Proceedings of a one-day closed seminar titled Considering the Contemporary I: Issues and Ideas for Framing Current Visual Art in Thailand November 7th 2008 F a c u l t y o f A r c h i t e c t u r e , C h u l a l o n g k o r n U n i v e r s i t y, B a n g k o k
S e m i n a r P r e s e n t a t i o n
I n t rod u ct ion B r i an
Curtin
Mapping Contemporary Visual Art in Thailand is a project that aims to document and classify contemporary visual art practices in Thailand. The objective is to create an ever-expanding resource, both physical and virtual, for cultural workers and educational institutes, to be overseen by the newly established Center for Visual Studies within Chulalongkorn. Intended projects include publications and a web-based archive of critical writing on contemporary art in this country. This small seminar will provide the basis for the first publication. Regretfully, not everyone I wanted to attend could; and invitees were approached on the basis of their interest in and knowledge of contextual accounts of contemporary art. The seminar is closed in order, apart from financial and logistical issues, to explore a relatively innovative means of generating and presenting ideas and discussion. Particularly, in difference from the practice of collating and publishing conference papers; this seminar’s discussion will be transcribed and form the key focus of the eventual publication.
Participants are invited to submit 500 word assessments, for publication also. Finally, this seminar also marks the project’s interest in relating events to publications and vice-versa. The title – Considering the Contemporary I – is, as suggested, the first of what is hoped to be a series of events addressing pertinent topics in a focused manner. The focus of this seminar is issues of nationalism and internationalism which, I believe have informed the most significant, if sparse, English-language assessments of contemporary art in Thailand. Moreover, questions of national and cultural identity can seem to form an ever-present undercurrent for the production and representation of some of the most noted contemporary art from Thailand. In the case of my writing for publications in Europe and elsewhere, for example I often feel a strong tension between the interests of relating Thai artists to their international counterparts and to local, culturally specific, contexts.
Key points from three texts are to be presented. Information on the texts has already been circulated and they provide a broad sweep for issues of nationalism and internationalism. An aim is to consider a partial genealogy for how contemporary art in Thailand has and can be considered in the terms sketched. In terms of discussion, critique and revision, it is hoped we elaborate, contest, and re-frame critical ideas from these texts. David’s paper - the last I have summarized here – for example, offers a particularly interesting challenge to ideas of nationalism and internationalism variously implicit and explicit in Dr. Apinan’s and Steven Pettifor’s books. To provide an account of how notions of nationalism and internationalism have informed Anglophone writing on modern and contemporary art in Thailand. To critically evaluate this account (elaborate, contest, re-frame). To sketch alternative models for considering contemporary art in Thailand. Dr. Apinan’s book as a contextual response to contemporary Thai artists works, Steven’s book as an attempt to theorize significance. David Teh’s paper critically addresses the problem of translating ideas from one historical reality to another.
From Apinan Poshyananda (1992) ‘From Modern to (Post?) Modern Art in Thailand’ Modern Art in Thailand, Oxford University Press.
B
a
n
-
g
k
o
k
w e l c o m e s m o d e r n i t y
-
characterized by
electicism
‘…e xtr a va g a n ce a n d e xcessi ve co n su m p tio n [m a y] r e su lt i n the decline of traditional culture and sp ir itu a lism o f th e T h a i peopl e’ .
‘T h e m o r e e co n o m ic g r o wth, the m o r e e co n o m ic p r o b le ms and co n cu r r e n t d e va lu a tio n o f human qualities. Morals and ethics are fo r g o tte n …’ ( Office o f th e N ati on a l Cu ltu r e Co m m issio n , 1989).
‘…new changes and the disruption of cultural continuity’.
‘What do terms like ‘modernism’ and ‘late capitalism’ mean to [Thai artists]?’
‘…m oder n Thai ar t has faced a di l em m a. On the one hand, it has str i v en to catch up with the inter national ar t of the Fir st Wor ld. M any Thai ar tis ts be lieved ther e should be a univer s al m od er n ar t that can be appr eciated by al l classes and nationalities. On th e o t h e r hand, som e ar tists felt obliged to m ai n tain their sense of national unity and racial homogeneity. This dual p u r p o s e – trying to be international as w e l l a s expressing Thai-ness – have be e n v e r y difficult to r econcile’.
Questions of modernism and post-modernism
- T h e t e r m ‘ m o dernism’ does not have
During the 1980s and 1990s, the sp e e d o f We ste r n in flu e n ce on T h a i cu ltu r e in cr e a se d d r amati ca lly’.
t h e s a m e r a n ge of meanings in d iff er e n t l a n g uag e s. - Th e o r i e s o f h i s tory for mo d e rni sm and p o s t - m o d e r n i sm may be unrelated to theories of art. - P o s t - m o d e r n i sm rep rese n ts a n o tice a b l e s h i f t i n s ensibility and practices t h a t d i s t i n g u i s he s a se t o f a ssu mp t io n s a n d e x p eri e n ce s from a p recedi ng period. - M o d e r n i z a t i o n occurs differentially in d iff er e n t r e g i on s a n d i s no t th e p rop e rt y o f t h e We st. - ‘I n t h e O r i e n t , ten si on s b e tw ee n i nter n a t i o n a l i s m a nd nationalism as well a s g l o b a l i s m an d p a roch i al eth n o cen t ris m a r e n e v er far fro m the su rface’. - C o n f l i c t i n g p r actices of modernist art ( e . g . s u r r e a l i s m and Greenber gian a b st r a c t i o n ) . - Va ry i n g i d e a s of th e ‘ ava n t-ga rde ’.
- Per vasive pr actices of pastic he. - Greater local exposure to var i o u s m ovem ents and styles ( Tr ans - av antgar de, Neo- Geo, Neo- Conceptual ) . - Most immediate examples of [ e a r l y ] post-modernism is provided b y t h e work of architects Rangsan To r s u w a n (e.g. Amarin Plaza 1989) and S u m e t Jumsai (e.g. Bank of Asia 198 9 a k a the Robot Building) . - However, the eclecticism and s y n thesis of [early] post-modern s t y l e has r oots in Thai ar chitectur e s i nc e the 5th r eign ( e.g. Chakr i Thr one H al l , Wat Ratchabophit) .
‘‘ T h e e m e r g e n c e of ne o -tra d i ti o n a l Thai a rt d u r i n g t h e l ate 7 0 s w i th C ha l ermchai Ko sit p i p a t a n d P a n ya Vi j i n th a n a sar n’.
‘‘ … vo c a l c r i t i c s of T h a i art w o rks ( es p e c ia l l y a b s t r a c t a rt) th a t l acke d na t io n a l to
c h a r a c t er,
sy n t h e s i z e
the
p refe rri ng tra d i ti o n a l
i n stead values
o f ‘clas s i c ’ a r t of th e p a st w i th their o wn c u l t u r a l m i l i eu …cl ea rl y a si g n of n e o -c o n s e r v a t i ve a tta cks o n th e cul t u re o f m o d e r n ism a n d ava n t-ga rdism ’. ‘Chalermchai …[offered] an escape route for supporters of neo-traditionalism who felt that Buddhism and Thainess had been threatened by materialism and corruption’.
‘‘T h e a r t i s t s ma n a g e d to re p l ace the
‘These
painters
have
no
desire
to
id e a o f t h e ‘ s h ock of the ne w ’ w i th ‘the
achieve authenticity and or ig i nal i ty i n
s h o c k o f t h e old’, confirming that the
the sense of avant-gardist defin i t i o n . O n
p a st c o u l d b e re fo rme d as an i d e al to
the contr ar y, they ar e content to em bel -
crit ic i z e t h e p r ese n t’ . A pp rop ri a ti on, hy -
lish works inspired by the old m a s t e r s
b rid iza t i o n , d i s c u rsi ve n e ss an d al l egor y
which ar e r ever ed as m ar ker s of nati on -
w e re k e y s t r a t e g i es’ .
al identity. Wor ks by these painter s ar e sim ultaneously r eflections of the anx i ety to escape fr om an industr ial i z ed and high- tech society’.
‘H o wev e r, t h e s ea rch for th e pa st i s dou b le -e d g e d . O n t he o n e h a n d , th e revival o f t r a d i t i o n s , t h e revitalization of myths, a n d t h e r e t e n t ion o f kn o w l e d g e have o ff e r e d a w a y of freeing Thai art from We st e r n i n f l u e n c e s. … a ne e d for d eep e r co m p r e h e n s io n of T ha i cu l ture and re l i g i o n p r o v i d e s a basis for a critique of m o d e r n a r t , w h i ch for some decades has b e e n c l o s e l y l i n ked w i th We ste rn art. On t h e o th e r h a n d , the pa st can be grossly d i s t o r t e d a n d made to serve only a s an e xc u s e f o r T h a i arti sts to ma ke de cor a t iv e s i m u l a t i o n s of trad i ti o n a l pa i nti ng’.
‘Ther e ar e m any aspects of contem po r ar y Thai ar t which contr adict the i deal of natur al unity and r acial hom ogenei ty … The heter ogenous elem ents in T hai ar t can be seen in the m ulti- layer ed defi ni tion of ethnicity ( r ace, languag e, c l as s , r eligion, and r egionalism ) . The m eani ng of Thai- ness m ay also var y…’ ‘The var iety of r esponses by Th ai ar ti s ts , whether positive or negative, to the ur ban condition in Thai society can be e x a m i n e d in relation to the reinterpretatio n o f P o p , Expr essionism , Envir onm ental Ar t, C on ceptualism , and M edia Ar t’.
From Brian Curtin (2005) ‘Reading Thai Art Internationally’, Art Journal, Spring.
‘F la vo u r s : C o n t e mpo rary A rt i n T ha iland is t h e f i r s t s u r v ey to cap tu re T h a i l and’s c o n t e m p o r a r y a rt sce n e i n te rms o f what t h e co n t e m p o r a ry mea n s; ho w a r tists o f t h is a n d r e c e n t g e n e rati on s ca n be s it u a t e d i n r e g a rd to cu rre n t n o ti ons of Th a i e x p e r i e n c e a n d i de n ti ty an d b r oad e r q u e s t i o n s o f i mpa ct an d si g n i fi cance o u t s id e t h i s c o un try’ .
‘It is [a] sense of Thai identi ty and a critical relationship to notions o f f o r e i g n influence and inter nationalism that de limits the contemporaneity of t h e a r t i s t s included in Flavour s; be it th e pr oj ec t of cer tain ar tists or an issue that Pettifor dr aws out. Ear lier wr iting, s uc h as Poshyananda’s M oder n Ar t in T hai l and and Herbert P. Philips’ catalog u e f o r t h e exhibition The Integr ative Ar t of M oder n Thailand exhibition had alr eady es tab lished a shift in Thai ar tists’ u s e of i s sues of ethnicity and indigeno us tr adi tions; from signaling the cha r a c t e r o f m ainstr eam or national ar t to a r ev i tal izing of newer for m s and appeal for the value of the m ar ginalized and c ul tur al l y specific’.
‘Pe t t if o r u l t i m a t el y l i nks th e q u e sti on of the ar tists’ contem por ar y significan c e, i n an i n t e r n a t i o n a l c ontext, to matters of infrastructure and funding, for the As i a P a c i f i c re g io n , r a t h e r t ha n a n a s i ssue o f l anguage and what it actually m eans to b e c ons i d e r e d p a r t o f a n international arena: in terms of, for example, how variable e s s e n c e s ca n b e t r a n s m u ted to a broa d e r a u d ience, what discour ses and pr actices ar e pos s i bl y re in v e s t e d w i t h mea n i ng s or, i mpo r tantly, what values ar e alter ed, m odified or ev en su b v e r t e d a s s i gn i fi ca n ce i s gi ven to, or pr ovided by, these ar tists’ wor k’.’. ‘ T h e T h a i c u r a t or Gridthiya Gaweewong, w rit in g o n t h e s ub j ect of T h a i a rti sts and cu lt u r a l i d e n t i t y, rai sed a cog e n t ques t io n in t h i s r e s p ect. S he aske d “…i s their a n y t h i n g i n b e t ween, where we can talk a b o u t o u r p r e s en t co n d i ti o n , w i th a hy b r i d o f o l d a n d new, in our own language? H o w d o w e d e a l with this problem?” The q u e st i o n o f l a n gu a g e i s i n d e e d a pr ob le m if t h e c r u x of th e i ssue i s the e xtent t o w h i c h p a r t i c ul ar tra d i ti o n s a n d i denti t ie s c a n b e k e p t i n vi e w, re si sti n g assim ila t io n o r t h e e x oti c amon g oth e r fa ctor s, w h ile m a i n t a i n i ng b roa d e r re l eva n ce’.
‘Gaweewong’s use of ‘our own ’ , how ev er, also sets up a dichotomy w h i c h s h e char acter izes as standing in th e m i ddl e of Buddha and Cyber space, as T hai ar t ists wor k to ar ticulate a positio n or pos i tions in ter m s of their cultur al i denti ty. But, of cour se, ar e the ter m s s o c l ear cut?’ - Exem plar y pr actices within Th ai l and - Practices largely relevant to l o c a l contexts - Thai artists established outsi d e Thailand - Links to European and Americ a n counter par ts - Establishm ent of cr itical contexts
From David Teh (2008) ‘The Perils of Utopia: Sakarin Krueon’s Terraced Rice Fields Project’, Lizard 2.
‘If
Sakar in
Kr ue- on’s
Ter r ac ed
Rice
Fields m ake a beautiful im a ge, i t i s beautiful as an im age of failur e. T he ar t ist’s ambition and the work’s sh e e r s c a l e
‘Sa k a r i n w a s t h e fi rst T ha i arti st to exh i b i t a t D o c u m enta [XII]. His Terraced R i c e F i e l d s p r oject drew upon ideas of c o m m u n a l l a b o ur an d tra d i ti o n a l fa rming t e c h n i q u e s . Wo r ki ng w i th a te a m of Thai a n d Eu r o p e a n vo l un te e rs, the a rti st ef fe c t e d a m a j o r physical transformation of a h i l l s i d e i n K a ssel’s Bergpark, once the b o t a n i c g a r d e n of La n d g rave Wi l h e l m IX. Bu t t h e p r o j e c t ’ s fa i l u res yi el de d mor e in te r e s t i n g r e s u l t s. The planned irrigation s y s t e m f a i l e d , l eading to a set of formal c h a n g e s a n d c ompromi se s, bu t al s o to a k in d o f a c c i d enta l archa e o l og y o f the s it e , re v e a l i n g a spe cts o f i ts w a rti me his t o ry. Ov e r t h e G erma n summe r, the ter ra c e s p r o d u c e d o n l y a h a n d fu l of r ice’.
ar e adm ir able in them selves. But w hat will m ake this im age endur e is the en dur ing im possibility of what it tr i es to achieve. I’m r efer r ing not to the fai l ur e of the ter r aces or the cr op, but to a fai l ur e of com m unication, of tr ans l ati on. In these leaking paddies – thei r t r o p i c a l density seeping thr ough Ger m any ’ s i n adequately com pacted past, d i s s ol v i ng it, destabilising the ter r ain on w hi c h i ts r econstr uction stands – her e lies an i m age of the im possibility of cul tur al and philosophical
cross-fertilisat i o n ,
the
difficulty of tr ansplanting an i dea or a way of life fr om one histor ical r eal i ty to another. It is per haps only na tur al that what we glean fr om such an ex er c i s e will am ount to two stor ies, not one’ .
‘[Dr. Ap i n a n Posh ya n a n d a ’ s] sl i de show
‘Amongst [Thai] artists, one s o m e t i m e s
in c l u d e d a c a t a logue of critical, political
gets the feeling that OCAC is e x c u s e d ,
a r t w o r k s t h a t h ad been exhibited in Thai
its nationalist pr etensions tolerated, be -
o ff icia l c o n t e x t s . It w a s de si gn e d to con -
cause its very existence promi s e s s u c h
t ra d ic t t h e i m a g e , po p u l ar a mon g st c om -
an im pr ovem ent on the chauv i ni s t and
m e n t a t o r s o n T hai art, of state propriety
dysfunctional
a s a f o r c e o f c onservatism, chauvi nism
the past. Once again, past dee ds , bei ng
a n d m e d i o c r i t y. H e w en t o n to rem ind
distasteful, ar e ignor ed for the s ak e of
t h e a u d i e n c e t h at the ne w ce n tre of the
a sm oother pr esent. But the r e ac ti onar y
co n t e m p o r a r y art w o rl d – B erl i n – was
state is still with us, or at any r ate un -
n o t t o o l o n g a g o th e ce n tre o f fa scism ,
dead. Of the ar tists deter m ine d to r at -
a p la c e w h e r e bo o ks w e re bu rne d and
tle its skeletons, to confront it s h i s t o r y,
f ro m w h i c h a r t ists h a d fl e d i n droves’.
Vasan Sitthiket and M anit S r i w ani c h -
cultur al
bur eau c r ac y
of
poom ar e per haps the noisiest. We w oul d not count Sakarin amongst them , t h o u g h he clear ly shar es their anti- cons um er i s t
‘ …pro f e s s i o n a l i n d e p e n d e n c e and i mmunit y f rom p o l i t i c a l i n t e r f e r e nce … wholly u n t h i n k a b l e i n T h a i l and – indeed , p r o b a b l y n o t e ve n aspir e d t o – a n d t h a t w i l l r e m ain unthi n k a b l e f o r y e a r s t o c o m e ’.
postur e. Sakar in’s is a ver y differ ent m o dus oper andi. It pr oceeds fr om a m or e sincer e,
non- confr ontational
engage -
ment with traditional aesthetics , t h r o u g h high cultur e ( Sakar in is head of Si l pa kor n Univer sity’s Thai Ar t Dep ar tm ent) , popular cultur e and folk sp i r i tual i ty ’ .
‘‘ T h e l i b e r a l - c a pitalist world … has seen
‘Sakar in engages dir ectly with c i v i c and
a lo n g t r a d i t i o n o f p o l i ti cal an d activ -
touristic space. His landscap i n g c o u l d
is t a rt - m a k i n g – l e fti st, tho u g h n ot all
be seen to cr itique and/or com pl em ent
o f it M a r x i s t – w h i ch a tta cks ca p i talism
the castle and par k as sites of aes thet -
f o r t h e i n j u s t i c e s i t pe rpe trate s, a tr a -
ic or histor ical significance. Ye t how ev -
d it io n i n w h i c h w e w ou l d su rel y place
er we read it, the paddies are i n s o m e
Sa ka ri n ’ s r i c e fi el ds, al on g w i th quite
sense out of place: apar t fr om the ob -
a lo t o f c o n t e mp o rary art tha t p i ts it -
vious clim atic and topogr aphic al i nc on -
s e lf a g a i n s t ‘ g l ob a l i sa ti on ’ . D ocu m en -
gr uity, they im por t an ancient and ex -
t a is a p r i m a r y si te fo r thi s sort of cr i -
otic for m of agr icultur e into o ne of the
ti q u e . A l o t o f it takes aim at nation
wor ld’s m ost industr ialised ec onom i es ’ .
s t a t e s a s a g e n ts of e co n o mi c a n d po li t ic a l v i o l e n c e , eth n o ci de , an d w o r se’. ‘Reading the pr oject in a T hai c on -
‘Wi th it s m ul t i c u l t u r a l w o r k f o r ce , Saka rin’s pro j e c t f i t t e d w e l l in to [ Docu m ent a X I I ’ s ] p o s t - n a t i on a l wonderland. A s a c u l t u r a l m a r ke r, t he p addies a r e r e g i o n a l o r c o n ti nent al, rat her t h a n n a t i o n a l ( ju st as t he s c hlo s s s i g n i f i e s a ne o cl ass ic is m t h a t i s c l e a r l y E u r o pean but not e s p e c i a l l y G e r m a n ) ’.
text, however, a r ather differ ent po litical geography becomes leg i b l e . F o r one thing, its ethnogr aphic d i m ens i on makes it more nationally spec i f i c . T h e ar tist dr aws not just on tr aditio nal far m ing techniques, but also on t h e s o c i a l and labour for m ations in wh i c h they ar e em bedded. The for m er a r e found thr oughout Southeast Asia, w hi l e the latter wer e m or e specific to Th ai l and ...’
‘ Hal f a c ent u r y o f c o n c e p t u a l i sm, m e d i a a r t a n d i n s t a l l ation has u n d e r m i n e d t h e s a n c t i t y of th e objec t . A n g s t a b o u t co m mo dif ic at ion h a s f l o w e d i n t o th e new a n x i e t y o f s i t e - s p e c i f i city: art w o r k s m u s t b e s e e n t o a dapt a nd res pond t o t h e i r c o n t ext’.
‘ O n e o f m a n y ethnographic gestures in Sakarin’s project was the metaph o r o f t h e lo n g k a e k – t h e rou n d -up w h e re vi llager s of one fam ily join those of another to s ew o r r e a p a c r o p , a communal effort traditionally lubricated by song, dance an d b o o z e . T h e do c u m e n t a ti on i nsta l l e d a t A rd el [Galler y, Bangkok] depicted the Docum enta ef f o rt in t h e i m a ge o f th e l on g ka e k, which it r evives and r ecor ds as an agr i c ul tur al p r a c t i c e – a n o rganic political economy – rendered all but extinct by the ju g g e r n a u t o f i n d u s t r i a l a g riculture. The artist went beyond mere nostalgia for a dying t r a d i t i o n : h e e x p l i c i t l y d e cried the triumph of waged labour over communal labour. H e n c e , t h e g e o -so c i a l d i s p l ace men t b e tw ee n the two contexts tur ned on this contr adi c ti on be t w e e n v o l u n t a r ism and alienation, the irony being that the former became p o s s i b l e in t h e u t t e r l y c a p i tal i se d soci us of centr al Ger m any ( albeit in a Utopian enc l av e) , a s i t w a s b e c o ming impossible in the hybrid labour market of Thailand, w h i c h i s s t i l l s o m e w h a t reliant on communal, informal and undocumented migrant wo r k f o r c e s ’ .
‘In in v o k i n g t h e l on g kae k as a practice p a ss e d , o r n e a r i n g e xti ncti on , th e pr oj e ct a pp e a l s t o an i ma g e o f a p re-mod e r n , p r e - c a p i t a l i st past where exchanges o f la b o u r w e r e co mmu n a l an d volun t a ry, u n m e d i a t ed by cap i tal , u n soiled b y t h e p r o f i t m otive. The problem with t h is sh i n y, h a p py p i cture of a pre- Lap sa ria n p a s t , w he re eve ryon e he l ps ev e r y o n e a n d n o b ody goes hungry, is that it o f t en c o n c e a ls a n a sti er re a l i ty. This is my m a i n r e se rvati on a b o u t th e Ter ra c e d R i c e F i e l ds proj ect: to con fect a U t o p ia n - a g r a r i a n, col l e cti vi st e n d e a vour – e s p e c i a l l y i n a su p e r-d e ve l op e d eco n o mic s p a c e l i k e G erma n y – i s to appeal t o a n i d e a l i z e d p i cture, a fa n ta sy really, o f a p r e - m o d e r n, p re-cap i tal i st so ciety (th a t is h a r m o n i o u s, co l l a b o rati ve, etc) ’.
‘How does a project like Sak a r i n ’ s f i t alongside
the
local
counter- c a p i t a l i s t
r hetor ic of subsistence catapul ted i nto public
discour se
by
Thailan d’ s
k i ng
and bur eaucr acy after the 1997 fi nan cial m eltdown, and enshr ined i n s tate policy by the m ilitar y- appoin ted gov er nm ent
following
the
2006
c oup?’
Te r m i n o l o g y a n d Te r m i n a l H yb ridity D a vid
Te h
Several issues of critical importance to Thai art discourse were raised during the discussion. The one I would like to address is a question of terminology. One panellist, Rathasaran Sireekan, pointed out the difficulty – or even error – of referring to a building such as the Dusit Maha Prasat Throne Hall as post-modern. While reacting to what he considered an anachronistic slip of the tongue, Sireekan’s caution suggests a semantic uncertainty inherent to this term and particularly to its application beyond the specifically Western context in which it was coined. This bears some analysis if we are to advance the incomplete history of Thai contemporary art, a discourse subject not only to the vagaries and slippages of translation, but also to the temporal parallax, lapses and highly variable speeds with which international discussions are received in the local art world.
The Throne Hall was built at the behest of King Rama V to commemorate the centenary of his family’s rule. Taking six years to construct (1876 – 82), it was designed by a British architect in a ‘European’ style, but with a roof that is taken to be exemplary of Thai architectural style. This hybridity is ramified inside, with neoclassical pilasters and gilded Baroque stucco work enshrining ‘traditional’ Siamese furnishings and décor. Such a stylistic marriage was hardly an isolated case in this period. It tells at least two stories: not just of local appropriation of European courtly and institutional styles, but also of a nascent nation’s attempts to stave off colonial domination from abroad – and impose its own locally – through simulations of foreign grandeur, ‘refinement’ and kwampen siwilai.
This architectural fusion may be fittingly compared with the kind of ‘fusion’ Bangkok’s nouveau riche these days enjoy at the city’s most pretentious restaurants. Elements taken to represent ‘Thai’ and Western cuisines can range from herbs, spices or other flavours; through meal and service formats, cuts of meat, wine-list; to cutlery, crockery, furnishings or the names of dishes. Prices reflect neither the quality nor the quantity of the food, but correspond closely to both the quantity and the quality of the inter-cultural signage being marshalled on the menu, walls and tables, on the outfits (and even the ethnicity) of staff and trendy diners. Similarly, there is no moment of truth for the Throne Hall, no point at which the building will be judged as building, especially since, as an item of royal-national heritage avant la lettre, it is quite simply beyond critique. Formally speaking, the question of any incongruity between the structure and its roof is moot. To the visitor, it remains an exotic wonder. To locals, it speaks of an appropriation of Western knowledge and taste, attesting to the sophistication and modernity of its patrons. It is a cipher for the hybrid Thai state, totally complicit with the now globalised metropolis that surrounds it, for which it served as a kind of forerunner and model. Sireekan has a point: to call the Throne Hall post-modern is to defy a certain functional
periodicity that has gone beyond the bounds of academic discourse (such as that of art history) into much wider parlance. The security of this classification is more a matter of consensus than of historical certitude, and academics are unlikely to have the final say. So rather than try to delimit its historical period, we might find it makes more sense to spatialise it, to ground it in a particular, contingent cultural context. When I was a student, debates about the use of this term were still, just, alive. The entrenched academic left had not quite finished its dissection and denunciation of the conservative and un-revolutionary tendencies of millennial recycling and stylistic promiscuity. Few had yet taken up the question of what followed – as Baudrillard facetiously put it, “What are you doing after the orgy”? And it was in architecture, we were taught, that the term first gained purchase. Much energy had been expended in distinguishing between the postmodern (a style), postmodernism (an attendant, tentatively sketched ideology) and postmodernity, which tied these to a period roughly parallel with the post-industrial and informational turn in Western economic history. So went the late-Marxist version that dominated the discussion (e.g. Fredric Jameson’s famous formulation, drawing on theorists like Hayden White and Daniel Bell). For all the Marxists’ perseverance in tying the aesthetic to its mate
rial base – particularly to a multinational sort of capital and post-national labour market – the whiff of apocalypse lingered. One couldn’t ignore the feeling (confirmed by Jameson) that the aesthetic had somehow become material, and that semiotic production could no longer be distinguished from some more ‘real’ production. The speculative orgies in Tokyo and Soho, along with neo-Hegelian declarations of the ‘end of art’ by inter alia Arthur Danto or Hans Belting, seemed to corroborate the collapse. It’s no accident that this loss of faith we mark with the term ‘post-modern’, and the arrival in the limelight of non-Euro-American contemporary art, should more or less coincide.1 But now that the euphoria of Lonely Planet Art is itself on the wane, we may be in a better position to see the continuities, rather than the epochal novelties. Sireekan’s complaint harbours the assumption that the post-modern is a fixed period more or less corresponding with the late 20th century, extending perhaps to the present. Wherever we put the book-ends, though, it will always be in reference to some modernist pantheon, whose gestures it is said to have recycled, aped, remixed, ‘re-contextualised’ and so on: but what if the remix occurred a century earlier, and incorporated two traditional idioms neither of which had much claim even to modernity? And what if their very fusion was
staking such a claim? What is at issue here is how to apply the term in contexts where its terminological foundations – modernity – are themselves absent, mixed, or (in Habermasian terms) incomplete. It calls for a meta-critique of Western periodicity, and its discontents elsewhere. It is little wonder then that Thai art commentators do not use the term post-modern very often. But this is not to say that the concept isn’t widely implied in the ways contemporary artists operate and, especially, in the international framings of their work of which they are all too conscious. In fact, we find openly post-modern framings in Thai contemporary art’s first bold strides abroad, viz, Apinan Poshyananda’s Traditions/Tensions (1996) the first exhibition in New York to shine a spotlight on Southeast Asia. Its very title promotes the dialectical opposition between tradition and modernity, offering the artworks themselves as synthesis. Such fusions have now been absorbed into popular culture’s semiotic bazaar of global hybridity. Even at art’s higher echelons, the West has – especially with watersheds like Okwui Enwezor’s documenta XI and through the broad institutionalisation of post-colonialism – done much to enlist ‘the Rest’ in its narrativisation of not only postmodernism, but also of what might come after it.
In his recent Tate Triennale, entitled AlterModern, French uber-curator Nicolas Bourriaud speculates that rather than trafficking ideas and signage between monolithic formations (nation states; East and West; Euro-America and Asia/Africa; or modernity and tradition), today’s trans-national artists resemble and reflect archipelagos, analogous to the ‘communities of interest’ found on the internet. Art’s memes move at electronic pace, not that of institutional or bureaucratic structures. With his ‘alter’, Bourriaud attempts to short-circuit the question of what comes after the Post. He wishes to distance himself from the distasteful aspects of postmodernism, yet salvage what is good about the post-national, the post-industrial, the post-ideological. But his idea of ‘post-production’ (which sees the artist not as a producer but as a ‘semio-naut’, a collector and commentator), and the blurred line between artist and curator, we already recognise as hallmarks of postmodern practice. The only difference would be – and its little wonder Bourriaud overlooks this – is that there is a new spatial field to draw on in one’s cultural recycling and semiotic repurposing. No amount of neologisms will save us from the terminological spiral of art’s ‘orbital’ phase (Baudrillard), at least, not until we have a history of the postmodern as nuanced as, e.g. Matei Calinescu’s The Five Faces of Moder
nity (1977); for ‘the modern’, too, played off a diverse series of foils and cognates stretching back to Roman antiquity. Did Asian antiquity generate the same dialectic? Tempting though it may be to adopt a permissive, post-modern position, if we want to resist the terminological muddying, we must specify which modernity or modernities are in play locally, and what they respond to. This implies the responsibility – often perilous in Thailand – to scrutinise economic and political conditions as well as cultural forms, something that was not achieved by the Traditions/Tensions mode of curatorship in anything but shallow terms.2 In any case, the 1990s strategy of semiotic arbitrage – playing on presumptions about old and new, east and west, here and there – is a spent force. Thailand’s parlous showing at this year’s Venice Biennale confirms its exhaustion. The critical veneer of the ‘glocal’ has peeled off, revealing little more than a facile PR gimmick. A lot remains to be said about post-modernity in Thai culture, but without social, historical and institutional critique, Thai art and art history will remain at the post-modern surface, condemned to its terminal hybridity. 1 The celebrated exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin for Paris’ Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989, is often seen as a harbinger of todays globalised curatorium. As Martin was researching his show, Jameson was in China giving lectures on something called ‘Postmodernism’. His seminal book of the same name was published in 1991.
No amount of neologisms will save us from the terminological spiral of art’s ‘orbital’ phase (Baudrillard), at least, not until we have a history of the postmodern as nuanced as, e.g. Matei Calinescu’s The Five Faces of Modernity (1977); for ‘the modern’, too, played off a diverse series of foils and cognates stretching back to Roman antiquity. Did Asian antiquity generate the same dialectic? Tempting though it may be to adopt a permissive, post-modern position, if we want to resist the terminological muddying, we must specify which modernity or modernities are in play locally, and what they respond to. This implies the responsibility – often perilous in Thailand – to scrutinise economic and political conditions as well as cultural forms, something that was not achieved by the Traditions/Tensions mode of curatorship in anything but shallow terms.2 In any case, the 1990s strategy of semiotic arbitrage – playing on presumptions about old and new, east and west, here and there – is a spent force. Thailand’s parlous showing at this year’s Venice Biennale confirms its exhaustion. The critical veneer of the ‘glocal’ has peeled off, revealing little more than a facile PR gimmick. A lot remains to be said about post-modernity in Thai culture, but without social, historical and institutional critique, Thai art and art history will remain at the post-modern surface, condemned to its terminal hybridity.
2 Again, recourse to the traditional opens temporal depth but occludes the spatial. In Southeast Asia, the Western styles that for at least a millennium were imposed by the powerful, and sometimes zealously embraced by the rest, have furnished this region with a general state of ‘hybridity’ that cannot be compared to the diversity found in the clean-slate, new world culture of the USA, nor to the late-onset hybridity Europe later caught from it. Hybridity may be a weak criterion that tells us little about the localised meanings taken on by signs of modernity, and late, anti- or post-modern twistings thereof in modernity’s wake. Moreover, this hybridity – at least in its common deployment by ‘cultural studies’ and studies of ‘globalisation’ – tends to privilege an exoticist or reformed-exoticist fusion of East and West, often ignoring the more material influences and flows within Asia, which have deeper histories and loom even larger now on the region’s horizon. We can but wonder how many innovations, for how many centuries, struck the locals (or were peddled to them) as ‘modern’. We should also keep open the possibility of an innately appropriative and ‘hybrid’ cultural substrate, especially in light of the enduring sway of oral rather than literary-authorial forms.
Sen and Sensibility: The Art of Mapping Thai Art Ph i lip
C orn wel-S mith
A map of 20th Century art fills a 40-metre-long wall of the Tate Modern gallery in London. Peruse this plotting of pivotal names in modern art and your eyes note just one Thai: Rirkrit Tiravanija. Few other Asians join him in Tate Artist Timeline, drawn by Sara Fanelli in 20063. She presents the Great Tradition of Western art as a progressive narrative of artists grouped around movements. Non-Westerners appear due to their impact on that lineage. In Tiravanija’s case as a smaller-print name near ‘Installation,’ while it omits the movement he has lead, Relational Aesthetics. Fanelli’s diagram raises fundamental questions about the assumptions, values, methods and inescapable biases involved in mapping not just international art but the task of this book project: Mapping Contemporary Art in Thailand. Visual culture pundit Rick Poynor4 criticised the applied-art prettiness of Fanelli’s map and
pointed out deeper issues about making the complex simple, but not simplistic. “According to Tate Modern, the handwritten timelines, which dominate the concourses, are intended to reflect ‘the dynamic nature of 20th-century art history’ — a history that is capable of constant re-evaluation and adjustment.” The handwritten format feels provisional, but her concept is pre-determining. Fanelli could add names and even art movements in smaller script, but the wider critique is of the map’s structure, the relentless linearity of time. In an Art21 blog entry on Fanelli’s map5, Ben Street questioned “the notion of creating a Barr-style timeline for the history of postmodern/contemporary art, something that contemporary art historians might balk at because of its Darwinian association of art as a series of improvements on the past. This remains entrenched in survey courses in western art
history, which sees the high Renaissance as a lofty peak, with pre- and post-Renaissance art as the slopes leading up and down… Are we in danger of being token in our selection of artists outside of the conventional framework of Western art?”
point: 1991. In Flavours: Contemporary Art in Thailand, Steven Pettifor examines one period in time – 2003 – like a graduation book for currently working artists who have drawn international attention as exemplars of Thai contemporary art.
The narrowness and ethnocentrism of that gaze can’t help but set the terms for ownership of the territory. An Asian might wonder why that map is linear, and why it’s a permanent fixture, not subject to cycles and constant change. However, her clustering of names loosely around movements may resonate in the East.
Concurrent with this seminar, four archiving projects have begun to document Thai art and writings about it: the Rama IX Art Museum Foundation6 in Bangkok, the Asian Art Archive7 (AAA) in Hong Kong, Reading Room8 and the nascent Thai Art Archive9 (TAA), both in Bangkok.
Thai Art Maps Diagrams like Tate Artist Timeline are art maps. Not all frames for considering art’s diversity are timelines or charts; they can take several forms. Frames include the floorplan of a gallery, the labels in a museum, the entries in a website, the database and files of an archive, the shibboleths of a cultural ideology, the chapters of a book, an essay. Two books considered in this seminar take different approaches to the mapping of art. In Modern Art in Thailand, Apinan Poshyananda delves into the cultural context, tracks trends and provides a chronological history up to that
3 Fanelli, Sara, Tate Artist Timeline (Tate Modern, 2006) 4 ’Sara Fanelli’s hand-lettering makes the Tate Modern more userfriendly, but what does it say about the art inside?’ Eye Magazine, 13 May 2007 5 Letter From London: A Contemporary Timeline, Ben Street (http://blog. art21.org, 13 October 2008) 6 Rama IX Art Museum Foundation, http://www.rama9art.org 7 Asian Art Archive, http://www.aaa.org.hk
The Rama IX Art Museum Foundation has continued to archive art materials and post information in its online directory, funding for a permanent museum having dried up three years after its foundation in 1996. AAA has, since 2000, conducted research and education and includes a library, art collection, calendar, newsletter, talks, event programme and archive of primary and secondary documentation, much of it digitised and searchable through key words, including text in Thai where possible. The Reading Room, founded in 2009 and led by Narawan Pathomvat, who worked with AAA, has an art library, an archive, a digital resource centre, talks and an event programme relating to contemporary art and culture. The TAA is being started in 2010 by Gregory Galligan, an American on a Fulbright Scholarship, and modelled upon the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in its focus on artists’ materials. Other contemporary art resources include the dormant About Café and the James HW Thompson Foundation10, which runs the Jim Thompson Art Center and the William Warren Library, where art curator Gridthiya Gaweewong curates exhibitions, catalogues, talks and symposia. In terms of ongoing event calendars, Rama IX Art Museum Foundation carries online listings of current and upcoming exhibitions. Bangkok
Art Map11, edited by Steven Pettifor and published by an American, plots galleries and lists exhibitions in a monthly art map-calendar. The preceding Bangkok gallery map, Art Connection12, was edited and published by a Frenchtrained Thai, Pracamkrong Pongpaiboon, and included a highly sylised map of Bangkok by artist Wit Pimkanchanapong. Features and comprehensive listings in English about Thai art have been carried by the Bangkok Post13, The Nation14, BK Magazine15 and Bangkok Metro Magazine16. Thai-language magazines with some art coverage include Art4D17, a day18, Happening19 and Freeform20.
8 2351/4 Charoenkrung Soi 91, Bangkok (0 2289 0395) 9 Thai Art Archive, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Thai-Art-Archives/ 10 Jim Thompson Art Center & William Warren Library, James HW Thompson Foundation, Jim Thompson’s House (www.thejimthompsonartcenter.org) 11 Bangkok Art Map, edited by Stephen Pettifor (Talisman Media Group, published monthly, http://www.bangkokartmap.com/ 12 Art Connection, edited by Pracamkrong Pongpaiboon (Kiao-Klao Publishing, 2002-2004) 13 Bangkok Post, daily, art coverage mainly Fri, Sun 14 The Nation, daily, art coverage on Fri, Sun 15 BK Magazine (www.bkmagazine.com, weekly) 16 Bangkok Metro Magazine, monthly 1994-2006 17 Art4D (www.art4d.com), monthly 18 a day (www.daypoets.com/aday, monthly 19 Happening (0 2938 1832, happeningmagazine@gmail.com, monthly 20 Freeform (0 2664 4256-7, freeformthailand@yahoo.com, occasional 21 S.iam.contemp, Ministry of Culture
Among physical institutions, the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority’s Bangkok Art & Cultural Centre (BACC) has since 2008 held significant historical exhibitions of Thai art, and is building up a library. The Culture Ministry, which publishes S.iam.contemp21, a magazine on official contemporary art matters, is facing the task of creating a gallery with a permanent collection of Thai contemporary art.
Consideration of this topic should mention arguably the most sophisticated, thorough and coordinated organisation that maps areas of Thai cultural expression and popular culture. The Thailand Creative and Design Centre (TCDC)22 has since 2006 conducted a world-class program of mapping Thai creativity and design. Under the state-funded Office of Knowledge Management (OKMD), TCDC includes permanent and temporary exhibitions, a vast library, a branch of the Materials
ConneXion materials reference archive, talks, workshops, website, industry outreach, monthly magazine Kit (Creative Thailand), networking systems through online membership and a namecard exchange scheme, contemporary and historical research, oral history recording, regional branches, and an annual symposium, Creativities Unfold, that attracts major international experts to speak. TCDC’s work is not about fine art, though covers the territory where design overlaps art, and can be regarded as a potential model for institutional art mapping. As all these projects gather and interpret their material and they will shape the Thai art map. So at this unprecedented threshold moment, it is timely to consider the criteria for mapping art in Thailand. Art Cartography In plotting art’s terrain, art maps are framed by their symbolic language, what could be called ‘art cartography.’ Archiving, too, is cartography. Its categories, hierarchies, keywords, contours, colours, symbols and indexes create an organisational chart upon which access to information pivots. Cartography matters. To generalise in terms of navigation, Westerners favour precise direc
tions, whilst to Thais, specifying the route from A to B matters less than how you get there and with whom. The challenge is to devise art cartography that all can read and find relevant. A map is a conceptual framework, but at the point of description, drawing, listing, sorting, documenting, filing, building or hanging, the map must eventually become tangible. By the same token, visualising an art map in cartographical terms can reveal instances of omission, anomaly, or analytical bias. Theorists can map art in abstract terms, but ideas are just cartographic layers in charting the full art terrain. Mapping art in terms of nationalism, post-modernism or ethnocentrism is akin to shaping a geographical map by frontiers, land use or language. No one method of mapping can stand for all interpretations. Any map of Thai art history must consider cultural specifics that may contradict Western assumptions, pass unrealised, or be dismissed because they don’t satisfy political correctness. Take the un-egalitarian nature of Thai culture. Thai language itself reinforces a seniority system that permeates Thai art’s social hierarchy: a vocabulary of pii (senior), nong (junior), ajahn (master) and khru (teacher). Key terminology like the word for culture, wattanatham, originated as a propaganda term loaded with
preconceptions. Colour coding – so useful to any sorting process – suffers particular distortions in the Thai context where colour identifies social tribes, and not just in the present political impasse. Colour taboos have historically delineated Siamese rank, from court gem hues to monastic saffron to peasant indigo. Careful what gets labelled red, yellow or pink. A map is but a tool for looking from one perspective or another; while useful, it can’t be all encompassing. An ideological map, or any kind of logical map, is of limited use for navigating aspects of Thai art driven by, say, relationships, reverence or patronage. To consider the issues and ideas framing current visual art in Thailand, what’s needed is not one art map, but many — a Thai art atlas. Dilemmas in Mapping Thai Art The main difficulty of this task is that mapping, documenting and categorising are fields in which Thai and Western culture couldn’t differ more profoundly. The process goes to the very core of how Thais and Westerners think. Westerners and some Thais see a need to map, document and categorise Thai art precisely because most Thais have not seen that need, otherwise they would have done it. In a culture of conflict avoidance, which encourages ambiguity, a direct accounting of art might have all
the appeal of an audit. Some Thais have reasons – social, cultural, personal – to avoid a full, thorough mapping of the Thai art world. Consistency in documentation would reveal inconsistency in material. Transparency of record (which ascribes responsibility) threatens the interests of censors, incompetents, corruptors or players who win fait accompli behind the scenes. Attribution might expose those who’ve taken credit for someone else’s ideas, whether created by Thai subordinates, foreigners or an originator copied without permission. Scholarship undermines a master system in which pupils can’t publicly outsmart the guru. The latter dilemma finds its apogee in situations where establishment powers have determined an official narrative – as in the labelling of Buddhist art periods, the endorsement of National Artists, or the definition of Thai-ness. Any re-mapping of historiography might be viewed as challenging not just the narrative, but its high-ranking originators and by extension the hierarchy itself. Labels in old museums – a crucial map of artworks – may languish uncorrected despite new information. One can picture the curatorial reluctance to contradict venerated figures who wrote the originals. Even if they were first
‘go inter’ may get snubbed, ignored or rebuked for not being sufficiently ‘Thai’ once back home. To follow one example through the various mapping scenarios, Tiravanija largely passes under the public radar in Thailand, his triumphs under-reported, his art often misunderstood beyond the Thai intelligentsia among whom he’s a role-model. To the West, his social art is exotic and gets labelled as Relational Aesthetics. Yet in the Thai social context in which so many Thai arts have been produced and experienced, his format appears less conceptual than an everyday form. What sets it apart is Tiravanija’s placement of an outdoor festival artform in a neutral Western gallery. His art is best understood within the art cartographic category of Thai popular culture, in which light the work of other Thai artists – Surasi Kosolwong, Navin Rawanchaikul and Michael Shaowanasai – might also come into clearer relief.
22 Thailand Creative and Design Centre (TCDC), Emporium, Bangkok (www.tcdc.or.th) 23 Korzybski, Alfred, Science and Sanity (Institute of General Semantics, 1933)
Maps as Ways of Seeing “The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map,” warned Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950), the Polish-American father of semantics23. He was referring to mental maps of reality, not geography, which bear directly upon art mapping. How different cultures see the empirical world has profound implications for any kind of mapping or archival structure. “Westerners and Asians literally see different worlds,” Richard Nisbett writes in The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently… and Why24. “Like ancient Greek philosophers, modern Westerners see a world of object – discrete and unconnected things. Like ancient Chinese philosophers, modern Asians are inclined to see a world of substances – continuous masses of matter. There is much other evidence – of historical, anecdotal, and systematic scientific nature – indicating that Westerners have an analytic view focusing on salient objects and their attributes, whereas Easterners have a holistic view focusing on continuities in substances and relationships in the environment.” This divergence can lead to dilemmas in art cartography, between connections and merit, relationship and principle, harmony and
category, group and individual, lineage and timeline, substance and object, context and focus, flexible and consistent, impromptu and planned, ambiguous and precise, Thai and unThai. Linear or Circular Thinking For archives, charts, and documentation of the Thai art world to ring as true to Asians as to Westerners, the mode of categorisation, indexing and drawing must cater to different views of the empirical world. Arrangements that seem obvious to one are not necessarily clear to the other, as amply proved by the scientific research Nisbett reinforces. The division between Eastern and Western thought is generally expressed in terms of shape. “The socio-cognitive systems of Greece and China are respectively linear and circular” Nisbett states, “Research shows that sequential models of objects linked in a linear way are easier for Westerners to understand, whereas Asians find concentric diagrams easier to grasp.” Nisbett and the researchers and philosophers he cites are mainstream in this deduction. In accounting for differences in Eastern and Western ways, most anthropologists, sociologists and commentators draw that circular/
linear distinction. Few people think of themselves in such a way; they just make choices or follow values that produce a pattern of traits. The three newest purpose-built Thai art museum buildings all take their visitors in circles. BACC’s chosen architectural design forms a spiral of curve-walled galleries. Bangkok Sculpture Centre25 mounts its collection on gantries surrounding a hall. The South-east Asia Antique Ceramics Museum26, founded by Surat Osathanugroh, displays its exhibits as if in a round kiln. The Rama IX Art Museum Foundation illustrates several Thai choices and values in the structure of its website. It is dedicated to His Majesty the King. The contents page is arrayed in a circle. It gives prominent face to sponsors. It categorises artists by rank, separating National Artists and the Beloved (deceased) separately from an A-Z index of Thai Artists. The coverage of artists is uncritical and written by the artists themselves in the form of links to their own websites. And it’s sanuk (fun), with variety trumping consistency. Each page has a different design, with several arraying their contents irregularly around the screen. The graphics are brightly coloured and often cute. Some pages even animate links, so to click you must anticipate the trajectory of a fast-moving icon like in an online game.
By contrast, the Tate Modern’s art map is literally a fixed line, ordered by time. Adapting or reinterpreting this art map would require redrawing the art piece and re-designing the wall. The Tate invested much credibility in so prominently portraying art as a progression through history in which Tiravanija has been assigned a place. So what might be Tiravanija’s place on a map of Thai art?
24 Nisbett, Richard, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently… and Why (Free Press, 2004) 25 Bangkok Sculpture Centre, 4/18-19 Nuanchan Soi 56, Thanon Ramindra (0 2559 0505 ext 119, 232/www.thaiartproject.org). 26 South-east Asia Antique Ceramics Museum, Bangkok University Rangsit campus, Thanon Phaholyothin, Rangsit (0 2902 0299 ext 2894/ www.museum.bu.ac.th).
Mapping in Thai History Mapping reorganised modern Thailand. When colonial cartographers started plotting around Siam they transformed Thai thinking about what Thongchai Winichakul, in Siam Mapped27, called the “Thai geo-body.” Maps turned the Thai form of a focal city-state surrounded by amorphous jungle into a nationstate with fixed borders. Similarly, official efforts to map the ‘Thai art-body’ not only memorialised the art terrain, they changed it’s orientation from a self-contained hierarchy into a border-patrolled National Culture. Western linear thinking underpinned colonialist notions of civilisation as a progression. In response to being considered behind in European estimation, the constructors of Thai national identity placed Thai art upon a progressive timeline, with a beginning (Sukhothai), a middle (Ayutthaya) and a never-ending (Rattanakosin). The National Museum28 follows this schema. The official mapping of Thai art was metaphorically cast in bronze during a period that advocates of this theory might consider as a pre-modern Golden Age. In terms of fine art at the National Gallery, after the modernist Thai disciples of Silpa Bhirasri, the collection basically stops. It hasn’t had a policy or funding to purchase pivotal works of
contemporary Thai art for the state patrimony like a Thai Tate. Private collectors have, by contrast, invested in modern Thai artists’ output. As yet no public collections fill the gap in the National Culture art map, which amounts to most of the canon of contemporary Thai art; just as transit maps by the state-run MRTA Subway don’t show stations of the independent BTS Skytrain, so independent art movements – and most working artists – have been off the state’s art map. As was Tiravanija until he received a Silpathorn Award for mid-career achievement from the Culture Ministry. The state art map has begun to broaden. Under the direction of Dr Apinan, the ministry’s Office of Contemporary Art now sponsors exhibitions – like Traces of Siamese Smile at BACC, Show Me Thai in Japan and Tout A Fait Thai in France – that survey a broad range of Thai artists, accompanied by professional catalogues. The Silpathorn Award extends the state art cartography by recognising leaders in contemporary art, design, music, dance and film. While the awardees include some perceived iconoclasts, the prize brings them partly under the establishment’s seniority system. Like the National Artist award, the granting of this title
divides artists into ranks, bestowing as much honour upon the hierarchy as the artist. Thai Mapping Models
Mandala Map
Ironically, the National Culture art map started out Western in form, being linear and ideological, rather than holistically, spirally Asian. However, you could say it stops the timeline from progressing and bends it into a hermetically sealed loop. Yet traditional Thai mapping models do exist that embrace the whole culture, namely the mandala and the meridian.
From the Indic tradition came the mandala, a circular diagram centred on mythical Mount Meru. It comprises a high sacred centre ringed by slopes, forests, skies, seas and continents in concentric circles. However distant from the source of power, everyone has a place in such a three dimensional map, with a relationship to everyone else the hierarchy. Artists might start far from the establishment, but they approach and rise up the mountain as their age and status increases, while the mandala itself remains static. As everything ultimately depends on its relationship to the central power, those relationships are archetypal, ritual and unquestioning, rather than expressive of creative independence.
The mandala map is static and hierarchical. It has a range of fixed positions between which artists can operate and gain repute. The meridian map is dynamic, yet holistic. It has interconnected energy streams encompassing all areas, high and low, core and fringe. These are essentially the Indo and Sino aspects from which traditional Thai culture is a fusion.
27 Winichakul, Thongchai, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (University of Hawaii Press, 1997) 28 ’Treasures from the National Museum Bangkok, ed National Museum Volunteers Group (National Museum Volunteers, 1995)
The difficulty Thai artists face in acting as free agents within the patronage system of Thai society indicates the continuing relevance of the mandala map. The neo-traditional art movement is not only content with this structure, they depict the Meru iconography, and thus helped restore the credibility that had waned in the mid-20th century. While pioneering personalities in this genre loom large, such as Panya Vijinthanasarn and Chalermchai Kositpipat, derivative processing of their styles into massmarket art products has taken traditionalist art back to its original context of anonymous, uncredited craftsmen. Such a mandala map
would accommodate the notion that for many Thais the most meaningful art map would be one which could be presented as an offering to a master, patron or deity. A mandala art map exists. The Rama IX Art Museum Foundation is a tribute that honours His Majesty the King as the Akara Silapin, or Supreme Artist. The homepage places its contents links in a circle around a picture of Wat Phra Kaew, the most auspicious Meru mandala of the Kingdom.
Meridian Map
Art Cartography Convergence
If the mandala is more hierarchical and spiritual in character, the physical organic world gets mapped in Asia through holistic diagrams of the human body. Thai cultural expressions like traditional massage and medicine hew closely the Chinese tradition of balancing energy along meridian lines, called sen, that links the organs and limbs.
Sen are easier than mandalas to integrate with Western cartography and new data visualisation techniques. A schematic of meridien lines on a body, hand or foot resembles abstracted networks like the London Underground map. In The Great Bear (1992), Simon Patterson customised that map by labelling lines and stations after actors, philosophers, saints and so on. Also in an abstracted manner, magazines such as The Face, Arena, Details and Wired have since the 1980s pioneered a highly illustrated, highly readable cartography of cultural maps. The 2008 Asiatopia Festival displayed ‘Performance-Art-Kontext’ by Gerhard Dirmoser and Boris Nieslony (2002), a circular graphic of names in that field with groupings by area, font and subdivision. Such visualisations portray relationships, flows and themes in the creative professions using innovative graphics based on serious research that the public can read in several ways
Herein lies another key to mapping Thai art society, namely that the focus is not on objects, principles, movements or content, but on relationships or connecting vectors. Tiravanija is a node connecting several sen, such as social art, installation, relational aesthetics, popular culture, the Ver collective, the Land collective, Thai artists based abroad, Venice Biennale, Hugo Boss Prize-winners, Silpathorn Awardees, Tate timeline artists. Tellingly, Thais also call social connections sen. Both society and the art world are bodies with sen energy meridians.
29 Harmon, Katherine, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004) 30 Maeda, John, The Laws of Simplicity (MIT, 2006) 31 Visual Think Map http://visualthinkmap.ning.com
The goal for archiving and mapping Thai art should accommodate a reality that Nisbett terms “the high context society of the East, low context society of the West.” Happily, a breakthrough in technological capability aids a convergence between the contextual cultural values of Thais with increasingly contextual Western mapping methods.
There is a long history of mapping artistically, as catalogued in the book You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination compiled by by Katherine Harmon29. The Dutch designer Joost Grootens won a prize for his Vinex Atlas’ Grootens, Joost, Vinex Atlas (010 Uitgeverij, 2008), which finds fresh ways to map cultural information. Now technology is enabling the interactive analysis of information through all conceivable criteria, as articulated by digital artist John Maeda30. This dynamic visualisation of ‘data’ can be seen in examples on the website Visual Think Map31. Computer aided design helps the creative expression of developments and changing relationships, whether over time or in different spheres of activity. In other words, sen could be databased and animated. A sophisticated digital archiving of Thai art would provide unparalleled research and curatorial tools that help map art in myriad ways. But a lot depends on the art cartography: the selection of archive criteria, an acceptance of differing viewpoints, and flexibility in access and presentation. Those contextual threads might include making meta-tags or keywords of relevant sen, whether popular culture, tradition, social trends, Buddhism, commerce, gallerists, curatorship, art mavens, politics, sponsors, patrons, collectors, critics, administrators,
censorship, self-censorship, lifestyle, art cliques, peer groups, aesthetics, public taste, official taste, corporate taste, foreign influence, social art, protest performance, and art movements, in addition to National Culture. The result could be interrogated by copious search options or hyperlinked references. It could even open to moderated contributions from outside, like social media or a wiki artpedia. In the new multi-perspective world of instant 3-D modelling, an artist’s archive listing could align with the hierarchy in one plane, while other planes could reveal their varied groups, interests and patrons. Tiravanija need not be cast in bronze, nor languish alone in a line, but he and other Thais could be traced through different archival layers like a GPRS signal. If to some these options appear relativist, iconoclastic or micro-managing, that’s a trait of these times. Art cartographers should also mull Alfred Korzybski’s cautionary proviso about all efforts to chart the intangible: “The map is not the territory.”