, a “white” country with erstwhile Europeanised pretensions, to attempt to exert a neo-imperial hegemony in a largely non-white region at a key historical juncture, when that region was finally beginning to rediscover itself. Many of these critiques were openly voiced and debated in the conference. Far more significantly, however, the opening and the ambitious conference provided a wonderful opportunity for a large number of scholars, critics and curators from across Asia to encounter each other’s work.

In that sense,the APT has served as an incubator for much of the energy and subsequent initiatives on contemporary Asian art across Asia and beyond.

The very success of the APT during the 1990s has however, contributed to a landscape where a comprehensive mapping is not as necessary as it was previously, when Asians simply did not know of each other’s practices. Institution building in Asia today is still in its infancy, but things are clearly much better now than they were twenty years ago, so that the APT does not need to bear the sole burden of representing contemporary Asian art. With the establishment of museums in Singapore and Fukuoka, the work by the Hong Kong-based Asia Art Archives in documentation, and the increasing presence of Asian artists in exhibitions beyond Asia, the singular role that the APT played in its first decade is now being complemented by others. But given the enormous scale of Asia and the rapid growth of its contemporary art, the APT, with its outstanding collection of contemporary art, its rich archives and publications and its continued advocacy for Asian art, remains a vital force.

Finally, the APT has also been innovative in conjoining Asia with the Pacific Island region. Undoubtedly, this is due to the specific geographic exigencies and motivations of Australia. Nevertheless, for Asian artists, scholars and curators, it has provided a unique venue to encounter artists and works from the Pacific, a region largely consisting of smaller islands with far fewer resources for human development than many Asian countries. The presence of the numerous Pacific artists and their works was sobering and eye opening to me. It powerfully brought home the sense that even less developed Asian regions enjoy a hidden privilege that they refuse to interrogate. Many Asians still consider themselves victims of modern history, but in comparison, it is many of the Pacific Island regions that have been far more marginalised and subalternaised.

The APT should be applauded for the major role it continues to play in showcasing and commissioning works from the Pacific region. And the lessons Asia-based curators and institutions might learn from this is to develop a keener sense of how marginality can be reinscribed as a form of power by those who see themselves as marginal. Asian institutions will need to develop greater humility in their self-perception towards the Pacific region, and begin a process of engagement in a respectful and supportive manner in a region intimately tied to Asia, yet frequently overlooked by its cultural institutions and thinkers.

Opposite: Rina Banerjee, With or without a name she was blue and who knew when she would slip into another mood for her understandable unwillingness to do, to speak to, to feel and determine her next move rests in her nest as would a Refugee (detail), 2009 Photo courtesy the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris

Pages 268-9: Tiffany Chung, Roaming with the dawn–snow drifts, rain falls, desert wind blows (detail), 2012 Photo courtesy the artist

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MIDDLE AGED AT TWENTY?

Michael Desmond The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art is turning twenty. The series has become the flagship event, serving to distinguish the gallery from other institutions and to establish the gallery internationally. It is generally accepted that the APT has served the Queensland Art Gallery well over the years, building new relationships, putting Brisbane on the map and shaping the perception of the gallery, Australian audiences and the collection itself. When the first APT opened in 1993, it was a game changer, but over the last twenty years there have been notable shifts in the cultural and political relationships of the region. The APT has responded in part but the forthcoming anniversary might be a good time to evaluate its continued viability.

When the Keating government took power in the early 1990s, Australians were for the first time asked what it might be to be an ‘Asian’ country, or at least, a culture within the Asian region rather than an outpost of the West. Keating spoke of the ‘big picture’ envisaging Australia as part of a global society. The economies of Australia’s northern neighbours had changed dramatically and our most important trading partners had broadened from Britain and the USA to include Japan and Korea. The change of attitude at the beginning of the 1990s, in looking beyond Australia and its traditional Anglo-Saxon relationships to see Asia as a neighbour, profoundly reshaped our cultural perspective.

The Australia Pacific Triennial was part of this zeitgeist. In Paris, the 1989 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Magiciens de la Terre, was premised on the notion that “one hundred percent of exhibitions ignored eighty-percent of the earth” and sought out non-Western artists for the display. In Australia there had been a history of artist exchanges via ARX in Perth and the Melbourne-based Asialink to connect individuals and smaller exhibitions of Asian art had taken place in Australia—Zones of Love at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Change

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and Moderism in Thai Art at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, both in 1991.

But perhaps it was the forum and discussions held at the Australian National University to coincide with the Canberra exhibition that brought together many of the movers, art historians, curators and Asian specialists, including Apinan Poshyananda and Dr John Clark. The example of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in showing contemporary art from the Asian region in the 1980s was also inspiring.

Doug Hall, Director of the Queensland Art Gallery was astute enough to see this as an opportunity and determined a major and regular review of contemporary developments in Asian art would take place in Brisbane. The first Asia Pacific Triennial brought together contemporary art from Australia and its neighbours.

The inaugural exhibition included Dadang Christanto, Montien Boonma and Bul Lee, among others and ratified their careers as international art stars. Effectively, this also established the Queensland Art Gallery as a new force—for the first time Brisbane became a nationally prominent cultural centre, not just home to a minor provincial museum. The first APT made an international player of Australia too, as the world recognised the leadership role played by the exhibition in bringing contemporary Asian art together with contemporary Western art in significant depth.

The first APT was magic: it seemed like all at the opening and subsequent performances and talks could sense that this was history in the making. There was an astonishing and democratic intimacy, and a club-like atmosphere of conviviality. Works shown at this APT entered collections—Montien Boonma’s Lotus Sound (1992), (and the work of fourteen other artists) was purchased for QAG for example and the lively display of new works gave renewed energy to enliven Asian collections in Australian galleries, which had traditionally favoured displays of antique objects. The rich display drawn from Queensland’s own collection for the China Project at GOMA in 2009 was a result of numerous thoughtful acquisitions made over various APTs. The major galleries in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney followed suit, albeit to a lesser degree. The animated contemporary works reflected the emerging industry and cultural life of the Asian “Tiger” economies.

The impact of this on the rest of the world can in a sense be traced through the trajectory of succeeding APTs up to the present. The integration of Asian art into an Australian context also reflected the changing demography of the country itself. The debate at this time centred around the notions of global and local, and strategies for acting this out successfully, whether in art or in commerce. The sage advice “think global, act local” was countered by the opposite, “think local, act global” and before long the two were conflated into counselling that makers should create art that was “glocal”.

The second APT was superb, expanded and better branded as the Queensland team’s expertise came into play. In a remarkable display of diplomacy, Thai über-curator Apinan Poshyananda was invited to select both the Thai and Australian contingents. Some felt that he had snubbed Australian artists, but the souvenir stand outside QAG—run by the indigenous artists in the Campfire Group —protested against an elitist approach to art. Of course there was some irony in all this, as the selection of Asian tribal art by Australian curators had been frowned on by the locals, who tended to consider this folk art selected by tourist curators unaware of local politics. Audiences doubled from the 60,000 visitor count for the original APT to 120,000 visitors in 1996, eager to see Cai Guo-Qiang, Takashi Murakami, N.N. Rimzon and other ‘hot’ artists.

The 1999 APT remains a classic with a line up of artists, works and themes that still excite today. Xu Bing’s Book of the Sky (1991) lifted us into the realm of poetry, Cai Guo Qiang bridged (metaphorically and physically) the pond in the QAG, Michael Parekowei brought us down to earth with his Ten Guitars.

The third Triennial also produced the Kids APT—for the first time the gallery added a seriously chosen children’s section. Kids APT was not about talking down to small people, nor was it a debased and compacted version of the main game but an independent section with its own logic and appeal, created by artists asked to assist in making commissioned works. Asian contemporary art was popular and the gallery was capitalising on it for all it was worth.

In retrospect, this APT marked a high tide for the Gallery. The excitement generated by valuing and displaying contemporary Asian art had spread: biennials sprang up all over Asia, and are now in Singapore, Fukuoka, Shanghai, Yokohama, Taiwan and Gwangju. The newest, a festival of international contemporary art in India, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale was recently announced for 2012. Asian artists have their own circuit now and with the rise of the market for contemporary art, especially Chinese art, numerous superstars have emerged—Ai Wei Wei being perhaps the best known. The business of displaying contemporary art has become more competitive and is becoming customary. Art from the Asian region no longer defines itself as local and for many years has been geared to the international circuit. The APT is now one of many perennials of contemporary Asian art, but with the disadvantage of being located away from Asian and European population centres.

Opposite: Phuan Thai Meng, The Road to ……● 腐, 2009 Photo courtesy the artist and Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur

The 2002 APT responded with a different approach, showing fewer artists and in depth, to trace the ancestry of the new through seminal figures, such as Lee U Fan, Yayoi Kusama and Nam June Paik. APT5 in 2006 marked the opening of GOMA, and took into account the technological changes in art with greater emphasis on screen based work as well as performance. The didactic and evangelical seminars that had supported the APT in the past were effectively replaced by short talks and a long party. In part this recognised that the evangelistic moment was past and that the APT was now geared to appeal to the general public and equally admitted that plentiful information on the artists and the region is now in circulation. APT6 in 2009 was the biggest display of Asian and Pacific art ever to be seen in Australia. There was no shortage of powerful works and the gallery achieved a greater geographic spread than ever before with artists from isolated enclaves such as Tibet and North Korea, Middle Eastern countries Turkey and Iran, and smaller Southeast Asian nations Cambodia and Myanmar. Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich was a standout, his bamboo forms both suggestive and literal in defining the shape of an idea like some cargo cult CAD program. The inclusion of North Korean works was a triumph of politics over aesthetics, but brought home the importance of cultural diplomacy that underlies the whole enterprise.

And if Turkey can be included as both Asian and European, why not art from Russia?

The continued expansion of the APT risks making it generic.

I recall meeting colleagues at the Los Angeles County Museum soon after the second APT and for the first time, American curators were asking about events in Australia, specifically Brisbane. There was a buzz. The Triennials gave prominence to Australia and Australian art, reaching a high point during the third APT in 1999 but eventually diminishing with the proliferation of rival biennials in the Asian region and the inclusion of much travelled and increasingly familiar art world stars—artists not chosen by us in Australia as much as by world acclaim and prominence in the market. As the 2012 APT approaches, signalling twenty years of engaging dialogue, the Triennial still feels like it is chosen by country, like an Art Olympics—though the 2002 APT trialled an alternative by focusing in-depth on significant artists. The thesis of the first Triennial, announced in the catalogue

by Caroline Turner, “that Euro-Americentric perspectives are no longer valid as a formula for evaluating the art of this region” is undoubtedly proven. It’s fair to say that this was more by evolution than revolution. However, the major themes that have dominated Western art for the last decades—questions of gender and identity, a concern with the environment for example—remain in place though with local idiosyncrasies and specific cultural quotes. There are many more voices in the art world than there were two decades ago and many of the celebrated major artists of the present are from Asian countries, China in particular. Some of the artists shown at the APTs over the years compete internationally and others have built only local loyalties. There is no agreed standard in the ‘world art’ now shown in any international biennales. There is a broader spectrum of art styles and greater opportunities for artists, Asian and Australian, to show work.

The succession of APTs enabled the creation of new networks that had not been previously possible. Technology and ease of travel make it increasingly feel like we live in an homogenous global culture. Australian dealer galleries show at the Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore art fairs where it is just as hard to compete, when the market, driven by the major economies, determines ultimate loyalties.

The interest in the contemporary art of Asia and the broader culture of this region signalled a cultural shift. Australia now has a substantial population with Asian connections and a greater understanding of non-Western cultures.

The economies north of Australia are flourishing and the importance of the Asia Pacific region is recognised as part of an international cultural engagement. China is now a major trading partner and the world’s second biggest economy. Chinese cars, electronic goods, films and sundry produce flood Australia. All indications are that China will play a greater role in the world of art. The exoticism of the first Triennial is now remote, almost lost: it has become simply an exhibition of contemporary art, admittedly with a particular bent to encompass the art of Australia and its neighbours. Queensland has increased its reliance on big ticket Euro-American fare—Warhol, Picasso, Matisse, Surrealism, Masters from the Metropolitan, Valentino, Portrait of Spain—in line with the southern States.

The gallery maintains attention on programming for the younger set as they did for the Kids APT but, as zeal fades, this often seems geared to making the Gallery a familiar playground than anything more demanding. The global has become local and now it’s all grist for the art mill. The APT reliably performs as a solid part of the Gallery’s calendar, a heritage event venerated as part of its history.

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LARGESSE Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez Without having attended an Asia Pacific Triennial, I am nonetheless in its debt, precisely because of its thoroughly problematised and self-declared locus.

Attendant discourses have articulated how difficult a terrain it entered but the influence the APT has determined upon the artworlds across the imagined AsiaPacific is undeniable. Filipino critic-curator Flaudette May Datuin, who was among those privy to the Philippine participation in APT’s early years has confirmed how the APT alongside other earlier and parallel initiatives, such as the Fukuoka Art Museum’s contemporary Asian art exhibitions begun in 1980, “forced us to build active exchange”.1 The APT’s initial ‘aggressive’ thrust to stage such elaborate encounters established a momentum over which it did not have total control. The ensuing discourse and counter-discourse now occupy seminal places in any serious art researcher’s continuing education in contemporary Asian art. Auspiciously initiated at the beginning of the State of Queensland’s economic boom years, the first APT’s undisguised utopic tone was couched in a non-homogeneity that people would presumably acquiesce to across its purview (sans Indochina). Yet even then Filipino theorist Marian Pastor Roces was already talking up the making of spectacles of difference2, while sharing Thai artist-curator Apinan Poshyananda’s pining for new “calibrated terminology”. Poshyananda’s undisguised distaste for “neatly packaged” consensus art evidently struck a chord3, as he offered this charge: “The Asia-Pacific Triennial is not just one of the many zones for dialogue and exchange, but an arena to reveal identity conflicts and ethnic tensions.

The Triennial must avoid the trap of being the cultural space for ‘selling’ ‘AsiaPacific’ nations where frictions and collisions are often sidestepped for the sake of cultural diplomacy.”4

My own attempts at some degree of recollection bear out an Australian (specifically Queensland) desire to reconcile its Euro-indigenous history and an APT reconfiguring itself as it first set out as a three-time outing rather than the two decade venture it has become. Instead of succumbing to the easy option of casting the APT as poster child for the machinations of glocalism and territorialising, it would be more relevant to underline how major realignments and notional shifts in the larger artworld have effectively trimmed it of its vanguard qualities, even if it did figure so prominently at the time of its inception. By 2012 however, it should be apparent that the APT, over its growth years, participated in enabling art of a dissent-as-affectation stream to gain market as well as critical currency, and how presently it finds itself part of a greater regional arena engaging issues of singularity (of voice and articulation) and post-human/post-culture tropes.

While remaining wary of corralling superficial renderings of affinities —art historical narratives, long-drawn wrestling with indigenisation efforts, parallel assertions of polarities, gallery boom years from the 1960s-80s, nascent post-nation strands, if not at least less angst-filled notions of tradition and/or an inclination to make room for complexity—it should be acknowledged that ‘AsiaPacific’ realpolitik today poses equally compelling acrimony. For example, China and Japan’s very recent altercations over Diaoyu/Senkaku, and the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei’s extended posturing over the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

What is apparent through querying those involved at the onset of the APT venture is that Queensland’s overtures were clearly welcome even when eventually tempered with scepticism and measured caution. Filipino artist Imelda Cajipe-Endaya described how APT1 and APT2 connected with her personally: “A totally Eurocentric institution, having to go with the flow of a new country policy, [the APT] was practically grappling with how to ride the tide to the still unexplored territory of contemporary art in Southeast Asia. Since we were the first batch and well into helping organise the second, I felt rather privileged that my advice and comments were properly responded to and synthesised into the body of discussions and plans.”5 Flaudette May Datuin confirmed this by being aware of what she sensed was a patent earnestness in response to critique regarding matters such as institutional locus and parachute curating.

At the beginning of the ‘noughties’ (2002), the Queensland Art Gallery birthed its research arm, The Australian Centre of Asia Pacific Art. As critical interpretation concerning pluralism increased, APT6 responded to continuing queries about direction (themed/non-themed, mono-curating/curatorium, skewed representation omissions, indepth vs broad representation) with: “We want our audiences to be aware that modern and contemporary art is not something that just arrived in the region with the first APT, but that there are specific regional

histories that need to be accounted for, and that contemporary art practices can be developed over decades and are not just about ‘the latest hot new thing’… It isn’t about a roll-call of nations.”6

In retrospect it seems apparent that the APT hardly ever enjoyed the luxury of reputation or acclaim. Cajipe-Endaya revealed the following in response to a query regarding art historian John Clark’s remark concerning blunted critique: “When we arrived at APT1 with such hospitable attention from the hosts, the local Asians were protesting why the QAG had to search offshore when there were so many Asian artists already living there who needed opportunities. I thought the organisers naturally paid great attention and dominantly projected participation of, firstly Japan, an investor/donor country in Queensland, and secondly Indonesia—I think there were diplomatic issues at that time. These considerations did have great bearing on curatorial choices and decisions; I surmise influences like these could explain John Clark’s observation.” There has always been the perspective of an ‘open season’ critique of the APT. Leading up to the fourth edition there was little indication of it being construed as remaining ‘neat and tidy’, and that its unwieldiness appeared to be making the best argument for it being held up as an ‘instructive case’, as expressed by University of the Sunshine’s Lisa Chandler: The processes of consultation and shared curatorship undertaken for the initial Triennial were re-employed and expanded for the Second APT as the Gallery sought to respond to comments about selection criteria and reinforce its commitment to pluralism and democratic inclusiveness.

The Gallery commissioned a report providing an analysis of Australian and international reviews of the event, and this was one of the means by which critical discourse stimulated by the First Triennial informed the development of the second exhibition. In addition, QAG expanded the National Advisory Committee and held national and international fora, each with over 50 participants who contributed additional perspectives to “the intellectual framework and curatorial philosophy” for the 1996 exhibition. The selection of works for the Second Triennial was a complex affair, undertaken by 15 teams comprised of 42 Australian and international curators who selected 114 works by more than 100 artists. Although conscious of playing down notions that the event was based on national representation, (Caroline) Turner noted that a “country approach” for selections was employed for reasons of practicality. In a response to accusations at the previous event of Australian “cultural imperialism”, the Gallery invited Thai curator and art historian Apinan Poshyananda to chair the team identifying Australian works for inclusion.7 Elsewhere in Chandler’s text—anchored on Turner’s disavowal of the APT’s perceived mapping propensity and thus de facto inclusions and omissions—are documented instances of arguably oppositional projects: At the Second APT, the Campfire Group, a collective of primarily indigenous Australian artists, presented a provocative work entitled All Stock Must Go! (1996). This installation and performance emphasised a worldview which differed from the institution’s, as the artists deliberately chose to position their work, both literally and metaphorically, outside the art museum. The installation included a cattle truck parked outside QAG’s entrance, overflowing with items produced for the tourist market as well as paintings by acclaimed artists —all available for sale. It was concerned with the different spheres in which Aboriginal art circulates and the necessity of making various art forms for cultural and economic survival.

In addition, the truck alluded to the displacement of indigenous Australians from traditional lands. In the context of this work, QAG represented “the white man’s keeping place, with its own code of entry which must, by virtue of the tradition it belongs to, be at variance with the cultural codes of those selected”.8

27 5 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 4 2 012 Such gestures could possibly be construed as a display of sanitised dissonance, or merely taken as an omen of how institutional critique was to eventually become the complicit Other. Yet perhaps the more pertinent question is how this latitude facilitated those who did opt into the APT’s paradigm of engagement.

FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS, BEARING THE COSTS OF RECIPROCITY That the APT saw its role as more than serving up the avaricious tourist blockbuster is articulated further by Turner: “[T]he early exhibitions were unashamedly largescale surveys, aimed at creating contacts at a time when few existed. In addition, other projects have spun off from the APT—differently focused conferences, a planned exhibition on Asian Modernism and on seminal figures in Asian and Pacific art, who have also been collected as part of the permanent collection.

The Triennials were as much about building knowledge and hopefully enduring friendships as about selecting art for three exhibitions and in that sense they have undoubtedly succeeded.”9 The APT’s commitment to the mentoring of curators and to building up a network of art intellectuals was also a patent function of a “coalescing of interests between the artworld and political and economic arenas [which] facilitated the production of this large-scale, multi-faceted event”10 as Chandler stated.

Cajipe-Endaya recollected: “The impact of the APT was wide and remarkable as I saw artists who participated… later got invited into the museums and art events in Japan, USA and Europe. And art conferences continued to discuss the past APT for… years until the next APT opened. I tend to think though I may have been moving around a clique of curators then, which was hardly visible when I moved to New York—it was a different playing field among the multicultural tribes”,11 whereas artist Agnes Arellano, who participated in APT3, subscribing to the nation-trope in her recounting attests to “the vibrancy of the pre-opening days when Pinas (the Philippines) and little Fiji were there doing work alongside the giants China and India, but we didn’t hear from them again”.12

Texts from earlier Triennials reveal how the tension of competing desires—to homogenise and assert difference and engage its more immediate publics—served up a perceptibly narrowed array. While the APT triumphed its capacity to learn from its own contextual and institutional parameters and readiness to see itself against other discursive and representational mechanisms13, it’s apparent in my own region such discoveries are not being so avidly taken on by latter day artworld agents, so much so that to a large degree the same questions and confusion persist.

THE CONDITION OF DAMNED IF YOU DO-DAMNED IF YOU DON’T This journal summed up in 2009 Australia’s nonetheless marginalised networkgenerating status: “While the APT continues to ‘look’ towards its declared regions of Asia and the Pacific from its Australian base, the majority of its biennale colleagues that have been implemented since 2000 similarly does not cast much of a ‘look’ towards us. A quick scrutiny over this decade of Asian biennales and the like presents a negligible inclusion of Australian and Pacific artists almost to the point of invisibility. The curator of Singapore’s first incarnation in 2006 said for example that it ‘didn’t have to’.”14 It was in this same interview that the art historian John Clark, called out the Australian nationalist objectives undisguisedly framing the latter APTs and how critique of the APT in general and the conservatism he perceived with regard to the selection of artists had effectively been muffled.

Additionally, Australian theorist Adam Geczy went on to say that since “Asian art is now becoming increasingly recognised in a particular way—that is, Korean art, Japanese art etc., rather than generically Asian—it is perhaps time to hand over the mantle”15, assuming that it was held by the APT. Art historiancurator Chaitanya Sambrani concluded this Broadsheet ‘Dialogue’ by referring to the tension between APT’s family-friendly/user-driven presentation of art and its art-difficulty.

As the Asia Pacific Triennial celebrates its twentieth-anniversary and its status again comes under scrutiny, it can be said that it has contributed markedly in coalescing the regional art world regardless of the criticism it has sustained.

Of course the APT’s longevity serves as a benchmark—the 2013 Singapore Biennale for instance has picking up on its (initial) notion of a curatorium (in this instance twenty-seven from nine countries) and all the likely attendant complications.

Unfortunately (coming from a generation of curators and writers removed from those first involved in the APT), there seems to be a disconnect in how associated problematised ideas have been transmitted, apart from fortuitous viral transfer. Regardless of early exoticising, reductionist or ghettoising rhetoric appearing as passing concerns of a not so distant past, have those of us writing on the Philippines attempting to contextualise its practice in the institutionally circumscribed “Asia-Pacific region” indeed elevated our own professional platform, in asking the less predictable while continuing to crave for more serious critical writing and imaginative curation?

In her 1999 essay for Pananaw, Philippine Journal of Visual Arts, Datuin relates how artists such as Karen Flores were regretting their own ineptness in negotiating these initial encounters, not only the APTs but in parallel encounters such as the Artists Regional Exchanges (ARX). Nagging concerns remain as to

whether any recognisable advances have been made. Are there really enough protagonists who are the wiser, or have we all surrendered to the machinations of the now overwhelmingly more powerful auction/gallery circuits, hoping to capitalise on Asian market resilience, letting the logic of greed manoeuvre the course of neutered encounters?

Why is there still a residual perception that local ‘experts’ are still being exploited rather than genuinely engaged? Given how the recent history of contemporary art continues to be marked off by ‘successive’ turns—curatorial, narrative, relational, educational etc., why is it that the World Biennial Forum, occuring two months prior to APT7, continues to ask some very familiar questions: How can we undo the teleologies of Euro-centric modernity?

Do art biennials inspire and strengthen art communities and help to lay foundations for sustainable infrastructures? Facing increasingly homogenic and universal models of traditional art institutions, are biennials still alternative and sites for experimentation capable of resistance?16 Writing in 1993, Caroline Turner marked APT’s learning curve to at least ten years before a recognisable degree of confidence in Asia-Pacific engagement could be consolidated. After two decades how decentralised has the discourse become?

Certainly the curatorium, or at least some collective/dispersed sense of control and mitigation of hierarchy has carried over into other seminal markers, such as the (non-themed) 2007 Gwangju Biennale and this year’s six co-director Biennale (Roundtable), which coincided with the first World Biennial Forum. While one may not need to argue too strenuously that in a real sense this is a starkly different Asia-Pacific region in which the APT and all of us are currently operating within, the pertinent question remains is it at all possible to be simultaneously both vanguard and organic?

Notes 1 Conversation at the University of the Philippines with Flaudette May Datuin, 3 October, 2012 2 Marian Pastor Roces, ‘Consider Post Culture’ in Beyond the Future: Papers from the conference of the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art Brisbane, 10-12 September, 1999, Caroline Turner and Morris Low eds, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2000 3

Apinan Poshyananda, ‘The Future’ in Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, University of Queensland Press, 1993: 4

4

ibid: 20

5

Imelda Cajipe-Endaya email, 19 October, 2012

6

Lynne Seear and Suhanya Raffel responding to Lee Weng Choy in ‘APT5 Interviewed’, Broadsheet 35.4, 2006

7 Lisa Chandler, ‘Journey without maps: unsettling curatorship in cross-cultural Contexts’, Museum and Society, July 2009, 7(2): 74-91; http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies/museumsociety/ documents/volumes/chandler.pdf accessed October 24, 2012 8

ibid.

9

Caroline Turner, ‘Asian Engagements: Tubes of Bamboo’, Artlink Vol 20, No 2, 2000; http://www.artlink. com.au/articles/1431/asian-engagements-tubes-of-bamboo/ accessed 24 October, 2012

10

Lisa Chandler, op cit.

11

Imelda Cajipe-Endaya, op cit.

12

Agnes Arellano email, 23 October, 2012

13

For instance, by 2006, Seear and Raffel cited the following as compelling reasons for reconfiguring the APT in light of the establishing of the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA): “The direction we developed is now much more closely linked with our core business as an art museum–building the collection, building long-term relationships with key artists, establishing an academic and professional development research arm (ACAPA–the Australian Centre of Asia Pacific Art), enhancing our archival and publishing program and perhaps most important of all, increasing and educating our audience.”

14

‘The Asia Pacific Triennial: A Dialogue’, Broadsheet 38.4, 2009

15

ibid.

16

http://www.worldbiennialforum.org/program/ accessed 18 October, 2012

Page 272 top: Wael Shawky, Telematch Crusades (video still), 2009 Photo courtesy the artist Page 272 bottom: Slavs and Tatars, PrayWay (installation view), 2012 Photo courtesy the artists Page 273: Nguyen Manh Hung, Living together in paradise, 2009 Photo courtesy the artist

27 7 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 4 2 012

ALL OR ANYTHING AT ALL REX BUTLER The curation of art is difficult. There are always choices to be made, positions to be defended. There are always works to be left out—for taste, for lack of room, because they cannot be obtained. For many years, state galleries—like the Queensland Art Gallery—arranged their collections of Australian art to follow the succession of overseas art movements, moving from Realism, through Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstraction, Pop and on to Post-Modernism.

Each represented style here took place some ten years later than the overseas original and hopefully evidenced some nationalisation of the imported style.

Then about twenty years ago—I remember it occurring most clearly at the National Gallery of Victoria with the installation of Destiny Deacon’s Eva Johnson (1994) next to its colonial prototype—galleries started revising Australian art history, seeking somehow to criticise the works in their collections for assumptions they no longer shared. Or again, I remember it most clearly at the Queensland Art Gallery with a wall of works by Vida Lahey, AME Bale and Josephine Muntz Adams featuring women involved in domestic labour—the galleries not only included work by women, but attempted to make the point that this kind of work had previously been excluded. Or, finally, about ten years ago—I first remember this at the Art Gallery of South Australia, but also at the Queensland Art Gallery with its superb collection of John Peter Russells—a new hang of the collection would often feature a wall or even a room devoted to the Australian expatriates, showing that Australian art did not always take place ten years later than in Europe and did not always take place here.

But all of these ‘revisions’ proceed within an overall idea of modernism and a national art. They might criticise modernism, but they still assume its stylistic progression. They might contest or seek to widen the existing nationalist narrative, but there is still a narrative to contest. Works like Deacon’s Eva Johnson or women artists or expatriates are included, but confined to ‘breakout’ walls or rooms, as though additions or complements to the usual story. Indeed, the very identification or highlighting of these amendments tells us that their effects are meant to be confined. Their very criticality reveals that they are not really intended to replace the paradigm they are arguing against. They only want it to be more ‘inclusive’, more ‘representative’, more ‘responsive’ to presentday concerns and circumstances. And museums in this set-up still exercise the fundamental role of selection and curation according to the prevailing standards, even if contested, of aesthetics and social inclusivity, thus reconciling—the de facto task of all museums today—the problem of finding at once the best and most representative of art works.

Contemporary art, however, is an entirely different matter. Let us take the one defining quality of contemporary art, according to one recent account: the fact that it is contemporary. That it is taking place now, at the same time, everywhere. It is a radical tautology, at once all-inclusive and empty, in which it is by its absolute lack of qualities (whether aesthetic or sociological) that we define contemporary art, and according to which we are precisely not allowed to define the art. Contemporary art is by definition self-evident, offers proof only of itself: the very fact that it exists, that it is made now, is its essential quality. But perhaps this notion of contemporary is not as ecumenical, as all-inclusive, as at first appears. For, in fact, not all art today is contemporary. What is excluded, what is not contemporary—to complete the tautology—is that which is not contemporary, that is historical, that is associated with the modernist progression of styles or any revision of these. What is not allowed in contemporary art is any attempt to engage with artistic style, which is always a kind of history or mediation.

Contemporary art accordingly has no style, form or medium. All of these, insofar as they are constitutive, in any way the subject of the work, imply a historical perspective, raise the possibility of taste or comparison, and thus mean that the work cannot occur in exactly the same way at the same time.

Opposite: Inci Eviner, Broken manifestos (video still), 2010 Photo courtesy the artist and Galeri Nev, Istanbul

The art of the Asia Pacific Triennial is par excellence contemporary. The first thing it makes clear to us—in its overwhelming quantity and its breaking with the familiar Euro-American names and places—is that art is currently taking place everywhere—art is at this moment being made by everyone all over the world.

Our initial impression upon seeing any APT at the new Gallery of Modern Art is almost one of the sublime—the sublime in the strict philosophical sense of being imaginatively overwhelmed, of failing to make sense of things. It is art in its unmediated condition, unfettered by style, by history, by nation, by art we are almost tempted to say. The work strikes us in its irrefutable self-evidence: the fact, before anything else, it is there as proof that it exists. There is no narrative we can see carried on by this work, no story it can be used to tell. There is no tendency from year to year, no place it appears to come from more than any other.

It occurs all at the same time without any work talking to any other, without any meaningful relationship between the works. Each work is an argument only for itself and not for anything else. Each work is sui generis, unique, incomparable, one-off, a monster.

No wonder the APT is such a fascinating curatorial and museological problem. We can read repeated explanations by its various curators and directors that it is “experimental” or even “provisional”. Stripped of the rhetoric of avant-gardism—there is no progress here, no lesson to be learnt—they are right.

Each successive APT is an attempt somehow to think the phenomenon the exhibition has unleashed, to attempt to apply conventional museological criteria to it. The first APT sought to order the exhibition in geographical terms with the artists classified via regions (Southeast Asia, East Asia, the Pacific). The fourth APT (2002) sought to historicise the art by emphasising its masters (Yayoi Kusama, LeeU-Fan and Nam June Paik). The fifth APT (2006) emphasised the art of China with such artists as Ai Wei Wei and Yang Zhenzhong. And this was a pattern repeated in the following APT in 2009, which concentrated on the art of Iran, and is continued in the current one, which has pays special attention to the art of Papua New Guinea and the Pacific.

But each of these strategies fails, and in a sense betrays the fundamental experience of the art by trying to select amongst it. And the exhibition even knows this because, accompanying and in a way contradicting these shifting curatorial strategies, there is one tendency that is undeniable: it is getting bigger. APT2 (1996), which was held only in the old Queensland Art Gallery, featured some one hundred and forty three works by sixty two artists. APT6 in 2009, which was held in the new Gallery of Modern Art, featured some three hundred and thirteen works by one hundred artists. And this APT, which is held across both the QAG and GoMA, is billed as featuring a presumably as yet uncounted number of works by some one hundred and forty artists. That is to say, we are witnessing a principle of radical non-selectivity, an inability to choose, a desire to have it all, which is indeed the only possible principle produced by bringing the work together like this. Again, there is no tendency, no history, not even the speaking of works to each other across the spaces of the gallery, but only the sheer experience of numerical infinity, something like a mathematical sublime that goes beyond any principle or measure. The sole motivating principle of the contemporary art exhibition—like the skyscraper—is scale. Bigger literally is better, is more contemporary, is more evidence of the contemporary, for scale is how the contemporary evidences itself.

It’s undoubtedly for all of these reasons that video is the contemporary art medium of choice. Great modernist critics like Michael Fried in his Four Honest Outlaws and Rosalind Krauss in her critique of the “post-medium condition” attempt to make the medium, even in contemporary art, reflective or refractive, something that comes between the work of art and its spectator.

But contemporary art is not at all like this. In a way that is yet to be theorised, the content in contemporary art is entirely unmediated by any form or medium in which the work is expressed. (The models for contemporary art in this regard are religious icons and pornography.) This has the result that it finally does not matter what medium a particular work of art is in: painting, sculpture, film, video, performance, installation. But this is exactly why so much contemporary art is in video, which is fluid, weightless, endless, continuous. There is no “medium” in video in the sense of a history of comparative achievements or the making of its form the content of the work. Looking in APT6 at Chen Qiulin’s Garden (2007) or Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s The Ground, the Root and the Air (2004-7) on their high-tech screens or holes in the wall was like being in a cinema, but without its dark, its crowd, its air of attention and anticipation. It was a transparent, non-art experience, like watching a documentary or a news report or something on the children’s channel—anything, really, but a work of art.

But perhaps all this might be reversed, with a new curation and a new museology arising on the ruins of the old. For to say that contemporary art is contemporary is to make contemporary art allegorical of itself. And it is undoubtedly true that what we see in major exhibitions of contemporary art is an endless proliferation of the qualities that are said to define this art. The remarkable thing about contemporary art—and we suggest that this merits further study—is how it allows us to speak of anything, as long as it isn’t art. Just take the recent iterations of the Biennale of Sydney, each with its own bespoke curator and curatorial theme: Revolutions: Forms that Turn by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2008), The Beauty of Distance by David Elliott (2010) and All our Relations by Catherine de Zegler and Gerald McMaster (2012). In a way it is the lack of any inner content of the art that makes it available to all of these rhetorical opportunities. It is the necessary correlate of the fact that the contemporary work of art—which possesses no medium, no taste, no history to constrain it—is endlessly comparable. We can see this, for example, in the infamous ‘décor’ hang at London’s Tate Modern, which instead of organising its collection of modern art by artist, medium or movement, has rooms dedicated to “states of flux”, “energy and process” and “setting the scene”, and which change continually according to curatorial whim. Indeed, it can almost appear that, instead of works of art being selected, what we have is data being endlessly cross-indexed or word-searched, as though assembled by Google.

So too in this APT the theme—or at least one of the themes—is “temporary or ephemeral structures”. (This is in contrast to the previous APT where the curatorial theme was “architecture”.) At the entrance of GoMA we have a ceremonial house hung with paintings on shields by tribesmen of the East Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. In a similar vein, running down the high central vestibule of the Gallery, we have “Papua New Guinea Pacific Structures”, which features shark headdresses

by Arapesh-language group’s Alex Gabour. New Zealand artist Richard Maloy builds a huge “greenstructure” out of cardboard boxes that will block the view from a second storey window of the Gallery, which usually looks over the Brisbane River, and Vietnamese artist Manh Hung Nguyen builds a tottering “vertical village” out of wood that alludes to the crowded living conditions in many Southeast Asian cities. (In the previous APT, there was a work by Chen, Xinshong Town [2009] that made a similar point.) The Japanese artist Takahiro Iwasaki carves a floating palace out of cypress, split horizontally in two as though it is reflected in water.

Indian artist Atul Dodiya constructs memory cabinets out of tea chests, featuring personal mementos and photographs of well-known heroes and villains of Indian history. Finally, in a more Pop idiom, Japanese collective Paramodel builds sinuous sculptures out of household water pipes and makes winding wall patterns out of plastic railway tracks, in a work that is sure to be a surefire hit in the inevitable children’s version.

27 9 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 4 2 012 But this idea of “temporary structures” can be seen to apply too to such works as Taiwanese artist Goang-Ming Yuan’s three-track video Disappearing Landscape (2011), which attempts to speak of memory by following water flowing down a drain, Malaysian artist Thai Meng Phuan’s The Road to… (2009), in which a meticulous photo-realist painting of an anonymous concrete overpass is sliced with a penknife to make it look as if it is collapsing, and even Jordanian-born Oraib Toukan’s The Equity is in the Circle (Reworking Ammar) (2007-09), in which the artist devises a series of imaginary ads as though he were offering for lease parts of the Middle East. Even, finally, indigenous artist Shirley MacNamara’s woven spinifex bush shelters and the various archive projects by Herman Chong, Hong Kong’s Map Office and the Indian RAQs Media Collective could be considered in this light. The real point is—and this is not intended as a criticism—not that the category offers no insight into the work, but that it offers no more or less insight than any number of others. The enigmatic status of contemporary art is that it seems to be about everything—and about everything at once. It is not that we cannot collect the work around a particular theme, but that we can collect the work around any theme—any theme, that is, that is contemporary. It can’t have anything to do with medium, style, history, anything that might put one work before another or place one work above or below another. We can only select work, that is, on the principle we are not really selecting it, but taking only a momentary sample, a representation that necessarily implies others, and which turns the museum and any collection—to complete the circle or tautology—into a merely “temporary structure”.

There are all kinds of other “structures” that the show can be understood to organise itself around, all in various ways common tropes of contemporary art.

The first is so-called participatory aesthetics. The Gallery is inviting prominent British theorist of participatory aesthetics Claire Bishop to give an address on the opening weekend (although her latest book, Artificial Hells, is in fact a vitriolic attack on much of the art for its neo-liberal political agenda). And works in the exhibition that can be understood to fall within the category include Malaysian Roslisham Ismail’s The Langkasuka Project (2012), in which different generations of Malaysian women help to produce a cookbook, and Indonesia’s ruangrupa, as a rock band that first took life through fake album covers and band posters but that now plays live. Another possible theme is so-called superfiction, in which artists try to have taken for real plots and conspiracies of their own devising. We can see this, for instance, in Indonesian collective Tromorama’s subtly defaced banknotes, which are meant to return to circulation, and {disarmed} (2012), which is an attempt to imagine an archive of Pacific art that does not yet exist and that in some ways can be understood as the doppelgänger to the recently published Thames & Hudson superbook Art in Oceania. We could even speak here of the possible theme of history. But the notion of history has to be thought through very carefully in contemporary art. Precisely because everything in contemporary art is present, we do not have history as revisionism—art as the reinterpretation of past events, intervening in their reception as though they are over—but history as historical performance or re-enactment, as though the events in question have not yet ended. We can see this in two defining contemporary ‘history’ works: the Long March Project (2002-05), which re-enacts Mao’s famous Long March and concludes with one its participants getting a tattoo of the march on his back, and Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave (2001), which restages the extremely divisive British Miners’ Strike of 1984 with many of its original participants but without drawing any conclusion. And here in this show we would draw a distinction between such works as Michael Cook’s remaking of old photographs to put Aborigines in the position of the colonisers and Samoan Greg Semu’s reholding of Leonardo’s The Last Supper as a “cannibal” feast, which in a way are not contemporary; Egyptian Wael Shawky’s reimagining of the Crusades as though they were a televised spectacle and the Iranian-Polish collective Slavs and Tatars’ retraversing of the famous Silk Road that connected East and West as though riding on a magic carpet.

For some years now, art historians have been trying to think the prehistory of contemporary art, how we got to where we are today. Sarah Wilson, who was recently in Australia to give a talk on the Australian expatriate artist JW Power, has run a seminar for several years now at the Courtauld Institute with the title ‘Globalism before globalism’. The intention is to trace the gradually expanding phenomenon of immigrant and emigrant artists around the world.

Here, for example, we might follow the increasing presence of Australian artists overseas and of artists from other counties throughout the twentieth century.

This genealogy would attempt to be more than a simple breakout wall, or even room in an otherwise conventionally hung collection of Australian art. Rather we would reverse the perspective and instead of seeing the Australian expatriates as exceptional, we would see those who remained at home as the real exceptions.

It would be a story told not as most histories of Australian art are from the inside out, but from the outside in. It would not look out at the rest of the world and ask Opposite: Atul Dodiya, Bako exists. Imagine (detail), 2011 Photo courtesy the artist

how we are different, but look in from the rest of the world and ask how we are the same. It would be a history of Australian art not as apart from that of other countries—separated by time and space—but as part of that of other countries —absolutely contemporaneous and indistinguishable. So that it would be a matter of scattering not the expatriates amongst the natives in a national history, but the natives amongst the expatriates in an international history.

This APT attempts to write something of this prehistory with the accompanying exhibition Ian Fairweather: Late Works 1953-74. Fairweather, of course, is increasingly becoming recognised as one of Australia’s most important artists, who after spending lengthy periods in China, Bali and Japan, managed to fuse this with an interest in Aboriginal art and a residual Cézannism to come up with his final mature style. What is produced is a synthesis of many seemingly incommensurate influences, almost like world music. (And for a true world art history, Fairweather as well as being Australian must also be understood as a kind of Scottish Gauguin.) But there does appear to be something truly ‘contemporary’ about Fairweather’s work. Indeed, we see the same fusion of the indigenous and the international in much contemporary art. Here in this APT, for instance, we have the Iranian Parastou Forouhar’s use of Farsi as the pattern for a wooden dancefloor, the Indian-UK Raqib Shaw’s gold-painted miniatures of ancient spirit creatures wearing runners and indigenous artist Daniel Boyd’s rarrk-like latticework that also traces the movement of planets visible only through a telescope.

The crucial fact here is that we don’t have, as in much post-colonial art, the attempt to ‘indigenise’ the international style—that is, Forouhar does not ‘Farsiise’ dance, Raqib does not ‘mogul-ise’ landscape or Boyd ‘rarrk-ise’ abstraction.

Rather, in contemporary art it is the reverse that occurs: the artist takes the indigenous outside of itself, presents it already as international and belonging to the rest of the world. In Australian art historiography, it is the difference between Albert Namatjira, who is seen to Aboriginalise Rex Battarbee’s watercolours, and Emily Kngwarreye, who is seen to make universal Utopia women’s body painting ceremonies.

We must try to think through what is at stake in understanding Aboriginal art as “contemporary”, as one recent anthology of writings on the subject would have it. It involves giving up on all anthropological readings of the work (the anthology traces the shift from a first generation of interpreters with expert knowledge who see the work in these terms to later generations of art critics with no special knowledge and who on occasions are even proudly uninformed). It is to do away with the tribal context for the work—which was previously so determinative —or to argue that this context is from the beginning displaced or decontextualised.

Now Aboriginal art, for better or worse—if we are able to cling to any historical perspective, we would say for better and worse—is open to any kind of reading, any kind of conceit, the cross-indexing and googling that all contemporary art is available to. It is henceforth readable in any number of ways (and one of the surprising things about the anthology is just how “unspeculative” readings of Aboriginal art still are, but we would argue that with a younger generation of scholars this will start to happen): not just spirituality, the environment, law and cosmology, but science-fiction, old age, cultural distinction, temporary structures, etc. It is not at all inappropriate that the APT is accompanied this year by a season of Chinese animation at the GoMA cinemathèque, for the contemporary image is precisely “plastic”: endlessly mutable, lacking any particular form or medium and existing only through the concepts or interpretations applied to it.

This is the antinomy of the contemporary art exhibition. On the one hand, there is in fact no basis for its curation. There is no positive centre from which the work comes, there is no tendency that is dominant, everything and everywhere is of equal interest and merit. And it is this that the exhibition must seek to capture: contemporary art’s all-inclusiveness, scale, unclassifiability and incomprehensibility. The only principle, the only selection allowed is that which does not allow selection, that is contemporary in the sense of being post-stylistic, post-national and post-historical. And, on the other hand, as the necessary other side of this, freed from the usual categories of style, medium and judgement, there can be more and more arcane, esoteric, poetic, spectacular justifications —really, excuses—for exhibitions. Atempo. Days Like These. Destroy All Monsters.

And even the exhibitions that notionally attempt a diagnosis of the contemporary situation—Altermodern, UnMonumental, Under the Big Black Sun—are now really only conceits, an extra poetic turn of the screw in pretending not to be poetic, the equivalent of curatorial sprezzatura. On the one hand, calling it the Asia Pacific Triennial is enough. On the other, there is always a particular theme or explanation that is forgotten or surpassed as soon as we step into the gallery. It is tempting to say that here with the APT we have a kind of laboratory or bellwether or canary down the mine for contemporary Australian art, except that as we say there are no lessons to be learnt, no rules to be applied, no kind of historical consciousness, memory or expertise that is of any use at all.

APT7 focus topics

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PACIFIC STRUCTURES TIES THAT BIND

Andrew Clifford Since the first Asia-Pacific Triennial opened in 1993, much has happened in the so-called Asia-Pacific region, which has been reflected in an ongoing reconsideration of the APT’s borders and frameworks. Although still pitched as a “triennial of contemporary art”, there is a clear sense that ideas of contemporaneity and even the Western construct of art have become an increasingly slippery notion.

In New Zealand, especially Auckland, which has the largest Pacific Islander population in the world, an increasing awareness and appreciation of Pacific Island cultures in the 1990s also meant a growing suspicion of what it meant to be categorised as a Pacific Islander, irrespective of your country of origin. From the first significant exhibitions of contemporary Pacific or Polynesian art (Te Moemoea no Iotefa, 1990 and Bottled Ocean: Contemporary Polynesian Artists, 1994-95), this idea of a shared identity was both celebrated and challenged, as was the distinction between customary culture and its newer manifestations.1

Curator and artist Jim Vivieaere, who curated Bottled Ocean, was part of the selection team for New Zealand’s presentation in the second APT (along with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki and Margo Neale), and they brought a similarly ambiguous approach to regional or national identity by grouping artists as travellers within the collective structure of a waka (canoe). This sets an important precedent that can be traced through to the Pacific Textiles Project from APT5, or the Mataso Printmakers and Pacific Reggae projects from APT6, which acknowledge the political, cultural and social frameworks that define communities and are embedded in cultural production. Through different structures, such as music or textiles, we find new ways to consider the activities of a region.

This twentieth anniversary edition of the APT continues those intentions, looking beyond the prescribed networks and processes of Western contemporary galleries to source work from the Pacific.

Performative and architectural structures are a primary focus for this section of APT7, specifically looking at Papua New Guinea, but also including artists from New Zealand and Australia.

The diversity of ceremonial structures created by communities in Papua New Guinea is impressive, as much for their precarious verticality as for their temporality as a kind of mobile or performance architecture.

Like the massive diving towers of Vanuatu (constructed without nails), elaborate headdresses and masks made from a range of organic or modern materials, which approach architectural scale, a few even needing strings and sticks and the help of a support team to hold them up. In the village of Yenchen, life-sized crocodile masks are woven from cane and adorned with shells and trailing leaves. Created for specific rituals, some costumes (from East New Britain) are only used once and the production of new works for each year’s ritual is an important part of regenerating a culture.

In some cases, the dramatic result of this heightened performance can offer a transcendent effect and different forms are associated with particular spirits or deities.

Opposite: Edwin Roseno, Lucky bamboo (Dracaena) (from Green hypermarket series), 2011–12 Photo courtesy the artist

Dizzying effects are also employed in architecture, with two examples commissioned for APT7 in response to iconic Sepik architectural structures; one by the Abelam and another by the Kwoma. Both are spirit houses —one featuring a highly decorated ceiling to keep the spirit world involved in the community discussions that take place within—and are optically hypnotic when viewed from below in the gallery.

The coloured Tongan sennit lashings that hold roof beams together, along with many other applications, have been a focus for Tongan-born New Zealand artist Sopolemalama Filipe Tohi for nearly two decades. There is a formal complexity to Tohi’s work, which can result in as many as 2000 variations that could be unravelled back to the same binding point (and myriad meanings)—he has described these as a metaphor for DNA, holding the secrets of the universe.2

Ceremonial objects such as the garamut (slit drum) are also carved with different forms to reference animal spirits or ancestors, although sound is their most important feature (as a means to transmit messages) and a selection of these will be played during APT7. The totemic power of these objects (and the Western inclination to collect them) brings an intriguing tension to the paintings of New Zealand-Samoan artist Graham Fletcher, which juxtapose tribal objects with appropriated images of modernist interiors. Greg Semu’s elaborate photographic re-enactments of famous history paintings in a Pacific setting also critique ideas of primitivism and the colonial gaze.

More familiar in a gallery environment, the intuitive structures of New Zealand artists Joanna Langford and Richard Maloy are equally precarious, built to gravity-defying heights from found materials, like Langford’s spindly worlds of wire-frame cranes and silage wrap, or Maloy’s painted cardboard canyon. At thirty metres in length, Maloy’s improvised arena requires viewers to perform with the structure, beckoning them closer to discover its flimsy construction and explore the varied forms.

One particular event series that marks the APT’s twentieth anniversary is The 20 Year Archive projects that interpret the archives accumulated by the Queensland Art Gallery, and other archives that consider the last twenty years in the Asia-Pacific region. A group of artists from Melbourne, Auckland and Honolulu, including a poet, illustrator and photographer, contributes the multimedia project {disarmed}, which imagines an archive of militarisation in the Pacific. With the relationships this is likely to identify with countries like the United States of America, Great Britain, Germany or France, it will be interesting to see how far the geographical parameters of the APT will stretch over the next twenty years.

Notes 1 See Karen Stevenson, ‘Refashioning the Label, Reconstructing the Cliché: A Decade of Contemporary Pacific Art, 1990-2000’ in Melissa Chiu (curator), Paradise Now?: Contemporary Art from the Pacific, New York: Asia Society, 2004: 20-33; and Sean Mallon and Pandora Fulimalo Pereira introduction to their Pacific Art Niu Sila: The Pacific Dimension of Contemporary New Zealand Arts, Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2002: 7-19 2

Ron Brownson et al., Home AKL: Artists of Pacific Heritage in Auckland, Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery, 2012: 135

Above: Richard Maloy, Raw attempts, 2009 Photo courtesy the artist Opposite top: Paramodel, Paramodelic–graffiti, 2010 Opposite bottom: Paramodel, Mugen co. Paramodel pipeline, 2010 Photos courtesy the artists

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SETTING THE STAGE

Emma Budgen The collapse of contemporary and customary that defines the Asia Pacific Triennial can at times be seen as a perplexing potpourri, but when it works, the exhibition brings to light unexpected connections rich in complexity. A selection of this year’s participants can be grouped together across disparate materials and contexts by their interest in the notion of the “performed sculpture”, whether through participatory practices which generate social space or through evoking the activation of architectural space.

The Japanese collective Paramodel is known for immersive Gesamtkunstwerk-style environments that are a J-Pop amalgam of psychedelia and playground. Their name is a knowing mash-up of the words “paradise”, “paradox” and “model”, but also evokes the Japanese word “puramoderu”, or “plastic toy diorama”. There is a viral quality to their layered installations, which although sprawling and apparently random, are each underpinned by a linear network (such as model train tracks or plumbing ducting) that weaves over floor, ceiling and walls.

For APT7 the shape and scope of their work is derived from a workshopping process with local children, and physically comes together over the course of the opening weeks, performing itself into existence.

The playful grandiosity of Paramodel is echoed in the vast scale of New Zealand artist Richard Maloy’s work Big Yellow, which is sited in the ground floor atrium—viewable from several interior levels and from across the river. At around thirty metres long and two storeys high, it’s the largest work Maloy has made to date, and seems to defy the very ordinary and ephemeral material it is made from—cardboard. While Maloy’s early works deployed sculpture as an extension to the body, attaching cardboard as a kind of skin, his sculptures of recent years act as architectural additions, working within space to interrogate and alter buildings. The allusions to performance here suggest not only the transformative processes of making, but also the movement of viewers navigating and moving through the work. Maloy describes Big Yellow as “sculptural from the outside, yet inside it operates like an empty stage set”.

While stemming from a very different context, the contemporary work from Papua New Guinea exudes a similar level of vibrant do-it-yourself making. A cluster of artist collectives from New Britain and the Sepik region brings together the most extensive showing of work from PNG at an APT, including a substantial grouping of spirit masks and houses.

These are designed for use in a single performance and then destroyed, as though the spirit they have made manifest can only be contained by such an act of oblivion. Here the objects are positioned as latent vehicles for performance, empty vessels through which narrative is conjured and the liminal space between the past and present can be breached.

The performative aspects of ruangrupa’s work can be found in musical form, but also within the performance of a good yarn well told.

Their micro museum documents the rise and fall of a mythical Indonesian band, a curious fusion of truth and fiction that links Indonesian and Queensland subcultures. ruangrupa are an Indonesian artist-run gallery and collective whose collaborative practice uses the mechanisms of documentary and the archive to map the cultural nodes of urban space.

Shifting their focus from their hometown of Jakarta to Brisbane, they have taken a lens to the underground music scene of the 1970s, a period of the city’s history marked by the aggressively conservative policies of Queensland Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Peterson. Such insalubrious conditions proved highly fertile, with bands such as the Go-Betweens, the Leftovers, and Zero/Xero stamping a punk sensibility that would serve to define Brisbane internationally. Go-Betweens drummer Lindy Morrison once said of this time; “[I]t was incredibly conservative and if you were going to live there and be part of an artistic subculture, you were inevitably going to be radical”. Here the manufactured history of ruangrupa’s band is woven into the real history of Brisbane punk, developing a series of constructed narratives that mediate and disrupt a history already firmly mythologised into a local iconography.

Music is also a feature of Berlin-based artist Parastou Forouhar’s Written Room, with local musicians contributing to the work over a series of live performances. Written Room uses Farsi text to coat the walls of the gallery, literally writing the room and echoing a tradition of calligraphic murals within mosques and important buildings. Extracted from the page and thus removed from linear narrative, the text in Written Room can no longer serve to explain or elucidate. Instead, it creates a decorative space waiting to be activated, as much a stage set awaiting performers as Richard Maloy’s Big Yellow.

FUTURE-ARCHIVISM IN THE OPEN AIR OF HISTORY AND THE APT7 20 YEAR ARCHIVE

LILY HIBBERD A good question to ask is if we could imagine meaning out of memories in the future.

Heman Chong When artists work with an archive it is easy to suppose their labour is absorbed in the reiteration of the past. Another assumption made in relation to archives in the hands of artists is the implicit contract to preserve history, to keep a specific part of its account sacrosanct. But what if the artist’s endeavour is a-historic? What if the archive the artist creates exists only in and for the future? What if it contends with the (patri)lineage of false identities?1 While the archive is generally understood to represent a collection of particular objects that were conceived in the past, what is effectively overlooked is the crucial role of archives in the production of history for the civilised world, and this is just one reason for artistic contention. In this critique, the Archive, with a capital A, emerges as a Machiavellian character, whose rhetoric speaks for him or herself: heritage/ heretic, conversation/conservative. History in its unassailable ideological formulation is no different;2 as such these two capitalised archons, as the chief custodians of pastness, serve each other.3

In its disputed iteration, the Archive can also be understood as a boundary condition and a limit. It comprises a border around what has been excluded from its cases or its storerooms, of what has been forgotten or refused, all of which constitutes a form of the public secret.4 In either instance, there is always an author behind the archive, institutional (museum and government), local (community historians) or autonomous (freelance curators, artists and writers), who collects and curates the collection in order to promulgate a specific chronicle, a scripted heritage that is often erroneously imagined to be contained within and vital to the items that make up the archive.5 The past in this way is all too often configured to a set of principles that fail to tell the whole story, which portrays a version of events that reiterate a set of desirable or dominant ideologies. It is the archive of suppressed material of which Jacques Derrida speaks in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, saying, “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory”, and, let it be said, the suppression of public memory is paradoxically a primary evidence of civilisation.6

Where Derrida’s diagnosis is of mal d’archive (archive sickness), another kind of fever has taken hold, the urge to make an archive of one’s own. The conditions of the mal-Archive apply, without exclusion, to any artist operating in the disputed spaces of cultural memory and with collected and dispersed histories, official or otherwise. For, while artists might move mercurially through archaeological, curatorial, epistemological, historiographical and even ethnographic modes, we should be wary of the seduction of the archive’s panoptic spectacle, which is sometimes reproduced by artists in versions of the fifteenth-century Wunderkammer.7 It is difficult to avoid the power relations and inherent institutionalisation of the archive, yet out of this apparently barred context rises an opportunity for a counter-practice, which branches from the point of difference between the archive that is open to change and the Archive that is sealed from the future. The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exists within an analogous cultural tension, a paradigm partly of its own making, even though the multitude of people, places and voices that comprise its twenty-year lifespan inherently refuse the notion of tension as a single manoeuvre, and there is always movement and transformation in the exchange of who we are and who we become over time.

Of the seventy-seven artists in APT7, there are many who work either with archives or archivally, most markedly in the case of Atul Dodiya, the Jakarta-based artists’ initiative ruangrupa, Dayanita Singh and Manuel Ocampo, who has reworked for APT7 a body of his own paintings made over the last twenty years. Doubtlessly conscious that latitude is insufficient, APT7 features three additional curated projects, of which The 20 Year Archive directly addresses the leitmotif of the archive. Given the celebration of its twentieth anniversary, APT7 could also easily find itself looking backwards. The 20 Year Archive however, cultivates the concept and exercise of looking forward by looking back, realised for the 2012 program in various ways of either reworking an existing archive— engaging with range of local and regional archives, including QAG/ GOMA’s Australian Centre of Asia Pacific Art—or in producing an entirely new one. Springing from this reflexive premise, five autonomous projects each arise in a unique formulation.

Raqs Media Collective are using an active workspace to share materials from past and present project proposals related to Sarai, a Delhibased archive and centre that they founded for the discussion of issues relating to urban geography, media, technology and urbanism research.

A web link will be available in the workspace, taking us to a concurrent exhibition titled Sarai Reader 09, curated by Raqs for the Devi Foundation in Gurgoan, India. In a cartography based on the orientation of experience, the collaborators of MAP Office (Hong Kong, China) have recharted the map itself for APT7, plotting the borders and spaces of Asia in visual and textual form, as the territory of artistic production instead of proprietorial exclusion. Instigating an entirely new exhibition project, titled {disarmed} imagining a Pacific archive, Torika Bolatagici, Mat Hunkin and Teresia Teaiwa challenge the representation and economisation of Pacific bodies and people within the history and contemporary politics of the militarisation of the region, with an emphasis on Fiji. Singaporean artist Heman Chong delves into the Australian Centre of Asia Pacific Art (ACAPA) archive. Taking up documents chosen by QAGOMA staff, he prises the collection apart, reshuffling its ordered contents according to its internal users’ choice of presumably the material they might like us to see.

The gathered fragments constitute an “epic poem”, as described by Chong that he has used for a sound installation, thus creating a work that looks from the outside in, appropriately performed by Singaporean actor and Nominated Member of Parliament Janice Koh.

The 20 Year Archive represents an effort to contend with the contested aspects of the category. It is a curatorial action determination that, in keeping with the selected artists’ work, reconceptualises the Archive as a political material, not for what it contains or for what is valorised in a nationalistic way, but for what has escaped the major narratives of colonisation and now of markets and the proliferation of global commercial development.8 We can only begin to comprehend how fundamental such a contestation becomes when we consider how the unitary Archive really functions (i.e. what it does to objects and people), and that it often denies and thus violates history and memory for nations in flux. The return of APT7 artists to the archive gathers even greater symbolic import for this reason. In the publication accompanying the 2008 exhibition Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, Okwui Enwezor emphasised that, “Archival returns are often conjoined with the struggle against amnesia and anomie”.9 This is especially true of the diasporic contours of Asia and the flow of people across the ocean communities of the Pacific, where any absolute notion of history has no

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such ground. The concept of ‘nation’ is difficult inasmuch as the ideal clashes with the internal or the real state of instability, to the extent that it becomes impossible to determine if that political or social union is on the rise or in the process of decline. Many nations in the Asia Pacific region are additionally in the midst of the injudicious transformations common to ‘developing countries’, as globalisation forces capitalist structures and property to change hands in often opaque and unequal ways, regardless of and probably exacerbated by technological progress.

In the “labor of the negative”, what occasionally emerges from the long legacy of iconoclasm inherent to the cultural non-reflexivity of imperialism is a counter-narrative. This approach is evident in the practice of a number of APT7 artists who are working against such confiscations of the past from the future, drawing from far less visible archives, from personal research projects, or from collections in which there is possibly nothing material to work with at all. These counter-tendencies, I would add, are not a matter of aesthetic or ideological form but of necessity, and the détournement of the existing archive is an effective means of rethinking historical events and the status of history, whereby the archive becomes a medium in its own right.10 Raising the notion of using the archive against itself, Enwezor also states in Archive Fever that Christian Boltanski’s work provokes “questions about the stability of the archive as a means by which we come to know and understand the past”.11 The problem that refuses to be resolved in any retroactive formulation of the reprised archive, that I see in Boltanski’s work and in many others, is that it cannot avoid looking back, so that it correspondingly recasts the activated document into a kind of monumental stone. What remains perplexing for curators, historians, anthropologists and artists alike is how to prevent rock-art atavism from being repeated and free a collection or a past to interpretation beyond memorialisation.12

The distinctly future-focused adaptation of archives by a selection of APT7 artists, I would argue, conversely turns the archive away from its characteristic historicisation, so that personal and feasibly public memory might, as Enwezor suggests, convert monuments back into documents, bits of paper that in turn might catch a gust of wind and take flight in the open sky of change.13 Consider Heman Chong’s capitulation that it is possible to “imagine meaning out of memories in the future”.14 In the context of Chong’s established work and his inclusion in The 20 Year Archive, the ‘future’ provocation is not empty. Take, for example, the installation Calendars (2020-2096) (2004-10). In its gridded configuration, Chong’s Calendars work possesses formal and conceptual similarities to Hannah Darboven’s Konstruktion (1967-), Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (1964present), and to On Kawara’s Today series (1966–). On the other hand, despite the repeated presence of the photographic object and its sequential structuring, something of a futurity is produced in the calendars’ aporias into 2020-2096, into our coming over in time, in the not yet of time, which is the opposite of a gestalt ambition that might attempt to record everything.

Even so, when Chong makes this ideological and temporal leap, we could well be confused. Isn’t it an outright contradiction? Aren’t memories products of the past? Chong’s statement is, however, a “tiger’s leap” into the open air of history. The tiger I refer to here is an allegory of future hope that Walter Benjamin envisaged in 1940, on the eve of the Nazi occupation of Paris.15 Benjamin’s leap runs parallel to the “charged time of the now”, a notion that is extant in the essay titled Theses on the Philosophy of History, where Benjamin identifies the French Revolution’s reprise of ancient Rome as a ‘now’ blasted out of “the continuum of history”.16

In similar fashion, Chong atomises the history of the Asia Pacific Triennial, taking us directly to its heart, the usually cloistered (yet unsealed) Australian Centre of Asia Pacific Art research library. In a red-lit room, deep within its faceless head, we hear the voice of a woman who speaks from afar, taking up the words of multiple uncited authors. She offers us their words as the broken fragments of catalogues, articles and correspondence.

The giant brain (which can only be a space odyssey), does not explain itself, and we cannot recount history from its historical fragments, so we are cast forward, perhaps into nothingness, yet into an space for the future because of a shared past. In an earlier work called Philip (2006), the cover blurb of Chong’s collaborative science fiction novel asks, “does history, like all stories, ultimately have an end?” Based on this question, I wonder

if Chong’s temporal projection might yet be a ruse, a ‘Leap into the Void,’ harking back to Yves Klein’s 1960 photomontage, Le saut dans le vide, which constructed the artist’s notorious dive into the future as a trick.

In his counter-intuition and fictions of futurity, I can see why sci-fi might be attractive to Chong. Futurism could nonetheless be a telos, the end at which the vision culminates, whereby the future is just another edifice.

I fear too that my allegory inheres a form of perspectival thinking, in the tradition of classical rectilinearism, narrowing to a point. And here I meet an impasse: while artists of the Asia Pacific might ideally sail their airships in Benjamin’s “open air of history”, beyond historicism’s ideological borders, such a utopic notion could be just another ‘commonwealth’, or the false prophecy of a destined or desired social future. Arcadia’s islands exist in the mutability of political, environmental and social change, in which the future and the past are not historically or temporally distinct. Capricious time is similarly essential to the work that the above APT7 artists are doing on the counter-archive—against the archiving of archives—which at once adopts and subverts History to make a leap across époques into the future.

Atul Dodiya, one of the artists in the principal APT7 program, describes his merging of found images, as a “kind of provocative glamour”.

He also says that combining the opulent eyes and lips of actresses with pictures of Gandhi and distorted photographs of his father and grandfather “contributes to the uneasy tension that surrounds us all the time”.17 Yet how are we able to decipher any meaning from the mad jumble of images? What is the logic of Dodiya’s kaleidoscope? Without a structure, we look for a ground. Is it an empty page or a blank canvas; or is there a substrate meaning to the graffiti-covered wall or that reclaimed roller door? As artists recast reprised images into future memory, it seems to be part of the open sky of history, rather than a void. In this way, Dodiya’s passage to the future is made possible through the roller door of social polemic, where the context of history is firmly located in the present political world, even if satirical intent unsettles its veracity; a world where Bill Clinton wanders past the Taj Mahal, while Greek Olympic runners meet Meret Oppenheim, alongside famous Indian schoolbook icons.

The performance of all of these emblems stages a series of enactments, actions that remind me of the shape and gestural metaphor of language in the hysterical figures of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: fragments. Dodiya likewise deploys myth as a contemporary metaphor, resisting the stereotype of the tabula rasa or blankness of Eastern historical temporality. For Dodiya, the anomalous morsels that make up the new picture are not temporal drifters, but are part of a new ground that is generated as they carry the mnemonic flame of multiple worlds.

Dodiya’s race around the globe thus poses a challenge to the easy notion of the pastiche as a series of unrelated, timeless fragments, diverging both from modernity’s ‘rupture’ with the past and postmodernity’s strangely concomitant evacuation and salvage of history. A closer look at Benjamin’s montage technique reveals the related concept of the decisive political recognition of an image (or a text) as part of a constellation of historical origins, thereby exploding the myth of history’s progress and continuity.18 As the cut-up was for William Burroughs, so montage generated for Benjamin an awakening to the relationship between the pieces and the whole, which will never be whole. Akin to the work of Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective, Dodiya’s use of the appropriated image is a version of the Nietzschean eternal return, a passage of the present that is not at all a futile recycling of the past, nor the return of the same but the returning which of itself synthesises time and diversity. The recurrent existence of events and experiences as both past and present is comparably epitomised in the Maori word for the past, “mua”, which also means in front.19 Teresia Teaiwa’s writing, likewise, severs notions of linear (and forward moving) temporality. The oral tale is also vital for cultural continuity and the reinvention of the collective memory, for it refuses to fall in line with dominant language and historical systems: storytelling has long evaded the imposition of imperial language precisely because it is not written down. Teaiwa’s enfolding of identity, time and space emerges in this way from the practice of non-language, adopting a necessary process of ekphrasis—of art’s translation within and without form that ciphers the woman’s experience through the fish.

Te onauti20 Be te onauti And fly.

Walking is for Pathetic bipeds, And swimming Only half an option.

Men see one horizon Where you always see two.

Perhaps that is why fishermen lost and unable to stomach any more of the sea feel fortunate to catch you so they may suck on your eyes.

Fish out of water: fly.

Fish, out of water, see two horizons.

The fish-eye-voices of Te onauti speak of the multiple histories and dimensions of a (woman’s) body in its ‘other’ states, and of being outside oneself. With {disarmed} imagining a Pacific archive, the fish leaves the water altogether, as Bolatagici, Hunkin and Teaiwa combine their independent approaches to depict unrepresented aspects of war and military culture in the Pacific. Hunkin adopts a graphic illustration mode to narrate the history of the World War Two First Commando Fiji Guerrillas, and referencing forms of documentary photography Bolatagici examines the mass export of Fijian men for employment as military and private security, while Teaiwa’s poetry emanates from her research into three generations of Fijian women serving in the British Army and Fiji Military Forces. In the initiation of a new ‘Pacific archive’ these three artists engage the body in history and its biopolitics. If we take the word “arms” in several senses, two kinds of barriers are being taken down: the archive and ours.

We find ourselves listening to silenced histories being openly enunciated: how bodies in the Pacific have been and are still made into a sacrifice.

This is unlikely to be a bare account, because the fish, once out of water, once drawn in unyielding outlines, loses its flesh, leaving only scales, which is why transmutability of image and text across the {disarmed} collaboration has a crucial role in re-imagining political possibilities.

The artist working with the archive calls up the personage of the go-between, not because artists as carriers are powerless or oblivious to the messages they deliver but because there is a flow of desire in society, through which the boy or the artist becomes an agent, even a diplomat.

Meanwhile, the literary imagination for the remembrance of things past courses through the work of writerly APT7 artists such as Dayanita Singh and through Teaiwa’s meta-language. Singh’s House of Love (2011) is a book of photographs with a text by writer Aveek Sen that runs parallel to the pictorial fiction of Singh’s nine short ‘stories’. The image-text helix engenders the sense of an autonomous narrative; the two components braided around the motif of the Taj Mahal, loaded as it is with contentions of love and illusion collectivised in romantic fiction. These and other libidinal guerrillas of the archive do the boundary traversing across history’s disciplined or chastised zones, even as art making and curating, being bound within hegemonic forms of cultural production, remain bedded down with Enlightenment codes. Yet, taking up a go-between role at the moment of encountering APT7, we too can imagine (and desire) its work reflexively: to read history against History and archive against Archive, to allow time to transform matter and our minds. We still need to scrutinise how the creation of a new public memory might begin when access to the Archive has been denied, or its items lost or “consigned”, in Derridean terms, within the historicised past.21 As Chong proposes, this first of all entails the incitement of an imagination for a memory of the future, an open sky for dreaming, not under the burden of experience but out of an autonomous yet shared making of an archive to come—a future that is approaching for all of us.

Notes 1 See Dragan Kujundzic, ‘Archigraphia: On the Future of Testimony and the Archive to Come’, in Charles Merewether (ed.), The Archive: Documents in Contemporary Art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2006: 172-6 2 Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault branded this contested notion of History ‘historicism’. See Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Use and Abuse of History for Life’, Untimely Meditations, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997; and Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. The literature in this field is extensive, including key thinkers such as Hayden White, Karl Popper and Paul Hamilton. Alternatively, Foucault’s archaeologies might be thought to circulate in their own binary and re-historicise History, a retrospectivity with which New Historicists also might arguably fail to break 3 Jacques Derrida traces the etymology of the word “archive” and discovers the archons of ancient Greece, the superior magistrates of “archontic power”, whose role was to interpret official documents; “Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect speak the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law.” Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998: 2-3 4 For the notion of the public secret in relation to colonial iconoclasm, see Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999 5 “A science of the archive must include the theory of institutionalisation, that is to say, the theory both of the law which begins inscribing itself there and of the right which authorises it”, Derrida, op cit: 4.

See also, Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October 110, 2004: 2-22 6 Derrida, op cit: 4 (footnote). The same paradox underpins the deadly irony of a mimetic mausoleum for one’s own work that Marcel Duchamp instituted in the La boîte-en-valise (1935-41) 7 Okwui Enwezor makes this list of artistic modes in a footnote to Archive fever: uses of the document in contemporary art, New York, NY: International Center of Photography; Göttingen: Steidl Publishers, 2008: 48 8 On the colonisation and the migrant archive, see Arjun Appadurai, ‘Archive and Inspiration,’ in Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder eds, Information is Alive, Rotterdam: V2_Publishers/NAI, 2003: 14-25; and Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009 9 Enwezor, op cit: 37. On the archive and forgetting, see also Benjamin C. Hutchens, ‘Techniques of Forgetting? Hypo-Amnesic History and the An-Archive’, SubStance 36: 2, 2007: 37-55 10

For Hegel, the “labour of the negative” is a process of self-becoming that Geist (mind, spirit, ghost) attains in the dialectical transformation of an opposition and its negation. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1998: 10. Slavoj Žižek notes that “Against this false ideological spectre of Hegel, one should nonetheless insist that the Hegelian dialectic of the Notion is indispensable in the critique of historicism.” See Slavoj Žižek, ‘History Against Historicism’, European Journal of English Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2000: 104. For another incisive context for the Hegelian phrase “labour of the negative”, see Taussig, Defacement, op cit.

11

Enwezor, Archive Fever: 31

12 Azoulay’s 2011 essay ‘Archive’ analyses the right to deposit and access archival material, see Ariella Azoulay, ‘Archive’, Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, December 2011, available online http://www. politicalconcepts.org/2011/archive 13

Enwezor, op cit: 23

14

Interview with Heman Chong for the British Council Singapore, http://vimeo.com/30831892

15

The symbolism of the tiger is doubly charged too for Singaporeans, the naming of city narrated as a case of mistaken feline identity: the word “Singapore” approximates the Malay (singapura) for lion.

The Singaporean tiger moreover represents colonisation, being aggressively hunted and yet a sign of the wildness within that resists Western invasion, the tiger sometimes eating its predators too. Thinking of the “tiger economy” metaphor, tigers might be imagined also to attack the West by subterfuge too.

Kevin Chua discusses the Kiplingesque dream of the tiger on the Singaporean colonial frontier in the fascinating text, ‘The Tiger and the theodolite: George Coleman’s dream of extinction’, Broadsheet 36.2, 2007 16 By ‘now’ Benjamin means to invoke, among other things, an expanded present that encompasses both the past and the future and charged because of its consciousness of the political continuity between eras. See Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, Harry Zohn trans, Hannah Arendt (ed.), Fontana: London, 1973: 263 17

Interview with Atul Dodiya: ‘Work in progress’, Little Magazine, available online; http://www.littlemag. com/faith/atuldodiya.html

18

In The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades project, Susan Buck-Morss delineates that Benjamin’s “aim was to destroy the mythic immediacy of the present, not by inserting it into a cultural continuum that affirms the present as its culmination, but by discovering that constellation of historical origins that has the power to explode history’s ‘continuum’”. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989: x 19

H. W. Williams, Dictionary of the Maori Language, Wellington: GP Print, 1971

20

Kiribati for “flying fish”. Teresia Teaiwa, ‘Te onauti’, The Other Voices International Project online, Volume 3; http://othervoicespoetry.org/vol3/teaiwa/index.html 21 “Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration.” Derrida, op cit: 3

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URBANISATION AND THE SHIFTING ART WORLDS

Simon Soon In and around the institutionalised network of places where contemporary art occurs, a central response is one that is often connected to questions of urbanity and urbanism. This is not surprising, considering how most of the resources, networks and opportunities are mostly found in these concentrated centres of human habitation and activities. But what are we to make of this setting?

One common explanation is that the globalised urban experience facilitates a transnational outcome. It suggests that current artistic practice is almost entirely divested of national interest, where artists are able to fluidly translate, present or apply their preferred set of artistic methodologies in different cross-cultural contexts. I think of this characterisation as partial at best, and it does not fully account for how art worlds and interests shift and overlap as they interface with the myriad urban worlds that continue to drive and inspire a large part of its development. Is there another model of intimating the complex space artists inhabit and work through?

In thinking about a group of artists who are largely based in Southeast Asia, what came to mind was that the way in which historical urban formations in the region interact might well have contemporary resonances. The type of conceptual geography used to describe the region’s interface is elucidated in O.W. Wolters’ notion of the mandala, a distributed network of hierarchical polities that is primarily circular.1 These localised units of power, culture and economies often possess overlapping spheres of influence—driven by trade, cultural alliances, history—and serve as a counter-cartography to our modern geography of strict, unified national territorial blocks.

Applying the mandala loosely as a pattern to contemporary art suggests that artistic interests and concerns, reflecting the primacy of the urban environment as its centre stage, are radial—not necessarily as horizontal or random as the term “transnational” might suggest. More importantly, it accounts for the capacity of many artworks to operate and slip between registers that do not readily dispense with national concerns, yet have scopes that could be understood on other levels of allegiances.

It renews the ability to engage with contemporary art through the lens of urbanity, a cultural, economic, political terrain that shares certain modular features, such as comparatively high level of population density.

One area that is explored is the texture of the city, its weight that continues to press upon one’s lived experiences and the ways in which artists are responding to this vertiginous and growing urbanscape. Nguyen Manh Hung’s diorama of the Soviet-style housing block found in Hanoi (Living together in paradise, 2009) vastly exaggerates the height and verticality of its construction.

It draws upon the tension between the utilitarian uniformity of such housing complexes and their makeshift nature, in which humans —responding to population growth—adapt to its restrictive spaces within the challenges of the urban environment. Nguyen Manh Hung’s vertical tower can be contrasted with the horizontal sprawl that is the central issue demonstrated in Phuan Thai Meng’s large-scale painting. The artist strips parts of the canvas surface of his photorealist depiction of arterial highways that connect the city of Kuala Lumpur to reveal the plywood substrate, to comment (allegorically) on the illusory nature of progress.

At the other end of the scale, Nguyen Minh Phuouc,’s video Etude Red, studies the movement of an elderly woman performing tai-chi movements in a military uniform. Oblivious to her background, which shows images of daily scenes from present day Hanoi, her insularity and seeming apathy is an elegiac, existential and heroic counterpoint to the pace of change the city is rapidly undergoing.

While these examples explore specific urban environs and aesthetics, the model of the mandala suggests that these centripetal and centrifugal locales do not exist in isolation, specifically in relation to neighbouring mandalas. One aspect of this is can be seen in the excavation of occluded narratives about such links and bridges. Chia-En Jao’s multi channel video documentary REM sleep (2011), explores the aspirations of migrant workers in Taiwan by getting them to relate their dreams to the viewer. Playing on psychoanalytic therapy, it puts the viewer in the chair of the analyst, to draw their own conclusions about the hopes and fears of those who constitute the human traffic that drive our cities upwards.

At other times, the connections of unlikely orbits are instead invented, where the fictive dimension of art can engender new ways of understanding the relationships between cities, such as Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa’s construction of a museum of memorabilia for a fictitious Indonesian rock band and its speculative influence on the Brisbane music scene.

The intersection between the art worlds and the urban is one that is fraught with anxiety, made all the more relevant by the fact that the majority of us, who participate in the intellectual and civic life across the world are urban dwellers today. These spaces wrestle with history, both official and unaccounted, even as they seek articulate the future.

Sometimes, this future may stretch as far as the post apocalyptic scenario described in Tiffany Chung’s installation (Roaming with the dawn–snow drifts, rain falls, desert wind blows, 2012), displaying a parade of glass menagerie of animals forming a vast migration towards an unknown.

At each junction, while the typology of the urban spaces might share similar characteristics, they are also culturally and spatially manifold to the extent that artists operating in them and engaging with them require particular verve, cunning and experience. The mandala model therefore offers a middle ground to encompass the labyrinthine modes of experience when art takes on the modern city, where its outlooks are inflected by the array of voices that sustain it—and simultaneously inclusive of those practices, which continue to interact with the national allegory. Such a framing would also allow us to continue to speak of art worlds in the plural and their configurations as modularly shifting and porous in nature, engendered by the complexities of nuances and codes that makes in-depth curatorial research pressing and relevant—or even for an exhibition platform that configures its own sense of regionality, such as the APT and its relation to its host city, in order to reinvent itself in each successive incarnation as it takes stock of the shifting grounds where art occurs.

Note 1 See O.W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Religion in Southeast Asian Perspectives, Ithaca, New York: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University in cooperation with The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1999: 27

Black Casino Wade MarynoWsky

16 January - 3 February 2013

This project is a partnership between Mona and CasT as part of Mona FoMa 2013 Image courtesy the artist 2012

971 horses and 4 zebras 9 February - 10 MarCh 2013 yu arakI, Jordan baseMan, GeraInT evans, kaTIe GoodWIn InGer LIse hansen, JaMes LoWne, naThanIeL MeLLors, davId o’reILLy eMILy rIChardson, LoIs roWe, ChrIs shepherd, Tadasu TakaMIne davId TheobaLd, kIT WIse. CuraTed by Jordan baseMan, Gary ThoMas

Artistic license

as/1003 broadsheet 05/04

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Telephone: (08) 8212 2711 Fax: (08) 8231 7190.

Campbelltown arts Centre 2 February – 10 March exhibition launch Friday 1 February 7pM artist talks saturday 2 February 11aM