Di'van | A Journal of Accounts | Issue 11

d ı v a n C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T | C U L T U R E 11_J U N E 2 0 2 2 l

Queensland.ofUniversityCollection:2020.Austrailya’/‘AustikaHookey,Gordon RhettPhotograph:Brisbane.Gallery,Milaniandartiststhecourtesy:Image 2021Agency,Hookey/CopyrightAllanGordon©Hammerton.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD NANCY ADAJANIA India Cultural theorist, editor, writer and curator, Mumbai HOOR AL QASIMI United Arab Emirates President and Director, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah STEPHANIE BAILEY Hong Kong/United Kingdom Writer and editor, Hong Kong/London UTE META BAUER Singapore Founding Director NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; Co-Curator, 17th Istanbul Biennial

DJON MUNDINE Australia Independent curator, writer and art critic, Sydney NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS Australia Professor, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Melbourne

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PATRICK FLORES The Philippines Professor of Art Studies, University of The Philippines, Manila

VALI MAHLOUJI United Kingdom Curator, writer, critic and author, London

SHUBIGI RAO Singapore Artistic Director 2020 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, artist ZARA STANHOPE New Zealand Director, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth

E S I G N & A R C H I T E C T U R E C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T | C U L T U R Ed ı v a nl A J o u r n A l o f A c c o u n t s d ı v a nl A J o u r n A l o f A c c o u n t s This issue of d ɪˈ v a n | A Journal of Accounts has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia

NAT MULLER The Netherlands Independent curator and critic, Amsterdam

LEE WENG CHOY Malaysia Independent art critic, Kuala Lumpur IAN McLEAN Australia Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne

ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR Australia Executive Director, Artspace, Sydney REUBEN KEEHAN Australia Curator Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

THOMAS BERGHUIS The Netherlands Independent Curator and Art Historian, Leiden DIANA CAMPBELL BETANCOURT Bangladesh Chief Curator, Dhaka Art Summit, Artistic Director, Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka

PAUL GLADSTON Australia Judith Neilson Chair Contemporary Art, University of New South Wales Art & Design, Sydney

A R T S,

JOSÉ DA SILVA Australia Director, University New South Wales Galleries, Sydney FULYA ERDEMCI Turkey/Denmark Curator, KØS Museum of Art in Public Places, Denmark

VASIF KORTUN Turkey Curator, writer, Board Member, SALT, Istanbul

funding and advisory body

CHARLES MEREWETHER Australia/Georgia Independent curator, writer, Sydney/Tbilisi

Editor Alan Cruickshank Contributing Editor Paul Gladston Publisher DIVAN ART JOURNAL | University of New South Wales Arts Design & Architecture, Sydney Design Alan Cruickshank ISSN 2207-1563 d ɪˈ v a n | A Journal of Accounts is published biannually by DIVAN ART JOURNAL and UNSW Arts Design & Architecture © Copyright 2022 Alan Cruickshank in conjunction with the UNSW Arts Design & Architecture, the authors and artists No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission Editorial | Subscription | Advertising inquiries: Email: artandculturejournal@gmail.com

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PHIL TINARI China Director, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing MURTAZA VALI USA/UAE Writer, art historian and curator, New York ALA YOUNIS Jordan Curator and artist, Amman D Council, arts

Post: University of NSW Arts Design & Architecture Paddington Campus, Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd, Paddington, SYDNEY NSW 2021 AUSTRALIA

The views and/or opinions expressed in d ɪˈ v a n | A Journal of Accounts are those of the contributing writers and not necessarily those of the editor, DIVAN ART JOURNAL or the University of NSW Arts Design & Architecture divan: from the Persian dīwān, an account book; origin dēvan, booklet; also related to debir, writer; evolved through ‘a book of poems’, ‘collection of literary passages’, ‘an archive’, ‘book of accounts’ and ‘collection of sheets’ to ‘an assembly’, ‘office of accounts’, ‘custom house’, ‘government bureau’ or ‘councils chamber’, to a long, cushioned seat, which in this sense entered European languages divan presents a shift of content and meaning over time coexistent with evolving historical relationships between the East and West. d ɪˈ v a n | A Journal of Accounts offers critical interpretations on contemporary art and culture, and its broader historical, socio-political and theoretical contexts, from the greater Asia (Middle East, South/Southeast/East Asia and Asia-Pacific) regions which determine historical and current socio-cultural affinities with contemporary Australian art and society

BLAIR FRENCH Australia CEO, Carriageworks, Sydney ADAM GECZY Australia Senior Lecturer, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney; author, artist, Sydney

ROBIN PECKHAM China Co-director Taipei Dangdai, writer, Taipei

GUY MANNES-ABBOTT United Kingdom Writer, essayist and critic, London

2 | 3 CONTENTS 10 Parergon ALAN CRUICKSHANK 18 Crossing the river by feeling the stones STEPHANIE BAILEY 38 Race to at Venice ADAM GECZY 50 Nostalgia and intervention in colonial archives SOUCHOU YAO 64 To hold you close as you fall with the hope that you may rise in a better place MUHEB ESMAT 86 The Asian Modern CHARLES GREEN 98 All too mixed up and civilized now ANN FINEGAN 110 The art of seafaring SIOBHAN CAMPBELL 120 The ineffable NFT is good as Gold(ie) ANDREW WOOD 128 In and out of Oxford: reflections on Art and Trousers HOWARD MORPHY 138 Image Notations

DOCUM ENTA FIFTEEN JUNE 18 — SEPTEMBER 25, 2022 Kassel Hanging out,tellingwww.documenta-fifteen.destories.

Hà Ninh Pham Loop Script – English Dictionary 6242022× 816 px, user-defined duration single-player video game A+ WORKS of ART d6-G-8, d6 Trade Centre, 801 Jalan Sentul, 51000 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. www.aplusart.asia aplusart.asia Hà Ninh Pham: Recursive Fables 8 – 29 October 2022 Curated by Van Do

The English language, lingua franca of the international art world—yet to be “decolonized” —has become increasingly distorted over recent decades, more so in recent years, to the near point that it has lost its (real) meaning. In the context of the roller-coaster of contemporary Western politics, both the constitutional kind and that of hyperallergic civil-rights scholars and activist-engineered hashtag social movements, Art Language has become in its architecture and presentation, amongst other qualities hyperbolic, contentious, deceptive. Buzzwords and doublespeak proliferate, meaning and veracity contorted, corrupt or opaque, slightly disingenuous at one end of its spectrum, fraudulent at the other. Nouns have become verbs, adjectives nouns, phrases double-adverbial, prefixes hyper-augment, words “weaponized”, “harnessing” a “space” of “solidarity” for the writer’s and artist’s “labour” and “knowledge production”, “mapping” the “trajectories” of “identity” and “navigating” their “stories” of “the responsibility and ability of art in forging a sense of collectivity”, “resisting the hegemony of Euro-American ideologies”, and so on. It has been, and is used to speak to itself, of itself, of what is often neither inherent in the art nor the artist, a unique language inaccessible to a global audience, advantageous only to its advocates, but neither to validity nor principle… In their seminal study of ’International Art Language,’ Alex Rule and David Levine attested, “This language has everything to do with English, but it is emphatically not English… what really matters for this language—what ultimately makes it a language—is the pointed distance from English that it has always cultivated.” Audiences are now assailed, ad nauseum, by this new “coloniality of knowledge”, “ubiquitous in our post-truth, pre-fascist world” as “a frame to interrogate our contemporary warped space”: ergo, “the virus of coloniality” and “the Colonial Matrix of Power”, “the narcissism of colonial control”, “the recursive regeneration of the colonial episteme”, “algorithmic racism… and the new colonial frontiers of surveillance capitalism”, “labouring in the age of augmented realities”, “interrogate the historical contingencies”, “the interdependence of the pragmatic gesture”, “poetic imagination in ideations of… solidarity”, “decolonial feminist mapping”, “think conceptually through the space of photography”, “decolonial disobedient conservatism”,

(As a perversely laughable hypothesis, art was even touted in one art commentary online platform lead article during the run-up to the recent Australian May election, being able to “contribute to our democracy.”) All this, through a concatenation of buzzwords and jargon with its tendency to aggrandize art’s substance and meaning, by way of the “agency” and “solidarity” of its proponents: the artist, the publicist, the curator, the art critic, et al…

A L A N C R U I C K S H A N

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The global language of art, referred to as “International Art Language”, a quite different species from the vernacular, often written by the artist, more so the gallerist, the publicist, the curator and the critic, has advanced in recent years a plethora of claims to art’s importance and consequence, saving us, its global audience, from ourselves (“the Anthropocene”), presented as a remedy, solution, corrective: a cure all (“a vehicle for change”), proposing to liberate us from our apathy and/or ignorance, neutrality and/or complicity in the world’s travails; as redress and atonement.

ParergonK

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“make evident the invisible narratives”, “dewesternization and rewesternization”, “deploying logics of solidarity to interrogate their own terms”, “colonial toxification”, “intimacies of colonial domination”, “refusing a total disavowal of the agency inherent in dreaming”, “anti-colonial and antiracist projects of world-making”, “the extractive technologies of colonial vision”, “mobilizing power of art, craft and fandom culture as antidotes to racism and socio-cultural trauma”, “the machine’s role as… a medium for today’s racial capitalism”, “techno-fossils that remain in the aftermath of colonial violence”, “the neocolonial will to occupy the future”, “a catchphrase decolonized… to think about our relationship with the white gaze”, “decolonize the myths and perceptions [that] reveal these touristic images of paradise as a cliché”, “the global realities of late-capitalist, settler-colonial, white supremacist patriarchy”, “valences index disingenuous forms of influence made durable”, “parasitic platform capitalism”. On and on it goes... Art Language, is not alone of course. The long-term dissembling verbiage of real estate is one of the most dubious platforms for veracity and integrity. A property in a “much sought after”, “tightly held” area means that there usually aren’t any properties for sale because the collective owners aren’t interested in selling; a “nestled” property means that it is surrounded and confined by multiple, higher buildings; a “verdant setting” reveals several trees and/or bushes on its boundaries; a “cameo view of Sydney Harbour” equates to a pencil thin blue-green vertical stripe between two opposite view-obscuring buildings; a property providing “effortless living” really means it’s very expensive and the buyer must be a multi-millionaire to buy it, while the reverse, “exciting scope for improvement” confirms that the property has some major structural problems requiring extensive, costly repairs. A recent addition to this lexicon is that new apartment developments are “curated”, of its design finishes and fittings. Finance and Big Business are equal felons. The Australian Financial Review, at the end of 2021, published a list of the year’s worst jargon examples in finance, being: “transformative”, “hybridized ideation”, “decomplexify”, “romance the idea/s”, “disbenefits”, “systematic cadence”, “@ scale approach”, “developer velocity”, “platformication”, and more…

In addition to artist statements, publicists animate or heighten content seeking to strategically pre-empt viewer appreciation and understanding, curators and critics, emerging and otherwise inflate, exaggerate tenuous if not unsupported qualities for a professional edge, the artist’s if not theirs. Art Language has become a badge-of-authority, a brand of de rigeur correctness, a fuax-power. Unquestionably, the most omnipresent art buzzword for its trite, fanciful assertion is that an artist “interrogates” something through their art (according to Rule & Levine, it also “questions, encodes, transforms, subverts, imbricates, displaces” without doing so). The meaning of the word, as it used to be known, is to “ask questions of (a person), to seek answers or information that the person questioned considers personal or secret” (emphasis mine). As we know, a number of notorious twentieth century police and intelligence agencies “interrogated”. Art may well have the substance to provoke a studious response in the viewer beyond an aesthetic appreciation, but it is unlikely to either “interrogate” anything nor impress upon that viewer a corresponding distortion, that art might “ask questions” because the artist, publicist and/or curator say so. In contrast, in a world far removed, the English cricketer, swing and seam bowler James Anderson, in his favourite atmospheric playing conditions, curving in the air a 160 gram leather, twine and cork ball at 135kph at a batsman who has a subsequent reaction time of 0.46 seconds to not get bodily hit or be dismissed out, certainly “asks questions” of said batsman’s batting technique, until he is either dismissed out or knocked out. A similar distortion is that an artist “unpacks” something through their art. My first job having left school was as an assistant storeman, when I unpacked boxes for four years…

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Rather than a great tree, laden with sweet, ripe fruit, this biennial seeks to learn from the birds’ flight, from the once teeming seas, from the earth’s slow chemistry of renewal and nourishment. There may be no great gathering, no orchestrated coming together at one time and place; instead it might be a great dispersal, an invisible fermentation. Its threads will be drawn together, but they will multiply and diverge, at different paces, crossing here and there but with no noisy culmination, no final knot. Let this biennial be compost. It may begin before it is to begin and continue well after it is over.

BIENNIALISTANBUL17THSEPTEMBER17–20NOVEMBER2022CHARGEOFFREE BIENNIALISTANBUL17THSEPTEMBER17–20NOVEMBER2022CHARGEOFFREE

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The printed word, of ink on paper, has long been subject to the editor’s blue pencil and libel laws, whereas the new conventions of social media tend to dwell in the lesser etiquettes of vituperation (to quote one scribe, of “Twitter’s lead down a sewer of abuse”). One social media response to this review, by an artist of current contemporary note, who presumably wasn’t present to sight the evidence, crudely dismissed and queried the writer’s “entitled, white, right” (perhaps, therefore) journalism. As a retort to this objection, not necessarily facetious, is what does “entitled, white” Left writing look like? Invective of this kind, expected on social media, is consistent with multiple sectors of contemporary global art and political discourse that eschew dialogue for diatribe, driven by non-acceptance of an opinion and/or perception opposite to or other than one’s own.

The first instance involved a national newspaper arts critic (and academic, with an extensive knowledge of art history and the classics, known for his “vast erudition with sometimes bracing assessments of exhibitions, galleries and artworks”), who in an end-of-year arts roundup, that is, for the general public, stated that in one particular national art museum its galleries appeared to have a disproportionate representation of Aboriginal art at this one particular point in time, of the Christmas/New Year holiday period, relative to all other art disciplines and art historical periods in its collections. While acknowledging Aboriginal art and culture should be of interest to all, the writer opined that, in it being foreign to the cultural traditions of the vast majority of the population and the histories that have formed the contemporary world, it could be expected of the museum to mount a “variety” of exhibitions drawn from its extensive collections, thus reflecting its impressive cultural and historical “diversity”—and that the program looked “ideological”. Veni, vidi.

A L A N C R U I C K S H A N K

The motive for this attention to current art writing was a moment towards the end of 2021, of two instances observed simultaneously, of two dissimilar texts emanating from the same city, though appearing in two different countries. Invoking the tenor of and paraphrasing the introductory device (of truth v. plausibility) to the Coen Brothers’ 1996 film, Fargo: “The following is a true story, the events depicted here took place towards the end of 2021. Out of respect for the ‘guilty’ the names have been deleted.”

The tenor of the art critic’s use of language was in response to what was observed and examined on the museum walls and floors, contrasting that of the social media interlocutor in absentia. While the latter is also equally “entitled” to a point of view about something experienced, the corollary here is the now uncertain consideration of what is utterable, and permissible, who determines this and how it is presented within the increasingly fractious black-white binary of Australian cultural and political commentary…Thesecondinstance, by another Australian writer in a peer-reviewed Southeast Asian art journal, was a review of the exhibition The National 2021 New Australian Art which, in its aggregation of inclination and hyperbolic art jargon, presented more so the author’s apparent self-loathing as citizen of a nation with its “white colonial” history, than anything else, contentious though the exhibition was (see this journal Issue 10, https://artdesign.unsw.edu.au/unsw-galleries/divanissue-10). This writer, of course, again is “entitled” to advocate an individual viewpoint, but the peer-review panel, like any fair-minded reader, might query that in such a scholarly-rendered publication the author of an overtly partisan text might be “interrogated” for verification of facts, in its fashionably narrow, sectarian assertions. While the text’s driving theme—“challenges the role of Eurocentric narratives” and similar, undoubtedly merit scholarly scrutiny, its formula of the now ubiquitous Art Language rant, as badge-of-contrariness, denied both its integrity and validity...

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T. K. Sabapathy, 2009

My mother’s mother (born 1896), who with her matrilineally-refined ‘secret’ recipe made prized old-world Christmas puddings—the type prepared over several weeks, hung in a pudding cloth from the house veranda to dry, or perhaps to ferment, along with baking and preserving, the kind of which (“knowledge production”, “labour” etc.) have long been usurped by lifeless mass production—was certainly creative. Was she an artist then? Extending this consideration, one might regard another universe of ingenuity and talent, of over a century of national Country Women’s Association members who presented their cooking, baking and preserving efforts in national annual Royal Show competitions, certainly unappreciated over time by the “arts industry”. Perhaps they were all artists as well, and not just simply creative…

Some final words, from someone who has been writing them eruditely for nearly half a century as educator, historian, critic and curator, about art: Writers illuminate entry points of art and artists into the pale of history. Written texts are just as important as works of art in representing significance, value and meaning in the world of art.

Parergon Ergo: “global legacies of imperialism”, “critique of the power structures” and “decolonize the museum.” OK, nothing not read before; mild stuff, du jour. But the plaintiff citations intensified with “the violence of colonialism in the past and its continuation in the present”, “strategies of deconstruction to voice resistance to the exploitation of ‘otherized’ people and lands”, “systemically oppressed and controlled by European colonists”, “art as an agent of decolonial change”, “visceral memorial to the three billion non-human beings that died from the bushfires, a disaster traceable to the colonial mismanagement of Indigenous lands” (emphasis mine), “provocatively destabilize the ideology of nationhood” and “dismantle the colonial imaginary of the ‘nation’”, incantations neither proven nor referenced; while “confront the destructiveness of Australia’s colonial structures and imagine alternative frameworks of care in place” (emphasis mine) trailed into art jargon inanity; as referred to prior, the presumptuous cure-all, “art as a vehicle for change” and finally, that pervasive banality, that this art “interrogates”. In toto, the writer failed to qualify or reference how… This tale of two texts, of their disparities in articulation, meaning and equity, is symptomatic of contemporary global trends. An inclination towards appropriated Art Language and principle is hardly surprising given this country’s half a century or more mimicry of Euro-American sociocultural movements. Circa three decades ago, following such influence, the greater national arts landscape, of all disciplines and compositions, for political and economic validation was branded the “Creative Industries” and/or “Cultural Industries”, thereby linking “creativity” with commercial markets, so that business and government might discern it from primary and manufacturing industries, according to one think tank report, “turning the latent symbolic value residing in highly educated workforces, communities and locales into economic assets”, all of which would confirm the nation’s “creative economy”. As a recent flow on from this, artists (and others, who therefore were not, or are not, artists) are now, by those same imperatives, labelled “creatives”. It might be presumed that the terminology “artist” has become elitist, too defining of something specific, intellectually or practically skilled perhaps, for the advancing equalitarianism of policymakers. Or, it might suggest perhaps that “artists” aren’t “creative”. Such desired equalizing nomenclature, that all “creatives” are now equally creative with “artists” (or vice versa) is a paradox that also needs to be “interrogated”, as being creative mightn’t necessarily mean that one is an artist…

Ann Finegan is a writer and multidisciplinary academic who has held positions in Australia and overseas, including Sydney College of the Arts and Paris-Belleville University; a regular catalogue essayist and contributor to art journals, including Artlink magazine as guest editor for the Fashion. Performance. Industry issue. Her most recent book chapter was for the Eugenia Raskopoulos book Vestiges of the Tongue (Power Publications, Sydney 2019); co-founded Cementa Contemporary Arts Festival in 2012, which she continues to support through hosting fringe events.

Charles Green is Professor of Contemporary Art, University of Melbourne, Art History department, within the School of Culture and Communication; has written Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-94 (Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995), The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2001), and (with Anthony Gardner) Biennials, Triennials, and documenta (Boston, Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). More recently he has edited with Jon Cattapan a book on gardens, conflict, and art, Afterstorm (Melbourne: Art + Australia, 2021) and is co-editor with Ian McLean of the forthcoming volume, What is Postnational Art History (Melbourne, Perimeter Books). He is also an artist: Lyndell Brown and Charles Green have worked together as one artist since 1989 and their works are in most important Australian collections; Australia’s Official War Artists in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007–08. Howard Morphy is an Emeritus Professor and currently Head of the Centre for Digital Humanities Research (CDHR), Australian National University. He is member of the board of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia; has worked with Yolngu people since beginning his PhD at the ANU in 1973; has worked collaboratively with Yolŋu people on many projects including as anthropologist for the Blue Mud Bay claim, on many exhibition projects at cultural institutions and in the digital repatriation of archival collections; has won a number of distinguished awards and fellowships, including the Malinowski Memorial Lecturer (1993) the Huxley Medallist (2013), and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Council for Museum Anthropology (2017). He has written extensively on Australian Aboriginal art including Aboriginal Art (Phaidon, 1998) with three monographs Journey to the Crocodile’s Nest (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1984), Ancestral Connections (Chicago, 1991) and Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories (Berg, 2007). His most recent books are Museums, Infinity and the Culture of Protocols (Routledge, 2020) and Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value (Routledge, 2020) edited with Robyn McKenzie.

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Adam Geczy is an artist and writer who teaches at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. His exhibitions across Australia and Europe have received considerable critical acclaim, and appears in numerous national collections including Queensland Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Australia. As a writer, Geczy has a longstanding reputation as a critic and theorist. With some 20 books (including those contracted) including from Bloomsbury, Routledge and Edinburgh University Press; considered one of the world’s leading theorists in art-fashion crossover; recent books include The Artificial Body in Fashion and Art (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Transorientalism in Art, Fashion and Film: Inventions of Identity (Bloomsbury, 2019). His latest book (with Vicki Karaminas) is Gaga Aesthetics: Art, Fashion, Popular Culture and the Up-Ending of Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2021); currently coauthoring a book for Rutgers University Press on Literary Theory and Graphic Novels; founding editor of the journals The Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, and ab-Original (both Penn State University Press).

Muheb Esmat is a curator and writer based in New York; has contributed to exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, High Museum of Art, Hessel Museum of Art, and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. His writings have appeared in Dirt, C Magazine, Platform, Khabar Keslan, and the exhibition catalogue for the 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, USA.

C O N T R I B U T O R S

Andrew Wood is a New Zealand-based independent art historian, curator, critic, cultural mercenary and translator, Art Editor of takahē magazine, and a regular contributor to Art News New Zealand, the New Zealand Listener, and has written for the Sydney Review of Books, Art Collector, Art Monthly, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and contributes scholarly papers on everything from the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, to Roman iconography, to modernist photography, to postmodern new history painting, and English porcelain and silver of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is the author and translator (with Friedrich Voit) of Karl Wolfskehl: Three Worlds / Drei Welten, Selected Poems (Cold Hub Press 2016), The Sonnets of Walter Benjamin (Kilmog Press 2020) and Occult Aotearoa: An Occult and Esoteric History of New Zealand is due out with Massey University Press in 2023. He once caused a bit of a stir with Annabelle Utrecht about the history of the pavlova. Mostly harmless. Souchou Yao is a cultural anthropologist and writer based in Sydney and Malaysia. He has taught at universities in Adelaide, Singapore, and Sydney where he was senior lecturer at the Department of Anthropology. His work deals with the anthropology of Chinese diaspora, and the relation between aesthetics and social and political theory. His essays on art and aesthetic and the cultural politics of Malaysia and Singapore have appeared in New Formation, Australian Journal of Anthropology, Australian Humanity Review, Current Anthropology, and positions: asia critique. His research on contemporary Chinese art has resulted in monographs on the artists Xu Bing, Ai Weiwei and Shen Shaomin. Among his books are Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess (2006), Confucian Capitalism: Discourse, Practice and the Myth of Chinese Enterprise (2015), The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a Small, Distant War (2016). His latest book The Shop on High Street (2020) is an auto-ethnography of growing up in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown.

Stephanie Bailey is editor-in-chief of Ocula Magazine, contributing editor to ART PAPERS, managing editor of Podium, the online journal for M+ in Hong Kong, editorial advisory board member of d’ivan, A Journal of Accounts, and part of the Naked Punch editorial collective. Formerly senior editor of Ibraaz, she also writes for ArtMonthly, Canvas and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and since 2015 has curated the Conversations program for Art Basel Hong Kong; essays have appeared in Navigating the Planetary: A guide to the planetary art world–its past, present, and potentials (eds. Hildegund Amanshauser and Kimberly Bradley, VfmK, 2020); Germaine Kruip: Works 1999–2017 (ed. Krist Gruijthuijsen, Koenig Books, 2018); Future Imperfect: Contemporary Art Practices and Cultural Institutions in the Middle East (ed. Anthony Downey, Sternberg Press, 2016); The future is already here–it’s just not evenly distributed, 20th Biennale of Sydney catalogue (ed. Stephanie Rosenthal, 2016); Armenity, the catalogue for the Armenian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (ed. Adelina von Furstenburg, Skira, 2015); Hybridize or Disappear (ed. Joao Laia, Mousse Publishing, 2015); Happy Hypocrite #8: FRESH HELL (ed. Sophia Al-Maria, Book Works, 2015); and You Are Here: Art After the Internet (ed. Omar Kholeif, Space/Cornerhouse, 2014). Siobhan Campbell is a researcher and curator who teaches in the Indonesian Studies program, University of Sydney. Her research encompasses modern and contemporary Indonesian art alongside traditional forms of material culture, and has been published in journals including Visual Anthropology, craft + design enquiry, Indonesia and the Malay World, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde, and Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. She completed her doctorate at the University of Sydney in 2013 investigating the classical painting tradition of Bali and Balinese responses to museum collections; has worked with several public and private collections of Indonesian art in Australia, including the Australian Museum and the National Gallery of Australia; curated the exhibition, Upacara: Ceremonial Art from Southeast Asia, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney, 2021.

ON THE POLITICS OF OPENING AND REFORM IN SAUDI ARABIA AND CHINA AT THE 1ST DIRIYAH BIENNALE

d ı v a n 1 1l S T E P H A N I E B A I L E

CrossingY the river by feeling the stones

At the inaugural Diriyah Biennale, the first contemporary art biennale of its kind in Saudi Arabia, an installation of sculptures from Wang Luyan’s Corresponding Non-Correspondence series (2010–19) took centre stage in the first section of the show. Figures rendered in paper, card, wood and metal were poised on spartan plinths and within box frames, each expressing the artist’s interest in paradoxical relations, with descriptive titles amplifying each equation. Two People Who Walk Along the Right/Left Side While Walking Towards/Away from Each Other (2011), for instance, shows two steel figures positioned side by side in walking position, their formal distillation making it possible to see them going in both directions the work’s name describes. In 2019, the artist gifted ten large-scale versions of such walking figures, collectively titled The Walkers, to Whittier College in the United States, where, in a reflection of art imitating life, the artist’s brother studied in the 1990s, just as Wang Luyan in turn befriended an alumnus from the college in China at the same time. “The Walkers appear to be advancing and retreating simultaneously —the uncertainty of the direction” they “are headed towards represents the ambiguity of one’s dreams and goals,” Wang explained on the occasion. “People may have already deviated from their goals even though they think they are moving toward them. While moving towards the future, one is also moving backwards towards the unforgettable past.”1

1 ‘College Receives Sculpture Donation from Famous Chinese Artist’, Whittier College website, 26 March 2019; https://www.whittier.edu/ news/tue-03262019-1203-pm/college-receives-sculpture-donation-famous-chinese-artist

2 Elizabeth J. Perry, ‘Cultural Governance in Contemporary China: “Re-Orienting” Party Propaganda’, in To Govern China: Evolving Practices of Power, Vivienne Shue and Patricia M. Thornton eds, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 29–55. Viewed online at Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Core; contemporary-china-reorienting-party-propaganda/FDC3BC7F5D16463D0379C529ED31D424https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/to-govern-china/cultural-governance-in3 Ibid. 4 Yang Zhonghui, ‘“Stars 1979”: A Retrospective Approaching Historical Reality’, CAFA Art Info, Central Academy of Fine Arts, 14 January 2020; https://www.cafa.com.cn/en/opinions/reviews/details/8327047

5 Lisa Movius, ‘Stars Art Group, China’s artistic freedom fighters, celebrate 40th anniversary’, The Art Newspaper, 28 March https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2019/03/29/stars-art-group-chinas-artistic-freedom-fighters-celebrate-40th-anniversary2019; 6 Yang Zhonghui, ‘“Stars 1979”: A Retrospective Approaching Historical Reality’, CAFA Art Info

7 Ibid. Such is the nature of progress, perhaps, as witnessed by Wang in China, where, as scholar Elizabeth J. Perry points out, “efforts to commingle revolutionary and pre-revolutionary symbolic resources” in the service of cultural governance, have been preceded by “episodes in CCP history when party leaders actively encouraged vicious attacks on elements of Chinese tradition.”2 Among them is the Cultural Revolution’s violent call to obliterate “The Four Olds”—“old things, old ideas, old customs and old habits”—in the 1960s and 1970s, whose demonization of traditional Chinese culture, given its associations with imperialism and feudalism, and bourgeois Western influences writ large, would later give way to a re-orientation of nationalist propaganda that sought to unify China’s imperialist and revolutionary past in the service of what Xi Jinping has, in the twenty-first century, referred to as the “great revival of the Chinese nation.”3

It is from within this frenetic movement between past and future—always located in a present rendered thickly static by intersecting politics, temporalities, trajectories, commonalities and subjectivities—that Wang has operated as an artist. First, as a member of the avant-garde Stars Group, a collective of mostly self-taught artists who famously staged an exhibition in 1979 on the gates (and nearby trees) of the country’s most prestigious art institution, the China National Art Gallery (now known as the National Art Museum of China), from which they were excluded due to their lack of formal training in one of the state’s art academies.4 That ballsy, guerrilla show was a sign of the times. Mao’s recent death had created a path for his successor, Deng Xiaoping, to introduce reforms that opened up the economy to foreign investment and accelerated development, whose liberalizing knock-on effect was the opening up of China not only to the world at large, but also to itself.

“At that time, there were a lot of interesting people around artists, like poets and musicians,” said Stars member Huang Rui, who was also included in the Diriyah Biennale, when 10 Chancery Lane Gallery in Hong Kong presented a fortieth anniversary exhibition of that 1979 Stars show. “Deng Xiaoping’s movement for Reform and Opening Up gave us a certain confidence, and sometimes confidence was all we had.”5 When the Dongcheng Branch of the Beijing Public Security Bureau ordered the artists to remove their works on that exhibition’s third day—because they were “affecting the normal life and social order of the people”—the Stars staged a protest on the 30th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.6 As CAFA Art Info’s Yang Zhonghui writes, after they marched, the show’s “detained paintings were returned and the closed exhibition was allowed to resume.”7

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While many artists left China following the events of June 1989, Wang Luyan remained. Having co-founded the New Measurement Group with artists Gu Dexin and Chen Shaoping in 1989—a previous iteration was formed in 1988—the artist collective leaned in to a conceptual practice that prioritized an objective, collective approach to art. Bound by a “language of regulations”, the New Measurement Group removed nearly all traces of their individualism.9 In the five soft-bound books they created in the 1990s, known as the Analysis series, for example, each artist is represented by “a symbol, a coloured line (identified as A1, A2 or A3, for instance), or other signifiers that would be used to create a composite image based on a set of collectively pre-defined rules.”10

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Another Stars exhibition followed in 1980, this time taking place inside the National Art Museum,8 just one more milestone that defined a radical new wave in Chinese contemporary art that rode the momentum of Deng’s reforms. But then that momentum reached a decisive turning point in February 1989, when the China Avant/Garde exhibition opened at the National Art Museum, only to be closed down after artist Xiao Lu shot at her own installation. Months later, a student uprising networked across the country like wildfire, sweeping all walks of life into a moment of unprecedented hope, until that movement, which effectively called for more open dialogue between the people and their government (democracy was one call, but not the only demand) was snuffed out in a military crackdown centred around Tiananmen Square in Beijing that June. (An event that the state is still regrettably unable to engage with in earnest as part of the people’s history.)

d ı v a n 1 1l 8 Ibid. 9 Stephanie Bailey, ‘Mirror, Mirror—Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World’, Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol. 17, no. 3, May/June 2018, p. 92

10 See footnote 23 in Stephanie Bailey, ‘Mirror, Mirror—Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World’, Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art

12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 See Stephanie Bailey, ‘Mirror, Mirror—Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World’, Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol. 17, no. 3, May/June 2018, p. 92 17 Ibid. Quoting Hou Hanru from On the Mid-ground, Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Limited, 2002, p. 28 18 Ibid.

Crossing the river by feeling the stones Read in context, the collective, on the one hand, responded to the excessive subjectivity they perceived in Chinese contemporary art at the time. But that subjectivity was, in fact, a radical gesture among artists amid the conformist demands of state communism—as highlighted in 1993, when artist Song Shuangsong staged a performance at the National Art Museum in retaliation against the removal of around eighty percent of the works in an exhibition titled Country Life Plan, deemed by officials to be lacking in their positive representation of “life in the People’s Republic.”

11 In response, Song went to the gallery with a barber and proceeded to have his long hair—“a symbol of his individualistic way of life”—cut off.12 “You would have thought, to witness the scene that ensued, that the Government of Deng Xiaoping would be destroyed by this haircut; it was as though Song Shuangsong had been caught holding a bomb rather than a performance,” wrote Andrew Solomon in The New York Times.13 “Everyone was thrown out of the room. The doors were secured with heavy chains and padlocks. The exhibition was closed down permanently and immediately. Song was led out roughly between two guards.”14 Solomon quotes Gu Dexin in his article, whose response to Song’s action points to another potential motive, on the other hand, behind the New Measurement Group’s rational logic—beyond resisting a romantic individualism and embracing socialist conformity. “Imagine,” the artist laughs, “having hair and clothes such that people in the market or at the bus station could tell you were an artist!” to which Solomon concluded: “Their individuality is infinitely more powerful because it is camouflaged.”

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15 It’s an observation that hits anywhere in the world where artists have learned to conform in order to subvert the state system to which they must answer as citizens, and points to the refraction of meaning that can occur as a result—like when practices do not necessarily articulate their intentions clearly whether in their work or in their explanation of it, often on purpose and for their ownAssafety.Ihave written before, the New Measurement Group pushed the idea of objective collectivism to its limits, offering, as Hou Hanru called it, a “counter propaganda” to the propaganda, thus exploring “a new model of linguistic research which could function as an alternative to the ideologic-centric one.”16 What “the artists had recognized,” Hou noted, was “the need to create a constructive space for real modernization and democracy in China”17—a need that reflected itself quietly, and often with irony, in the work of artists from this period.18 Indeed, as Solomon reported 11 Andrew Solomon, ‘Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save China,’ The New York Times, 19 December 1993; https://www.nytimes. com/1993/12/19/magazine/their-irony-humor-and-art-can-save-china.html

Ibid. 20 Karen Smith, Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-garde Art in New China, Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Limited, 2008, p. 206

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Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, ‘Crimes Without a Scene: Qian Weikang and the New Measurement Group’, e-flux journal, Issue 65, May 2015; https://www.e-flux.com/journal/65/336470/crimes-without-a-scene-qian-weikang-and-the-new-measurement-group/ Y in his article: “What looks radical often is radical, but not always in the ways you think. In Nanjing dialect, the sounds ‘i luv yoo’ mean ‘Would you care for some spiced oil?’ ‘What the West does, encountering our art,’ the artist Ni Haifeng said, ‘is to think we’re saying we love you, when we’re only having a private conversation about cooking.’’’19

Or Zhang Peili’s iconic Water: Standard Version from the Cihai Dictionary 水 (1991), which features CCTV news anchor Xing Zhibin reading a dictionary definition for water, amplifying the fact that, while she reported on the student movement in April and May of 1989, the events of 4 June went unmentioned on that day’s broadcast. Water: Standard Version from the Cihai Dictionary 水 is now on view in Hong Kong as part of the Sigg Collection exhibition at M+, with its poignancy amplified by the mantra of the recent Hong Kong protest movement, ‘Be Water’, which in the context of the New Measurement Group could translate to how the trio used the state’s logic to operate with, for, and against it, all at once. (Plausible deniability is not only a tool for fascists.)

21 See Fiona He, ‘Introduction: Hans Van Dijk Archive’, Ideas Journal, Asia Art Archive, 1 December 2012; https://aaa.org.hk/en/ideas22journal/ideas-journal/hans-van-dijk-archive

The Analysis books themselves appeared in different languages, based on where the books where showing—mostly abroad, with Chen Shaoping counting only one time the Group showed in China.20 Analysis III (1994), for example, re-configures ‘Letter to Beijing’ by ZERO artist Gunther Uecker, which was sent to the New Measurement Group ahead of a joint exhibition organized by curator Hans van Dijk in cooperation with the Goethe Institute. Apparently, the exhibition was meant to take place at the Hanmo Art Gallery in Beijing, but since Uecker’s letter mentioned human rights, it was not allowed to go ahead, and was eventually staged at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin in 1995, reflecting the strong links that were forged between European art institutions and contemporary Chinese artists in that decade and beyond.21 (In 2007, ahead of the Beijing Summer Olympics, which was to showcase China’s twenty-first century ascension to world power, the Chinese government invited Uecker to finally show Letter to Beijing at the National Art Museum of China, where he presented the UN Declaration of Human Rights on nineteen large screens with words partially obfuscated by black paint.)

Around 1995, the New Measurement Group disbanded—a reaction to their increasing popularity among Western institutions in particular—and destroyed most of their work. Chen Shaoping apparently stopped making art almost immediately, followed by Wang Luyan’s retreat from the Chinese art world in the late-1990s and early 2000s, with Gu Dexin abandoning his artistic career in 2008.22 “When recently asked why he had given up exhibiting his works from the mid-

Take, for example, Wu Shanzhuan’s Today No Water (1986–97), which comes from the artist’s Red Humour series: hundreds of pages of A4 paper filled with notes, drawings, diagrams, and lists, mostly written in red, referring to a common public notice that characterized life in China at the time—a gesture designed to exhaust meaning by pushing it to a nonsensical abstraction.

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Wang’s was a telling rejection of the growing Western appetite for Chinese revolutionary pop at the time—whether ironic, cynical, or not—as Chinese artists became increasingly fetishized on the post-Tiananmen world stage. The neutering effect of that post-’89 boom for Chinese art in Western exhibitions and markets, which sought out a very particular kind of art, was somewhat mirrored by the Chinese state’s response to the socio-political upheaval that Deng Xiaoping’s liberalizing economic reforms triggered, leaning further into its pursuit of economic development and “leaving little room or appreciation for non-pragmatic thinking and cultural discussion,” according to Wang.24 But while Wang stopped exhibiting, the self-taught artist, who once worked as a lathe operator at the Beijing Furnace Factory, continued to create designs for installations, images, and sculptures preoccupied with the contradictory nature of relation, with forms engaged in the aesthetics of technological progress. Some of these designs were fabricated for Sawing or Being Sawed, the artist’s first solo show since his retreat, staged at Arario Gallery in Shanghai in 2007. Installations like W-Set Square (2007), a giant pair of set squares rendered in stainless steel and each inscribed with different measuring scales, hinted at, to quote Yinghua Lu, “Wang’s profound distrust of established ideas and systems.”25

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The meaning behind such gestures was extended in Diagramming Allegory, a 2013 exhibition staged at Beijing’s Parkview Green Exhibition Hall with an overtly geopolitical bent. W Symmetry Wath D11-06 (2011) shows two watches forming something of a Venn diagram. A fighter on each face points a gun at the other—one holds an American M-16 rifle and the other a Soviet AK-47—with the numbers 9 and 11 appearing between them, thus drawing a relational link between the history of the Cold War, its politics and proxies, and the events of 11 September 2001, whose repercussions now stretch out to the disastrous withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan between 2020 and 2021. With the monolithic state blocs that defined the Cold War binary in mind—which pushed the world into divisions between communism or capitalism—Wang’s image “underpins the reversibility of the killer and the killed. In other words,” writes Chiu-Ti Jansen, “a slaughter is not a relationship between a killer and the killed, but between a killer and a killer.”26 But Wang does not settle on that conclusion, either, because being killed is what all too often prompts one to kill in turn, after all—as demonstrated in a work like W Fire at Both Ends Automatic Handgun D13-01 (2013). A giant handgun “equipped with artillery facing both forwards and backwards and the shells shooting in both directions at once,” is “positioned not to point at the giant target pasted on the

23 Carol Yinghua Lu, ‘Wang Luyan’, Frieze, 1 November 2017; https://www.frieze.com/article/wang-luyan 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Chiu-Ti Jansen, ‘Wang Luyan’s Allegory of Civilization’, Sotheby’s, 11 June 2013; https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/wang-luyansallegory-of-civilization Crossing the river by feeling the stones 1990s, Wang remarked matter-of-factly that there was simply no suitable ‘soil’ for his ideas to take root in,” wrote curator Carol Yinghua Lu in 2007. “During that time Western influences and market forces practically hijacked the dominant narrative within Chinese contemporary art, promoting a homogeneous practice that thrived on formulaic and graphic reiterations of China’s revolutionary past and political reality, and excluded multifaceted, in-depth investigations of art itself.”23

d ı v a n 1 1l 27 Ibid. 28 David Spalding, ‘Critic’s Pick: Wang Luyan’, Artforum; https://www.artforum.com/picks/wang-luyan-40837

With that in mind, Wang’s equation problematizes the clarity of positions in wars and conflicts that are complex, opaque, and far from clear cut; such that one person’s terrorist could be seen as another person’s freedom fighter, depending on who is looking, and from what angle. To take all those points into account—to view history and its effects not from a single side, but as the prism that it is—brings to mind the phrase used in the aviation industry to describe the conditions of visibility that were observed on that September day in 2001: severe clear. Such is the view of the accumulation of intertwined, intersecting, and contradictory realities that have shaped a world still reeling from the legacies of the twentieth century, both its historical roots and its contemporaneous wars, in which a cruel Manicheism pitted peoples, geographies, and ideologies against each other, sometimes within the boundaries of their own nation states, with disastrous and ongoing effects.

Today those divides have both flipped and multiplied into a complicated multipolarity, despite George Bush Jr.’s attempts at dragging the twentieth century’s clear, US-led separations into the twenty-first when he defined the so-called Axis of Evil following the 11 September attacks in 2001 by declaring: “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with [America] or you are with the terrorists.”30 Then and now, the purity of that statement does not match up to the intersecting trails that led to the events that ignited America’s War on Terror, which professor Radhika Desai described as “particularly ‘aggressive’ form of ‘US imperialism’” that signalled

30 ‘Text: President Bush Addresses the Nation’, The Washington Post, 20 September 2001; https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/ nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html wall, but at the shooter”—such that, as Jansen summarizes, “pulling the trigger becomes an act of self-destruction,”27 or as David Spalding put it in his Artforum review, “every action simultaneously triggers itsPeropposite.”28hapsthisis the allegory that Wang diagrammed in that 2013 show, when thinking about the reference to ‘9/11’ he makes in that work: not so much a ‘both sides’ argument as much as a statement about the ramifications of proxy wars between world powers, which can, have, and do trigger human crimes and tragedies that accumulate into one hell of a chimeric ouroboros; in the case of ‘9/11’, of American violence returning to its heart, with an attack on one of its core instruments, the World Trade Center, constituting an act of revenge, resistance and abject violence all at once: and at base, a profound human tragedy and trauma experienced on an individual level by those directly impacted by the events (as is the case with any person subject to geopolitical aggressions to which they are connected by dint of their citizenship or lack thereof). The Twin Towers were the bastion of a post-WWII international economic order, after all; one that centred the United States through the establishment of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group in 1944 at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference hosted in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire —what economic historian Harold James called “the intellectual sugar” that “cover[ed] and mask[ed] the bitter taste of the pill of Realpolitik dollar hegemony.”29

29 Harold James, ‘The multiple contexts of Bretton Woods’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, vol. 28, no. 3, 2012, p. 428

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“the end of globalization.”31 Today, the end that Desai observed is bearing fruit, as the multipolar world heralded across a spectrum, from decolonial thinkers on one side to Chinese Globalists and Duginist Neo-Eurasianists on the other—the latter defined by Putin advisor Aleksandr Dugin’s rejection of a unipolar Atlanticist world order—is coming into being. All of which recalls Wang’s diagrammatic sculptures on view at the first Diriyah Biennale, which locate the paradoxical reality of multipolarity in the human body, thus both focusing and extending questions of meaning and embodied experience in a world where words, terms, and positions that have been historically used to describe and assert certain ideologies and conditions have become increasingly fluid, contingent, and unstable. Such was the experience speaking with one American art critic in Dubai in 2022, who wistfully described Singapore as “socialist”—a descriptor that has since made everyone I know in Asia laugh immediately, every time I recount the story. (It is certain that this person’s idea of socialism is vastly different to the Singaporean development model, after which the Dubai model was drawn.)

32 Chiu-Ti Jansen, ‘Wang Luyan’s Allegory of Civilization’, op cit.

Today, the frames of reference that have traditionally been used to organize and define populations are failing to describe the sheer complexities of the moment, and in fact, seem to only highlight the violence—and ignorance—of projecting such all-encompassing terms altogether, insofar as they reduce the nuances of human experience to gross generalizations that fail to take into account the particularities of context. As Chiu-Ti Jansen muses when reflecting on Wang Luyan’s The Walkers D12-01 (2012), a set of mirror-finished stainless-steel figures who seem to be walking backwards and forwards at the same time: “Perhaps this is what the artist sees as the great paradox of civilization.”32

31 As quoted in Mark T. Berger, ‘After the Third World? History, Destiny and the Fate of Third Worldism’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 1, 2004, p. 30

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33 Xiaobo Zhang, Arjan de Haan and Shenggen Fan, ‘Introduction: Policy Reforms as a Process of Learning’ in Narratives of Chinese Economic Reforms: How Does China Cross the River? Xiaobo Zhang, Shenggen Fan & Arjan de Haan eds, Singapore, Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific, 2010, p. 6 34 Xiaobo Zhang, Arjan de Haan and Shenggen Fan, p. 5 Crossing the river by feeling the stones

Among the sculptures by Wang shown at the Diriyah Biennale that exemplified this paradox was Differences in Direction of Identical Decision (2017), depicting a figure walking forward, the head becoming the connecting point for another body extending up from it, this time upside down and walking to the side, in a manner that, as with Wang’s other walking figures, could be going either left or right. Persons Lifting Their Right Arms or/and Left Arms (2018) illustrated a more overt but still ambiguous call to action, with two figures standing side by side, each one raising an arm with a hand balled into a revolutionary fist, as if to express a shared point of departure from either side of the political line. Other political equations like The Inverted Person from the Inversion (2017), showing a plywood figure standing on top of the panel out of which it was cut, were extended in works like Collective of Imprisoned Individuals Who Escape from Imprisonment (2017), in which a line of figures cut out from corrugated card cross the bottom of a packing box frame, with the cardboard panels from which those figures were cut lining the top of the box, outside of the enclosure.

These were apt figures to showcase in an exhibition whose curatorial theme extended Wang’s diagrams from one point of the world to another, which explains why such a large section of the Diriyah Biennale’s first chapter was given over to them. Working with curators Wejdan Reda, founder of Sahaba Art Consultancy in Jeddah, and curators from the China-based institution Ullens Contemporary Center for Art (UCCA) Shixuan Luan and Neil Zhang, the Diriyah Biennale’s artistic director Philip Tinari, the director and chief executive of UCCA, effectively curated a relational temporality that was originally intended to be staged as part of a Saudi-China cultural year, before COVID-19 scuppered those plans. That relational temporality opened up a generative space to reflect on where the world stands, as the twentieth century bleeds into the twenty-first. It did so by linking Saudi Arabia today, and its ambitious Vision 2030 economic and social development program launched in 2016 to develop, diversify, and modernize the economy, with China in the late-twentieth century, defined by Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up project, which paved the way not only for China’s so-called economic miracle and its ascendancy in the twenty-first century, but for the social upheaval that would define that period in which the New Measurement Group emerged.

A phrase from that transformative chapter in Chinese history inspired the exhibition title, Feeling the Stones, which comes from the phrase “crossing the river by feeling the stones”, which was used in China to encapsulate the ethos of Reform and Opening Up. As scholars Xiaobo Zhang, Arjan de Haan and Shenggen Fan write, that period had been triggered by the lessons learned from “the disastrous performance of the ideology-based process in the planned economy era, such as the Great Famine (1959–1961) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976),”33 with the Communist Party’s 11th Congress in 1978 signalling a shift in “the policymaking process from ideology-based to evidencebased under the slogan of ‘seeking truths from facts’”—a “programmatic attitude approach towards reform” that placed “great weight on demonstrated evidence on the ground instead of on theory.”34

36 Eleanor Albert, ‘China’s Grand Plans for Shenzhen’, The Diplomat, 21 August 2019; https://thediplomat.com/2019/08/chinas-grandplans-for-shenzhen/ and Phoebe Zhang, ‘Beijing unveils detailed reform plan to make Shenzhen model city for China and the world’, South China Morning Post, 18 August 2019;

37reform-plan-make-shenzhen-model-city?module=inline&pgtype=articlehttps://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3023330/beijing-unveils-detailed-IrisDeng,‘Coronavirus:Huaqiangbei,world’sbiggestelectronicswholesalemarket,remainsclosedashi-techhubShenzhenstepsupbattleagainstOmicron’, South China Morning Post, 8 March 2022; https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3169702/coronavirushuaqiangbei-worlds-biggest-electronics-wholesale-market A I L Y

35 Xu Wei, ‘China to further promote innovation and entrepreneurship’, The State Council, People’s Republic of China, 20 July 2017; english.www.gov.cn/premier/news/2017/07/12/content_281475723086902.htm

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In this context, “crossing the river by feeling the stones” was used to characterize reform as a careful, step-by-step process that is grounded, tentative, and considered—an approach that takes into account the river to be crossed as something material, present and unpredictable, and which requires careful movements, not to mention patience, so that one might cross safely from one place to another based on every step taken and its results, repercussions, and reverberations. It’s a phrase that works as much for navigating this accelerated moment in Saudi Arabia’s history, as it did for walking through the Diriyah Biennale exhibition, whose thematic framework created space in an increasingly post-Western and post-unipolar era to consider the histories and politics of development in China and Saudi Arabia, and the speed and scale with which they have been enacted.

Taking these shared conditions into account in Feeling the Stones were works like Simon Denny’s video installation Real Mass Entrepreneurship (2017–21), which centres on a film tracking the accelerationist rise of the city of Shenzhen, once an industrial backwater and now China’s Silicon Valley. Denny’s film, produced in 2017, departs from a call made by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang for “mass entrepreneurship and innovation,” which “was first put forward by the Premier during the annual meeting of the New Champions 2014 in Tianjin.”35 These ambitions—one of the many plans for accelerated development that has characterized China’s rise, and which are echoed in Vision 2030’s grand plans—were encapsulated by Shenzhen, which China’s State Council and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China identified “as a model ‘socialist’ city” in 2019, after unveiling plans “for wide-ranging reforms” intended “to make the city a leader in terms of innovation, public service and environmental protection by 2025.”36 Against this backdrop, Denny’s footage centres around the Huaqiangbei electronics market, “an important segment of Shenzhen’s hi-tech industry, which accounted for twenty percent of the city’s GDP in 2020.”37 Members of Shenzhen’s tech community interviewed for the film, some of them new arrivals, express a profound optimism for their future prospects and the dynamism of the city: in one case, someone describes the potential of the technological work they are doing as giving people back time and space. Tempering this buoyancy, however, is one interview regarding the creation of a makers platform that effectively produces nothing, but “gets the dreamers together to make profits from them,” pointing to an extractive model of platform capitalism that essentially exploits the idea of entrepreneurship, or indeed, talent and ingenuity, for gain—a description that bears some resemblance to a state-backed soft power machine like the Diriyah Biennale, and its instrumentalization of art and artists to ultimately serve (and wash) the state’s interests.

With that, the connection that Tinari made between China then with Saudi now carried subtle warnings, when it comes to riding a state-mandated wave of economic, political, and social

38 Vincent Ni, ‘The party’s over: China clamps down on its tech billionaires’, The Guardian, 21 August 2021; https://www.theguardian.com/ 39business/2021/aug/21/the-partys-over-china-clamps-down-on-its-tech-billionaires‘AConversationwithSimonDenny’,Culture™,publishedbyLEAPandPalomaPowers; https://us15.campaign-archive. com/?u=599a68340b0286af889dd8b06&id=be68fc813d

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41 Ewan Morgan, ‘Al-Huwaitat tribe seeks UN help to stop Saudi forced displacement’, Al Jazeera, 9 October 2020; https://www.aljazeera. com/news/2020/10/9/al-huwaitat-tribe-seeks-un-help-to-stop-saudi-forced-displacement Crossing the river by feeling the stones change. Tiananmen Square notwithstanding, Shenzhen offers a more recent example of what can happen when the state reneges on its loosening grip. Recently described by Xinhua as “China’s Reform and Opening Up paragon” on the fortieth anniversary of its designation as a special economic zone, this Pearl River Delta city hosts homegrown tech powerhouses like Tencent, which Xi Jinping praised for making “historic leaps” and “achieving miracles” in 2018 before spectacularly clamping down on it and other tech firms in 2021. That move signalled an increase in regulation and state management over one of China’s key industries; an abrupt Closing Up that was apparently triggered in part by the increasing confidence of China’s private tech sector. In 2020, for example, the Chinese government suddenly suspended the planned IPO of Alibaba’s fintech spinoff Ant Group, after a conference in Shanghai where Alibaba’s formerly outspoken founder, Jack Ma, criticized state regulation, with Ma promptly disappearing from public view—“a three-month absence that sent chills through the business community.”38

The tentacles of an authoritarian state run deep, and its whims can be fickle—and in a context like China, everything becomes blurred as a result. In the case of Real Mass Entrepreneurship Denny points this out in the context of funding. “It’s hard to draw a line between public and private money in the current landscape. Museums and biennials routinely fold private support into their systems in many forms at many levels,” Denny says in one interview. “And what of the Chinese context —can one say a state enterprise umbrella that funds real estate development, tourism, tech hardware production, and contemporary art at the same time is legible in terms of dividing public and private money?”39 It’s a question that could easily be posed in Saudi Arabia, where Vision 2030 is so broad and extensive, that private projects not officially integrated into the public plan are subsumed into an authoritarian framework so all-encompassing that its official projects include the creation of an entire self-sustaining, tech-forward green city in the desert that is larger than Kuwait or Israel—the kind that Lawrence Lek seemed to reference in Nøtel (Red Sea Edition) (2021), an open-world video game included in Feeling the Stones that centres around an ominous, panopticon-like automated hotel designed with every need in mind. Beyond proclaiming a city that will be a model for future living—the name of this Vision 2030 giga-project is a portmanteau of “new” in Greek and “future” in Arabic—the developers for Neom say it will “exist entirely outside the confines of the current Saudi judicial system, governed by an autonomous legal system that will be drafted up by investors.”40 Baked into such ambitions, in which a freezone is effectively created to attract an international elite, is another China connection, with its own legacy of large-scale development projects that have forcibly displaced entire communities, which in the case of Neom includes the al-Huwaitat tribe, who in 2020 called for the United Nations to investigate allegations of forced displacement and abuse by Saudi authorities.41

40 Merlyn Thomas and Vibeke Venema, ‘Neom: What’s the green truth behind a planned eco-city in the Saudi desert?’, BBC News, 22 February 2022; https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-59601335

The DGDA’s target of 27 million local and international visitors by 2030 sits within Vision 2030’s broader aims to host 100 million worldwide tourists in the kingdom by 2030. The Diriyah Biennale, of course, is located within this framework, in which art and culture are playing a central role, and its inaugural show could not have done a better job of both showcasing the transformation taking place in the country and expanding this context into a global picture.

42 Simon Henderson, ‘Saudi Arabia Adjusts Its History, Diminishing the Role of Wahhabism’, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 11 February 2022; https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/saudi-arabia-adjusts-its-history-diminishing-role-wahhabism

The largest standing structure in the citadel, Salwa Palace, was the original seat of the Saud dynasty, and it was on this structure that an image of the G20 leaders was projected in 2020, the year the kingdom hosted the meeting virtually. It is effectively from Diriyah that the Saudi state is rewriting its national narrative to reflect Vision 2030’s radical re-mapping of the kingdom’s past, present and future all at once. In 2022, the town became the point of departure for a royal decree that announced the establishment of Founding Day, a new celebration held annually to commemorate the year 1727, when Imam Mohammed ibn Saud ascended to the throne, during which time he embarked on a quest to unify the Arabian Peninsula. The announcement was momentous—as one commentator put it, “the equivalent of the United States deciding independence did not occur in 1776.”42 It effectively re-wrote Saudi Arabia’s former foundation story, anchored to the year 1744 when ibn Saud provided sanctuary to the Islamic preacher Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, after he was chased out of nearby villages for preaching a brand of ultra-conservative Islamic orthodoxy, Wahhabism, which the Saud dynasty embraced in what was ultimately a political union. This establishment of a new founding story could not have been a stronger signal of change that is already being reflected on the ground in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where the once-feared religious police, who enacted the Wahhabi doctrine on the Saudi population, have effectively been neutered, as freedoms for the public at large—but more notably, women—expand. The inaugural Founding Day took place in Diriyah in February 2022. Celebrations were organized by the Diriyah Gate Development Authority, which is leading a SAR 64 billion development project to restore the former capital and transform it into a mixed-use historic, culture and lifestyle destination.

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Such is the double-edged sword of development’s death-drive—the kind that some international leftists choose to defend when it comes to assessing the politics of development in the non-Western world, even if those politics replicate the very Western imperialist tendencies they critique—where visions for a better future come not only at the cost of present and past, but at the cost of life and liberty, which once again recalls Wang Luyan’s works at the Diriyah Biennale, and the way they diagram progress as an ambiguous walk backwards and forwards—something that is expressed in the site of the Diriyah Biennale itself. Staged in a transformed industrial area known as the JAX District, whose warehouses are being converted into art spaces, studios, and the administrative home of the Diriyah Biennale foundation, the Diriyah Biennale site is located in Ad-Diriyah, a town on the north-west edge of Riyadh that was once the capital of the First Saudi State. Today, Ad-Diriyah is home to the UNESCO world heritage site of At-Turaif, a historic eighteenth century adobe mud city built in the Najdi style.

Crossing the river by feeling the stones China was an apt point of reference, with the two contexts sharing much in common.

Both countries have technically never been colonized by the West, and both forged their own paths through the Cold War split, without aligning completely with the Third World liberation movements of the time. They did not meet the same fate as so many of the newly independent nation-states, monarchies, or communist blocs that ultimately collapsed in the post-war twentieth century, nor were they destabilized by military coups that would all too often open the doors for liberalization on Washington’s terms. Both are also twenty-first century regional and world powers in their own right, enacting their own violence on peoples both within their sphere of influence, and beyond it—as with other nation-states of the world, the United States being one obvious example.

Both Saudi Arabia and China have also operated to varying degrees like hermit kingdoms, developing unique and hybrid forms of statecraft in order to navigate the liberal world economy without submitting to its politics, thus insulating peoples within their borders while conditionally integrating them with the world outside; a process that Ayman Zedani’s fascinating installation Between Desert Seas (2021) touched on in Feeling the Stones by amplifying the realities and specificities of context. A salt mound is framed by a maze of free-standing walls that host speakers emitting

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interviews and field recordings related to the Arabian Sea’s humpback whale, which developed its own unique culture due to its separation from other humpbacks around 70,000 years ago. It’s a simple work that makes a clear point: living beings evolve differently depending on the ground from which they develop—a point that relates not simply to nation-states and their borders, but to human and non-human individuals and communities on the ground that live within, across, and beyond them. As artist Manal AlDowayan noted recently in conversation during a tour of AlUla, home to the biennial Desert X sculpture exhibition and where the ambitious Wadi AlFann sculpture park is currently being developed with plans for site-specific monumental works by James Turrell, Agnes Denes, Michael Heizer, AlDowayan and Ahmed Mater, now is not only a time when Saudi Arabia is opening up to the world, but a moment when Saudis themselves are discovering their own country and all of its histories and cultural legacies. A case in point is the UNESCO world heritage site of Hegra in AlUla, home to the ancient tombs of the Nabateans, which is now being developed into a tourist destination along with the ancient oasis city of Dadan—but another node in Vision 2030’s vast plans. Up until recently, locals apparently believed Hegra to be cursed and avoided the place. On a recent press tour, however, a local couple visiting the site asked to take a photograph with us, so that they could show their family and friends that people from Hong Kong, Singapore, and India had come there. It was a moment that recalled memories of China in the 1990s, when locals would ask to take photos with tourists—an

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Placed within this longer history, the relevance of a phrase like “crossing the river by feeling the stones” for Saudi Arabia reaches back to the twentieth century, when the post-war international order was being shaped, and speaks directly to one of the works that opened Feeling the Stones Maha Malluh’s World Map (2021) is a monumental assemblage of 3,840 coloured cassette tapes arranged in bread-baking trays, each containing recordings of conservative Islamic sermons. These cassettes were sourced from the 1970s and 1980s, when Saudi Arabia pulled back on the period of modernization and liberalization that ensued as the country’s fortunes rose amid the oil boom—a direct effect of the devastating armed takeover of the Grand Mosque of Mecca in November 1979 by men of the Islamic association al-Jamaa al-Salafiya al-Muhtasiba, led by preacher Juhayman 43 Stephanie Bailey, ‘At Diriyah Biennale, Chinese History Meets a Saudi Future’, Ocula Magazine, 12 January 2022; https://ocula.com/ magazine/features/diriyah-biennale/

45 See ‘History’, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation; https://www.oic-oci.org/page/?p_id=52&p_ref=26&lan=en

34 | 35 Crossing the river by feeling the stones experience of people encountering one another with curiosity that stands in stark contrast to the posturing and actions that occur at state level, where populations are reduced to pawns in dangerous, deadly, and dehumanizing war games, which explains why some working in the spheres of art and culture see the potential of engaging in such projects as Wadi AlFann, despite Saudi Arabia’s human rights record. People change when they encounter one another, after all, and it is the people who change states in the end—or at least, it is the people who try.

All of these factors feed into Ahmed Mater’s installation Desert Meeting (2021), one of the opening works of the Diriyah Biennale. Five cathode ray television monitors positioned in a line each host an animated image that tracks Saudi Arabia’s rise to oil producing powerhouse. One photo shows Aramco’s annual board of directors holding a meeting in front of Dammam Well No. 7, the first to produce commercial yields in 1938. It is 1962, “two years after OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) was established, which excluded America and Russia, and six before OAPEC (Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries) was founded in 1968”—”a harbinger of the 1973 oil crisis, an embargo initiated by OAPEC in retaliation against the Arab-Israeli War,” which would spark the so-called oil shock that would destabilize the world economy, leading to “Aramco’s full nationalization in 1980.”43 The catalogue for Mater’s first solo exhibition in Riyadh, which inaugurated Lakum Artspace in 2022, reveals what prompted Mater to create Desert Meeting—“the remnants of local and global histories” that continue to act in the present, including “historical moments such as the Cold War and the Soviet-Afghan conflict (1979–89), which was a proxy war in Afghanistan that pitted Islam and Communism against each other, while further masking Western interests.”44 As I have written previously, Naeem Mohaiemen’s 2017 film Two Meetings and a Funeral tracks this fork in an already forked Cold War road by charting the moment the Organization of Islamic Cooperation —established in a 1969 summit held in Morocco and whose first meeting was held in Jeddah in 197045—diverged from the Non-Aligned Movement, with Saudi Arabia, buoyed by petrodollars, emerging as a key US ally in the Cold War and beyond. (It was from Saudi Arabia that the United States launched fighter jets to enact Operation Desert Storm in 1991.)

44 See the catalogue for Ahmed Mater: Prognosis 1979–2019, curated by Sara Raza at Lakum Artspace, 8 December 2021–8 February 2022, published by Lakum Artspace, Riyadh, 2022

With all that in mind, the Diriyah Biennale’s focus on connecting China and Saudi Arabia through a historic and contemporary narrative of development opens up un/familiar territory when it comes to how one deals with the geopolitical realities that manifest both as macro-narratives expressed via state actions, development programs, and media reports, and as lived experiences on the ground. In Saudi Arabia today, for example, there seems to be an overwhelming sense of support for the internationally notorious MBS, given the changes already implemented in a country where sixty to seventy percent of the population are apparently under the age of thirty—at least in the case of the young people I spoke to there, who all expressed a feeling of hope and excitement.

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46 ‘Mecca 1979: The mosque siege that changed the course of Saudi history’, BBC News, 27 December 2019; https://www.bbc.com/news/ stories-50852379

al-Utaybi. “Juhayman’s actions stopped all modernization,” said one close follower in a BBC report looking back on those events, pointing out that one of his demands to remove women presenters from Saudi TV was met in the aftermath. Indeed, in one 2018 interview, Mohammed Bin Salman (known as MBS) noted that before 1979, “We were living a normal life like the rest of the Gulf countries, women were driving cars, there were movie theatres.”46

All of which puts Vision 2030 into perspective, while drawing attention to just how radical (and effectively risky) the reforms being implemented in the country are—without, of course, denying the complexities and contradictions that exist in a context like Saudi Arabia. Only recently was it reported that rainbow products, deemed to encourage homosexuality in children, were being pulled from Saudi shelves, where homosexuality remains a crime, just as a new Buzz Lightyear movie was banned in the UAE for showing a same-sex kiss; once again recalling Wang Luyan’s figurative diagrams that show people moving backwards and forwards at the same time. Nor does this exploration of Vision 2030 through the lens created by Feeling the Stones justify the assassination of a certain journalist whom a certain crown prince allegedly ordered, though the fact that it was the CIA that concluded who was behind the murder does muddy the waters, not so much in terms of whether or not the conclusion is correct, but more so given the American intelligence agency’s own track record of backing assassinations and coups across the world that would trigger devastating chains of events that continue to have repercussions today.

To emphasize: none of this is a justification for anything more than learning to engage with a multipolar world and all of its unfolding contradictions and complexities through the networks created by contemporary art and culture, as the age of American hegemony shatters into a fragmented global terrain where no country looks better than any other. (Because while some places are freer than others, that freedom does not necessarily extend to every inhabitant within a given jurisdiction.)

Take the fact that, while Saudi women who fought for the now existing right to drive in the country remain in jail, so Black men are still incarcerated in America for the possession or sale of marijuana, in states where that drug is now legal. Or the fact that the rhetoric of Putin’s advisors Aleksandr Dugin and Vladislav Surkov, which speaks of a decolonized multipolar world founded on the concept of sovereign democracy, invoking the language of non-alignment and the era of Third World liberation, holds as much weight as the American promise to deliver democracy to the world using bombs and asymmetric liberal free-market capitalism—a form of imperialist violence that, as evidenced in the last decades, has returned to roost at its point of origin.

Crossing the river by feeling the stones

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One young man described going to a dance party for the first time, and not being sure what to do when a woman asked him for a lighter; while another talked about his own fears of the religious police while growing up, acknowledging how much harder it was for girls. At the opening of the Diriyah Biennale, a young woman artist bounded up to a friend with whom I was speaking and proclaimed how lucky she felt to be a woman in Saudi Arabia right now.

Of course, while this does not discount the harsh realities that remain on the ground, anecdotes like this do speak to the real-world intricacies that arise once you go beyond the headlines, and indeed, beyond the reductive narratives of national politics when expressed in macrogeopolitical terms. With that in mind, perhaps some perspective is due when it comes to how people from one place look at people from another, particularly in the context of art and culture, especially given the violence of imperialism and its spawn, the nation-state, to which the world remains embroiled, and whose form all too often reduces people to extensions of their states, thus erasing their humanity, individuality, and in some contexts creativity, and foreclosing any possibility of encounter, which is a shame given how transformative encounters can be, especially when art is concerned.What this all means is hard to say, but what it reveals is telling. Of course, culture plays its role in washing the various crimes that governments commit in the name of their people. In the history of the biennale format, this has been the case since the establishment of the World’s Fairs by Western imperialists back in the nineteenth century, which used culture and industry as a means of exerting and defining their power on a world stage. In that sense, a line can be drawn from the Venice Biennale at the turn of the twentieth century to the Diriyah Biennale in 2022—but by that same token, connections can also be made between the people who engage with these frameworks, who come together to encounter one another, often against many odds and in the face of real-world conflicts and contradictions, wherein clean divisions give way to an overwhelming blend of transparency and opacity. To cite Wang’s sculptures once again, these are ultimately ambiguous spaces in which, much like the world at large, all directions are in play even if they are not always visible, no matter how hard one tries to control the narrative. People will be people after all. And not all people can be completely reduced to the neat distinctions projected upon them by political nationalism, particularly in the realm of international contemporary art and culture, where operating just under the radar of the state—and in turn learning to recognize the signs of that operation—has become a craft unto itself. And herein lies a final connection that might be drawn between China then and Saudi Arabia now, and what ‘Reform and Opening Up’ might mean from the perspective of contemporary art, especially when thinking about the rise of authoritarian world powers on a rapidly shifting geopolitical stage. As artists of China’s Stars era learned, art can only do so much depending on the context in which you live. Sure, it can reflect the world, edge change along, and troll power into revealing its weaknesses, but it’s also a long game when the conditions of freedom are not a given—a space where people can and do learn to swim with and against ever-changing tides.

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RaceY to at Venice

1 See this journal Issue no. 10, 2021; https://artdesign.unsw.edu.au/unsw-galleries/divan-issue-10

38 | 39 In the 1993 Venice Biennale, for the German Pavilion, Hans Haacke had the concrete floor jackhammered with the word “GERMANIA” in a font inescapably reminiscent of the 1930s, emblazoned in bold hard letters centrally on the facing wall. The arc wall gloomily illuminated at its upper rim, was the only specific build for the site, the rest was just a destroyed mess that paid homage to the history of bombed cities in Germany at the end of the Second World War. It was also the wilful desecration of the pavilion that had been proudly refurbished by Hitler and a fillip to the other buildings that had been made and still more planned and not achieved during the Third Reich. More universally it was a work that spoke to the hubris of overweening nationalism, and the price to be paid by imposing state will onto culture. Most strikingly, Haacke’s act of artistic creation was an act of vandalism that was also state-sanctioned. We all know that a cryptic characteristic of capitalism is that it likes to be admonished so that it can absorb that disapproval for its own profit. This artwork was far more than perverse self-excoriation and in hindsight it continues to stand as a corrective to much of the art that has been shown at Venice, before and since. For although there have been many specific national and historical references, it nonetheless prompts reflection upon how the Venice pavilion functions for each country, and the willingness of any country stake its share in its own trauma andAdmittedlyremorse., Australia is not the only country which would disallow something like Haacke’s Germania. It takes enormous confidence for a culture to allow such a gesture which then poses counter-questions about how carefully each country’s pavilions are curated. Australia has a special position within these vexed issues. Would it allow an exhibition in Venice that openly excoriates its own heritage and culture? Perhaps not so in Venice, although there have been numerous domestic instances such as the three The National exhibitions (2017–2019–2021)1 along with a regular schedule of exhibitions that feature Indigenous artists exclusively (Tarnanthi and the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards). There are therefore several issues at stake. There is plenty of rebarbative content in the above exhibitions, but it tends to be quarantined within a national discourse not allowed to blemish any external image. The first is the degree of tenor of complaint, dissent and division that Australia wishes to project to the outside world from these exhibitions, albeit that this “outside world” is a relative object, as this discord is almost wholly confined to Australia. The second is the pressure placed on curators to measure up to what are nonetheless fluid and obscure units that require a ‘balance’ of ethnicity. The third, in this balance is selective and measured, internal to the exhibition between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists but which, for the most part, proportionately disavows Australia’s Asian and Middle Eastern population. It would be naïve not to say that these discrepancies are not agenda driven. It would be constructive to national discourse to have a frank debate about the extent to which Venice is being used as a vehicle for projecting a finely-tuned socio-cultural image, and to what extent it has, in the last two decades or more, as a way of ensuring that the same unnuanced myths of Australia continue to bubble on in the global popular conscience. But this is at the expense of artists who may call the effectiveness of selective aesthetic strategies, and this at the expense of other sectors—some who identify as minorities, others simply of mixed heritage and others not at all but whose work is decisively nonAnglo in orientation—who are made to be content to nip at the cultural edges.

The presiding question, then, is: if curators run the risk of potential career-cancelling criticism if they exclude Indigenous artists, why is not the same criticism carried over to artists whose work is rooted in their Asian and Middle Eastern backgrounds? The immediate answer has inevitably to do with profitability and perception, suggesting that ethnic redress within cultural frameworks is not only driven by ethics but also by cynical considerations of benefit. In terms of social kudos, turnstile numbers, fomenting mass masochist guilt, the Asian card is simply not ace-high. Thus, from a cultural perspective—and this umbrella term can be taken to mean visual art or can be distended outward to other fields of activity from dance to music—it is as if Australian artists who identify with Asian or Middle Eastern ancestry are, with two isolated exceptions, apparently written out altogether from consideration of national representation at Venice. The exceptions have been isolated: Hany Armanious (born Egypt) represented Australia in 2011 and Simryn Gill (born Singapore) in 2013; there have been no other artists identifying with Asian descent since.

A normative pattern of black/white, Indigenous/non-Indigenous has slowly established itself with the paradoxical effect of entrenching as opposed to ‘addressing’ oppositionality. And it might also asked, what kind of Indigenous art might be favoured? Is there a discernible pattern of the kinds of Indigenous artists nominated to be shown at Venice over others.

These too have their own share of stories of dislocation and disenfranchisement.

Arguably yes. These are artists who either identify as having traditional weddedness to land and lore or else “contemporary/urban” who present a pared down and safely oblique version of postcolonial critique. For the first—the “traditional” tribally-oriented artists—the violence of resentment is considerably toned down as it is lies encrypted within styles that, depending on the artist and the group, is purposely unavailable to non-Indigenous, non-initiated eyes. For the urban artists who work within the Euro-American idiom of “art” (there is no such a word or concept in traditional Indigenous culture), the standpoint is almost exclusively of resentment of having to communicate in a system of language and signs that have been imposed. Yet this is a domestic ressentiment From a Venice perspective (to call it metonymically), there is no potential or politically feasible equivalent of Germania open to Indigenous artists inclined to like-minded heresies, such as, for example, Richard Bell or Gordon Hookey, who are known for their aggressive and confrontational perspectives of the unevenness of reconciliation. (On the other hand, and which it would be too digressive to go into any detail here, the combativeness of some artists, such as Bell and Hookey, which often tips into uncensored recklessness, is insulated from critique or any reasoned reprisal. For that any concerted attempt to do so would court negative consequences that would not be worth the effort in doing so.) On the opposite pole to Bell and Hookey are Indigenous artists for whom the etiquette of the art world establishment is strictly, if not slavishly observed, effectively institutionalizing Indigenous art into a charmingly tame, smilingly hale, and decorously picturesque entity.

The omissions of Indigenous artists that purvey a cynical attitude to Australian culture are tacitly branded as inhospitable, fêted within their own country as a sign of social toleration and free speech but, as evidenced so far, non-contenders as ambassadors. These omissions are not structural, they are not an intentional effect of policy—or of any official policy—which in fact makes it more, not less, sinister.

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at Venice

There are further points of nuance here that exist well outside any (clandestine) attitudes of the art establishment, and that is the disinterest of Indigenous artists, relative to non-Indigenous artists, of pursuing the political agendas in their work in overseas markets. This leads to the conclusion that the orientation and scope of the content of these artists is more national-local than international.

It adumbrates a contemporary cultural obsession in which every cultural group is the loser.

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It also begs the question as to the degree of pressure exerted on Indigenous artists—exerted by their Indigenous peers and also non-Indigenous curators fearful of being branded as “racist” and who unrepentantly “mine black gold” as the saying goes—to appeal to an amorphous body of sociohistorical guilt. Postcolonial narratives can be posited on a sliding scale, and there are countless tame versions as well that doff their hat to the expected ideology. To put this in plainer terms, what contemporary Indigenous art has taught us in Australia is that it is not genuine or authentic unless is engages in some form of dissent against the dominant non-Indigenous establishment, which then contributes to a culture industry of complaint. Such preconditions are further vitiated to the extent the complaint is also expected by non-Indigenous curators and audiences, so expected that it has become the sine qua non, of contemporary Indigenous art practice. This is the case even to the extent that any work that does not evince these themes is liable to be read as such, by default. to

Race

Written by a white male, it reported the in-coming director as saying: “Today, if you are a white male artist, you are not so interesting. It doesn’t mean to say you’re not a great artist—I think it’s more that this isn’t what is relevant for people now. You have to think in a timely way.” Not only was the statement surprisingly asinine, what was equally astonishing was that it was made with impunity: no de-platforming, no public outcry, no reprisal or retraction. This lack of backlash had a twofold connotation: that it was met with sympathy, or that the public were far too bewildered and psychologically beaten into submission to want to react, since white (straight) men are very cheap cultural currency and sadly a universalized target. There was some noise on social media, which caused Cotter to offer more circumspect comments in reply. It is a statement that should not go unobserved and its failure to be censured in any significant way means that it is emblematic of a set of contemporary conditions that have gained momentum since movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and the international trend of reassigning or tearing down monuments associated with a history uncongenial to the dominant narrative of the present. Critical race and identity theory tell us that there are perpetrators and victims, but more importantly that perpetrators exist even before one physical body can be found or positive verification made. It is a scattergun ontology of shame and vilification. One dramatic trait of these movements is that they are fundamentally purgative, on the level of flushing out of culprits accused and/or complicit in repression and abuses of power, but also on that of mass psychology, a cathartic expulsion of energy of behalf of wounded parties past and present. This means that these movements are more to be understood as strategies, or operations, that work on a collective level to flush out what is deemed harmful to the cause, while at a personal level to empower, or rehabilitate

On the advent of Suzanne Cotter taking on the new director position of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, on 13 February 2022, the national newspaper The Australian ran a short, deliberately provocative article headed, “White, male artists on notice: you’re boring.”

2 Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Zizek and Others, London and New York: Verso, 2003, p. 158

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The cultural complaint-industry, as it might be called, is principally systemic of postmodern and now new millennial capitalist culture. That is to say that it is an index of the authenticity of a cultural product, especially contemporary art, that it voices some revisionist position that impugns the regnant system. It is precisely what the system wants and what it readily absorbs for its own purposes. It is worth recalling a comment that theorist Terry Eagleton made in a review of a book by Gayatri Spivak almost two decades ago: “Nothing is more voguish in guilt-ridden US academia than to point out the inevitable bad faith of one’s position. It is the nearest a postmodernist can come to authenticity.”2 This is therefore a model that recent generations of artists and audiences have grown up with and have come to expect. The demarcation of black and white is highly legible and intelligible, and conflict that is tested and expected. But for other minorities in Australia the same kind of bifurcation is less possible, not only because their artwork is not necessarily combative, nor can it take advantage of what is now a cultural habitus, which is to descry colonization. Asians, Middle Easterners et al. can be seen as all participating in the ongoing process of colonization, which is how migration can be conveniently misread. As seen from the expected narrative of guilt and repatriation, disenfranchizement and repression are simply not plausible as they are altogether imprecise signifiers of culture. Without loss or shame there is less to play with.

It is now firmly established that the definitional difference between postmodernism and The Contemporary is that while the former dealt predominately with repositioning the terms of reference to modernism, the latter is more so focused on race and identity. Race and identity are highly volatile concepts however, as they typically veer into radical solipsism, which is another way of saying that they are so inward-focused, subjective and reliant on private languages that they can foreclose debate in one stroke. This focus has accelerated out of hand with development of social media (Facebook: 2004) and smartphones (Apple iPhone: 2007). One of the criticisms of identity politics is that there is a propensity for people to study themselves as opposed to the world (although it has admitted voice and image to many selves hitherto invisible). Yet this new visibility has its limits, as it is mass visibility which is the new techno-invisible, where everyone has an opinion but with a disproportionate number of people listening, suggesting narcissism en masse. That everyone (with the right technology) has a right and site for asserting self has eventuated in an intensification of opinion but not necessarily a deeper inquiry into how these opinions came to be or how they ramify. For example, teen female deaths by suicide as a result of social media trolling and bullying is now in epidemic proportions (the social scientist Jonathan Haidt Race to at Venice

42 | 43 with the aim of a more fair and benign status quo. They are testament to countries with a right to free speech (or the fight for it), but the darker consequence of the need to shift priorities is to expect that other voices not aligned with the movement, or narrowly associated with what it seeks to eradicate, are discredited using the same universalizing bias that eventuated the protest in the first place.

For many such movements are debilitated by their frequent belligerence and a tribalism that militates against diversity of opinion within their own ranks. In the quest for new grounds for authenticity, certain groups are actively sought out as ipso facto inauthentic.

d ı v a n 1 1l A D A M G E C Z Y is particularly helpful in enumerating and explaining this scourge).3 The primacy given to subjectivity and identity without the tools to develop what subjectivity and identity consists of, namely being-inthe-world and the social is the cause for countless cases of misery. This is not a digression. Refer back to the Cotter’s statement of priorities given to race and gender at the expense of any philosophical concern about art’s contemporary importance, a concern that is immanent to art since it historically became autonomous and secular. Or rather the questions over art’s functioning and quality have been shelved in favour over primacy given to gender and identity, and added to that, age, if you are not a stand-out cultural celebrity. Identity becomes the sine qua non for decisions and policy from which then the criteria for desirability are determined.

Aboriginal art, as art per se and not a set of conventions internal to ritualization, has several phases: 1970s: discovery; 1980s: growth and “acceptance” (with all the indelicacies that word inspires); 1990s: museification; 2000s: financial entrenchment and commodity boom (for the elite cultural stakeholders and almost exclusively white investors); 2010s and beyond: to position Aboriginal art into a place of central importance to Australian culture. The latter especially is a revisionary measure about giving voice to what had been excluded, but the obsessiveness with which it is put forward now has deleterious consequences. One is to sideline other minority groups, situating their plight as ancillary. And the degree of cultural importance invested in Indigenous art ought not be seen as wholly driven by egalitarian and ethical concerns, far from it.

The narrative is now a familiar one. The Indigenous people of Australia were gradually divested of their land and customs since British colonization in 1788. Their history of racial violence and eradication due to introduced illness is now well-documented. Indigenous art as it emerged gradually from the 1970s onward was a dynamic and forceful means of asserting their voice. I won’t venture into a long history of its Westernization from Papanya in the Australian Western Desert region to the present day. By Westernization, I mean the (in this case) dot painting artworks were transposed using paints on boards or canvas. But depending on how far one wishes to take it, this transposition, which is dramatic, is already from the beginning a form of colonization: a devolution

When Cotter invokes the power of the multitude of what constitutes “interesting”—it may have its bearing on a superficial set of criteria-based social pressures that appear to be the most visible and determined, but it is also a very convenient position to take from a curatorial perspective. For it means that questions over the ontology of art—which is indeterminate and perpetually changing—can be briskly elided to land squarely in what is only ostensibly sure because it is named. Nomenclature according to race and gender has now recently been officiated into many forms of communication especially in emails or in Zoom assemblies (she/her; them/they; he/him) which leads to more of a Pandora’s box than a solution (not an imprecisely couched problem). In other words, identity can be assigned as much as it is perceived. The leap over the ontology of art is confirmed but also confounded by Cotter with the caveat: “It doesn’t mean to say you’re not a great artist.” So-called “greatness” is built on several irreducible and abstract criteria in which relevance plays a central role. For an artwork to have value is for the ways in which it speaks to the past and to the present.

3 See Louis Perry, ‘The suicide rate among girls is higher than ever, as toxic social media becomes all-consuming’, The New Statesman, 3 March 2021; https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2021/03/suicide-rate-among-girls-higher-ever-toxic-social-media-becomesall; accessed 12 January 2022

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4 See Ian McLean, ‘The Aboriginal Memorial and the Militarization of Australian History’, di’van | A Journal of Accounts Issue 6 2019, pp. 48–61; https://artdesign.unsw.edu.au/unsw-galleries/divan-issue-6

d ı v a n 1 1l A D A M G E C Z Y of sacred and secret ritual stories and practices into a framework that is not simply formal but deeply historical and discursive—the ubiquitous Western tradition of painting.

It is perhaps the marriage of what, from an uninitiated and Western perspective, is a “primitive” style and that of familiar and near universal Western discourse that made Aboriginal art, as it gained popularity in the 1980s onwards, so congenial. Note as well that the first stirrings of Aboriginal art are based on traditional styles, ritual and lore. “Traditional” Aboriginal art as it is called, implies that the artist who produces it has direct contact to the languages, stories and rituals of his or her native land which, by assumption and implication, have been passed down for thousands of years. Traditional art, which to the Western eye is read through twentieth-century modernist abstraction, is in truth more like a form of writing, since it was through such configurations—what we would call designs—that were the main form of transmission of tribal stories that linked people to the land and their ancient ancestry. To begin with, the work of these artists was very pleasing aesthetically and wholly inoffensive and non-confrontational.

In many ways the milestone for Aboriginal art was The Aboriginal Memorial4 of two hundred hollow (tree) “log coffins” exhibited in 1988 concurrent with the Australian Bicentenary celebrations. Conceived by one of the country’s most significant Indigenous curators, Djon Mundine, the work was intended as a riposte to two hundred years of white colonization. Made by forty-three artists from the Ramingining and neighbouring communities of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, its form is more figurative and aesthetically different from any Western modernist style, ensuring that it could be perceptually “othered” from its realization. At the time, each of the two hundred poles (log coffins) symbolized a year of colonization. As a memorial and a symbol of mass graves and loss the message was clear enough, but there was still a countervailing point of view of a richly aesthetic and elaborate set of “primitive” objects, as evidenced by the fact that it never became an incendiary political object. If anything, it has become more of an artefact than anything resembling a cultural rebuke. In 2000 it was shown at the Hermitage Museum in Russia, itself a structure that came into being at the expense of immeasurable human suffering. As one of the most outstanding works of art to have been made in Australia it is now an icon of the National Gallery of Australia’s collection in Canberra. The Aboriginal Memorial was first exhibited in a far more raw, direct way, using red earth to symbolize the country’s “red centre”. Viewers had to navigate their way via a designated pathway stained with the red dirt. In its following incarnation at the NGA’s entrance foyer the size of the installation was attenuated (the logs closer to one another) to accommodate it in the museum space, and the unstable and messy red earth was replaced with stones, like in the manner of floor decoration in a custom apartment block. At the time of writing it has now been moved to the central gallery on level one, the “heart” of the NGA where it was first intended to be installed. And while it is now seen as a national treasure, it is the very degree to which it is valued that is an index of its inertia. As very much a cultural artefact, it is yet another example of the paradox of monuments, that they induce amnesia more than remembrance. (The French artist Christian Boltanski, whose career has largely been devoted to Holocaust recognition, once said that the only memorial that he would think of creating would be one that needed daily attention, otherwise it would be consigned to the same oblivion as all others.)

To put this another way, to include Indigenous artworks is to have the ‘deed done’. But in truth the obsession with inclusiveness is a continual deferral of the real event, for the utopian moment is devolved into the inert art object and any tacit, purported political objectives are quashed. That there is plenty of material for the contemporary Aboriginal artist and just as much opportunity to show it is a doubtful advantage however, because the two integers of antagonism and opportunity are inherently self-cancelling. The anomie that is the ontology of the contemporary Aboriginal artist is built on an inherent cultural dissatisfaction, which, if consistent would also have to spread to the very opportunities themselves to be exhibited, to receive commissions, and so on. Richard Bell and Gordon Hookey present extreme forms of this contradiction. What is open for speculation but is seldom asked is whether the same degree of aggression in their work would be countenanced let alone tolerated (that is, simply given a showing) by a non-Indigenous artist.

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Yet it is also this unevenness between the critical responses to their work and others that exposes a curious paradox: Aboriginal art is critically quarantined to its own country, while being elevated to

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The history of The Aboriginal Memorial is in many respects the plight of all traditional Aboriginal art. It suffers from decontextualization and thereby misreading. This occurs on several levels which begins with the divide between Judeo-Christian and Euro-American perspectives and those of Indigenous people. To relieve the need for understanding and, from that commentary and judgment is no impediment but to the contrary, it comes as an enormous relief especially to the nonIndigenous curatorium who can play fast and loose, turning their active unknowing into something of a cultural fetish. Moreover, to forego the need to know is a convenient vehicle for strategies of reconciliation—that being the common term used for peacefully redressing the racial injustices of the past and present—as they are assurance that all such strategies are open, shallow and tokenistic.

Thus, the role and dimensionality of Aboriginal art in the new millennium is arguably to safeguard a benign presence, and air of conciliation and redress, as a smokescreen or veil for their continued depredations. Measures of recognition through works of art are both tangible and oblique. This means that the presence of the art object represents a set of cultural and political objectives while such objectives remain abstract. It is this quantative approach by the predominately white, or white-managed curatorium that lies at the heart of the historical disproportion of artworks shown in group exhibitions, to proportion of population. White-black dualities are now so entrenched in Australian culture that Asian voices are effectively edited out. There is no compelling narrative to do so—or rather there is no space for a commensurate narrative to germinate organically. This concern ought not to be considered in an isolated way as such, but as a serious misprision that effectively effaces third, fourth (and onward) terms to the cultural binary, to show that there are many more and many different kinds of divisions that would then make the national representation more diverse The way that Australian culture has given primacy to artworks that are “representative” over ones that are provocative and potentially offensive to the etiolated status quo is evidence of this.

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disproportionate prominence. Instead of being called to task for simplistic generalization, or the lack of nuance that normally comes with overreach, critical responses have been and remain hagiographic and partisan, shrinking away from any form of critical analysis lest any negative comment be construed as racist. There is an obvious masochism here, albeit circumscribed within the limits of “art” which, however political it may be, is always different from direct, instrumental political action. In other words, self-excoriation is admissible within the insulated confines of elite culture. It would be beneficial to undertake a comparative analysis of critical assessments within Australia and internationally, from writers who are free of the same vested interests and threats of reprisal.

To put this another way, to explore the most unwelcome issues that continue to beset Indigenous culture makes for some unsettling subjects and art that is disagreeable. The word used for artists chosen for Venice is that the artist “represents” the country in question. The history of this concept does not hark back to when Venice began in 1895, but rather more firmly and visibly after the Second World War. Before that national representation was far more nominal. It took Nazism to bring art and racial representation out of anthropology and ethnography into politics, to press cultural products into the service of asserting national superiority with clearly defined rules and standards. While divesting itself of the overtly nationalist and racial baggage, the Venice Biennale that reemerged after Europe had begun to make sense of itself in the 1960s was one of national competitiveness. It has since been an opportunity to represent cultural capital. If we return to the introductory example of Hans Haacke, the main problem for Australia is the orientation of its cultural criteria, which means whether there is any prospect of broaching anything but a positive national image. The examples of Bell and Hookey begin to answer this question, as they present an image of Australia as “duplicitous, racist and banal”—whether this is true or not is open to debate and impartial comparison with other multi-racial countries with similar broad multi-cultural policies (translation: the Western Anglophone states of the UK, USA and Canada). It may be worth considering the benefits of such an approach as unpopular as it might be to the domestic domain: for the art world is driven by novelty and tends to reward flights of self-excoriation as courageous.

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To repeat, art, culture and capitalism as a whole thrive on condemnation, which it is all too apt to absorb. Hookey and Bell are founding members of an artist group known as proppaNOW, active since 2003.5 Known for the audacity of their opposition to the (white) Australian establishment, it is indeed because of this audacity that they have become examples of capitalist culture’s aptitude for absorbing its opposition. For proppaNOW and its associated artists are prey to their own brand: local Australian curators who need to spice up a group exhibition with political ressentiment will inevitably turn to them for support. To cite the concept of the Marxist theorist Georg Lukács, their political platform has become reified, objectified into a chattel for indiscriminate transaction for someone else’s profit. Reification places subjects and their actions into a depersonalized chain of things that is alienated from any personalizing or liberating functioning. If the new MCA director’s comments are used as any indicator—and they cannot be discounted as off-hand, they have symbolic merit as a cultural symptom if only because they roused next to no official opposition—then Australian artists will be increasingly judged along ideological lines of political self-interest.

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If the more strident Indigenous artists are ruled out of the Venice equation on the basis of offending national sensitivities, perhaps the biggest losers are, as mentioned, the Asian and Middle Eastern artists. The Asian, specifically the Chinese, population has had decisive presence in Australia with an influx of labourers firstly in the 1840s and then as miners during the Gold Rush in the 1850s (at the same time of the Gold Rush in California). According to the 2016 census, 5.5% registered as Chinese, 2.8% Indian, 1.4% Filipino and 2.8% Indigenous. Further, it is noticeable that a sizeable number of Chinese artists, especially those that migrated to Australia, or those already studying who were allowed to stay following the Tiananmen Square massacre, have participated in numerous international biennales, for example Guan Wei, Ah Xian, Lui Xiao Xian and Xiao Lu amongst others. An incontestable fact is that the international representation of such artists, numerically proportionate to population, outstrips that of Indigenous artists, despite the latter’s high exposure nationally. Notably, the main contingent of Australian Indigenous artists that continue to be exhibited in international biennales and festivals are largely traditional or deceased, as in the senior bark painters in Yirrkala, East Arnhem Land, who made the Yirrkala Drawings (1946-47), exhibited in the 2015 Istanbul Biennial curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.6 Artists who identify with their Middle Eastern heritage such as Khadim Ali (Pakistan/Afghanistan) and Khaled Sabsabi (Lebanon) have established careers with distinguished bodies of work about dislocation, inheritance and memorialization that chimes with many of the themes operative in biennales over the last decade (Lahore, Sharjah and Lyon; and Sydney, Yinchuan, Kochi-Muziris, Sharjah and Marrakech, respectively).That relatively large ethnic groups are downplayed in Australia to the point of invisibility in consideration of the most prestigious international exhibition venue is far more than a casual oversight. It speaks to a far greater divide in Australian culture in which otherness is structurally curated on the basis of saleable and serviceable narratives that speak to legibility and profit. The current primacy afforded Indigenous artists is not a positive move but a zero sum game of manipulation that will see them, again, in second place. See https://proppanow.wordpress.com/about-us/ See http://14b.iksv.org/participants.asp?id=71

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They were once “communist terrorists”, now they are objects of nostalgia, national heroes neglected by history and nation. For those who want to pay them homage the place to go are the ‘peace villages’ in southern Thailand where ex-Malayan Communist Party guerrillas settled after the signing of the 1989 peace accord that formally ended the communist insurrection that began in 1948. Betong is a grimy town near the border, visitors come to shop and for the seafood, and not a few men for sex. For some, though, the real attraction is Chulaporn Village No. 10 a few miles away. This village sits in a lush valley. Silver streaks of the corrugated roofs break the expanse of tropical green as the land slopes gently up towards the distant hills. In mid-morning the mist clings to the forest still, but close to the road the sun has sliced through the low clouds and shows up the rows of huts, neat and well-spaced like suburban dwellings—houses of the ex-guerrillas and their families. On the road people are walking about, each with a wide straw hat, one hand holding a basket, a scythe or a spade: a mundane village scene in Asia. The bus stops outside the History and Heritage Museum. Inside are the sad remains of the tools of the revolutionary—firearms, ammunition, pamphlets and flags, aged and dust-covered on the display tables. Outside the museum I meet a group of young students. Chirpy as young birds, their faces wet from the heat and excitement, they have come from Kuala Lumpur, a sprightly young woman tells me, to find out for themselves “another history of the struggle for independence.” She talks as she scans the village with her video camera, then zooms in on an old Chinese woman’s bouncy stride down the road. To her everything is a photo opportunity, and in her mind every stranger on the road is an ex-guerrilla fighter, an embodiment of revolution and anti-colonial struggle. In the peace village the ‘old comrades’ run shops, guesthouses and eating-places, and take tour groups to the old jungle camps and hideouts. In the evenings, they hold court at the Peace Restaurants and tell tales of endurance and great suffering. “The most frightening were the bombers. They flew so high, just specks below the clouds. Then the bombs came: the explosions all around you, the horrible noise they made; you lay flat and tried to dig the ground with your fingers.”

The audience listens with rapt attention. The storyteller’s eyes glisten, his voice a sad quiver as he speaks, stirred by what he has called up from memory. This is what the audience has come to hear, the ‘revolutionary heroes’ have not endured the struggle with the mute stoicism of beasts, they have lived a life of mighty purpose and nothing can be held against them. There is the desire for revolution, but one makes sure they are not on the wrong side of history. We in Malaysia have ours: the communist uprising that started in July 1948 in post-war British Malaya and ended with a ceasefire agreement in 1989 signed by Malaysian and Thai governments and the Malayan Communist Party in southern Thailand. The four decades of conflict have made the Malayan Emergency, as the anti-insurgency was called, a roost for ideological illusion and historical myth. There’s nothing like an abortive revolution to coddle romantic nostalgia for those who fought for the ‘good cause’ and failed. For the vanquished, they nurse their past like a selfinflicted wound, painful but worthwhile. While the Malaysian State continues to push the line that The Emergency was a great anti-communist crusade, the ex-insurgents, physically and ideologically spent, are settled across the border, a sad remnant of a once great adventure. Thus, a mission awaits to rescue them from oblivion and restore them to their rightful place as ‘national heroes’.

1 Souchou Yao, The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a small, distant war, Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2006

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Even I have had a go at it.1 A leftist academic, I took to the book project with zeal. At the university, Marxism was of the ‘arm-chair’ sort: strong on ‘culture’ and meek on the practicalities of guerrilla warfare. One avails oneself to the literature on The Emergency written by historians and strategic studies experts—virtually all anti-communist and pro-British. The leftist writings were, with few exceptions, in Chinese, including personal memoirs of ex-insurgents retired in Hong Kong and Macao after spending decades in exile in China. While the academic literature tends to be proBritish these writings are predictably self-serving and nostalgic.

For a writer—and for an artist too, all this poses a formidable challenge. How does one navigate the mud slog of ideological illusion and justification, on both sides? The Emergency covered the years 1948 to its official ending in 1960; it dragged on intermittently until 1989 with the signing of the peace accord. These four decades cover tumultuous world events: the British post-war reoccupation of Malaya, founding of People’s Republic of China, the Korean War, the Cold War, the wars in Indochina with communist victories in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and the fall of the Soviet Union. These events affect the way we view the world and anything that has do with communism and revolution. As for communism, one cannot but point to its moral bankruptcy in Maoist China and the Soviet Union, and in Malaysia we are reminded of what took place in our neighbourhood, especially the genocide by the Khmer Rouge to bring about a new Kampuchea.

The communist revolution in Malaya did not succeed. In Malaysian people’s minds the conflict is a ghostly shadow, a mixture of actual events, imagination and ideological misconceptions.

The Singaporean artist Sim Chi Yin also went to southern Thailand to meet the exinsurgents and visit the guerrilla bases and ambush sites. Sim’s work has long had a strong political tinge. Before her current series on The Emergency, there was a series of photographs of Chinese miners with black lung disease and migrant workers in Beijing, and her travel to the North Korea-China border produced desolate images of nuclear installations and the surrounding landscape. However, it is The Emergency’s communist insurrection that has most preoccupied her. The Emergency is, in one sense, a primarily a ‘Chinese story’: the MCP leadership and guerrillas were mostly ethnic Chinese, so were their victims.2 The artist’s grandfather was a communist sympathizer captured by the British and sent in exile to China, where he later died. A decade in the making, her various ‘interventions’ were brought together in a photographic exhibition, One Day We’ll Understand, a set of images of the Malayan conflict, and its companion work, Remnants (2017–ongoing) at Zilberman Gallery, Berlin, in October 2021.

2 See Anthony Short, ‘Race and politics in Malaysia’ Asian Survey 10 (12), 1970, pp. 1081–89; also The Communist Insurrection in Malaya 1948–1960, London: Frederick Muller, 1975

A vertiginous stupor follows your every step as you wade through the texts, documents and artwork. The dividing line is clear and binding. The official version is, the British were fighting for democracy and later the Malaysian State maintaining peace and order, while the MCP were attempting to seize power on direction of Moscow and Beijing. On the other side, the British were holding on in empire’s twilight in Malaya, and the insurgents were fighting to bring about a rice-bowl revolution for all citizens. If only for that, you want to be on the side of the communist insurgents, but post-Cold War geopolitics as much as communist regimes’ colossal debacles pull you back.

Many of the images in the Interventions series utilize documents from the Imperial War Museum in London. These are pictures of waging a war of low-level conflict, of long-range patrols and the use of helicopters: military deployments that later become familiar during the Vietnam War.

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4 Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Straus & Giroux, 1973, p. 44

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In contrast, the artwork in the Remnants series is of relative quietude, meditative. Included here are photographs of ambush sites and old guerrilla camps, and a video installation of former deportees and exiles performing revolutionary songs.3 There are still suggestions of blood and violence, but the tone of the images is relatively muted, along with its overt polemics. The referents and images that constitute One Day We’ll Understand are diverse, complex. It is not too much, as you mentally take stock, to approach her work as posing a dialectic, a dialogue of opposites and counterpoints.

For Sim, graphic realism is a blunt instrument that has to be undermined. We witness in Interventions the profound ambivalence in photography’s testimonial to reality. With her postcolonial bent, the images retrieved from the Imperial War Museum offer an expression of her political stance.

One image shows a British soldier on a patrol, his back turned, a figure flanked by dense bushes and all but swallowed by the jungle mist. In another, a helicopter is suspended in mid-air, your eyes follow the rope and the soldier making his descent. It is an image of stillness, there is no frantic whirling of the helicopter’s blades to suggest the sense of flight. The images have been reworked and manipulated, as evident in the brownish tint that edges out the natural green your mind, if not the eyes, expects of a jungle war. To add to its effect, the archival marks on their reverse are also seen to recall their home in an institution devoted to memorializing British military ventures overseas. And pointedly, the soldier descending from the helicopter is set against an enlargement of a memo that identifies the item in the museum’s catalogue. The effects are achieved, we are told, by placing the pictures on a lightbox and photographing them. There only a small sense of imperial grand gestures in these images, yet each casually reminds you of its origin and political significance. The manipulation aims to deface, to vandalize, the very potency—and the imperial associations—the photographs assume for themselves. This is a fairly conventional artistic makeover, but one granted a philosophic weight by Susan Sontag’s keen admonition: “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality… One can’t possess reality, one can possess images.”4 The past is a battlefield, everyone can have a go at making it theirs, and in shaping it in their own ideological image. Clearly, the images in Interventions insinuate an intent—an alternative narrative that is anti-colonial, pro-insurgent and ‘communist-friendly’. It settles your mind. In Malaysia, or Singapore—the artist’s home country —such a ‘communist-friendly’ exhibition would certainly raise a few political eyebrows. It apparently did not in a city that had historically faced the wraith of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. There you have it: the palpable silence on the moral catastrophe of communism in Asia and Eastern Europe. We know the defacement of the official images of The Emergency is meant to reverse the ideological mirror: the British military the villain, the insurgents the heroes. Yet, this is assuming too much—a sin the follows the artist in all her work. For the alteration of images has other effects than imperialism-busting; the manoeuvre has the habit of retreating to obtuseness. When that happens, it creates a strange evocation that the postcolonial magic of counter-narrative is not so easily pulled off. https://www.zilbermangallery.com/one_day_well_understand-e287.html; 10 March 2022

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54 | 55 One image, Remnants #11 (2017) shows an elephant appearing from the dark jungle charging toward the viewer. The image is not defaced as such, but tetchy manipulation disorients the viewer and defamiliarizes the familiar. Elephants are a legend in the insurgents’ lives, a source a food when a shot could be risked; the felling of the beast was a celebrated occasion for the men and women on a starvation diet. Is this what the artist has in mind? What occurs here is a modishly postmodern gesture that destabilizes the image and its discursive potency. In a rare moment, things are left wide open. Our mind wanders to other terrains. If the images celebrate the hardship of the insurgents’ existence, why not consider the natural grandeur of the jungle, or the lyricism of an Eastern adventure, such as T. E. Lawrence in Arabia? The lithe signification of nature edges aside the oppressive ideological intent. The viewer is let free and allowed to make up their mind. It is a moment of rare pleasure to be had from an exhibition. For all her erasure and defacement of the real, Sim appears to be only half aware of realism’s fetishistic power of self-representation. An image insists on telling its own story. It is hard put to tame it to serve a singular narrative. After the magnificent beast in Remnants #11, it is a shock to reach the ultra-realism of Remnants #19 (2015–18), a stark image of an artificial limb. If this is to elicit pity for those who suffered at the government counterinsurgency, the social and political elements feel hemmed in. The artist has already turned the table, you are led to see the image as a part of the horror of the imperial undertaking. In this, the artist is aided by the stark pictorialism, as much as by her predilection for interpretive certainty. In this struggle—for the viewer as well as for the artist—the battle is always half won. Through the image, the artist has tried to solicit a sense of pity for those who suffered. But the wheel of exegesis does not stop its turning. There is meaning on top of another meaning. The clinical depiction, the medical inferences: they flatten the alternations of a particular history, and they universalize a revolutionary violence that is packed full of its specific agendas and strategies. It is disorienting to see the work going the way of the ‘in a war everyone suffers’ bourgeois sentimentality.Wedo not expect an artist to be consistent in their work, in the conceptual scheme of their execution. We like them to sustain one step at a time in keeping the mastery of form, the next holding the work to the free, exuberant play of ideas and in their realizations. Artistic strategy, like carnal tenderness, is best left to soft whispers and affectionate insinuations. Never coy with her intentions, the artist of One Day We’ll Understand shows her cards openly. If Sim’s guileful reworking of the images of war is strategic, so is her turn to stark realism. It puzzles us but a little when we ask, what drives the artist’s work? Where is the conceit? Where is deployment of the actual and the imaginative, the fantasy and socially real, that propel artmaking? The artist wants to have her say and has made the communist insurrection the presiding preoccupation. In one aspect, the work in both the Interventions and Remnant series try to achieve a sense of different polemical heat, of a blend of manipulated images and naked pictorialism, but they do not move into a position of dialectic engagement. They feel disconnected, when connection and focus are evidently what the artist is looking for. By the time the viewer engages the Remnants series, the Sontag-like rebuttal of pictorialism—evident in her defacement of images—has all but been abandoned. Realism has become a commanding feature. One image, entitled Interrogation (2020) in the Remnant series shows a group of captured insurgents squatting outside a police station—four sorry-looking men, their hands bound, their eyes downcast. As they wait to be interrogated by the police, some would perhaps wonder at their fate. After their trial, if found guilty they would face imprisonment or the death penalty, and some Nostalgia and intervention in colonial archives

Daniel Heller-Roazen, Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons. E-book. New York: Zone Books, 2021, p. 17 Ibid., p. 19

Art’s charming conceit collapses: there is no more the ‘almost real’, no more the teasing denial of ‘what you see is what you get’. You feel photography’s validation of the real is affirmed. Realism is a striking yet risky strategy. You feel what you have seen gives you a certain knowledge of what is depicted. Not only that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, there is also the sheer magic of the sensation of the eye. Still, words and ideas never give up, as they circle around and around the war wagon. What makes Interrogation such a defining act in the exhibition? The answer is surely the fetishistic power of similitude, the likeness between what we see and the piteous figures waiting upon their fate. The work is without conceit; the secret is out. The artist wants to arouse your conscience; the anti-colonial fighters deserve fair treatment. But similitude is not enough to achieve this without tacking onto something outside itself, without the play of ideas. For our identification with the insurgents is a double fact. For the moral personality of the communists is allied with the lack of the same in a British soldier. The lack of moral excellence in the enemy is a code, a discursive sleight of hand that illustrates the abundance of such a trait in the figure of our identification. The divide in one and the other is organic, natural. The result is a kind of non-person who “can be grasped as the positive expression of anything — animate or inanimate, good or bad, real or imaginary—that ‘person’ is not.”5 As the philosopher Daniel Heller-Roazen explains, his idea of a non-person is tied to the idea of being a person, in the sense that a “nonstarter” is a starter, a “non-event” an event, or a “nonentity” an entity.6 Interrogation is all but dependent on this work of inferences. What happens when we refuse to observe the game plan? Does one side so easily reflect the other’s lack? The British military was no angel, neither were the insurgents. Facing the artwork, we feel we are being hauled into a cause we barely recognize or agree with. This is the pitfall of the postcolonial take on The Emergency that the artist so keenly puts forward, a conceptual weakness that haunts the exhibition at every step. As with Interrogation, Remnants #3 is sparse and oppressively silent. In the stillness, ‘absences’ of all sort press upon you. Domestic normalcy should be here, but it is not. And the rickety furniture is impotent in making a stand against the truancies. Those from Malaysia recognize it as a room—probably the eating area—in a house of the working poor. The table, the faded plastic chairs, the concrete floor, the wooden partition of old paint: they make no pretence to interior decoration. From the doorway, you see a television on top of a cabinet, chairs neatly stacked, a white table—the sitting room proper. Here in the eating room, you can imagine, after a meal and the dishes are cleared,

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d ı v a n 1 1l would be sent to Communist China to suffer the deprivations of a socialist paradise. The detainees look stoic, pathetically young. Each thrusts out his chest a bit for comfort or in a feint display of defiance. Pictures of insurgents, you remember, all seem to look like this in the newspapers and official documents. At the police station, on the mud path under guard after capture, it is the same taunt figures of men and women, the same cotton shirts and blouses and dishevelled hair, the same mystified look in their eyes: “What next?”

It is a photograph of brown pigment, otherwise free from any doctoring. There is nothing more expressive of Sim’s identification with the insurgents than this image of evident pathos.

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the adults would gossip and talk about the recalcitrance of the young, financial worries, good news of someone getting a new job—the preoccupations of any working family. The rustic room may well reflect the artist’s own family background, but we don’t know this. It is a picture of want, but there is no suggestion of penury or grave deprivation; lean and well kept, the room lends dignity to a family of limited circumstances. Most communist insurgents would have come from a family setting like this, perhaps including the artist’s grandfather. If this was indeed the case, the artist has come a long way from Singapore to Berlin, from a regional artist to one of international fame. In this movement, in this professional upgrading, the sense of nostalgia is hard to ignore. It is easy to make too much of the ‘absences’ in the room, as if an ‘absence’ simply implies non-presence. We recall Heller-Roazen’s insight: an absentee is not one who is non-present, so much as one who lives vicariously through its other and its opposite qualities. Read ‘absence’ as ‘loss’ and you begin to feel the artist’s need to fill the room with all kinds of referents. It may be a cliché to suggest the room is symbolic of the artist’s own loss—but of what? Maybe the loss of existential certainty due to her communist-grandfather’s death. Perhaps it is aligned with the fact of the insurgents’ sad end in various manners. Or ‘loss’ is a reminder of the failed anti-British insurrection, a theme that haunts the whole exhibition. All not unreasonable guesses; the artist’s persistent prodding has inexorably taken us there. The picture has told its story. Or has it?

Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, London: Merlin Press, 1963, p. 8

8 Ibid.

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One Chinese New Year, on my visit home, my mum handed me a black and white photograph. The man in the photograph stood confidently, hands on hips. He was not tall, had a high forehead and thick lips... and a camera was slung around his neck. Another photographer in the family? I was intrigued. I’ve driven around northern Malaysia and southern Thailand, in the towns where you’d lived and worked, in the so-called ‘black areas’ where the Communists were active. Where they had ambushed Commonwealth soldiers, shot British rubber estate managers, where they hid in limestone caves, lived with tigers and elephants in the jungles. I visited old tin mines founded by the British, and that jail where they had kept you.10

This from the Marxist critic Georg Lukács: “The central aesthetic problem in realism is the adequate presentation of the complete human personality.”7 By “complete human personality” he does not suggest individualism at the core of bourgeois humanism. As a Marxist thinker, he could hardly approve of the depiction of men and women except as a complete being socially and historically constituted. “For the inner life of man,” Lukács writes, “its essential traits and essential conflicts, can be truly portrayed only in organic connection with social and historical factors.”

8 In other words, representation of the real must conform to certain aesthetic laws: “The true artistic totality of a literary work depends on the completeness of the picture it presents of the essential social factors that determine the world depicted.”9 The key word here is “totality.” An author—Lukács is speaking of the nineteenth-century novels of Scott, Balzac, Dickens—must break through the appearances of the individual characters so as to reveal the historical and political contradictions they embody. The common sin of Marxist thought is reductionism, the idea that a person’s individuality can be explained solely by history and the social circumstances that have made them. Lukács is more subtle, for him to show up a character’s total character is to give them a moral complexity beyond the self-calculating individual. Literary realism—like art’s visual power—is so riveting, so aesthetically satisfying that we tend to forget that while people make themselves, they are also fashioned by social forces outside themselves. Thus, the problem of realism: its enthralment makes us belittle the social and the broader circumstances. No wonder, after the defacement of the official images of The Emergency, the return to realism feels like a let-down. The sparse room in Remnants #3 loses its potency, a depiction shorn of social truth or association, in Lukács’ phrasing. The signifier does not engage, but direct itself to the personal, to the artist herself. In an interview with the writer Maaza Mengiste, Sim reads a letter she wrote to her dead grandfather: Dear Granddad, I never met you and the family, from the time I was a child, never talked about you. Except once. Dad mentioned in passing that you had died in China in the 1940s and, for some reason, had a monument built to you. I thought it was strange that you—having been born in Hong Kong but then taken as a baby to Malaya, where you grew up, lived, and worked—would have died in our ancestral village in China. Your father had left the village at the turn of the 20th century, along with a wave of migrant Chinese labourers headed for Southeast Asia, America, Australia, and Africa. And why did the family never talk about you in the 60 years since your death? Why does Grandma’s gravestone not bear your name?

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58 | 59 9 Ibid, p. 147 10 https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/sim-chi-yin-maaza-mengiste/; accessed 10 March 2022 Nostalgia and intervention in colonial archives

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What teary emotions and longing are expressed in the letter. In her work—in her life, her martyred grandfather looms large. The letter sets itself firmly in the present, but the past the author refuses to let go. Reading the letter reminds me of the communist apparatchik mother in the film Goodbye Lenin (2003) who falls into a coma just before the reunification of Germany and wakes up to a post-communist world while her mind is marooned in the Soviet past. She suffers from the malaise of “Ostalgie”—nostalgia for the East—and in Malaysia and Singapore, ‘East’ was the Socialist Malaya that never came about. And this nostalgia has an urgency, a psychological impulse that cannot be repressed and fills every crevice of the sad, empty room. If the gallery room is sparse, it is also crowded with memory and the artist’s unassuaged yearning. What it offers up is the doubleness of realism: its ability to drawn attention to itself, and its reliance on all manner of absences. Absences and emptiness always insinuate presences. It is the principle of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, as much as that of Sim’s eerie room. The insurgents, those prosecuted and banished to China, victims of the conflict, and the artist’s grandfather are residing in there, figures of imagination and of the artist’s own creation. Nostalgia is a form of desire, it finds expressions in wilful and unconscious forms. I had an experience of this when, accompanied by a guide, I went to the Martyrs’ Memorial that commemorates the 1970 purging of alleged spies and counter revolutionaries who supposedly infiltrated the MCP. Before the monument, with the boiling sun beating down on us, we—I an academic, he an ex-jungle fighter—were both out of place and historically irrelevant. The MCP’s homicidal errors were imbedded in each dent of the memorial; any sense of our nostalgia was washed over by its grey ugliness Sim has bravely hung on to her postcolonial ideal which is her strength and as well as her weakness. As she rewrites the communist insurrection into personal narrative, the communal suffering morphs into private grief. The communist revolution in Malaya was a failed revolution, and there is nothing more romantic than an abortive rebellion. It is a romantic vision borne out of despair, and the need to salvage some residue of grandeur from what happened. Your mind is filled with the ‘near misses’ and ‘if only’. With a failed revolution, it is all ideological reverie and there’s little need to confront the reality and its consequences. We know that struggle sessions were held in the jungle to stage the persecution of alleged spies and subversives: an aping of the Cultural Revolution that took place at its height, in China. Perhaps that was evident enough of the MCP’s quick turn to violence, and of communism’s propensity for blood and prosecution of enemies of all hues and shades. History is invariably a blend of actual events, public myth and personal memory. When history is written down, its carries, in every aspect, the author’s presence and desire. And history is endorsed by images artists and others have created to celebrate or condemn a past, and to serve the present. Do we need to go into history’s busy traffic with images? From Picasso’s Guernica (1937) to the socialist realism of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China—each is a contribution to the making of history, each is a sign of political thought of different ideological hue. With The Emergency, the issue is not one of veracity, or even one of restoring ‘revolutionary martyrs’ to their rightful place in history. Before that, we have to reckon with the very power of images: the way they move us and render real and normal what we see. Pictures are not only ‘worth a thousand words’, but in their potency, they are ‘words’ themselves. Images are silent but never dumb. What we encounter in

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With history’s hindsight, we know communism is not free from ideological illusions or straight falsehood. But why stop there? Why not engage with the impossibility, the fetishism built in all ideologies and their narratives? For an artist, this is an undertaking that has to face unflinchingly both truth and falsehood—just as they have to, more viscerally, act out the intangible and the phantasmagoric. With The Emergency, so much a part of that history is a sense of reverie, an emotional stupor that we have associated with the uprising and its repression. In the same vein, we may ask: apart of the 1970 mini-Cultural Revolution in the Malaysian jungle, if the MCP had actually come to power, would there be struggle sessions to prosecute the pro-British reactionaries, the Malay feudal elite, the ‘running dogs’ that put themselves behind the blood deeds of the counterinsurgency? The struggle sessions would be reminiscent of those that took place in Mao’s China. But China is too far away—in history and in distance. Then you remember: communism is not so. The Southeast Asian region too has seen the genocidal rage of a communist regime: Democratic Kampuchea under the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Sim’s genius has been her way of making us cease our pondering when the Malayan Emergency presents itself as a story that leads to more stories. Such is the potency of her work that it makes us willingly, complicitly give over to her view of things. The other reason is the ideological tenor of her work. Who these days would want to cast doubt on a series of artworks full of the heat of anti-colonial polemics? Who would not want to cheer an artist who aligns herself against the post-Cold War neo-liberalism? Postcolonial studies have left their mark on artmakers and writers.

The effect, however, is not all positive. We tend to forget postcolonialism is not anti-colonialism. With the best of postcolonial literature, terse polarity of perpetrator and victim is muted, even broached. It was Edward Said who wrote, “On both sides of the imperial divide men and women shared experiences—though differently inflected experiences—through education, civic life, memory, war.”12 This is true for any European colonies as for Malaya. And speaking of “shared experiences”, had not the British and their post-war enemies, the communists, once joined in fellowship in the fight against the Japanese in the Second World War? In one sense, Said’s insight simply points to the nature of everyday life in a colonial situation. In Malaya, the British ruled and imposed their authority, while the people lodged themselves in the system that oppressed as much as it protected life and property. British rule was one of great political fairness: it often left sufficient slack in the reins of control and oppression such that its benign intentions came through for most people. We do well to remind ourselves of this relationship, this bridging of the structural divide when we approach something like The Emergency.

60 | 61 the streets, at home before the television, or in an art exhibition constitute what the anthropologist Michael Taussig calls “implicit knowledge.”11 With its profound banality, “implicit knowledge”makes us blind to the reasons why certain things are real, and certain ideas true and valid. And this we witness in One Day We’ll Understand: when an historical event is transformed into images, it becomes objectified; it is given a tangibility it does not have. The Emergency becomes a smoothrunning narrative where the divide between heroism and villainy is clear cut and unbreachable.

11 Michael Taussig, ‘History as sorcery’, Representations, no. 7, Summer 1984, p. 87

12 Edward W. Said, ‘Always on top’, London Review of Books, 25(6), 2004, p. 3

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In Singapore and Malaysia, enticed by the romantic grandeur of communist revolution, postcolonial revision of history has taken us down the path where insurgents tread on the side of justice, and those who question their cause on the side of the pro-British loyalists. In this sense, Sim’s approach is at one with what is prevalent in the West generally: the postcolonial revision of history, the pursuit of a form of identity politics that is both affirmative and censorious. At worst, both approaches enable the bolting of the door of debate, the shutting down of the free play of ideas and perspectives. If it has not come to that, it is something art practitioners from the region should make a point of resisting.

Australia has, since the governments of Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, worked towards being a part of fast developing Southeast Asia, economically and culturally. Perhaps we should seize the spirit: lessons can be learned across the region, and the boldness and the defections in Sim’s artwork serves to illustrate both the possibilities and the perils for Australian artists in their own take on the postcolonial project. and intervention in colonial archives

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13 Spencer Chapman, The Jungle is Neutral, London: Chatto & Windus, 1949

Writing this based in Australia puts one in a reflective note. Looking back, it seems remarkable that the artist’s approach to colonial history and the righting of wrongs are resonant with much of the artmaking in Australia. Like Sim, Australian artists and writers have challenged the nation’s colonial history, emphasizing the massive deprivations of the Aborigines. And the notion of social justice is extended to a canopy of contemporary issues on gender equality, the acceptance of the LGBTQ community, the admission of refugees and asylum seekers. Allied with these are the contested identity politics and the interrogation of history. All these are hopeful signs of progressive agendas as they come to prevail in Australian art practices. It is, of course, the nature of political art to take sides, to choose the perpetrators and identity the victims; still this pursuit is not without its unhappy outcomes. This critique of Sim’s elegant and powerful work has been to shine a light on the way a postcolonial approach to artmaking tends to polarize and impede imagination’s palpitating flow which, lest we forget, is worth the fight for as well. In contemporary Australia, each of us is not a racist or a non-racist, a perpetrator of social injustice or their victim; but both if only some of the time.

Yet, much of the postcolonial approach to artmaking is about shutting the fences when the flow of traffic promises so much. On “shared experience” something can be made of the friendship between MCP leaders, particularly Secretary General Chin Peng, and the British officers to whom protection and aid was given in the darkest years of the Japanese occupied Malaya during World War two. One of the British officers, Spencer Chapman—the ‘T.E. Lawrence of Malaya’— wrote in his book The Jungle is Neutral (1949), his full praise of the communists who made up the only effective anti-Japanese force after the expulsion of the British.13 Such facts would have enlivened Sim’s project, giving it a greater worldliness and conceptual poise.

The realization that almost a year later there are still few words that will best describe what happened in Afghanistan in August 2021, is rather daunting and somewhat defeating. Partly because no words small enough to fit this page can carry the weight and gravity of the sea of pain and loss unleashed upon a nation for years, made ever more visible overnight. The end of an occupation marked the rise of the despotic Taliban regime. It is a titanic change that is increasingly more visible, but we are still to fully grasp its consequences and effects upon the people in all its forms. Who won, and who lost in the two decades-long war waged upon the land is a bewildering question, but what has become ever more evident is that it was the ordinary citizens whose lives and futures were gambled in a contest for power between the United States and its allies, and the Taliban. In our increasingly connected but shockingly distant and remote world, it didn’t take long for everyone to become spectators of the end of the US imperial game which they had long ignored. As scenes of desperation at Kabul Airport were etched onto television screens everywhere, famously enshrined by the unbelievable desperation of the men who saw no other hope but to cling onto the C-17 US Air Force plane, only to then live on as falling stars, captured by cell phone cameras in broad daylight. Two of them, Safiullah Hotak and Fida Mohammad, had clung to each other before falling onto a rooftop in Kabul. While it feels mentally and physically jarring to think of the fear that must have crept into them as they took on this journey to the impossible, their eventual destiny served as a reminder of how the American occupation and its foreign and local allies viewed the local population and their lives as dispensable. This was made even more visible by a drone strike on civilians in Kabul the day before the US withdrawal, the shooting of civilians by on the ground and a suicide attack at Kabul Airport. While the deaths, the losses, desperation and calamities of the end of the American occupation were genuinely shocking to the world, albeit momentarily, if one were to look closely and truthfully at the events of the last two decades, this end was nothing but expected—another moment in an utterly destructive war that had destroyed many lives was only set apart because it was no longer invisible—giving the world a glimpse into what truly this long war was: a bloody occupation blanketed under the guise of a mission for democracy and freedom. On the other hand, this moment for reflection upon the US and its allies’ occupation was rather quickly overshadowed by the return to power of the Taliban, whose own track record of violence and atrocities rivals that

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In terms of what motivates my work, sometimes it’s a fragment drawn from life, or something that grabs my attention. It comes from bodily perception, and from nature. When motivation appears it can take the form of excitement, entanglement, passion or courage. It changes with the years and grows with the seasons. My failure in personal relationships prompted an awakening in me. Curiosity prompts me to continually seek to discover myself and get to know the world. Over time my concerns shifted from myself to society, from unconscious and passive resistance to making conscious decisions and letting go. The experience of artistic practice makes me realize that the right to express my own free will is as important to me as the air I breathe. If a project impinges on this I will forsake the opportunity. When I fired a gun into the telephone booth that was my art work Dialogue in 1989, I didn’t think of myself as a performance artist. At that time, all I wanted to do was to express myself. I remember when I was in the second year of art school, I had a conversation with Maryn Varbanov, the Bulgarian artist who taught at the academy, and I asked him: what is art? His answer was: “It is to use all means to express what you want to express.ˮ I am still inspired by his words to this day… A performance is generally something that can be repeated continuously. In fact, with each performance I have done, I have had some misgivings, and have had the urge to do it again, but then I think, life is actually a performance work, and it is impossible to repeat what you have experienced—the regrets and accidents, excitements and losses. These are all real experiences at certain moments in one’s life.

The lives of individuals and history are intertwined, just like the performance of Tides, you fall down and you get up again, and then you rush towards the depths of the sea, to battle with the treacherous tides of life. Chinese literati painting is known for the depictions of the four gracious plants, also known as the four gentlemen: plum, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum. These plants represent qualities of pride, seclusion, strength, and simple elegance, respectively. Looking back on those thirty years, it is the word “strengthˮ that guided me through many difficult years. Choosing bamboo poles to be inserted on the beach in Sydney has a certain cultural meaning for me. Claire Roberts in conversation online with Xiao Li, 8 November 2021: see the full transcript see http://en.xiaoluart.com/index.php?c =show&id=81 For further information on Xiao Lu’s performances, see the text by Lynne Howarth-Gladston/Paul Gladston, ʽBeyond Dialogue: Interpreting Recent Performances by Xiao Luʼ, files/lynne_howarth-gladstonpaul_gladston_beyond_dialogue-interpreting_recent_performances_by_xiao_lu.pdfhttps://artdesign.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/atoms/

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Tides was created for the exhibition at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney. Because it was a thirty-year retrospective exhibition, the thirty bamboo poles represented the thirty years since the China/Avant-Garde exhibition, and my arrival in Australia. When I conceived the work in China, I was thinking that the space at 4A was limited, so I decided to make an outdoor work. From 1989 to 2019, the ups and downs of my life and art have impacted my fate like the tides.

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80 | 81 of the occupying armies. Nevertheless, this tragic turn of events marked the power of visibility and the urgent need for a critical reexamination of Afghanistan’s recent history beyond the official narrative dispersed during the American occupation. This monumental task has been at the core of the artworks produced by the artist Aziz Hazara. Despite his young age and the pressures of working in a hostile social and convoluted artistic environment, he has long sought to critically reexamine the visible and invisible sides of the war and how it continues to shape Afghan society.

1 Erica Gaston, ‘Night Raids: For Afghan Civilians, the Costs May Outweigh the Benefits’, Open Society Foundations, 19 September 2011; https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/night-raids-afghan-civilians-costs-may-outweigh-benefits

3 See https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-budgetary-costs-date-us-war-afghanistan-2001-2022

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In a rather enigmatic scene, three young boys are photographed standing shoulder to shoulder at the centre of the image. With barren hills behind, glimpses of white light are scattered like stars above them. Beyond looking directly at the viewer, the subjects’ presence is strangely heightened by the blur that restricts the viewer from clearly constructing their faces. In addition, the image’s ghostly greenish luminescence further exacerbates the unease pulsating from the image.

Part of a series of seven photographs titled Camouflage (2016), Hazara created this work utilizing military night vision goggles used by US forces in Afghanistan, which the artist bought from a local market inInKabul.these staged scenes captured through the master’s tool, Hazara allows the viewer to reflect on the invisible and hidden sides of the American war and the technologies that facilitated inconceivable violence. He presents the viewer with a glimpse into the loss, trauma and confusion inflicted upon many Afghan families during night raids or “kill or capture” operations, a military tactic used by the US and its allies. At one point, the international forces reportedly conducted forty raids per night across Afghanistan.1 These raids often involved the sudden bursting into civilian homes, resulting in casualties and human rights violations that would never be accounted for, as both this foreign military and its local allies would see any search for justice as an act of war against their succinctly created and glowing narrative of life under the occupation.

During his speech to the United States Congress and the nation on 20 September 2001, President George W. Bush emphatically claimed that they “should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations secret even in success.”2 Against this background, which according to the Cost of War Project3 resulted in the eventual deaths of nearly 71,000 civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Bush’s claims about (covert) visibility and invisibility are a significant cause of how the true face of the subsequent two decade occupation was hidden from the public. This invisibility plays a central role in Hazara’s art practice, as he takes up his monumental task of investigating and bringing to light the ghastly spectacle of war that has scarred many inside the country.

; accessed 16 May 2022

2 ‘Text: President Bush Addresses the Nation’, The Washington Post, 20 September 2001; https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/ specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html

Transgressing the dramatic images produced by photojournalists that exploit the theatrical cruelty of war through the abject bodies of its victims, in Camouflage Hazara utilizes obscurity as a powerful tool to guide the viewer’s attention from the victim to the perpetrator. The blurred images directly reference the murky evidence used by the foreign armies and their local allies to sentence the local subjects of these raids to acts of violence. As Susan Sontag writes in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), “the memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.”4 This localness is evident in the Hazara’s work as he deliberately attempts to respect his subject’s blamelessness, as a consideration that any citizen in Afghanistan could have been that subject, even himself. Instead of facile compassion often aroused by the widely circulated images of the war, Hazara’s works aim to incite examination and investigation which was not a common practice for artists working in Afghanistan, his sad images evidence of the barbarity of a war that lacked transparency in its conduct. The most potent works of art emerge from a deep connection with the environment that gives them their meaning and urgency, where the artist has not only observed the various causes and material encountered but also has lived with them. An undeniable amount of lived experiences seeps out from Hazara’s artworks towards its audience, specifically related to how the military technology that flooded Afghanistan after 2001 began to interpolate itself into the physical and cultural environment.Oneofmyearliest memories, of bewilderment, of the difference between our world and that of the foreign soldiers patrolling our neighborhoods early in the war, in the mid-2000s, is a story told by a friend in school. Sitting in our freshly renovated classrooms, part of the war’s ‘humanitarian enterprise’ (that requires a separate essay to this to expose and disprove), as with any adolescents preoccupied with the never-ending search for new facts in the service of impressing our peers, a classmate, who I would refer to as “Khalid” loudly claimed that he had learned that the foreign soldiers had glasses that would allow them to see anyone naked. The bizarre fact was that even at the time his story seemed both incomprehensible yet equally believable, given the breadth and depth of military technological might that had overrun the country that was extricating itself from a decade of destruction and world isolation following the end of the Soviet invasion of the 1980s. I introduce this element here because there is a direct relationship to this subjectivity of lived experience in Hazara’s Inartwork.asetof four monotone images titled Kite Balloon (2018), taken from the top of a hill overlooking Kabul, Hazara focuses his camera towards what appears to be a tiny white balloon seen hovering above the city. This series draws attention to helium-powered US military surveillance balloons (which measured nearly 120 feet long and were stationed at 1,500 feet high), visible over Kabul and many other cities in Afghanistan. These spy blimps have now disappeared following the exit of US forces—but the experience of living under them, that shaped the lives of many since their original introduction into the country in 2007, remains.

4 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, New York City, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003

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With a strong and dusty wind, a familiar sign of a summer day in Kabul, pushing against him, a young boy dressed in the traditional Perahan-tunban and vest attempts to stand upon a rocky setting at the edge of a panoramic view of Kabul. This moment of endurance and perseverance is part of the five-channel video Bow Echo (2019)—installed across giant screens that hang in a semi-circular presentation, each channel shows a different young boy attempting the same feat, to stand upon the rock and forcefully blow into a small toy trumpet, only to be toppled off the rock by the violent wind that acrobatically animates their scrawny bodies. The viewer is invited to not only see the boys repeatedly take up this quest side by side but also listen to an eerie sound mix of the fierce wind, drones, helicopters and the tiny plastic trumpets, fighting to annul one another. In this powerfully poetic work, Hazara continues his examination of how conflict and war penetrate every part of life.

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An Islamic holiday celebrated twice annually, Eid marks some of the most sacred and festive days in Afghanistan, when the everyday hustle and bustle of life momentarily stops to give way to the joys of family and community. In recent decades, Eid in Kabul has increasingly been engulfed by the spectacle of material consumerism. One of the most common and highly in-demand objects in stores throughout the city are toy guns, that come in various shapes and forms and have become ever more realistic and sophisticated over the years. In a bizarre twist reflective of the wider environment, children turn to these toy guns to celebrate Eid by staging fake wars waged with family, friends and neighbours. As a masterful stroke, in Rehearsal, Hazara presents an amalgamation of a long, violent history through this single scene. Faced with the harsh realities of growing up with never-ending war, these young subjects have internalized its mechanisms, which in return will generate them into active players in future war. This work is a reminder of how even the most sacred of moments and innocent acts of play are not only contaminated by but also instrumentalized by the poison of war.

The boy’s journey to mount the rock can be seen as a metaphorical depiction of what it is like to grow up in an environment where the echoes of war blow fiercely at you from a young age. Once again, a toy takes a centre stage in Hazara’s work, but only this time to become a tool to empower, by giving voice and not taking it. The boys’ inability to stand still in the face of the wind and continue to blow their trumpets leaves one wondering what melodies they would play when the wind settles.

These balloons, part of a far more comprehensive network of surveillance with their capabilities and functions highly classified, and equipped with infrared heat-sensing cameras, were considered an ‘evil eye’ in the sky. While they might not have been able to see the citizens living beneath them naked as “Khalid” stated, they were a direct attack on the sanctity of the private sphere below, a sacred pillar of local society. Through simple counter-imaging, Hazara reminds us of the state of fear and victimization inflicted upon innocent civilians by these surveillance systems; their presumed long-lasting psychological effects taking years to reconcile. Contemplating the long-term effects of war on the population also becomes the central point of focus in the video Rehearsal (2020), where a young boy getting a piggyback ride from a slightly older friend loudly performs the sounds of gunfire, tuh tuh tuh… tuh tuh tuh—tuh turrh turhhhh Shaking from the weight resting on his back, the supporting friend rotates left and right to give the young boy a broader view as he unleashes bullets firing from his imaginary gun held effortlessly in his scraggly arms. While this is a relatively short video, the work’s historical potency goes beyond its length.

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In Hazara’s artworks, contemporary war ’s invisible exteriorities and extended mechanisms assume an essential place. Regarding them as consolidated instruments in the continuation of war and by making them visible to the public, he actively constructs a practice of resistance against these structures and tools of oppression. Furthermore, there is an undeniable thirst for justice in his works, making them extremely important and resourceful for our ability to memorialize Afghanistan’s recent social and political history. Aziz Hazara gives us a glimpse into the long-term effects of the last two decades of war beyond its end and reminds us how it will take an extended time before we might fully grasp the extent of the damage it has inflicted upon Afghan society. Simultaneously, he subtly leverages the potentialities of art and critical examination to challenge official accounts of the war and effectively disrupt their continuity.

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To hold you close as you fall with the hope that you may rise in a better place Hazara further explores this contamination and instrumentalization in another work titled I am looking for you like a drone, my love (2021). A large-scale panoramic image of immense piles of trash, including military and electronic waste, food, office supplies and random junk left behind by the American forces after their exit from Bagram Air Base, is even more haunting as these inherently toxic and violent materials will sooner rather than later find their way into the local economy and life, just as Hazara had sourced his military night vision goggles from a local market. Contrastingly, this work reflects how the occupying forces treated the land and people as a dumping ground for military and technological outcomes with no regard for either, while it also illustrates a direct attempt to document and gather evidence against the extended economy that helped propel the war. Probing through the expansive material and noting its producers and suppliers, the viewer is invited to ponder how this war offered an opportunity for major international corporations and calculating individuals in trading lives for money. In an uncanny dance of light and sound, in the single-channel digital video Takbir (2022), Hazara further offers the viewer an unprecedented look at the fall of the American occupation and the return of the brutal Taliban regime, in juxtaposing videos of Kabul’s urban landscape dimly lit by imported electricity from neighbouring countries, with chants of Allah-u-Akbar (“God is great”) orchestrated by the local government seeking to validate its own religious identity as the Taliban were entering the capital. These chants are followed by the beguiling melodies of Taliban nasheeds towards the end, signalling the turn of a new era and extending an invitation to investigate the crucial role that sonic media played in constructing the narratives of both the occupation and the Taliban’s war. Dispersed far and wide, online and offline, these sounds are evidence to and active players in Afghanistan’s recent tumultuous faith. The proposition Hazara ponders in Takbir is what is ‘greatness’—pontificated upon fabricated truths, while a transmuted mystery lurks in the shadows. Hence, this work delineates between light and sound as symbols to investigate the epistemologies of the narratives constructed around the war in Afghanistan and its dire consequences upon the nation’s future. If Afghanistan’s history could teach us anything, it is that great powers come and go. Still, their legacies of pain and the scars of trauma will likely last forever and mutate into ever deadlier agents of chaos. As is evident in these artworks, Hazara brings an emphatically nuanced look into reexamining the legacies of the American occupation that is not only brave but also unprecedented for both local and foreign artists. Moreover, his search for understanding the roots of violence and the importance of debunking the bigger spectacle of this war is nothing but extraordinary when seen through the fact that the artist lived and worked under these realities until very recently.

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d ı v a n 1 1l It’s time. Actually, it’s way past time. First, it’s time to decolonize. Next, to think past comforting national stories, which means to imagine the postnational. Then, to completely renovate the canon and at the same time give back all those precious stolen objects regardless of self-serving arguments about great art being the heritage of everyone, kept best in big art museums. After that, to recognize Indigenous sovereignty, to think about geography and to admit and apologize for whitefella history despite the friction and cost of recognizing diversity. And, alongside all this, to change bad old cultural habits that exclude and trivialize much more than half of the world’s population.

And right on time, we have a set of competing new books and exhibitions that chart what art history will start to look like in the wake of these transformations. At the top of the list must be John Clark’s The Asian Modern 1 In this book, Clark realizes the radical and subversive intention that has for more than two decades been his aim: to urgently rethink and write meaningful regional art histories and as a result to be able to describe for the first time the panoramic sweep of modern Asian art from the perspective of Asia. (But let’s leave aside for the moment that word, regional.) This has been an immensely, even wildly ambitious mission, one that had been presaged by his Modern Asian Art, which had systematized the study of modern and contemporary Asian art.2 His approach blends anthropological and sociological categorizing with art history’s attention to the specificity of paintings and a frequently astounding depth of sheerly historical research, invariably conducted in the specific Asian language required. The book comes with more than four hundred colour illustrations, each placed adjacent to where they are mentioned. This would be revelatory if it were not for their tiny, matchbox size, but I guess the alternative would have been a massive, coffee-table tome instead of this trim but still heavy handbook-sized volume.

The Asian

The effect of Clark’s book is to question and recast accepted wisdom about both Asian and Western art, both by more traditional-minded Asian scholars and by putatively progressive, ostensibly sophisticated Western scholars, including those involved in the now-global project of decolonization. He can do so by virtue of careful, often intimidatingly comprehensive scholarship and a polymath grasp of theoretical ideas outside art history, especially ideas and theories from social theory and cultural history. With my assessment comes a big disclaimer: I am merely a scholar of post-1945 contemporary Australian and Western art. I am not in any way a specialist in Asian art, even though I have been a constant, long-term visitor to South Asia for many decades. However, in Anthony Gardner’s and my 2016 history of biennales and triennials, Biennials, Triennials and documenta: Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art, 1955-2015, we were ineluctably driven to trace the Modern

1 John Clark, The Asian Modern, Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2021

2 John Clark, Modern Asian Art, Sydney and Honolulu: Craftsman House and University of Hawaii Press, 1998

A few pages later, he explains, “this claim, which is true in a rather simplistic developmental history, vanishes the moment it is accepted that modernity invents itself everywhere it is required for a new relativization of the pasts of any given culture or group of cultures.”6 And so, with The Asian Modern, we arrive at the first methodical, chronological study of modern and contemporary art across the Asian region, and the first that refuses the modern and contemporary art history of Europe and North America, instead treating it—and this is not an exaggeration—with disdain and, sometimes, a degree of amply-deserved contempt. For as recent, slightly mystified reviews of The Asian Modern demonstrate, it remains hard for European and North American art historians to imagine a story where their regions are resolutely kept in the background, appearing merely in passing and not reinstated as principal or even supporting actors. For instance, in an otherwise deeply respectful review of The Asian Modern in London-based The Burlington Magazine, Mary Recinto wrote, Clark’s frequent comparisons between historical events in Euramerica and Asia, a reference tactic that inexorably detracts from the discussions at hand. Still, it is difficult to fault Clark for this as, “The basic problem for the study of The Asian Modern, and perhaps for other kinds of non-Euramerican modernity, is how to escape the constraints of pre-existing Euramerican frames” (Clark, p. 67). In many ways, Clark succeeds in addressing this problem, but his insistence on comparing Asia to Euramerica alludes to the latter’s enduring centrality. Perhaps an alternative vantage point less burdened by this correlation would allow space for further investigations into Asian modernity.

3 Charles Green and Anthony Gardner, Biennials, Triennials and documenta: Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art, 1955–2015, Boston: Wiley Blackwell, 2016 4 John Clark et al., Modern and Contemporary Asian Art: A Working Bibliography 2011 Version; https://www.researchgate.net/scientificcontributions/John-Clark-2015261387; accessed 29 April 2022 5 Clark, The Asian Modern, p. 8 6 Ibid., p. 16 7 Mary Recinto, ‘The Asian Modern’, Burlington Magazine, no. 163, 2021, pp. 973–974, 974

86 | 87 histories of biennials of the South and of Asia.3 We found that we were often guided by John Clark’s famous, open-access, online bibliography.4 We saw, wherever we looked in libraries and art museums, that Clark had been there before us, read everything in the original language and would be more than willing to share his knowledge not just with ever-widening international circles of ex-students but, as well, with ignorant colleagues like me, who have only just managed to quite myopically traverse our careers reading and speaking merely European languages. Interestingly, the complexity of the book in turn enables Clark to partly evade, under the cloak of dense, almost bewilderingly erudite thickets of new ideas and references, one piling on top of another, the otherwise abrasive appearance of going toe to toe with his peers within the art history and art museum discipline, even though that is the blunt implication of a careful reading of his new book. This means that even when critics are offended by his methodology, they recognize that The Asian Modern is a landmark book. At the very start of The Asian Modern, Clark writes that North American and European experts, art historians and curators alike, “believe that Euramerican modernism and its narratives are the story of modern art.”5

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And in an angrier review in New York journal, Art Journal, Kevin Chua says, Clark inherits a crude form of postcolonialism that is based on a strong opposition between Asia (or the ‘East’) and the West. While Eurocentrism has (rightly) been a battle cry for nonWesterners since the 1970s, one wonders whether the term’s over familiarity masks deeper structural shifts in global politics and economy (e.g., the reappearance of economic and political hierarchies within and across cultures in the wake of globalization) 8

I think Chua is completely wrong because he vastly underestimates and glosses over the survival of all the structural faults of the art history discipline and its deeply entrenched monocultural, Western bias. James Elkins spends a whole book convincingly explaining these in his indictment of current Western art history, The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing: North Atlantic Art History and its Alternatives.9 Elkins’ erudite book should be required reading for all art historians and is The Asian Modern’s necessary complement. He explains the weaknesses in North Atlantic-based scholars’ and curators’ attempts to think globally: they move in and around non-Western modern art in order to lead the reader to rethink contemporary European and American art rather than comprehend nonWestern art. As Elkins writes, “The dissolution of the introductory ‘story of art’, as E.H. Gombrich called it, is impelled by interests in decolonization and identity, and by the ongoing introduction of unfamiliar practices into the art world. But as the art world is becoming more diverse and less uniform, writing about art is becoming less diverse and more uniform.”10 8 Kevin Chua, ‘Parochial Modernism’, Art Journal, vol. 81, no. 1, 2022, pp. 118–121, 119 9 James Elkins, The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing: North Atlantic Art History and its Alternatives, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021 10 Ibid., p. 7

But why a pan-Asian investigation of modern and contemporary art across this vast and disparate region, from Japan to Australia to India and Thailand? (For reasons of space, no mention of the interesting cases of Tibet or Nepal.13) And, furthermore, why not divide these stories according to the generally accepted model of separating the study of regional art into national categories: of Thai art, of Japanese art, of Australian art, and so on? After all, that’s the path that recent excellent books still take, for example David Teh’s Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary.14 Even to a non-specialist like me, there seem to be several reasons to depart from national boundaries. Part of the answer is that it has been through cross-national contact that otherwise apparently national art (and artists whose reputations remain bounded by nationality) unfolds. We miss or gloss over cross-national stories because there are few models from which to write this type of narrative other than in straightforward biography but, even though biographies of twentieth and twenty-first century artists might easily evade the constraints of national reification, biographies of artists almost always slot somewhere on 11 On Arte Util, see https://www.arte-util.org/. Full disclosure from me: the office of Arte Util is at the Whitworth Museum, Manchester; I am part of a UK-based, AHRC-funded project led by Ana Carden-Coyne, working with refugees and NGOs to reshape the Whitworth and Manchester Art Gallery (MAG) with the full cooperation of both art museums, a project not associated with Arte Util even though the latter’s office is at the Whitworth 12 Three instances amongst a lifetime of bad memories: first, the 2022 Biennale of Venice Artistic Director Cecilia Alemani includes many women in her Italian Pavilion flagship exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, resulting in criticisms of the show as “woke”. As The Art Newspaper’s appalled editor Ben Luke recounts, “And yet it’s Alemani’s Biennale that is described by the Financial Times critic Jackie Wullschläger as ‘absurdly gender-unbalanced’. Even worse, despite praising artists including Rego, Precious Okoyomon and Simone Leigh, she goes on to write: ‘By choosing almost exclusively women, Alemani has paid a severe price in terms of quality, a cost obvious too in the contrast with many superb exhibitions by male artists across town’.” See women-dominated-venice-biennale-has-been-criticised-for-sacrificing-qualityrevealing-just-how-necessary-such-progressive-https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/04/27/theprojects-really-are; accessed 29 April 2022. At a far more sophisticated end of this spectrum, theorist Susan Buck-Morss asserts, “I may have become emotional in defending a project that is today quite unpopular, because it opposes ideas of alternative modernities, hybridity and multiculturalism. I am making a case for universality,” continuing, “Of course, you do have to know the canon, otherwise you are dominated by it without knowing it… It is important to know about them because they are presumed as given by subsequent knowledge.” Susan Buck-Morss, in conversation, ‘Postcolonial Narratives’, in James Elkins (ed.), Art and Globalization, Pennsylvania, PA: Pen State University Press, 2010, pp. 73–83, p. 93 & p. 81–82. Finally, at the 2013 Tate Modern conference accompanying ‘Global Pop’, a leading, New York-based art historian declared that a concern for quality should make us cautious of over-elevating the reputation of artists like Guyana-born artist Frank Bowling; see https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/ tate-modern/global-pop-symposium; also see https://www.tate.org.uk/audio/global-pop-symposium-recording

13 On modern and contemporary Tibetan art, see Clare Harris’ simultaneously revelatory and frustratingly pedantic In the Image of Tibet: Tibetan Painting after 1959, London: Reaktion, 1999 14 David Teh, Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary, Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2017

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Of course, we now begin to see small shifts in the widening collection policies of a few international museums like Tate Modern and, further along the spectrum in Europe, with activist curatorial projects such as that connected with Arte Util (Useful Art), an idea usually associated with charismatic Cuban artist Tania Bruguera and with curator and frequent biennial director Charles Esche, the Director of the Van Abbemuseum in The Netherlands.11 Otherwise, the astounding lack of curiosity about art beyond the modern and contemporary North Atlantic canon is always in evidence in symposia and conferences in Europe and North America. When an event focuses on a non-Western subject, participants are more or less relegated to talking to themselves. This is because art by non-Westerners, and women, is not regarded as the main game in town, an attitude huffily justified by the oft-repeated myth that sheer quality explains why we endlessly talk about (insert name of famous, white, male, North Atlantic artist).12

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18 Ian Mclean, Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art, London, Reaktion Press, 2016

17 James Elkins, ‘The example of Art Since 1900’, in The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing, pp. 95–112; also see, of course, Hal Foster et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism with its notorious, curt, complete dismissal of (Indigenous Australian) Western Desert painting; for critical reviews see Norman Bryson, ‘Review: Art Since 1900’, frieze, no. 92, 2005; also see Nancy J. Troy et al., ‘Interventions Reviews’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 88, no. 2, 2006, pp. 373–89. See Bernard Smith, Australian Painting 1788-1960 ; Bernard Smith and Terry Smith, Australian Painting 1788-1990, third edition, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991; in that edition, all the later chapters on art after the 1970s were written by Terry Smith

As we know, eventually the increasingly anachronistic Australian Painting was very cautiously directed through a crucial update for the third edition in 1991, though still conforming to the increasingly eccentric idea that art history could be written by excluding all other media except painting. A new writer, Terry Smith, was brought in to write postscripts at Bernard Smith’s invitation. The idea—that Aboriginal painting should not be included as Australian art—was urgently remedied with a key 1991 chapter which now properly celebrated, explained, and integrated Indigenous painting as Australian painting. But even more than that, as my University of Melbourne colleague Professor Ian McLean definitively establishes, Indigenous Australian art has become Australian art and in turn has substantively displaced the icons of Australian art.18 The result, as Australian art historians Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson convincingly argue, is that beloved, so-called Australian art such as the Heidelberg School (late nineteenth century Australian Impressionism) should be really regarded as British art, for it was made sometimes in Australia, sometimes in the United Kingdom, by expatriate, restless British artists.19

d ı v a n 1 1l a spectrum of hagiography, especially since most biographies are exhibition catalogues and these are always, and I mean always, congratulatory. So even though most artists are usually gathered under a national banner, they really don’t fit, neither (English-born) Tom Roberts nor (Indigenous Australian) Yolngu Bark painters. Reforming art history requires understanding that modern and contemporary art emerged entwined in decolonization, war, and conflict, with courageous responses emerging in response to that collective violence. But world authorities within art history instead habitually default to the narrow perspective of continual, calm, tree-like growth that either privileges the perspective of the centre of the global art industry (for this in action see the paradigmatic Art Since 1900,15 the well-known myopia of which is dissected in forensic detail by Elkins in the memorable fourth chapter of The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing), or consists of proud but brittle national histories bound up in reaction to that centre and creation of a national so-called School, as in Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting, 1788–1960,16 the first edition of which deliberately excluded Aboriginal art.17

Bernard Smith, Australian Painting 1788–1960, London: Oxford University Press, 1962

19 Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson, ‘She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism’, MeMO, 5 June 2021; https://memoreview.net/ reviews/she-oak-and-sunlight-australian-impressionism-at-ngv-by-rex-buter-and-ads-donaldson; accessed 29 April 2022

16

So how does Clark deal with these problems? In The Asian Modern, he sets out a loosely chronological sequence of studies of individual artists or groups, interrupted by reflections on what this shows. The book is divided into two quasi-autonomous sections, each of which would be adequate for their own volume. In Part 1 he traces Transitions to Modernity (1850s–1890s), Academy Realism and Salon Art (1880s–1910s), Early Modernism (1920s–1930s) and Transitions through 15 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois & Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, London: Thames & Hudson, 2004

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World War II. In Part 2, he writes first about art in the long post-War period of Liberation movements towards national independences, then on Abstraction and Conceptualism (1940s–1960s), on The Contemporary (1980s to the present), and finally on Aleatoric and Fractured Spaces (also covering the contemporary period). If some of this seems to overlap, and if the several long bridging chapters appear repetitive and very difficult, then the effect of the whole is to firmly and definitively establish that there were plural, overlapping and often self-sustaining modernisms across Asia.

d ı v a n 1 1l C H A R L E S G R E E N

If I’m less convinced that the exact argument holds true in the latter sections of Part 2, as we move into the period of contemporary art, then I think Clark would agree for something else —equally messy, complex, and simultaneous and part of what Terry Smith calls “contemporaneity” —unfolds from the 1990s onwards. So, the Asian Modern, Clark explains, has continually engaged with multiple vectors of extra-national, postnational contingencies which are both inside and outside national boundaries: his key terms are exogenous and endogenous influences and forces, by which he respectively refers on the one hand to local causes, effects, events, and influences versus, on the other hand, to international contacts, impacts, and knowledge transfers. In effect, from the start of modern art in the nineteenth century to the present, artists appear within a matrix of forces. This matrix involves the two-dimensional intersection of two typologies or lists, one of which is the division of artists into eight types of artistic career possible on the spectrum from endogenic (the impact of the local) to exogenic (the impact of the international) circumstances, and the other is the division of Asian Modern artists into five successive cohorts or generations. It all sounds and looks both pedantic and heavy-handed, but such diagrammatic concepts—and such intensively defined discursive identities—come from the well-known and long-accepted models of structural anthropology with which Clark is very familiar; James Elkins sees evolutionary theory at work in this, as well.20Thetrouble is the language of our own disciplinary specialization. If we are art historians or artists, we are much less familiar with such jargon than academics working in film studies or cultural studies or anthropology. But these are merely navigational tools to explain, in Clark’s words, the “siting of artists in art discourses.”21 The first type of artist never went abroad but was in contact with foreign art via examples provided, for instance, by patrons. One of Clark’s examples here, near the start of his book, is the career of Thai mural painter Khrua In Khong, the heir to an immensely rich Buddhist iconography combined with the depiction of deep space, a breathtaking combination. The second type also stayed at home but mixed with expatriate Western artists or cultured foreigners: the astonishing Travancore-based Raja Ravi Varma is a famous example. The third type —one of Clark’s examples is the great nineteenth century Philippines painter Simon Flores—also stayed home but was trained by foreign teachers in the studios and European-style art schools that were set up unexpectedly early (to the ignorant Westerner) across Asia. The fourth type spent short but decisive periods abroad in Europe or North America studying or in residencies: famous painter, Amrita Sher-Gil (popularly regarded as India’s Frida Kahlo) is one instance. The fifth type, for instance Pan Yuliang, became long-term expatriates, never able to return home. The sixth type 20 Elkins, The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing, p. 142 21 Clark, The Asian Modern, p. 23

23 Connections can be obvious, especially since from the mid-1960s on, air travel was increasingly ubiquitous (and the critical demands both in 1960s Japan and then in 2000s China that local art be measured against international yardsticks were so insistent), but the resonances that we retroactively find are all too often wilfully dismissed as mere evidence of belated influence by arbiters at the centre or their local apologists. Instead, Clark obdurately insists on the transnational, lateral nature of contact and resonance between artists and across borders, refusing the blinkers that assume belatedness at the periphery and mimicry of the centre. The virtue of refusing continual cross-referencing between so-called centre and so-called periphery is that within his structuralist framework, Clark is set free to write about who artists were (where they were born, trained, who they knew and who they disliked), what they did, where they made their works and why. He does not linger on the centre’s teleologies, not on what we should learn from these artists’ works about our own political or moral struggles as almost all contemporary art writing tends to do, since looking for moral guidance from art has a very short shelf-life, no matter how worthy, and Clark clearly aims for the long view.

92 | 93 were expatriates who moved back and forth from their new, permanent homes abroad back to their birthplaces, including Tom Roberts and Kuroda Saiki at the same time, or post-War Indian painter S.H. Raza. The seventh are exiles, the most famous of whom in our time is Chinese conceptualist/ activist Ai Weiwei. The eighth and final type are Clark’s cosmopolitans, not just returning home and travelling abroad but mediating between art worlds, including Indian painter M.F. Husain or Indonesian artist Heri Dono. Clark includes long sections on individual artists that represent the sum of his previous writing on certain artists, for example on nineteenth century artist Raja Ravi Varma, and other sections that are revelatory in their detail, such as where he focuses on great, Baroda-based painter Gulammohammed Sheikh. Clark always locates each artist within the wider, rippling circles of their many contemporaries.

22 Reiko Tomii, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016, p. 18

23 Tomii, p. 20 Asian Modern

The

Observing how, when, why and where each artist progressed, as opposed to constantly comparing them with cutting-edge European art and finding their art belated, is the great strength of Clark’s book. He has long thoroughly internalized the antidote to what seminal New York-based, Japanese art historian Reiko Tomii calls the hole-digging fallacy: in her Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (2016), she explains the “Eurocentric equation of the centre-periphery with the original-versus-imitation paradigm,” continuing, “Worse, since the centre would hold the authority to accord historical legitimacy, the margin more often than not relentlessly deployed the centre’s discourse that it had assimilated and internalized.”22

She illustrates this by pointing out that Japanese artist Yoshihara Mishio dug the earliest hole in late-modern art in 1956, eleven years before Claes Oldenberg’s first hole-digging projects. She then reveals the coincidences, patiently explaining that “contemporaneity frequently manifests itself through similarity in form, idea and strategy… putting in perspective the presumption of the flow of influence from the centre to the periphery.”

Then, in the later chapters of the book, he inscribes this within post-1989 globalism which he, and I, would carefully distinguish from globalization, which is much more multivalent. Even though art has engaged deeply with postnational forces, renewed configurations of national identity have continued up to the present as dominant discourses despite decades of art historians and postcolonial theorists around the world examining the assumptions of national cultures. National art still rules the roost inside each nation, especially in art museum displays of their permanent collections.

d ı v a n 1 1l Clark shows us multiple forces in action across successive chapters. He enumerates his lists and structures over and repeatedly, across the book and again in its Conclusion. Therefore, Clark can admit into his narrative both the nineteenth century European art training of Raden Saleh but also the non-radial diffusion of ideas from Asian artists to their friends and down to the next generation. This book, clearly, concentrates on artists and their careers. It is far less interested in exhibition histories—in tracking the appearance of cross-national exhibitions and residencies that brought together artists from across the region—though he has written at length elsewhere about Asian artists and international biennials. In more recent decades these have principally taken the form of triennials and biennials—of course, those at the putatively ‘old’ metropolitan venues like Venice but as well, and more importantly for Clark (and for me), in exhibitions from the late 1980s onwards, first at the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, then at the Asia Pacific Triennial, and immediately after at a host of biennials including the most important, the Gwangju Biennale. All these gathered artists and art from across Asia and they meant that a new aspect of contemporary art, the ascendency of curators, appeared together with whole typologies of artmaking and exhibiting. Contemporary Asian art migrated from hermetic, avant-garde, and experimental origins into the realm of the spectacular, transcending specialist, insider audiences and garnering wide, global, public attention to contemporary art. That is the first layer of Clark’s book. He goes deeper, explaining the shifts in the discourses and practice of modern and contemporary art due to the cataclysmic forces of European and then Japanese colonialism and imperialism. This is more than the usual rote observations by art historians about Western cultural imperialism and, even more depressing, radial diffusion of influence. This is about brute force and repression. In Australia, we have just begun to acknowledge these impacts, and this is largely because Indigenous artists and activists have generously shared their experiences with us. Clark writes, “For most Asian cultural discourses, the modern began with the relativization of the past provided by the historical break of colonial or neo-colonial rule.”24 He continually reminds us of the fierceness of the forces of colonialism and imperialism, and of their dialectic with nationalist identity, placing artists firmly within the matrix of post-1945 national liberation movements.

There are a few exceptions. In Australia’s region, the National Gallery of Singapore (NGS) has gathered a host of great works from all across Southeast Asia together into a deeply inspiring permanent collection display but, even then, the NGS reserves a separate wing in its vast building to tell an exclusively national (and to an Australian viewer, deeply illuminating) story of Singaporean art. The NGS has done what our own National Gallery of Australia should always have managed: its displays weave a regional narrative.

24 Clark, The Asian Modern, p. 19 C H A R L E S G R E E N

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With this study of Asian art, Clark replaces the existing narrative of national art histories across Asia with sharper, micro-level stories. He neither leaves modern and late modern (pre-1970s) art locked in the past, nor does he lump contemporary art into an ahistorical and unchronological present, differentiated merely by morphology or form. In other words, Clark, like his friend and colleague Terry Smith, one of the other key art historians working today, writes the fifty-years-old contemporary period as proper history. And in this there is a historiographical background, one that Clark is clearly aware of, since he includes Australia in the category of Asian art (like Japan, at the edge of Asia, for both nations have an uneasy and sometimes queasy relationship with seeing their art as Asian). In Australia, we already know that those living beyond New York or London had often sought to escape the condition of being provincial artists or provincial art historians. This was, of course, the “provincialism problem” that Clark’s erstwhile University of Sydney colleague Terry Smith had defined in an essay of the same name in 1974. As a very young artist way back then, I read the article at the time of its publication in the New York art magazine, Artforum, and I understood quickly how Smith had arrived at his bleak determinism which he summed up in the sentence, “as the situation stands, the provincial artist cannot choose not to be provincial.”25 Smith had used this definition to explain and lament a model that saw the New York art world as the metropolitan centre, with all other art communities, including large, culturally autonomous, rich, confident cities—Sydney, Seoul, Tokyo, Melbourne —all viewed as provincial. And we have already pointed to supposedly definitive books, such as the notorious Art Since 1900, which wilfully ignored, trivialized, or dismissed anything beyond canonical North Atlantic avant-gardism. Clark explains that “international” or “modern” art would long insist on only including Euramerican art (James Elkins prefers the term, “North Atlantic art”, as do I) until the mid-1990s, and the North Atlantic still almost never admits parallel notions of non-Western or Asian modern art despite the “worlding” (a term that Terry Smith is primarily responsible for) of so many regional centres.26 This—including the problem of how to write comparative art histories —is the problem with which David Joselit, the only senior member of the October circle with any interest in art outside the North Atlantic, grapples in his recent Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (2020).27 Clark sums this up fairly definitively at the very end of his book: Modern artists transmigrate between the levels of the state, notions of modern style that belong to them as artists, and often between quite specific sets of allegiances which allow the outsider to project authenticity onto the work of the artist. They also join in constituting the modern specific to their own art culture by greater contact with Euramerica under late colonialism.

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25 Terry Smith, ‘The Provincialism Problem’, Artforum, vol. 12, no., 1974, pp. 54–69; the essay is reprinted in Terry Smith, Transformations in Australian Art Volume Two: The Twentieth Century–Modernism and Aboriginality, Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002, pp. 113–121, 117

26 On this and other unfamiliar terms, and on the shape of an history of contemporary art, see Terry Smith, Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art, Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2019; on the dialectic between the art industrial complex and deinstitutionalization, see Terry Smith, Curating the Complex and the Open Strike, New York: Sternberg Press, 2022

27 David Joselit, Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020

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I have said that The Asian Modern privileges the stories of artists rather than exhibitions, but this is not completely true, for within his chapters and especially inside his copious footnotes

What might we draw from all this? First, both Asian art and so-called Western art have always been metonyms for a much wider, all-pervasive, complex international system that has historically been in continual operation between and inside different national art worlds. Second, the value of art is socially constructed and regulated. Third, understanding the complexity of exchange is immensely important even though it at first appears pedantic, for it shows that artists and their works move in extraordinarily predictable and rigid circuits substantially dominated by historical, political, and state forces within which they still exercise remarkable agency. Fourth, Clark continually shows the role that imperialism and colonialism played in the formation of the Asian Modern, and he insists that this can be explored from an Asian perspective with conclusions that may also then be applied to the North Atlantic’s centres. What all this means, of course, is that the canonical modernity of New York and Paris was always merely relative. And it cut both ways. For Asian artists consecrated North Atlantic artists as well as positioned themselves through self-promotion for local canonization. In sum, The Asian Modern has the capacity to change our thinking and even revolutionize our perspective. John Clark shows us that, as far back as the 1850s, artist-to-artist possibilities, problematic political deals and often-tragic personal compromises ran through a modern and contemporary Asian art that unfolded with urgency, vivid surprise, and lapidary intricacy. Asian Modern 28 Clark, The Asian Modern, p. 409

Clark does explain in forensic detail the various tactics by which exclusionary stories have been maintained: the several famous bi-national exhibitions during the early 1990s in Paris were tools to compartmentalize nations; curators sought Japanese representatives of New York or European art tendencies. This means—and still does mean—selecting artists who mostly live in New York or exhibited in that city, or perhaps in London or Berlin, in the knowledge that the nation state and its institutions, including its art societies and then its art museums, became powerful so that traditional configurations of national identity underwrote post-independence art worlds across Asia and around the world underneath superficial levelling-up at places like the Biennale of Venice.

The

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That contact allows a new notion of customary artistic practice to be constituted as “the traditional,” both in resistance to the colonial, or to the presumed external centre in Euramerica, but also in an absorption of the customary.28

The international art world’s premier showcases of contemporary art—the Biennale of Venice above all—still seem to provide opportunities for artists from around the world to show their work on an international stage, but in fact only within predetermined identities, within an atlas of the world in which the North Atlantic is central and everywhere else either marginal or completely absent. But this in turn ignores the long duration of survey exhibitions inside the Asian region, either focusing on painting in one nation, as did the Jakarta Biennale, or experimenting with ideas of the region, as did the Taipei Biennial.

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2 See footnote 4 page 40

All too mixed up and civilized now

Within this broad compass, Mundine has drawn from an inclusive range of artists, many of whom he has worked with before.1 But, the deeper insights he brings can be traced back through his decades-long engagements with the Ramingining community in Arnhem Land, as cultural advisor, curator and creative director, and internationally touring works of national importance like The Aboriginal Memorial, and securing its installation in the National Gallery of Australia.2

A uniquely Australian wild dog, a creature of many forms, inhabits the fractured mythological core of The Dingo Project, curated by Bandjalung artist, Djon Mundine. Through personal experience Mundine knows the dingo well—as fellow traveller and fireside friend, a companion and a real dog. But he is also acutely aware of its powers as a totem spirit being, a shape-shifting guardian of considerable awe, a wise adjudicator and counsellor in foundational fables of Aboriginal creation and law. For the settler culture of the British arriving after 1788, the dingo was an altogether different thing, a wild creature conjuring the dread of the European wolf and a killer of sheep, its identity affirmed in the ‘big bad wolf’ of the forests of counter myth.

Mundine’s own video performance, Conversations with my Grandmother (2021), conducted with a live dingo, offers the best introductory insight into The Dingo Project’s agendas. Joseph Beuys was possibly the first artist to stage a performance with a wild dog in I Like America and America Likes Me in 1974. For three days Beuys cohabited with a wild coyote in a New York gallery, and the performance, much feted in its day within the emergent ecological consciousness of Europe, was championed as restorative of the lost spiritual kinship with the natural world on the far shores of America. For Sydney Contemporary, New Zealand artist Hayden Fowler reprized Beuys’ pact as a premise for collective ecological action and locked himself in a cage with a dingo for Together Again (2017). Mundine’s Conversations with my Grandmother follows suite, marking a critical difference, 1 Daniel Boyd, Michael Cook, Judith Crispin, Karla Dickens, Blak Douglas, Fiona Foley, Maddison Gibbs, Julie Gough, Aroha Groves, Fiona Hall, Sandra Hill, Warwick Keen, Garth Lena, Trish Levett, John William Lindt, Johnny Malibirr, Teena McCarthy, Tallulah McCord, Danie Mellor, James Neagle, Lin Onus and Michael Eather, George Pascoe Jnr., Jenny Sages, Peter Swain, Jason Wing

Rather, what matters for Mundine is the faltering of the bonds of kinship binding Aboriginal people to the natural world. Without the intercessions of totem spirit beings assigned to individuals at birth and affirmed through the rituals of coming of age, Ceremony4 cannot be performed, and Country (tribal lands)5 properly managed according to traditional law. Under the ongoing pressures of contemporary dispossession, these bonds with totem spirit beings have begun to fray. Mundine explains, “Aboriginal people are bonded ‘totemically’ to think of nature as being us. The exhibition is to examine human-animal relations/consciousness. For Aboriginal people it appears as a totemism and for non-Aboriginal Australians an archetype, and ideas of the passions remaining in ‘the Id’.”

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From my perspective Beuys and Fowler were trying to present that they had a special spiritual persona; they were a ‘shaman’ and were being with the primitive. They dramatized this by putting themselves in a cage in front of the public. And didn’t speak or discuss with an indigenous person. I, an Indigenous, a primitive, shared a large room space with my dingo relative for my performance without a public audience—I know who I am—I don’t need to reclaim it.3

Hence, Conversations with my Grandmother opens with the assumption that the narrator and his totem animal, the dingo, are already known to each other, unlike the coyote that appeared unsettled and anxious in the documentation of Beuys’ performance. In Conversations with my Grandmother the dingo wags its tail. Perhaps she knows him? And he, in turn, recognizes her. Therefore, the conversation flows along familial lines: “How are you Granny? Well, look at you. Well, I haven’t seen you for a long time. Not for a long time. Can you hear me? Do you know who I am? Do you remember me? They call you Gunjungjurra.” She can only be approached by the correct name appointed by the creator spirits: Gunjungjurra. In the Aboriginal world naming is sacred. Every rock, tree and animal etc., has been given a name and a place. Everything, in varying degrees—plants, animals, people, earth, sky and water—is interconnected in a person’s ‘country’ (or tribal lands) in Aboriginal culture. When Aboriginal people visit their homelands their first duty is to sing out greetings to the landscape so that country will know them, and that they belong. Forgetting, in this context, is a community tragedy. How will their country recognize them if they misremember the names? However, the dingo, like a forgetful elder relative, seems not to quite know him, no doubt for reasons of their long separation. The displacement and fragmentation of colonization have been long and many. Therefore, Mundine invokes the tribal language he still retains, in order to jog her memory. At the same time, he begins to doubt. Is it really her? Perhaps, she no longer knows her name and who she is for Aboriginal people. There has been no one around to perform 3 Email from Djon Mundine (and all following quotes by him), 25 May 2022 4 Ceremony with a capital ‘C’ is the formal, collective reference to the traditional cultural practices connected to Country. See following footnote. Ceremony with a small ‘c’ is a more informal reference to a person’s own ceremonial obligations 5 Country is the term often used by Aboriginal peoples to describe the lands, waterways and seas to which they are connected. The term contains complex ideas about law, place, custom, language, spiritual belief, cultural practice, material sustenance, family and identity. A capital ‘C’ is used in reference to the system in its fuller formal ramifications, whereas country with a small ‘c’ refers to the place a person comes from and the land for which a person has responsibility and duty of care

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“Too mixed up and civilized now”: the irony bites, a mantra for contemporary times in which hybridity is now the norm but only sometimes manages to paper over the cultural losses. Such impasses are not unexpected and knowledge recuperation has its limits. Across Australia the survival rates of traditional culture and story is patchy at best.

6 The Stolen Generations were children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by Australian federal and state government agencies and church missions, through a policy of assimilation. See https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/ 7stolen-generationsDeathsincustody refers to the loss of aboriginal lives while in police or prison custody. For further reading see https://humanrights.gov. au/our-work/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-social-justice/publications/indigenous-deaths

102 | 103 the necessary ceremonies. This state of affairs is not unlike the scenario still playing out for the Stolen Generations, who, as children, were removed from their families by government agencies as late as the 1970s.6 Without their proper clan names (erased in the institutional ledgers under new Anglicized appellations), how are they going to find and know each other?

mixed up and civilized now

“

9 As recounted by Djon Mundine. In the 1880s the notorious Jack Watson, who worked on a number of cattle stations in Arnhem Land, was responsible for numerous massacres. Detailed accounts can be found at https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/detail. php?r=720. For a firsthand account of an encounter with Watson and his grisly exploits see extracts from The Diary of Emily Caroline Creaghe available at outback-horror-house/news-story/17022ba7691314b4cff5aadbf8511936https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/grisly-secret-of-cattlemen-who-kept-40-pairs-of-ears-as-trophies-in-

10 The Australian film Ten Canoes (2006) directed by Rolf de Heer, won the Un Certain Regard Special Jury prize at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and was the Australian official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film category for the 2007 Academy Awards too

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Clearly the conversation is not going well. Mundine provokes with a little teasing, hoping to get a rise. “Tell me, Gunjungjurra, you look a little different, are you really a dingo? You don’t look like a dingo. You look too white to be a dingo.” And indeed, Granny doesn’t much resemble a dingo, which is characteristically lean and golden brown. Granny, stumpy-legged, with odd dark spots lurking around her ears, is certainly very white. But this remark is really directed at the fact that, these days, it is not infrequent for a person’s Aboriginality to be challenged on the basis of appearance, rather than on cultural knowledge and clan belonging. Mundine full well knows that appearance is an unreliable test of heritage. He explains, “My banter is really for the benefit of other Aboriginal people—it’s what is always said to us by unsophisticated ‘white’ people—we don’t look like the stereotype of an Aboriginal and we resent it.” Nonetheless, he perseveres with Granny. He tries a different tack, addressing her with a common Walpiri lingua franca for calling to attention.

Though there were massacres in Arnhem Land, some genocidal, including most of an entire Yolngu clan in Gurruwilling, the Arafura swamplands,9 where Ten Canoes (2006)10 was filmed, not far from where Mundine was based, nonetheless, many of the ceremonies and lines

Namaka. Can you hear me? Are you really listening? Tell me whoever you are.” Finally, he has to give up, ending with a shrug of resignation, and a closing dig. As an Aboriginal she is not nearly aggressive enough. Given the long list of urgent complaints, including ongoing deaths in custody,7 poor Indigenous health, and the lack of a constitutionally formalized Voice to Parliament,8 she is not as angry as she should be, if she was really Aboriginal. “Are you really a wild dog? I think you are really too friendly to be a wild dog. Well, I guess we are all too mixed up and civilized now.”

8 A Voice to Parliament, enshrined in the Constitution, would enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to give advice to the Federal Parliament about laws and policies that impact them through a simplified policy making process and structural change

12 The Top End of Australia usually refers to the regions of Cape York (northern Queensland) and Arnhem Land (northern region of Northern Territory), but can more generally indicate a broader area that also encompasses the Kimberley region of Western Australia

An entire room of The Dingo Project was given over to the decidedly sunny project of the Ongoing Adventures of X and Ray (2000) in which ‘Ray’ the dingo, and ‘X’ the stingray, ride the waves of contemporary hybridity together as best mates. Their names, placed adjacent, and read across the line, spell out the collaborative pun of X-Ray: a traditional Top End style of bark painting (in which the outer layer of a body can be seen through to the bones), and Ray the dingo wears a coat of traditional rrark crosshatching on his back. With titles X and Ray discover father’s country (2001); X and Ray in the garden of earthly delight (2021) and X and Ray witness the sinking of the last ship carrying woodchips from Tasmanian shores (2021), they demonstrate an ethos of “getting along”, echoing that important partnership between Djapu, clan head Wonguu, and anthropologist Donald Thomson, still passed down in the stories of the Yolgnu today.

d ı v a n 1 1l of transmission through “story”11 (a term that also encompasses custodial duties) survived in the more remote regions of the Top End.12 This includes Cape York visited by artist Karla Dickens and a considerable slab of Warwick Thornton’s film We Don’t Need A Map (2017)—in essence an examination of Australians’ relationship to the celestial constellation of the Southern Cross—was told in Arnhem Land through the preparation for and performance of the traditional ceremony that had survived intact. Ten Canoes, realized through a partnership between director Rolf de Heer and the Yolngu peoples, at their instigation was told entirely in their language, with subtitles, and based on the retrieval and revival of lost cultural practices from the anthropological record.

Earlier, in the 1930s, anthropologist Donald Thomson and Wonggu, head of the Djapu clan, had formed a partnership through which they secured the peace to end Arnhem Land’s ‘Black Wars’.13 Hence in the Top End, the historical record is less dark, the cultural losses fewer and attitudes towards cross-cultural cooperation more upbeat. Or such is the tone conveyed in the work produced through the partnership of Indigenous artist Lin Onus and non-Indigenous artist Michael Ether, for whom cultural ‘mixing up’ is a way forward, and a bit of an infectious lark.

13 For an account of the role Thomson played in securing the peace of Arnhem Land, and his partnership with Wonggu, see http://sensiblefilms.com/portfolio/thomson-of-arnhem-land/

The Dingo Project is multifaceted, the stories move around, crossing clan boundaries, a hydra of a project that branches out in many directions around its loose associative core. However, outside the Top End, there are fewer intact traditional stories of the dingo totem spirits left to tell. Or, even in other pockets, where the culture endured, how many of Australia’s contemporary Indigenous artists would be of the right clan or skin (totemic division) to have the authority or permission to tell them? For most, the dingo is not their totem. To borrow Mundine’s expression, “we are all too mixed up now.” Many of the traditional lines of transmission are either fractured, or broken.

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And, additionally, because so much knowledge and culture has been lost, history sometimes appears to start somewhere around the 1780s when their dispossession begins and the psychological damage starts to accumulate. Hence for some, The Dingo Project is a haunting ground in which tales of the wild dog circulate through unresolved resentments, where trauma runs deep and old scores remain to be settled, injustices set to right—as in the more savage, less sunny and less 11 Aboriginal peoples customarily refer to ‘story’ in the general global sense without the article (the)

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15 The Black Line followed a number of massacres committed by both European settlers and Aboriginals defending their land. Colonel George Arthur, Lieutenant Governor of Tasmania, under pressure from a committee of private citizens implemented in 1830 the operation of the ‘Black Line’, made up of a force of two thousand and two hundred conscripted settlers, to corral and drive the remaining Aboriginal people from a large area of Tasmania’s most productive farmlands with the view to transporting them to Flinders Island. Most Aboriginal people escaped, with two recorded killed and two captured. See https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/theblack-line too mixed

forgiving works of Fiona Foley’s Dingo Hunter (2021) and Julie Gough’s Kaparunina (For the Dead Are Many) (2021), which bluntly recall the historical culls of the wild dog14 and Aboriginal people alike—and, by inference, the infamous attempt to drive Aboriginal people out of Tasmania under the notorious Black Line.15 Again, as underlined by Mundine in Conversations with my Grandmother, talking about the fate of the dingoes is also a mode of talking about the fate of Aboriginal people. The brutality of the colonizers can be perhaps, partially explained through the psychological darkness of the colonial imaginary introduced to Australian shores. In a painting titled Pest Is Less (2021), Blak Douglas tackles the ‘black dog’ of the depression endemic in Aboriginal communities, through the near wholesale absorption of Francisco Goya’s The Dog (c. 1820s), painted by the Spanish artist during his black period of acute mental and emotional distress. Douglas barely

14 In Tasmania, the Thylacine, a ‘relative’ of the dingo, was a large carnivorous marsupial known as the Tasmanian Tiger or Tasmanian Wolf, now believed to be extinct

d ı v a n 1 1l changes a detail, exchanging the head of Goya’s dog with that of a dingo, just poking out of an absorptive surface representing the ‘black dog’, an intensive nothingness that sucks down, like an undertow, bearing down from above. Except for the head, whether dingo or dog, the entire field of the painting is filled with the ‘black dog’ of depression. You have to look hard to discern the difference, that Douglas’ painting isn’t simply a copy of the Goya. In exchanging the head, the contagious field of depression’s ‘black dog’ switches continents, imported wholesale. Prior to this, the beastly figure of the ‘big bad wolf’ arrived in the collective psyche of the early colonizers. Even though supposedly eradicated in Great Britain prior to 1788, residual dread of the wolf endures. To give some indication of what the dingo was up against, Mundine installed texts from European folkloric tradition on the gallery walls: “The time between midnight and dawn when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most palatable. It is the hour when the sleepless are most pursued by their sharpest anxieties, when ghosts and demons hold sway. The hour of the wolf is also when most children are born.”16

17 Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, Barbara Bray trans., New York NY: New York Review of Books Classics, 2003

Though, strictly speaking, these texts were written well into the twentieth century, they attest to a lingering dread. And, inherent in this imported mythological violence, was a core imperative: protect yourself against the wolf. Hence, in settler conflations of dingo into wolf, in the transfer from mythical creature of the imaginary to the real-world animal no chances were to be taken with the Aboriginal dog, the sheep killer that was a cognate of the wolf. And by corollary logic, they killed the dingo’s kin, the Aboriginal people who also killed their sheep. Not only did they build the Dingo Fence (or Dog Fence),18 a straggling structure over 5,600 kilometres long, but they also set the dingo traps into which Jason Wing inserted a human skull, Stop This Thief (2021) and Maddison Gibbs, her own face, in Removed (2021). In stark contrast, for Aboriginal people the wild dog, in spirit form, had an entirely different signification: the dingo totem spirits were creation deities, and protectors and arbiters of justice and law, powerful guardian figures who were the very antithesis of the imported European beast. In Arnhem Land they were responsible for the creation of fresh water streams: a bark painting by Gladys Getjpulu recounts the dingo spirit story of how the stream at Gurrka came into being, and a similar Yolngu tale from Johnny Malibirr, Dog Story (2015) chronicles the creation of three streams in a cave at Gurrkawakarrmurr. And in the spirit world, the dingo totem spirit beings continued to appear in all their grandeur. The painting, 3AM (1994), chronicles the nighttime studio visitations of the shadowy forms of twin dingo spirit beings first encountered by non-Indigenous artist, Jenny Sages, many years after she had her first experience of them in Arnhem Land and the Kimberly. Teena McCarthy, travelling near Alice Springs, came across a similar pair of spirits in their role of guardians on a 16 Hour of the Wolf (1968), film directed by Ingmar Bergman

18 The Dingo Fence is the world’s longest human-made structure that stretches over the states of South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria, across the northern border of Australia’s most fertile southeastern quarter. Built in the 1880s and constructed of wire mesh and also dug underground to prevent dingoes digging underneath it, it was designed to protect the sheep industry

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More dangerous for the dingo, was the logic that eliminated the distinction between beast and pet, “The hour between dog and wolf, that is, dusk, when the two can’t be distinguished from each other… when country people believed that transformation might happen at any moment.”17

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Eventually, the Macassar man said, “What is wrong with you, why do you act this way? Wungunn replied: It’s because I am an independent Aboriginal Black Man. If I took these from you, I would become dependent and become a White Man. (I would be civilized but dependent!)” The Macassar understood, and went away, never to return, leaving Wungunn and his people ‘living happily’ in their country. Therein ended the tale for some several hundreds of years. Then the British arrived. Apparently, they didn’t meet the Wungunn, or didn’t listen. They didn’t trade, nor did they negotiate, but brought with them murder, disenfranchisement and dispossession. And, exactly as Wungunn had predicted of letting in things you don’t want, the people became unhappily civilized. In this light, Conversations with my Grandmother is an affirmation of what the Wungunn foresaw: Aboriginal people have become “too mixed up and civilized now.”

But the final words on The Dingo Project belong to artist and curator Mundine for whom, The exhibition really starts with the Dingo and the Matches story as the central premise of the show and the colonial view of Australia and its native inhabitants, about difference and independence and co-existence. How do we live with different independent indifferent beings? Do we control them by making them dependent, by restricting their movement and excluding them, by poisoning them or killing them in other violent ways? Aboriginal people of course are a parallel metaphor, companion being in the examination of this relationship.

All too mixed up and civilized now

The penultimate word on the dingo, like a good dose of mischief, surprisingly involves a flock of sheep. Installed furthest away from the entrance on the museum’s back wall, literally an endnote to the exhibition, the video of Mundine’s Judas Goat (2021) tracks a mob of sheep released into the gallery on opening night, with the footage of their antics live-screened to the audience outside. The irony of this dispossession was not lost on those displaced from their ‘gallery lands’ by the invading sheep. In between calmly munching fodder scattered about and defecating on the floor, the sheep, imported beings that they were, raised their heads to keep a wary eye on the dingoes on the walls.As‘imported beings’ the presence of the sheep directly referenced the story of ‘The Dingo: Wungunn, The Macassar, and the Matches’, as told to Mundine. Installed immediately adjacent to the only gallery entrance, the text was the alpha and omega of The Dingo Project, the first and last thing visitors would see. It went like this: the Macassar came to trade, proposing many items, rice, tobacco, canoes, even matches, all of which Wungunn, the dingo totem spirit, politely refused.

108 | lonely stretch of desert in The Gatekeepers (2021): “dog horse size Creatures/They seemed not of this world.” There they were, looming large across the highway, on the lookout for a transgressor. “They part to let us drive through/ Coming back together.” On either side of her immense canvas, McCarthy’s handwritten verse subtends the image in the mode of the visionary engravings of William Blake’s The Four Zoas (1797–1807). Benign spirits, the gatekeepers were out to catch “That Rubbish-man, who broke our Lore.”

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The art of seafaring

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The above is from a story accompanying the Yolngu/Macassan Project at the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) by the Yolngu artist Gunybi Ganambarr. The sail in question is a Macassan sail, recalling a time when fleets of wooden sailing boats from the port of Makassar in South Sulawesi navigated a cyclone-prone ocean to reach the coast of Arnhem Land in the north of Australia. More than one hundred years since the contact between seafaring Indonesians and Indigenous Australians officially ceased, the dynamic history and present-day incidence of sea crossings and cross-cultural exchange has been documented by the many individuals involved in this project. The Yolngu/Macassan Project is contained within a tranquil space of light blue gallery walls, yet the complex assemblages within the space reflect many layers of exchange. It incorporates multiple curators, artworks produced across several decades, commissioned work and collected artefacts, collaborations and individual responses, and is entwined with a broader program of artistic exchanges exploring the encounters between the Yolngu and the Macassans.2

1 From the wall text accompanying Djirrit by Gunybi Ganambarr

110 | Their engine broke down at sea, so they paddled to a nearby island where they found food, fire, water and shelter for the night. In the morning, they calmly fashioned a sail from what was available to make their way home.1

3 Chris Saines, ‘Foreword’, The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2021, p. 15

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4 Agung Hujatnikajennong, Kurasi dan Kuasa: Kekuratoran dalam Medan Seni Rupa Kontemporer di Indonesia, Jakarta: Marjin Kiri, 2015

2 The term “Macassan” is used widely in Australia to denote the people from present day Indonesia who sourced trepang in northern Australia for the export trade based in the port city of Makassar in South Sulawesi

The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial has rightly been described as a “milestone”, the result of “an unprecedented, shared effort from participating artists and curators, writers and advisors and interlocutors from across the region.”3 From the outset this momentous exhibition has seen shifting models of cooperation and curatorial practice: this iteration features sixty-nine projects by more than one hundred and fifty artists from over thirty countries. While Australian commentators have frequently described the overall significance of the APT in terms of reorienting the Australian art world towards the Asia-Pacific region, its impact on the region’s art world has often been evaluated in a more tangible sense. In Indonesia, for example, throughout the 1990s the APT was important for many artists who were unable to show subversive art in their own country.4 As the selection of artists and works was done independently from the Indonesian government, there was no pressure to showcase state-approved art and thus, in the absence of institutional legitimation in their own country, many artists aspired to participate in this major international exhibition. Furthermore, the APT was a model for aspiring Indonesian curators who had no access to specific training in curating or art history in their own country, and who relied on the co-curatorship model and informal interactions to develop their skills and networks. Although different curatorial structures have been trialled over its thirty-year history, the co-curation model remains an important facet of the APT. The Yolngu/Macassan Project has been curated by Diane Moon, the Curator of Indigenous Fibre Art at the Queensland Art Gallery| Gallery of Modern Art with Indonesian artist and performer Abdi Karya, whose video performance is part of the exhibition. In turn, there has been considerable interaction

7 The different ethnicities of the trepang fishers is reflected in the large number of loanwords found in northern Australian languages from speakers of languages other than Makassan, including those from South and East Sulawesi, Maluku and Timor-Rote and the Bajau and Oceanic subgroups. See Antoinette Schapper, ‘Beyond ‘Macassans’: Speculations on layers of Austronesian contact in Northern Australia’, Australian Journal of Linguistics, vol. 41, 2021, Issue 4

6 From 1746 there was a direct junk link between Makassar and the port of Amoy (now known as Xiamen). See Heather Sutherland and Gerrit Knapp, Monsoon Traders: Ships, Skippers and Commodities in Eighteenth-Century Makassar, Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004

The trade in sea cucumber (trepang), based around the trading port of Makassar on the southwestern peninsula of Sulawesi, is the best known and documented aspect of early contacts between Indonesia and northern Australia. China was the destination market for the trepang found throughout island Southeast Asia and by the eighteenth century trepang fishing was established as the most important commodity for Makassar,6 a cosmopolitan trading port which attracted settlers from throughout the archipelago. The trepang fishers were predominantly of Macassar and Bugis ethnicity, but included other groups like the Mandarese, Butonese, Bajau, Timorese, Malukan and Papuan (now collectively referred to as Makassans).7

between the curators and members of the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, the Indigenous community art centre located in Yirrkala, East Arnhem Land. The complexities of the curatorial interactions and artistic collaborations, now spanning several years, are partly described in an account of the project by Abdi Karya, which makes clear that this been a pivotal experience professionally, but a profoundly emotional one.5 The Yolngu/Macassan Project is about personal connections to a shared history.

9 Regina Ganter, Mixed relations: Asian-Aboriginal Contact in North Australia, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2006

5 Abdi Karya, ‘Jappama. Nia’ma (I’m leaving. I’m here)’; https://apap.qagoma.qld.gov.au/jappama-niama-im-leaving-im-here/

8 Campbell Macknight, ‘The View from Marege’: Australian Knowledge of Makassar and the Impact of the Trepang Industry across Two Centuries’, Aboriginal History, vol. 35, ANU Press, 2011, p. 122

10 Julia Martínez and Adrian Vickers, The Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labor and Indigenous Encounters in Australia’s Northern Trading Network, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015 d ı

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A MARITIME WORLD

Sourced widely from the archipelago around Makassar, trepang fishing extended to the coasts of neighbouring islands and into Australian waters. The dating and scale of this trade has been debated amongst scholars over recent decades, though its extent is thought to have reached the Kimberley coast, an area known as Kayu Jawa, in the northwest of Western Australia during the 1750s, and Arnhem Land, known as Marege, in the 1780s.8 Coastal people from various parts of Indonesia, including the Bajau (Bajo) and the Butonese probably visited Australia earlier than this and, while many accounts of contact between Macassans and Indigenous Australians focus on the Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land, the region of cultural contact was likely to have been across a much wider area of the Australian north coast.9 Marine products other than trepang were also important for trade, including seaweed, pearls, tortoise shells, trochus shells and shark fin. The pearling industry, which developed in northern Australia throughout the nineteenth century, brought Indonesians from islands such as Alor, Babar, and Solor to Broome, Darwin and Thursday Island.10

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Macassans also had sexual relationships with Aboriginal women and fathered children in Australia.

When the southeast winds arrived in March or April each year, they would return to Makassar.

By the early twentieth century the thriving trepang industry between northern Australia and Makassar was terminated. The British colonial administration attempted to take advantage of the lucrative export trade by gradually introducing higher taxes from the 1880s until the South Australian government (which administered what is now the Northern Territory at that time) completely outlawed the trade in 1907. In Indonesia, although Makassar was a trading port of the Dutch East Indies Company and then a regional centre in the colonial Dutch East Indies (1800–1942), the trade in trepang was largely in the hands of local traders and regional rulers. Throughout the eighteenth century the Dutch East Indies Company’s trade in Makassar was “relatively insignificant” and in decline.14 Today, the trepang industry is still significant for Makassar, which continues to operate as a hub for its fishing, processing and exporting while seafaring communities still operate throughout the Indonesian archipelago.

112 | 113

The people who collected trepang in Australian waters were organized into large fleets of wooden sailing vessels of a type known as paduwakang. These were plank-built boats, characterized by their tripod masts to which rectangular sails, made from karoro or palm-leaf sail cloth, were attached. The trepang harvesting fleet was the largest collection of craft sailing in and out of Makassar, and in the year 1786-87 there were eighty registered boats.11 Maritime journeys were regulated by the onset of the monsoon season. These fleets would depart Makassar each year with the arrival of the northwest monsoonal winds, usually during December. The boats travelled northeast of Timor, stopping for supplies on one of the islands in the Banda Sea before embarking on the journey south across open seas to Marege, a total travel time of between ten and fifteen days. On arrival, the trepang fishers would then negotiate with local populations to spend four to five months collecting and processing trepang, building small camps close to the shore and erecting smokehouses. The boats probably carried bamboo and prefabricated wall panels, mats and palm leaf for this purpose.

Some Aboriginal Australians travelled back to Makassar with the fleets, either to work in the port city and return home during a subsequent fishing season or to settle and establish families.

The presence of Aboriginal Australians in Makassar was recorded by a number of nineteenth century European visitors in written and visual accounts12 and there are traces of this in present-day Makassar: residents in the neighbourhood of the former home of Unusu Daeng Remba, a captain involved in the trepang trade, recollect that the house was constructed of ironwood brought to Makassar from Arnhem Land and that several Aboriginal Australians lived in the house.13 Macassan heritage in the Northern Territory is extensive, including rock art and trepang processing sites, in objects of material culture such as cloth, iron and dugout canoes, and in languages, music, art forms and ceremonial life.

11 Heather Sutherland, ‘Trepang and Wangkang: The China Trade of Eighteenth-Century Makassar c. 1720s-1840s’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde, vol. 156, no. 3, 2000

12 Jane Lydon, ‘Picturing Macassan-Australian Histories: Odoardo Beccari’s 1873 Photographs of the ‘Orang-Mereghi’ and Indigenous Authenticity’, in Jane Carey and Jane Lydon eds, Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange, Routledge, New York, 2014, p.147-48

13 Marshall Clark, ‘Tangible Heritage of the Macassan-Aboriginal Encounter in Contemporary South Sulawesi’, in Marshall Clark and Sally K. May eds., Macassan History and Heritage: Journeys, Encounters and Influences, Canberra: ANU Press, 2013 14 Macknight, p.122; Sutherland, p. 461

d ı v a n 1 1l S I O B H A N C A M P B E L L

The Yolngu/Macassan Project also features work by artists from the Marika family, including two paintings on bark and wood by Dhuwarrwarr Marika, titled Macassan-style Swords and Long Knives (2021). These relate to the earlier work of her father Mawalan Marika (1907–1967), who made the crayon drawing on paper, Makassan Swords and Long Knives for the anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt in 1947.18 Dhuwarrwarr Marika’s two renditions of Macassan-style Swords and Long Knives feature a series of colourful, vertically arranged knives with individually shaped handles.19 These knives are a distinct symbol of cultural identity in South Sulawesi and to the Indigenous Australians were synonymous with the Macassan seafarers. They are made in a variety of shapes and sizes but generally feature straight, curved or wavy blades and can reach about half a metre in length. Much more than a weapon and hunting tool, they are believed to have been imbued

15 For an overview of the Hati Marege and other projects see Aaron Corn with Brian Djangirrawuy Garawirrtja ‘The Legacy of YolŋuMakassan Contact: Before the First Wave’, in Danielle Clode and Gillian Dooley eds, The First Wave: A New Approach to Exploring Early Coastal Contact History in Australia, 2020, Film, Digital Media or Visual Output, Adelaide; https://youtu.be/nr0MW6uWf6s. See also details of the Trepang Project by Andrish Saint-Clare; https://www.insideindonesia.org/trepang-3

19 In addition to the works shown at APT10, Dhuwarrwarr Marika has produced other versions of the work, including a collagraph in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/works/2021.13/ and another shown in the exhibition By the Stars, Wind & Ocean Currents at Cross Art Projects, Sydney 2019; http://www.crossart.com.au/current-show/357-by-thestars-wind-ocean-currents

One example is the late Yolngu painter Johnny Bulunbulun (1946–2010), whose painting on bark titled Body design–wind (2002), representing the northwest wind, clouds and weather patterns (lunggurruma) measured the timing of the fishing expeditions.16 In 1993, the artist took a group from Maningrida to perform the Marayarr Murrukunddjeh ceremony over three nights at the Museum La Galigo in Makassar, the ceremony by which Ganalbingu people annually received the Macassan traders to their land. Johnny Bulunbulun was also part of a major exhibition, titled Trepang: China and the Story of Macassan–Aboriginal Trade in collaboration with classically-trained Chinese artist Zhou Xiaoping, held at the Capital Museum in Beijing and at the Melbourne Museum in 2011.17

RECONNECTING

The art of seafaring

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While the significance of the interaction between Aboriginal Australians and the Macassans has never featured prevalently in the national histories of either Indonesia or Australia, the descendants of the people involved have retained and recorded these histories in various forms.

18

Since the 1980s there have been many initiatives to reinvigorate connections, involving community members, performing artists, and exhibitions of visual art. One of the earliest and most significant was the controversial 1988 Hati Marege bicentennial project, for which the Northern Territory Museum facilitated the recreation of a traditional paduwakang vessel to re-enact the voyage of Macassan trepang fishers from Makassar to Yirrkala.15 It is important to note that these numerous initiatives have involved many of the artists exhibited in the APT10 Yolngu/Macassan Project and that many works in the current exhibition draw on earlier forms of collaboration.

16 This work is part of the QAGOMA Collection, Accession Number 2003.147; https://learning.qagoma.qld.gov.au/artworks/body-designwind/ 17 Marcia Langton, Alejandra Duschatzky and Stephanie Holt eds, Trepang: China and the Story of Macassan–Aboriginal Trade, Melbourne: Museum Victoria, 2011

The work is part of the Yirrkala Drawings Collection at the Berndt Museum of Anthropology, University of Western Australia

23 Julie Janson, ‘The Eyes of Marege’, APE Australian Performance Exchange; http://australianperformanceexchange.com/dev/v2/?q =eyes-of-marege and Ananda Sukarlan, ‘“The Voyage to Marege” a Voyage of Discovery’, The Jakarta Post, 11 August 2017; https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/08/11/the-voyage-marege-a-voyage-discovery.html

22 The batik production was funded by the Australian Embassy in Jakarta and presented to the Textile Museum in Jakarta in 2017; https://indonesia.embassy.gov.au/jakt/MR15_012.html

20 Halilintar Latief, ‘Revisiting the Collection of Dr František Czurda’ in Sri Kuhnt-Saptodewo (ed.) Sulawesi and Beyond: The František Czurda Collection, Wien: Museum für Völkerkunde, 2010

24 Will Stubbs, APT10-10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2021, p. 172

21 Although commonly associated with the island of Java, the technique of batik is practiced by many cultures of Indonesia, including Central Sulawesi, where the Sa’dan Toraja people use a resist dyeing method with rice paste and indigo dye

d ı v a n 1 1l with a supernatural force during the time of their forging. A young man embarking on a journey would usually be presented with a dagger by his family in the hope that it would bring protection and prosperity.20Thelarger of the paintings depicting the Macassan-style knives was then replicated by a group of Javanese batik artisans on cotton cloth using the wax-resist dyeing technique. The technique of batik, practiced predominantly on the island of Java, has no apparent direct relationship to Macassan culture, though cloth was certainly part of the exchange of material goods between the Aboriginal Australians and the trepang fishers.21 Collaborative batik production has also featured in earlier exchanges. For instance, when the Yolngu artist Nawurapu Wunungmurra (1952–2018) visited Makassar and Java in 2015, a batik cloth was made by artisans in Pekalongan based on his bark painting which features a triangle design symbolizing the departing red sails of the Macassan traders.22 In addition to the painted renditions of the Macassan blades, for the Yolngu-Macassan Project artists including Djakapurra Munyarryun have recreated the actual knives using materials such as metal and synthetic twine. Djakapurra has been involved in several performances based on the exchange, including The Eyes of Marege, shown at the OzAsia Festival in Adelaide and the Sydney Opera House in 2007 and The Voyage to Marege with the Indonesian classical composer Ananda Sukarlan in Jakarta in 2017.23 An additional significant form of memory represented in the Yolngu/Macassan Project are the earthenware pots, and shards of earthenware arranged on a circular mound of sand. These shards regularly appear on the east coast beaches of East Arnhem Land.24 The Macassans brought earthenware with them to use as cooking pots, water and storage jars. They were manufactured locally in South Sulawesi, though some may have come from other parts of the archipelago. Song cycles known in Bawaka, which record the knowledge of place, explain why there are so many broken pieces found on the beach, The songs tell us of the harvest working together side by side, sharing and trading. And at the end, a great party. Our friends bring out all their fine goods. We laugh into the night. We celebrate our hard work. We sing and dance. And then when it is finished and we have drunk all the nanitji and eaten all the fine food, we smash the bottles and they burst and explode!

25 Djawa Burarrwanga, as told to Will Stubbs, p.172

25 S I O B H A N C A M P B E L L

116 | 117 The art of seafaring

The Macassan Sail (2020) by Gunybi Ganambarr is a testimony to the precarity of life on the ocean and to the resourcefulness and poise that it takes to “calmly fashion a sail” to travel by boat through a vast body of water. Constructed from a frame of wooden harpoons, it hangs on the gallery wall with one harpoon lying vertically, intersected by a second harpoon at a forty-five-degree angle to create a triangular-shaped frame onto which a fabric sail has been fastened with wire. The sail itself has been constructed from pieces of repurposed cloth in shades of dark blue, light blue and yellow, roughly sewn together and attached using the eyelets in the dark blue cloth. This improvised sail was produced by the artist and family members in December 2020 when their boat engine failed during a turtle hunting trip, Gunybi, his son Daniel, Yinimala Gumana, Mangila Munungurr and Bulungitj Marawili used the boat canopy and their work shirts, stitched together with copper wire, to make a Macassan-style sail, supported by a frame of turtle harpoons. When the tide and wind were favourable, they set sail for home, but were intercepted by a police boat searching for the men following reports that they had been missing overnight.

27 From exhibition wall text accompanying Djirrit by Gunybi Ganambarr

SEAFARING AS ART

S I O B H A N C A M P B E L L 26

Curator Abdi Karya, and Will Stubbs of the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre have been investigating the history of this earthenware for some years. They were able to collect a number of pots made by artisans in Soreang, a village located to the south of Makassar, which were then painted by artists in Yirrkala.26 Several of these painted pots are in the exhibition, including one by Nawurapu Wunungmurra which features several bands of a triangle pattern and cross hatching and a single black band featuring objects including a long dagger, pants, a tobacco pipe, sailboat and water pail. The earthenware on display encapsulates the spirit of these artistic exchanges, for like the collaborative batik pieces the Yolngu/Macassan Project is less concerned with authenticity or reproducing historical artefacts than with exploring how objects of material culture have been remembered and how they can relate to each other in the present.

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Sharing the floor space, adjacent to the earthenware pots and shards set in sand, was an installation of Larrakitj memorial poles, Wangupini Larrakitj made by Nawurapu Wunungmurra between 2016 and 2018. Several of the wooden poles feature depictions of white wangupini clouds on a base of black, referring to the thunder clouds that mark the arrival of the wet season, a time Abdi Karya, op cit.

The sail, as a document of their experience, and a photograph of their boat made by police rescuers, informed the second work by Gunybi Ganambarr, Djirrit (2021) an etching on aluminium composite board depicting the boat at sea. An aluminium boat, or tinny, dominates the top half of the picture, with rails along the bow, boldly afloat, the pointed nose of the boat facing the viewer in threequarter profile with the five men seated aboard. The handmade sail appears taut, the artist using a shading effect to signify the multiple pieces of fabric used to construct it. The sea around the boat is rendered in a series of vertical zigzag lines partly infilled with cross hatching, while a darker narrow panel along the top of the work suggests the clouds on the horizon or coastline.

27

118 | 119 when the monsoon winds turned and enabled the Macassans to sail to Australia. Suspended from the ceiling above the poles was a large rectangular palm-leaf sail called Karoroq/Gharuru, made by artisans in West Sulawesi. Sail-cloths like this, made by weaving the fibres of the Arrenga pinnata or gebang palm, hung from the tripod masts of the paduwakang vessels that travelled to Australia.

The Yolngu/Macassan Project also featured a handwoven sail made from woven pandanus (pandanus spiralis) and hand-rolled kurrajong bark string (brachychiton populneus), by Margaret Rarru called Dhomala (2018). Sails like this, and the dugout canoes (lipa-lipa) they propelled, are examples of practical knowledge brought by the Makassans to Australia. This sail was commissioned for the APT9 in 2019 and similar sails were shown at Dhomala Dhäwu: Makassan Sail Stories in Sydney at Cross Art Projects in 2021. The latter featured a series of drawings by Margaret Rarru depicting woven dhomala and canoes alongside the work of Javanese artist Ipeh Nur, whose drawings depict the craft and livelihoods of Makassan and Bugis boatbuilders.28 The refined canoe sail hanging next to the spontaneously constructed Macassan Sail suggests the kinds of possibilities the Yolngu/Macassan Project presents, to understand that this cultural exchange is more than unearthing underexplored histories, and seeing how memories and skills are rendered aesthetically and developed over time. As works of art many of these pieces have been displayed independently of the Yolngu/Macassan Project, the efficacy of which is to usher the viewer into a vast island world, to consider that not only contact between Aboriginal Australians and Indonesians occurred, but also to acknowledge a sense of ambiguity around some of these objects and artworks. The resonances of these legacies are complicated, the voices of contemporary Makassans are particularly faint, perhaps a legacy of the Indonesian art world that is concentrated on the art centres of Java and Bali, leaving artists from cities like Makassar on the periphery. However, given the momentum and passion that has driven this project for so many years, it is clear that the journey does not stop here.

28 Dhomala Dhäwu: Makassan Sail Stories, 2021; http://www.crossart.com.au/current-show/369-dhomala-dhaewu-makassan-sail-story-bythe-stars-wind-ocean-currents-part-2

The art of seafaring

d ı v a n 1 1l A N D R E W W O O D The ineffable NFT is good as Gold(ie)

At this juncture, in order to explain the contextual frisson involved, it is important to understand the specific niche Goldie occupies in Aotearoa New Zealand art history as what passes for an Old Master. As a painter, trained, like so many Antipodean artists of the time, at the Académie Julian in Paris, Goldie was an unexceptional, even mediocre, though popular dauber. He made his mark, however, in the lucrative local market for Māori portraiture. This gives his work prestige among Aotearoa New Zealand’s indigenous people for whom having accurate representations of their ancestors outweigh its technical merits, and by extension gives them the distinction of national treasures.4 It also appealed to the colonial, and, to a lesser extent, international markets, for whom it

See Roger Blackley, Goldie, Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery and David Bateman Ltd, 1997; Michael King, ‘Moko and C. F. Goldie’, Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 84, no. 4, 1975, pp. 431–440

1 Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object From 1966 to 1972, New York: Praeger, 1973, pp. 263–264

120 | 121 Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are of the moment, either loved or abhorred, but neither better nor worse than they should be, irrespective of the pear-clutching snobbery of gatekeepers who never understood the difference between connoisseur and investor. They are new and anything new has its value, even if it’s a bit slapdash because it’s early. Few things concentrate the attention so much, in this age of distractions, as large sums of money. To give a thoroughly inadequate elevator pitch, nutshell explanation for anyone who came in late: and NFT uses blockchain technology to prove ownership of virtual assets (in the financial and the coding sense), usually digital-like videos, memes, tweets, and photographs. These are minted as unique files on a digital ledger of the blockchain, which is an unfalsifiable record that you own access to the NFT, a key if you will, a key that can be traded on the market. NFTs have their philosophical and environmental issues, and seem eminently suitable for money laundering, but if one accepts that the mainstream art market is grossly inflated anyway, that conceptual and digital art negate the need of the physical object (Lucy Lippard’s “dematerialized object”1), and that authenticated editions have value, then much of the snobbery that attaches itself to NFTs is difficult to understand. An international 2021 survey revealed 39% of Millennials and 47% of Gen Z have invested in cryptocurrencies and NFTs.2 These are the kids that disrupted global banking by decentralizing and democratizing the stock market and now they’ve come for the art world; it’s basically a more aesthetic form of cryptocurrency and no one mocks Bitcoin or Ethereum these days, despite the laughable boosterism. In February this year Webb’s auction house, based in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand and arguably the country’s biggest, sold two glass plate negatives as NFTs, accompanied by “a framed contact print of the image and the original glass plate negative” presented in a custom-built pine box.3 The images were by the artist Charles Frederick Goldie (1870–1940)—Charles Frederick Goldie at His Easel and Charles Frederick Goldie in His Studio, taken between 1910 and 1920 by the Robert Farnell Studios, and which sold for NZ$ 51,250 and NZ$76,250 respectively. This is considerably more than the estimate for the plates themselves at NZ$5,000 and NZ$8,000. This is perhaps the point.

2 Jack Caporal, ‘Study: What Are Gen Z and Millennial Investors Buying in 2021?’, The Motley Fool; https://www.fool.com/research/whatare-gen-z-millennial-investors-buying/ 3 https://auctions.webbs.co.nz/m/lot-details/index/catalog/425/lot/94210/RUPERT-FARNELL-STUDIOS-Charles-Frederick-Goldie-in-His4Studio

9 Iconoclasm is when there is a clear intent for the destruction or the demise of an image. Iconoclash is when there is an uncertainty about what is committed when an image, from science, religion or art is being smashed. See Bruno Latour, Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2002 10 Nicolas Pointon, ‘Digital images of Goldie sell for $127k at New Zealand’s first NFT auction’, RNZ, 2 February 2022; https://www.rnz.co.nz/ news/national/460726/digital-images-of-goldie-sell-for-127k-at-new-zealand-s-first-nft-auction, 3 February 2022

d ı v a n 1 1l was mostly painted. The former saw it as a necessary accessory to their nascent nationalistic impulses. The latter had an insatiable thirst for the exotic and the wrinkly tattooed faces of Māori elders lost in reverie or quietly napping fitted the bill.5 But of course, these NFTs aren’t images of those paintings. To suggest the destruction of such images, which contain an element of the spirit of the sitter as do the paintings, would be considered sacrilege in terms of Māori tikanga (cultural practice), an attack on the mauri (life force) of the ancestor contained within. René Magritte’s admonition, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”6 holds no smoke in this context, but does it for an image of the artist himself? “The famous pipe,” he says. “How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe’, I’d have been lying!”7

6 René Magritte, La Trahison des Images (1929), Los Angeles County Museum of Art

A N D R E W W O O D

There is (or is there?) somehow a difference when dealing with the image of a Pākehā (European New Zealander) painter. And yet some cross-pollination—some Māori I have talked to find the proposition awkward because of Goldie’s relationship with them. There is also, perhaps, the additional irony that Goldie as simulacrum has a previous history in the form of the notorious New Zealand art forger Karl Feoder Sim (1923–2013), who changed his name by deed poll to Carl Feoder Goldie so that his versions of the paintings and drawings of the original C. F. Goldie acquired a certain dubious legitimacy.8 There is also the issue that these photographic plates are irreplaceable heritage objects, which will likely protect them from going under the hammer in a more literal sense, wherever they are now. Or will it? There is no real legal recourse in New Zealand heritage law to prevent the destruction of antiques as private property. The brutal iconoclasm of Daesh (ISIS) might, in a glissading lapse of taste, be regarded as a kind of artwork in its own right —a moment of Latourian iconoclash.9 There is a long history of vandalism of historical art discussed in all earnestness as acts of political expression. Problematic monuments are being torn down in the West as I type. What’s the difference? Webb’s director of art, Charles Ninow was reported by Radio New Zealand as saying, “We did this auction because we could see the potential of the NFT space and I think that it’s fair to say even we are astounded by the result.”10 Included with the original package as a piece of theatre or, perhaps, conceptual art, was a small brass hammer, which Ninow puckishly had suggested might be used to smash the glass negative, as a statement about whether the Benjaminian aura of artistic authenticity11 lay in the object or in the concept of the work. “Perhaps you might want to make

8 See Karl F. Sim, C F Goldie and the Creative Art of Forgery, London: Lulu, 2003; Ian Dougherty, A Good Joke: The Live and Crimes of Notorious New Zealand Art Forger Karl Sim, Dunedin: Saddle Hill Press, 2019

5 See Roger Blackley, Galleries of Maoriland: Artists, Collectors and the Māori World, 1880-1910, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2019

accessed

11 Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin, trans. Jane Todd, New York: Guilford, 1996, p.48

7 Harry Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, Richard Miller trans., New York: H. N. Abrams, 1977, p. 71

Only the humourlessly pretentious would try to make something more sinister and profound out of this than a bit of showmanship—which, of course, Hyperallergic predictably did. They interviewed blogger Molly White of Web3 is Going Just Great—a blog that the hacks, scams and generally bad ideas haunt, like many crypto and web 3.0 projects. White had tweeted about the auction, “I suspect,” she told Hyperallergic, “the whole thing was a calculated move by the auction house. They knew that offering a hammer and suggesting the buyers smash a historical artifact to make the project ‘permanently digital’ would be provocative and generate interest. They seem to have been successful, too—both auctions closed at prices far above the estimates—but certainly at the cost of being able to claim to be motivated by their love of art rather than money.”15

Oh, sweet summer child, pas possible! Such charming naiveté! Being motivated by money when your job is to sell on behalf of a client is a reality of the business. That, however, doesn’t reflect poorly on their love of art, nor does it mean they can’t be playful. One suspects the idea was inspired by Australian auction house Lloyds’ June 2021 auction of the Rose Stereograph Company’s collection of 10,000 historical photographs going back to the 1880s, accompanied with NFTs to establish provenance by blockchain.16 Webb’s was dabbling its toes in the water, but with the intriguing twist of making the NFTs, indeed the whole performance, an artwork in its own right. We are now, therefore, in the territory of auction houses making, or at least collaborating, in conceptual art pieces. The most obvious example of this is when in 2018, Banksy in a moment of spectacularly miscalculated hubris, triggered a thoroughly trite painting to shred itself at the dramatic moment in a Sotheby’s auction. Presumably this was supposed to be a middle finger to the art establishment, but all it did was cement the artist as a commodity when it was resold three years later for US$25.4 million dollars.17 Sotheby’s had to be in on that stunt (and clearly had a better idea of how it would turn out than Banksy did)—they would have failed spectacularly at due diligence in their condition inspection not to notice a shredder and battery pack in the frame. It might have been a bomb. If you still believe they weren’t conscious, willing collaborators, well then, I have a Leonardo da Vinci Salvator Mundi to sell you.

122 | 123 it permanently digital. Smash it? Smash it,” Ninow told NewsHub.12 Think of it as a variant on Robert Rauschenberg’s painstaking rubbing out of a De Kooning drawing in 1953.13 “In hindsight,” Ninow told Radio New Zealand, “giving people a hammer was a slightly too provocative way of explaining that. Everyone will be pleased to know we will not be including a hammer.”14

16 ‘Massive historic photo collection to be auctioned–with NFTs!’, Inside Imaging, 28 June 2021; https://www.insideimaging.com.au/ 172021/massive-historic-photo-collection-to-be-auctioned-with-nfts/SharonPruitt-Young,‘Ahalf-shreddedBanksypieceisauctionedfor

$25.4 million, a record for the artist’, NPR, 14 October 2021; https://www.npr.org/2021/10/14/1046134451/banksy-shredded-auction-sold-record

The ineffable NFT is good as Gold(ie)

12 Simon Shepherd, ‘New Zealand auction house becomes the first to auction NFTs’, NewsHub, 26 January 2022; https://www.newshub. co.nz/home/new-zealand/2022/01/new-zealand-auction-house-becomes-the-first-to-auction-nfts.html; accessed 3 February 2022

13 Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; https://www.sfmoma.org/ artwork/98.298/ 14 Pointon, op cit.

15 Valentina di Liscia, ‘Auction House Sells Glass Negatives As NFTs And Tells Buyers To “Smash” the Originals’, Hyperallergic, 1 February 2022; https://hyperallergic.com/708792/auction-house-sells-glass-negatives-as-nfts-tells-buyers-to-smash-the-originals/; accessed 3 February 2022

20 ‘Market analyst: “NTFs are complete folly”’, RNZ, 30 January 2022; https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/sunday/ audio/2018828598/market-analyst-ntfs-are-complete-folly

For some reason Hyperallergic chose to describe Goldie as a “polemical artist.” He wasn’t. Unlike the Bohemian immigrant artist Gottfried Lindauer (1839–1926), who, coming from a culture that Vienna had done its best to systematically erase, may have had some polemical intent while painting Māori in New Zealand. Whereas Goldie, who was friendly with most of his Māori sitters was mainly in it for the money in the market for the exotic. Much like the people who create NFTs. NFTs have surged in popularity and price in the past year. Nor is Webb’s unusual in pursuing that potential. In a recent online auction run by Christie’s, a particularly ghastly, aesthetically low stakes and disposable collage by Beeple (American graphic designer Mike Winkelmann) fetched $US69 million in 2021.18 Why should one reach for the smelling salts when the aforementioned ‘Leonardo’ went under the hammer for US$450.3 million?19 Of course, in the case of NFTs, much of the excitement is down to a potent cocktail of novelty and wealthy collectors in COVID lockdowns craving an adrenalin fix. However, the rapid rise of this new class of commodity assets has attracted criticism and scepticism, though this seems to come from people who either don’t understand the technology, don’t understand the art world, or don’t understand both. However, the rise of this new asset class has attracted its fair share of criticism from sceptics. Jeffrey Halley, a senior market analyst with the Canadian-based foreign exchange company OANDA, told Radio New Zealand in January that the rise of NFTs was a result of low interest rates and the conditioning of people to buy almost anything. He also said that inflation and the inevitable move by the US Federal Reserve to start normalizing interest rate policy would raise the cost of credit, negatively impacting crypto and NFT sales, and that the intangible nature of NFTs carried significant risk: “This is complete folly,” Halley said. “You can’t use it... why would you buy something you can’t use?”20 You mean like art? There are plenty of Monets and Van Goghs locked away in vaults that no one ever sees, not even their owners. It’s a facile argument—with a wall-mounted screen you can use them as much as you might use a Netflix subscription. All is not, however, plain sailing for auction houses in this wild, unregulated zone of big money and few rules. One Canadian company is suing Sotheby’s and the artist Kevin McCoy over the sale of an early NFT Regarded by many as one of the first NFTs, if not the very first, Quantum was minted in May 2014. In June 2021 it sold for US$1.47m in Sotheby’s landmark ‘Natively Digital’ auction. But on 1 February this year the Canadian company Free Holdings—a dubious entity apparently consisting of one “sole member”—filed in the district court of southern New York, claiming to be Quantum’s rightful owner.21 This individual argued that they had secured the rights to the work seven years after it was created when McCoy had, they argued, let his ownership expire. They also named as a defendant the tech start-up Nameless, which provided the condition report on the digital artwork prior to the auction.

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MBS’ Yacht, Artnet says’, Bloomberg, 11 June 2019; https://www.bloomberg.com/ news/articles/2019-06-10/da-vinci-s-450-million-masterpiece-kept-on-mbs-s-yacht-artnet

21 Wallace Ludel, ‘Sotheby’s and artist Kevin McCoy sued over sale of early NFT’, The Art Newspaper, 5 February 2022; https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/02/04/sothebys-kevin-mccoy-lawsuit-quantum-nft

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18 Jakob Kastrenates, ‘Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million’, The Verge, 11 March 2021; https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/ 19beeple-christies-nft-sale-cost-everydays-69-millionKatyaKazakina,‘A$450MillionDaVinciisAboard

23 Lizzie Plaugic, ‘The story of Richard Prince and his $100,000 Instagram art’, The Verge, 30 May 2015; https://www.theverge. com/2015/5/30/8691257/richard-prince-instagram-photos-copyright-law-fair-use

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25 Taylor Dafoe, “Russia’s Hermitage Museum Will Auction Off NFTs of Prized Works by Leonardo, Van Gogh, and Other Artists in Its Collection”, artnet, 27 July 2021; https://news.artnet.com/art-world/hermitage-museum-auctioning-nfts-1992830

26 ‘The British Museum to launch NFTs, as the craze continues through 2022’, Yahoo News, 31 January 2022; https://sg.news.yahoo.com/ 27british-museum-launch-nfts-craze-020053061.html

To what end? As glorified postcards? Well Duchamp might have done something interesting with that. On the other hand, some people are taking the opportunity to create new, unique digital artworks in the NFT format, with slightly more effort than Webbs. For a scene on the periphery of the international artworld that has significant implications, there is an NFT bubble forming like the dotcom one before it and inevitably a market correction sometime in the not-too-distant future. Arguably the path to securing enduring value for NFTs is to create them as unique or limited-edition artworks with genuine aesthetic appeal and cultural value that takes advantage of the medium as an asset rather than a liability. One need not look far. The process of what art historian Frank Popper has termed the “virtualization” of art has been in play since at least the end of the 1980s.27 The standard has already been set by digital and new media artists, or by digital and new media artists in collaboration with traditional artists—Lisa Reihana, David McLeod, Deena Abdelwahed, Ash Koosha and Jess Johnson come to mind. There is much to be said for how NFTs can bring a positive influence to bear on the artworld. The environmental issues are far from insurmountable. Proof of Work (PoW) blockchain processes like Ethereum and Bitcoin are obscenely energy hungry, but the newest NFT studios are 22 Ibid.

See Frank Popper, From Technological to Virtual Art, Cambridge MA: Leonardo Books and MIT Press, 2007; Joseph Nechvatal, ‘Frank Popper and Virtualised Art’, Tema Celeste Magazine, Winter 2004, Issue 101, pp. 48–53; ‘Origins of Virtualism: An Interview with Frank Popper conducted by Joseph Nechvatal’, CAA Art Journal, Spring 2004, pp. 62–77

Many museums, including the Hermitage in St. Petersburg25 and the British Museum26 are just as bad, having simply NFT-ized high resolution photographs of objects from their collections.

The ineffable NFT is good as Gold(ie)

24 Tim Schneider, ‘Will NFTs Revolutionize the Art Market or Repeat Its Greatest Failures? These 4 Factors Will Determine Their Fate’, artnet; https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/30/8691257/richard-prince-instagram-photos-copyright-law-fair-use

The issue arises because Quantum was originally minted on NameCoin, a blockchain software that, like an Internet domain name, needs to be renewed every 250 days, meaning that under normal circumstances the NFT could be claimed by someone else after that time. According to Nameless’ condition report, however, “this specific NameCoin entry was removed from the system after not being renewed, and was effectively burned from the chain,” making it impossible to reregister.22 Sotheby’s is vigorously defending the claim. In fairness there are a lot of cowboys out there trying to cash in by turning any old picture or screengrab from the Internet, often without any legal right to them, into NFTs, from memes and social media posts to images lifted from Etsy, Spotify album art, and art gallery online catalogues. Naturally one would be a fool to get involved with those, though it isn’t dissimilar to Richard Prince’s shenanigans with Instagram.23 Artist Addie Wagenknecht describes this as “showing us in real time what disaffected white bros trafficking in meme culture looks like.”24

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32 Kabir Jhala, ‘The original NFT? Sotheby’s to offer a receipt for an invisible work by Yves Klein for €500,000’, The Art Newspaper, 23 March 2022; https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/03/22/sothebys-selling-receipt-invisible-yves-klein-work-paris

These Zones are purely conceptual pieces that have no tangible real-world existence and were purchased with a weight of pure gold which was then ceremonially thrown into the Seine River.

The conversation resurged in 2020 with a good chance of the government taking it seriously. On the one hand, that might encourage auction houses to explore the possibilities of NFTs to squeeze more out of safely long-dead artists. On the other, the NFT marketplace TreeTrunk has developed smart contracts that collect and distribute royalties to artists for NFTs listed on the secondary market. They also use “crypto-lithography” to authenticate which copies are officially linked back to the original NFT.30 In another curious twist, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, NFTs are being used like war bonds.31Toreiterate, none of this is new, and as if to underscore that, one of Yves Klein’s Immaterial Zones (zones de sensibilité picturale immatérielle) (1959–62) is coming up for auction at Sotheby’s.32

28 Tom Bateman, ‘EU regulator calls for a ban on proof of work Bitcoin mining to save renewable energy’, Euronews, 20 January 2022; 29https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/01/19/eu-regulator-calls-for-a-ban-on-proof-of-work-bitcoin-mining-to-save-renewable-energyTeManatūTaongaNewZealandMinistryforCultureandHeritage,‘AResaleRoyaltyRightforVisualArtists’,PolicyDiscussionDocument,2007;https://mch.govt.nz/sites/default/files/ResaleRoyaltyPublicDiscussionPaper.pdf;‘ArtistResaleRoyalties’,

31 Dorian Batycka, ‘As Members of the Crypto Community Rally Behind Ukraine, NFTs Have Suddenly Become 21st-Century War Bonds’, Artnet, 1 March 2022; https://news.artnet.com/market/war-bonds-crypto-art-2079282

The ineffable NFT is good as Gold(ie) gravitating to Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchains like Tezos, Peercoin, and CENNZnet, which are orders of magnitude more energy efficient. The transition is inevitable with Vice-Chair of the European Securities and Markets Authority Erik Thedéen calling in early 2022 for the European Union to ban PoW in favour of PoS due to its lower energy consumption and reduced carbon emissions.28 Lessons can also be learned from the failings of music streaming services as to how better reward artists for their work.Prominent New Zealand artists have been agitating for some time for Aotearoa New Zealand to introduce artist resale rights to the secondary market similar to that in the EU.29

What has been will be again, and what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9

30 Annz Santos, ‘TreeTrunk introduces a reliable royalty payment system for artists’, Smart Liquidity, 27 February 2022; https://smartliquidity.info/2022/02/27/treetrunk-introduces-a-reliable-royalty-payment-system-for-artists/

The Big Idea, 1 December 2020; https://www.thebigidea.nz/stories/media-releases/229087-artist-resale-royalties;

Tom Pullar-Strecker, ‘Art collectors should pay artists each time works bought and sold, Government told’, Stuff, 12 January 2020; https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/118618938/artcollectors-should-pay-artists-each-time-works-bought-and-sold-government-told

The only concrete evidence of its existence was a receipt, drawn up to look like a banker’s cheque, which the collector could retain for future resale, or burn as part of the ritual so that the Zone would cease to exist upon their death.

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In and out of Oxford: reflections on Art and Trousers

David Elliott, Art and Trousers Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Asian Art Hong Kong: Art Asia/Pacific Foundation, 2021

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IMAGES AND TEXT

Art and Trousers is an improbable and intriguing title for a book! In a sense the work contains a book within a book—a play within a play. And, as with Shakespeare’s plays within plays, the insertion disrupts the temporal flow and adds to the pleasure of the performance. The Chronicle of Trousers appears in the Foreword and is serialized as the introductions to the three sections into which the book is divided. The reader is given the option of reading that narrative as a whole. The history of trousers is inserted into the text just as Bottom is inserted into A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Unlikely though it may seem, the reflections on trousers give insights into parallel processes in the world of art: movements that effected change in Europe can be seen as part of a global discourse in which fashion, or simply clothes, played a sometimes significant and often an irreverent role. And in a way it is the role of that ‘mercurial garment’1 in the narrative that allows me to feel that I can say something about a book which, as the subtitle suggests, lies somewhat outside my area of expertise.

David Elliott’s twenty years as director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford (MoMA) (1976–96), were foundational to his subsequent career. There followed successive directorships of the Moderna Museet Stockholm (1996–2001), and the newly established Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2001–06). He helped to launch the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art in 2007, before leaving institutional positions behind to devote his energies to curating on a global stage. He was the artistic director of the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010), and curator of the inaugural Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2012). The book begins with an extended introductory narrative focusing on his time in Oxford. There then follow a series of previously published and revised essays on his engagement with Asian art. His curatorial practice has been based on building relationships with people over time. And as one might anticipate from a book that reflects a lifetime of making exhibitions, the images are as important as the text. The illustrations are wonderfully rich, eclectic, and at times irreverent—a parallel way of engaging with the book. The images encourage the reader to reflect on the relative autonomy of the history of form, yet its continuing entanglement with social processes. Fashions

6

4 The Museum of Modern Art Oxford was founded in 1965 and today continues under the more contemporary label Modern Art Oxford Elliott, pp. 170-173 Ibid., a typically bold generalization!

In his essay on Subramanyan Elliott’s agenda is clear in challenging the either/or of tradition and modernity, and the view that the West led the periphery into modernity; “A culture that believes in the reincarnation of the soul finds it difficult to take seriously the western obsession with chimera of originality.”6 2 Ibid., pp. 167–169

The book provides insights into why David Elliot was such a great museum director and subsequently such an innovative curator of major biennales. The exhibitions that he created are central to the trajectory of his life and are arguably his most significant contribution to art theory and art history. Images and exhibitions create spaces for interpretation and reflection—perhaps more than written texts—and often leave the argument open. But in Elliott’s case the contribution he made through his exhibitionary program becomes surprisingly clear. From the very beginning he was challenging linear and Eurocentric understandings of the meaning of ‘contemporary’ and challenging its association with modernity and the avant-garde. In doing so he made it possible to see world art in a different way. As Vishakha Desai notes in her Prologue, David Elliott challenged twentieth century conventional concepts of authenticity. The perspective on art history one gains from the exhibitions he curated and the range of works chosen is very much in accord with the emerging art historical challenge to the use of the term “contemporary.”3

Oxford has long been a city of museums, from the foundational Ashmolean to the University Museum of Natural History where Thomas Huxley debated evolution with Bishop Wilberforce, and its adjoining museum of anthropology, the Pitt Rivers Museum. But a Museum of Modern Art arrived late and without a collection.4 Elliott saw the MoMA’s location in Pembroke Street in the centre of Oxford as a place to make a difference, allowing him to use the immense resources of the University and City to the MoMA’s advantage. His essay on ‘K.G. Subramanyan–An Indian in Oxford’5 reveals the process of his museum practice. He begins with an idea or a topic, and follows it up with research, developing relationships with artists, curators and academics, then seeks the resources for creative engagement that might perhaps lead to an exhibition. While pursuing a broad agenda the process also allows for serendipity.

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3 Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009

In Who’s wearing the trousers?, looking at striking images of Mao’s suit and Marlene Dietrich’s 1933 trousers, we are asked to reflect on the challenging relationship between artists—and the works they make—andTherpower.2eisa strong biographical component to the book but by no means a linear one, and some artists and some works recur with new significance as they take their place in different essays.

THE PLACE OF OXFORD

128 | 129 recur and sequences are disrupted. Extraordinary synergies exist across space and time—art provides a medium of discourse between similar process in very different contemporaneous contexts.

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130 | 131 Elliott first met K.G. Subramanyan in Delhi in 1981 researching his 1982 exhibition Indian Myth and Reality: Aspects of Modern Indian Art. He selected for the exhibition a set of terracotta reliefs that the artist made in response to the atrocities committed in the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. Subramanyan was subsequently awarded a Christensen Fellowship at St. Catherine’s College (1987–88) which allowed him to be an artist in residence at MoMA. There he worked on a series of gouaches on perspex where the “languages and traditions of modern Indian art are conflated with experiences of living in Oxford—the heartland of the Old Empire.”7 I was personally struck by one image, Inayat Khan looks at Oxford No.3 (1987), where an Indian gentleman drinking a cup of tea is observing naked dancing figures cavorting and floating in a North Oxford garden. The gabled Victorian house and the expansive urban gardens reminded me of my childhood visits to the mysterious donnish environment of North Oxford where some of my friends, the offspring of Oxford dons, resided.

THE HEARTLAND OF THE OLD EMPIRE In 1986 I had returned to Oxford from thirteen years in Australia researching the art of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land and teaching at the Australian National University. I was appointed as a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum and a University Lecturer in Ethnology. Curiously, despite my local origins, with no Oxford degree and arriving from Australia I had assumed the identity of a welcomed outsider. Somewhere in Oxford’s cloistered and distributed hierarchy the message came that something needed to be done to celebrate Australia’s bicentenary and that perhaps a newly arrived expatriate curator could take that role. Under the rubric of Australia in Oxford, a title suggested by Sir Zelman Cowen,8 the Provost of Oriel College, I was able to co-curate in less than a year a distributed exhibition in four locations—the Ashmolean, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the University Museum and Museum of the History of Science.9 Another story, but it made me aware of the extraordinary nature of Oxford’s collections and the mysteriously supportive environment that could be directed to new ventures. And very soon after my return to Oxford I became a regular attendee at the openings of exhibitions at MoMA and got to know him. As Director of MoMA he saw in the eclectic set of museums and in the schools of art, and architecture, and the departments of art history, anthropology and the humanities more broadly, the opportunities to develop new ideas. In 1976, in the context of the Western art world, “’modern’ and ‘contemporary’ meant more or less the same thing and one could still use the term ‘avant-garde’ without any tinge of irony.”10 He set himself an agenda: the progressive encompassing of the arts othered and decentred by the Western placement of them off-centre from contemporary art practice. This not only meant journeying outside the Western axis but also required looking at Western art history in a different way.11 7 Elliott, p. 171 8 Sir Zelman Cowen (1919–2011) was a renowned constitutional lawyer and academic who served as the nineteenth Governor General of Australia (1977–82), before becoming the Provost of Oriel College

9 See Howard Morphy and Elizabeth Edwards, Australia in Oxford, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, 1988 10 Elliott, p. 11 11 Ibid., p. 12 In and out of Oxford: reflections on Art and Trousers

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d ı v a n 1 1l Elliott’s radical stance is at times heavily critical of the trajectory of Western society—the “vast industrial laundromat of contemporary art”12—the way in which art had become the prestige commodity of the elite, somehow separating form from the meaning and significance of the works, and from the artist’s intension. From that radical stance he strongly defended his application of what some might problematize as conservative perspectives—arguing that the very idea of art implies qualitative judgements and that comparative analysis is fundamental. He carried forward the question, “Was any of it really good?”13 While going beyond the mainstream he was nonetheless looking “for equally good things in other places.”14 But good needed to be defined within a broader global world, and this involved understanding local and regional trajectories, historical positions, different histories of practice, and different engagements with the past.

In looking outside, and moving into the domain that subsequently would be framed as alterity, he created exhibitions that would challenge conventional expectations of what the visitor might find in a museum dedicated to modern art; for example his 1978 exhibitions The Inner Eye: Work Made in Psychiatric Hospitals and The Falling Leaf: Aerial Dropped Propaganda, 1914–1968. Stepping outside the imposed structures of predetermined distinctions between art and craft, or pure and applied, he opened ways of engaging with arts cross-culturally.15 He saw the exhibitions and their associated publications as part of a wider means of engagement, providing an aesthetic and educational armature around which smaller displays, film programs and events might be organized.

16 In Europe his exhibitions moved east. He writes about his early interest in German Expressionism. The overlapping aesthetic battle between Fascism and Communism in the preWorld War II era led him to German and Russian art in the contemporary context. And Russia led to Mexico by way of Mayakovsky and Eisenstein, resulting in the 1981 exhibition of the muralist José Clemente Orozco. From 1981 to 1994 Elliott curated a series of exhibitions on contemporary Indian art. He explicitly saw these Indian exhibitions and their catalogues as a substantial project analogous to building a collection. As a whole they were designed to have a long-term impact that might change people’s attitudes. He determinedly interspersed them with other exhibitions so that they could be in dialogue with other projects, overlapping in unpredictable and potentially productive ways.17

Conversations made into exhibitions and exhibitions being part of conversations and providing a resource for his own curatorial agendas. His next exhibitions moved to engage with the contemporary art of China and Japan. He studied all the time, always researching, but also seizing opportunities and looking for resources through collaboration. He developed two simultaneous Chinese exhibitions at the time of the 12 Ibid., p. 28 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Referring to existing categorizations and distinctions he writes that he “wanted to step outside prescribed taste so to compare what one knew with other things that either crossed such disciplines or never even approached them.” Ibid., p. 29 16 Ibid., p. 31 17 Ibid., p. 36

The connections that can be made are almost infinite and depend on the particular purpose of the ritual and who the participants are. Links scan be made on the basis of kinship, of moiety, of Ancestral Being, of animal species, of sound or even colour. There is a multiplicity of ways of making connections and changing directions some of which seem to be almost arbitrary to the observer. The structure of each performance has a particular logic, but it is hard to predict the content of each step in advance. In retrospect, however, every step that is taken adds coherence to an evolving whole.18 Somehow this has synergies with Elliott’s curatorial trajectory.

132 | 133 apparent opening up of China to the West. Looking again to Germany he found a partner in the newly opened Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. Working with co-curator Elizabeth Mepham he produced China Avant-Garde for HKW and they organized an additional exhibition Silent Energy for MoMA. When I went into Silent Energy for the first-time, Huang Yong Ping’s Yellow Peril (1993), had immediate impact and became locked in my memory. The visitor walked between two imperial-yellow silk-lined canvas tents above which hung a vivarium of one thousand locusts and five scorpions—a visceral work of art. The contradictory emotions of empathy, repulsion and fascination evoked by the work echoed beyond its specific reference to masters and slavery.

AN AUSTRALIAN/ OXFORD/CHINESE/A CONJUNCTION

MoMA Oxford’s Chinese exhibitions overlapped with a major exhibition of Indigenous Australian Art at the Hayward Gallery in London Aratjara: Art of the First Australians. The cover of the Aratjara catalogue was a Yolngu ceremonial painting made on bark and collected by the anthropologist Donald Thomson in 1937. The MoMA exhibitions and Aratjara both brought mixed reviews.19 And one by Tom Lubbock in The Independent covered both exhibitions.20 Ostensibly, a somewhat negative review of Aratjara, it provided the excuse for an equally negative review of MoMA’s Chinese exhibitions.21 It can be read to exemplify the positions from the West that Elliott was trying to challenge. To him, “it seemed completely ridiculous that modern or contemporary art worthy of consideration could be limited by its location, [or] ethnicity.”22 But Lubbock, referring to Aratjara, opined: “this art mostly wasn’t made within the traditions of modern or indeed ancient 18 Howard Morphy, Journey to the Crocodile’s Nest, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Press, 1984, shows how meaningful connections are made in a Yolngu funeral ceremony

20 Tom Lubbock, ‘ART / Lost in the Outback: Tom Lubbock on ”Aratjara: Art of the First Australians” at the Hayward Gallery’, The Independent, 2 August 1993; on-aratjara-art-of-the-first-australians-at-the-hayward-gallery-1458898.htmlhttps://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art-lost-in-the-outback-tom-lubbock21 Elliott, p.47 22 Ibid., p.12 In and out of Oxford: reflections on Art and Trousers

In reading Art and Trousers, I could not help thinking about something that on the surface appears to be completely different and other. The mortuary rituals and ceremonial performances of the Yolngu people of eastern Arnhem Land require the sequencing of songs, paintings, dances, sand sculptures and intonations of names associated with different Yolngu ‘countries’.

19 For my own reflections on the reviews of Aratjara see Howard Morphy, ‘Aboriginal art in a global context’, in Daniel Miller (ed.), Worlds Apart: Modernity through the prism of the local, London: Routledge, 1995, pp. 211–39

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134 | 135 Western Art. It is, as they say, other.”23 It is both in the selection of comparators and in the slipping from different to other that there is a problem. To be fair to Lubbock, some essays in the Aratjara catalogue deliberately place the works outside Western discourse while simultaneously placing them within the category of fine art—a position that Elliott acknowledges is part of contemporary discourse. He sketches two perspectives on cross-cultural engagement. On the one hand: … difference is for the most part attractive, necessary, and can be learned about and celebrated as an enhancement of common humanity without much threat of its being homogenized. The other view—a defensive and in some cases “genetic” position—advocates that difference may not be fully “understood” or mediated by anyone outside the culture in question because outsiders do not have the native linguistic, emotional and, perhaps, intellectual capacity to appreciate its complexity.24

In conversations I had with Elliott after his return the idea emerged of co-curating an exhibition on contemporary Australian art that would reflect the changes that we sensed were beginning to take place in the country. Our aim was to build on the emerging recognition of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian art as being in a primary sense contemporary.25 Working on the exhibition allowed me to observe him at work, visiting artists in their studios, extensively discussing the project with curators in different institutions, working with galleries to pull together collections of an artist’s work, and finding contributors to write essays in the catalogue.

He concludes that his choice has always been to follow the first path because he sees he has no alternative. And indeed, as an anthropologist neither do I! David Elliott’s engagement with Asia brought him closer to Australia and to America as contemporary Asian art moved west. In the 1990s he developed a close relationship with Vishakha Desai, curator of Asian Art at the Boston Museum of Arts and subsequently in 1990 director of the Asia Society in New York, where two years previously Dreamings had been held. In 1992 he visited Australia at the invitation of Leon Paroissien, then director of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary art, and moved on to attend the first Asia-Pacific Triennial curated overall by Caroline Turner in 1993.

27 For more details of the exhibition see the catalogue, edited by Rebecca Coates and Howard Morphy, In Place (Out of Time): Contemporary Art in Australia, Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1997 In and out of Oxford: reflections on Art and Trousers

The exhibition In Place (Out of Time): Contemporary Art in Australia opened at MoMA, Oxford in September 1997. In one memorable space (a high-ceilinged relatively narrow gallery) Imants Tiller’s Izkliede (1994) from his Diaspora series—a wall of sinister images of oppression—faced onto Gordon Bennett’s powerful works from his Home décor (Preston + De Stijl = Citizen) (1997) series, engaging with the contradictions of modernism from an Indigenous Australian perspective.26 And together those works contained a story within a story for those who remember Nine Ricochets (1990).27

23 Lubbock, op cit. 24 Elliott, p. 13 25 Ibid., p. 48. Stephanie Radok in her essay ‘The ethnographic present: Aboriginal art – A gift that keeps on giving’, Artlink, March 2009 quotes that our intention to demonstrate that the category Aboriginal art includes “in an ethnically-defined category works that would equally fit into that dominant unmarked category – contemporary fine art” thus challenging and changing the category of the contemporary 26 Ian McLean’s reflections on the significance of the paintings engaging as they did with the contradictions of Australia’s entanglement with modernism, shows how relevant they were to the concept of the exhibition, Gordon Bennett’s Home Decor: the joker in the pack, Law Text Culture 4, 1998, pp. 287-307; https://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol4/iss1/18

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28 I am grateful to Robyn McKenzie for making me emphasize this point 29 ‘The Best of Times the Worst of Times Contemporary Art along the Post-Soviet Silk Road’, David Elliott, Art and Trousers, p. 157 30 Elliott, p. 133 d ı

AFTER OXFORD In Place (Out of Time) was for both of us our concluding exhibition in Oxford. We went our separate ways. I returned to Australia and David Elliott went to Stockholm. My engagement with him influenced my subsequent work. I was privileged to become the Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University in succession to Nicolas Thomas, who had written the catalogue essay on Gordon Bennett for the MoMA exhibition. I was able to work with Caroline Turner who moved from Queensland to Canberra and also formed a partnership with Nigel Lendon, both of whom shared many of the same ideas as Elliott explored. Nigel and I co-curated a series of projects that combined workshops with exhibitions and catalogues that were inclusive of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. I was able to work with artists who I had been introduced to through the MoMA, Oxford exhibition and I gained many ideas about what was possible through the short time I spent working with David Elliott. And I was able to reconnect with him when he curated the 17th Biennale of Sydney in 2010, The Beauty of Distance–Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, a topic that resonated with me. Through Art and Trousers, the reader can follow Elliott’s work with Asian art broadly conceived through a set of powerful essays that provide the rationale for his work with particular artists and shows his understanding of their work and its significance. The voices of the artists are always present and become an integral part of the wider discourse that is reflected in the themes of his exhibitions and biennales. Through the essays written at particular moments in time, readers are able to place themselves within a trajectory of change. In a sense he is ‘making’ contemporary art—researching and redefining—rather than following or predicting the next best thing (taste-making).28 Some of the essays are quite disconcerting to the contemporary reader who fails to recognize the present in the past, and others make us wary that things have hardly changed at all. There is an optimism about the role that art and artists can play in the world, the intelligence, intuition and humanity of the artists who have made the work in, and for, this biennale is not directed towards providing any solutions. Art does not work in that way. Rather, it gives inspiration by its example. In their critical, sardonic, humorous, or iconoclastic views of the world, in their ability to see and think outside the prisons into which we so often willingly confine ourselves, and in their clarity and commitment to truth in art, these artists energize us to go a step further—to experience and analyze more keenly for ourselves the causes and effects of life, the very fountainhead of creation.29

These are the concluding thoughts to the opening essay to the catalogue of the first Kyiv Biennale, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times–Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art. But it does not take long for our optimism to be confronted. In introducing the essay Elliott refers to the significance of Kyiv by placing it in deep time; “its historic position as a bridge between north and south, east and west could make sense in terms of contemporary art.”30 But many of the works in the Kyiv Biennale can almost be read to signify a reversal of time, a warning that what we imagine has been achieved is at times a fragile illusion.

49 In

The Hunter and the Prophet (2004) and The Lady with an Ermine (2012), he begins: “And so, on this last visual note—a balancing act contrived by an established female artist between a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, a contemporary sculpture of a giant Indian ‘deity’, and an ironic statement about culture and individuality that extends far beyond its initial context—this book draws to a close.”

177 32

CONCLUSION Art and Trousers–Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Asian Art is a book you cannot do justice to in a single sitting. It contains essays that you want to return to again and again. David Elliott concludes helpfully in his Epilogue with what is essentially his own review of what he has achieved and just how essential the juxtapositions of images in the text are to ‘reading’ the book.

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David Elliott made his mark by bringing the contemporary art of eastern Europe, China, India into the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, and then perhaps ironically was provided with the opportunities to move his practice out of Europe from a launching pad in Stockholm to the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. His life, so far, can be seen as a single grand research project bringing the world’s art together in a peripatetic journey with reflections back to Oxford, “a flaneur within the fabric of so many fascinating cultures.”32 31 Ibid., p. Ibid., p. and out of Oxford: reflections on Art and Trousers

In referring to the concluding illustrations of the previous chapter by the Indian artist Bharti Kher

The Mumbai artist Jitish Kallats’ work Covering Letter (2012), was one of the works exhibited in Kyiv in 2012. The work comprises a walk-through installation in which words and facsimiles are projected onto a mist screen, where they appear and disappear as the viewer walks through. What is projected is Gandhi’s letter to ‘Herr Hitler’ on the eve of World War II pleading for him to prevent a “war which may reduce the world to a savage state.” In an essay on the same work for the catalogue of an exhibition six years on Elliott writes how it “deftly joins the worlds present with India’s past in again embodying a situation in which violence should have no place.”31 A message which, in Kiev, resonates today.

Page 23 Top: Ahmed Mater, Desert Meeting installation view from Feeling the Stones Bottom: Ahmed Mater, Desert Meeting (cathode-ray TV still), 2021 Photos courtesy the artist and Lakum Artspace, Riyadh Page 27 Colin Chinnery, Voluntary Garden (video stills), Photos2019 courtesy the artist For the project’s conceptual shape, Chinnery was informed by the opera stages that are traditionally part of Suzhou gardens, transposing this idea to the Fusion Art Center. At the centre of the garden is a pond, in which Chinnery built a floating stage for the musicians to perform upon… performers played their music one by one, responding to the recordings made by the other musicians who had played before them. From Chinese folk and classical music, to jazz, rock, metal, electronic, experimental, noise, and avant-garde music, the musical content… crosses the gamut of musical creativity in China today; exhibition/voluntary-garden//https://ucca.org.cn/en/

Page 18 From Saudi Arabia’s Relations with relations-with-china/https://nasreenalissalaw.com/en/saudi-arabias-China;

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Page 33 Screengrabs for Diriyah Gate and Neom web pages from the Vision 2030 website; https://www. vision2030.gov.sa

Front cover Xiao Lu, Tides (video still), 2019 Photo courtesy the artist and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, 2019. From 1989 to 2019, from China to Australia, a history of 30 years. On a beach in Sydney, facing the incoming tide, Xiao Lu planted 30 bamboo poles, one by one, into the sand at first light. The performance and the waves refer to her past and the future, resistance and letting go, the individual and history.

Page 34 Top: Wang Luyan, W Fire at Both Ends Automatic Handgun D13-01, 2013 Bottom: Wang Luyan, W Symmetry Watch D11-06, Photos2011 courtesy the artist As if it were a gesture of self-deconstruction, Wang’s visionary world relies on the object of his critique: mechanical and glossy on the surface, but cold and self-destructive beneath. At the entrance of the exhibition hall, a sculptural installation titled W Fire at Both Ends Automatic Handgun D13-01 (2013), equipped with artillery facing both forwards and backwards and the shells shooting in both directions at once, is not pointing to the target but at the shooter himself. Therefore, pulling the trigger becomes an act of allegory-of-civilizationhttps://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/wang-luyans-self-destruction;

Page 20 Wang Luyan, installation view from Feeling the Stones Photo courtesy the artist Page 28 Lei Lei & Chai Mi,1993–1994, 2021 Installation view from Feeling the Stones Photo courtesy the artists

Page 24 Simon Denny, Real Mass Entrepreneurship, 2017 installation view from Feeling the Stones Photo courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz Berlin/Cologne/New York and Fine Arts, Sydney

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Page 34 Wang Luyan, installation views for W-Set Square, Photos2007 courtesy the artist … two entirely different sets of measuring scales engraved onto the set squares, inducing us to reflect on the arbitrariness that conditions the parameters within which we https://www.frieze.com/article/wang-luyanoperate;

Page 47 Ramingining artists, The Aboriginal Memorial, Image1987-88courtesy the artists and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra On 1 June 2022, after three years of consultation, the National Gallery [unveiled] the first phase of a major revitalization project for The Aboriginal Memorial–its relocation to Gallery 9 on Level 2. Positioned in the literal ‘heart’ of the Gallery… [Director Nick] Mitzevich said… “This project has enabled the National Gallery, with the help of conceptual curator Djon Mundine, to reconnect with the community in Ramingining and we are honoured to be able to work with them to reimagine ways all Australians can connect with The Aboriginal Memorial”… Bruce Johnson McLean, Wierdi/Birri Gubba people, who heads First Nations Engagement at the National Gallery, says… “Here in Canberra, we are used to seeing many monuments–they are often large and cold and huge. They symbolize death. Memorials are alive. As custodians of The Aboriginal Memorial, we are charged with keeping the spirit of this work alive, of keeping the memories and legacies of those who have gone before alive”; gov.au/stories-ideas/the-aboriginal-memorial/https://nga.

Page 50 Sim Chi Yin, Interventions: Helicopter, from One Day We’ll Understand, 2020 Photo courtesy the artist and Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul/Berlin “Sim excavates photos from the colonial archive at the Imperial War Museum in London that were used by British authorities for media campaigns and psychological warfare to legitimize national military operations against anti-colonial fighters. Sim has photographed these prints on a light table so that the markings and labelling, which would otherwise be concealed on the back, can be seen through the image like a palimpsest.” Gallery media release

Pages 41, 43 Richard Bell proposal for the Australian pavilion, 2019 Venice Biennale Original photographs by John Gollings Images courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, ForBrisbanefurther information about Bell’s proposal see Zoe de Luca, ‘We Don’t Really Need This/BELL Invites’; https://artdesign.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/ need_thisbell_invites.pdffiles/atoms/files/zoe_de_luca_we_dont_really_

Page 38 Hans Haacke, Germania, 1993 Photo courtesy the artist In 2015, the Venice Biennale’s artistic director Okwui Enwezor underlined the significance of Germania, both within the setting of the 1993 biennial and, ultimately, his own. At the time of the Venice Biennale’s 120th anniversary, Enwezor would stress how Haacke was the first to use a national pavilion, not just as a gallery in which to place objects, but as a contested space–a site of true enquiry. Which is why Germania will always remain a touchstone for artists and curators alike, especially at a time when art has become increasingly imbued with an air of activism. What Haacke successfully achieved was to show how politically motivated art might intersect with an immersive experience that truly values its audience. Moreover, his ethical approach toward his chosen subject matter has become increasingly prescient, serving as a reminder of how we might tackle such thorny topics as post-truth, land rights, nationhood and colonization, to name but a few. Germania continues to offer readings that are by no means confined to 20th-century Germany history. It truly goes beyond. Gregor Muir, ‘Gregor Muir on Hans Haacke’s Germania Pavilion at the 45th Venice Biennale’; https://www.frieze.com/ 45th-venice-biennalearticle/gregor-muir-hans-haackes-germania-pavilion-

Page 45 Top: Marco Fusinato, DESASTRES, 2022 Solo durational performance as installation for 200 days, Australia Pavilion, 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia Photo by Andrea Rossetti Middle: a page from the Score for DESASTRES Bottom: installation view Australia Pavilion Photo by Andrea Rossetti Photos courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

For further reading see Ian McLean, ‘The Aboriginal Memorial and the Militarisation of Australian History’; https://artdesign.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/ memorial_and_the_militarisation_of_australian_files/atoms/files/ian_mclean_the_aboriginal_ history.pdf

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Bottom:article/malayanemergency.htmhttps://www.britishempire.co.uk/SimChiYin, Remnants #3, from One Day We’ll Understand, 2016 Photos courtesy the artist and Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul/Berlin

Top: Sim Chi Yin, Remnants #19, from One Day We’ll Understand, 2015–18 Photo courtesy the artist and Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul/Berlin

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Top: Sim Chi Yin, Interventions: Parachutes from One Day We’ll Understand, 2020 Photo courtesy the artist and Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul/Berlin … during the Malayan Emergency, the SAS further developed airborne operations with treejumping. In 1951, the SAS developed a method of inserting airborne patrols directly into the [Malayan] jungle. Paratroopers would drop into thick jungle foliage with the expectation of getting stuck in the canopy.… the paratroopers would tie a rope to the tree and abseil down to the thick-forests-and-jungles/this-is-how-specialized-paratroopers-drop-into-https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-tactical/ground;

Top: Sim Chi Yin, Interventions: Interrogation, from One Day We’ll Understand, 2018 On The British Empire website by David Brent, Asststant Superintendent of Police, Malaya (1952–58), under the heading ‘The War of the Running Dogs’, there is a photo titled ‘Surrendered Enemy Personnel Leaflet’, with the description, “This1955 government leaflet shows ex-guerillas smiling and enjoying themselves to demonstrate to anyone holding out in the jungles that it was possible to surrender and not be executed or sent to prison indefinitely. The reverse of this leaflet explained who they all were and the faults of the leadership in the local area. It then encouraged them to hand in their weapons and take advantage of safe conduct passes to leave the insurgency once and for all”;

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Pages 65–69 Top/bottom: Aziz Hazara, Dialectics (video stills), 2016 Top/bottom: Aziz Hazara, Bow Echo, 2019 Top/bottom: Aziz Hazara, Camouflage, 2016 Photos courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata “The work has been inspired by my own experience of the recurring horrors of suicide bomb attacks that have unsettled the city of Kabul. They are a sort of ‘horror game’ and, since 2001, have taken place in different parts of the city, becoming an integral part of its recent history. The question of how best to represent this history and its effect on the lives of individuals has been one of the most persistent questions during the making of this work. Very often, the idea of representation becomes a aziz-hazara/https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/participants/dilemma”;

Page 62 Top: Sim Chi Yin, Remnants #11, from One Day We’ll Understand, 2017 Photo courtesy the artist and Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul/Berlin Bottom:The Long and Winding Road: Hero to Public Enemy No. 1, Ong Boon Hua, a.k.a. Chin Peng. Chin Peng, MPAJA and later CPM leader being awarded the Burma Star and the 1939–45 Star on the steps of the Municipal Building (now City Hall, Singapore) in January 1946 by Lord Louis Mountbatten; photos/a.2753029408055512/2753017751390011/https://www.facebook.com/thelongnwindingroad/

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The manifestation and sublimation of the universal value of Polar surpasses all Xiao Lu’s previous works… the visual logic of the metaphorical production of the interaction between the phonebooth shaped wall of ice and the human being gives people multiple cultural and political imaginings. We can see in the elements of ice, knife, of the human being and her blood, the passionate desire for and the hardship involved in achieving human freedom. Although the freezing point and the surrounding siege of evil can imprison the human body… courage…blood, carves out the cruelty and romance of freedom. It is suffocating. It is also exciting. In particular it is the sharp knife carving through the ice, the flowers of freedom formed by the combination of the broken ice shards, fresh blood and knife, the use of beautiful cruelty, that revives the numbed humanity of altruism in the viewers. This time, the humanity of innate freedom does not belong only to Xiao Lu, but also to every innately free viewer. Tong Yujie

Pages 74–75 Xiao Lu, Skew (video stills), 2019 Performance 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong PhotosKongcourtesy the artist and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong

Pages 70–71 Top/bottom: Aziz Hazara, Takbir (video stills), 2021 Top/bottom: Aziz Hazara, Rehearsal (video stills), Photos2020 courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata

Pages 78–79 Xiao Lu, Holy Water (video stills), 2017 Performance, Venice, 2017 Photography by Yi Zilei Photos courtesy the artist and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong Xiao Lu places 27 blue acrylic plates from east to west in a diagonal line in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, and pours a bottle of Moutai (53% alcohol) into 7 white porcelain bowls. She stands at one side of the blue line, raises a bowl of liquor and starts downing them one by one. After drinking the third bowl of Moutai, she begins to feel dizzy and falls to the ground. She cries out and crawls forward. By the fifth bowl, she starts rolling on the ground, and her piercing screams echo in the air over the Piazza San Marco. When Xiao Lu plunged into a canal in Venice in 2013, that was her spontaneous rendezvous with God, leading her to choose to have another dialogue with God. Facing Saint Mark’s Basilica, she devoutly raises her cup and downs the bitter sweetness in one gulp, and moved by the God of Wine, she roars and struggles in a hellish way.

After fifteen minutes, the structure burst apart at the seams, releasing her thrashing body onto the sidewalk in a pool of red water. At the moment of freedom, she was still gasping for air. Xiao positioned her performance as a response to the violent oppression faced by the protesters in Hong Kong… Every work feels like a burial but postulates her survival–sometimes literally. Hera Chan, reviews/202001/xiao-lu-81794https://www.artforum.com/print/

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Pages 76–77 Xiao Lu, Polar (video stills), 2016 Performance 798 Danish Cultural Center, Beijing Photography by Yi Zilei Photos courtesy the artist and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong

Page 80 Aziz Hazara, I am looking for you like a drone, my love (detail), 2021 Photo courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata Page 84 Aziz Hazara, Kite Balloon, 2018 Photo courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata

Pages 72–73 Xiao Lu, Tides (video stills), 2019 Photos courtesy the artist and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong. Commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, 2019. Xiao is one of the few artists in China to maintain a consistent focus on performative expressions of the body–unlike other artists… she has enjoyed far less mainstream recognition and representation… the almost complete lack of critical attention given to other aspects of Xiao’s artistic practice [and] the very different levels of public recognition… can be understood as a product of unfamiliarity with Xiao’s points of reference and an inability to comprehend the context within which her work has been shaped; avant-garde-exhibition-xiao-lu-alex-burchmorehttps://4a.com.au/articles/china-

https://youtu.be/9WKfbx78Azw

Page 91 John Young, Socialite Realism III (Filigree),1987 Photo courtesy the artist

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Page 88 John Young, Modernity’s End: Half the Sky, 2016 Photo courtesy the artist and ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne Modernity’s End: Half the Sky presents the lives of Alice Lim Kee and Daisy Kwok, two Australianborn Chinese women who grew up in Australia before the women’s liberation movement, and during the White Australia Policy (1901–1973). The women migrated to Shanghai at the height of interwar modernity, rising to prominent positions in Shanghai society prior to the Japanese invasion and occupation in 1937. The title of the work contains half of Mao Zedong’s proclamation that “women hold up half the sky”, referring to the equal role that women would play in China’s Cultural Revolution, which in reality required women to perform the same work as their male counterparts in addition to family --s-end--half-the-skyhttps://www.johnyoungstudio.com/w/modernityduties; 91 The Asian Modern, ISBN: 9789811406072

Page 95 FX Harsono, Paling Top (Top Most), 1975 Photo courtesy the artist Pages 98, 101 Djon Mundine, Always was Always Will Be, 2022 Djon Mundine’s body stencil from poster paint, Ngunungula Gallery entrance wall, January 2022 Photos courtesy the artist

Page 102 Teena McCarthy, The Gatekeepers, 2021 Photo courtesy the artist Page 105 Maddison Gibbs, Removed, 2021 Photo courtesy the artist Current thematics include intergenerational stories of contemporary Aboriginal affairs–with a focus on telling women’s narratives. Maddison Gibb’s work is polarizing, offering up culturally feminine intuitive visual poetics which at times starkly contrast with her art activism at the barricades; https://artereal. com.au/artist/maddison-gibbs/ Page 102 Johnny Malibirr, Dog Story, 2015 Photo courtesy the artist I only go and do exhibitions where I’m invited. These people (Ngununggula) asked me would I do something here because I work most of my time away from here… I wanted to do something more dramatic. Everyone knows an Aboriginal hand stencil, or hand print. In other ceremonies I’ve been in there are body prints. I wanted to do that here. I’ve done it once before in Mosman on a rock wall. [Here] I had to have this stamp, of an artwork, that said, This is Aboriginal land pure and simple, always was always will be. You have to do it once in one grab, make it happen as much as you can, and it’s the statement that you make… it’s a pure statement; Djon Mundine speaking about his artwork at Ngununggula; southerntablelandsarts.com.au/djon-mundine/;https://www.

142 | 143 Page 107 Fiona Hall, Scalp, 2021 Photo courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Page 107 Installation view, The Ongoing Adventures of X and Ray by Lin Onus and Michael Eather, 2001 Photo courtesy the artists Page 108 Djon Mundine, Judas Goat, opening night Photo courtesy the artist Video filmed by Gotaro Umatsu, January 2022 Page 110 Gunybi Ganambarr, Djirrit, 2021 Photo courtesy the artist and Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala, Northern Territory Page 114 Yolngu/Macassan Project installation view Front: Nawurapu Wunungmurra, Wangupini, Photo2016–18courtesy the artist and Buku Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala Back: Dhuwarrwarr Marika, Macassan-style swords and long knives, 2021 Photo courtesy the artist Page 114 Dhuwarrwarr Marika, Macassan-style swords and long knives, 2021 Photo courtesy the artist Page 117 Top: Nawurapu Wunungmurra, Wangupini, 2016–18 Bottom: Nawurapu Wunungmurra, Macassan pot, Photos2016 courtesy the artist and Buku Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala Page 119 Gunybi Ganambarr, Macassan Sail, 2020 Photo courtesy the artist and Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala

Page 120 Lot closed–Price Realised incl. BP: $51,250 NFT image removed at buyers request; https://auctions.webbs.co.nz/m/lot-details/index/ act=5&aid=425&lid=94210&current_page=0STUDIOS-Charles-Frederick-Goldie-at-His-Easel?ucatalog/425/lot/94209/RUPERT-FARNALL-

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Polemically autobiographical and sanely skeptical, this is an essential read for those who want to know what the fuss is about, written with insight and humour by one of the first makers of the fuss. Rear cover promo by Craig Clunas FBA, Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, University of Oxford Page 126 Lot 2 Description: Rupert Farnall Studios Charles Frederick Goldie in His Studio NFT, Polygon blockchain. Minted 25/1/2022. Lot closed–Price Realised incl. BP:$76,250 NFT image removed at buyers request; https://auctions.webbs.co.nz/m/lot-details/index/ uact=5&aid=425&lid=94209&current_page=0STUDIOS-Charles-Frederick-Goldie-in-His-Studio?catalog/425/lot/94210/RUPERT-FARNALL-

Pages 130, 134, 137 Images 1–4 chapter heading pages; image 5 front cover of Art & Trousers Tradition Modernity on Contemporary Asian Art published by Art Asia Pacific Foundation, Hong Kong 2021 ISBN 978-0-98968853-6 Designed by Anıl Aykan at Barnbrook Curator and scholar David Elliott, who was in at the birth pangs of global contemporary art over forty years ago, here uses his unparalleled knowledge of the field to produce a brilliantly original, provocative, and readable account.

Page 126 Portrait of C.F. Goldie in his studio with Patara Te Tuhi, attributed Alfred Hill, ca. 1905–10; http://archival.sl.nsw.gov.au/Details archive/ 110089207

Page 126 Lot 1 Description: Rupert Farnall Studios Charles Frederick Goldie at His Easel NFT, Polygon blockchain. Minted 25/1/2022 Lot closed–Price Realised incl. BP: $51,250 This unique digital asset is derived from the original glass plate negative of a well-known photograph of C.F. Goldie, perhaps Aotearoa’s most celebrated artist… The purchaser of the NFT will also receive a framed contact print of the image and the original glass plate negative in a custom-built pine box. N.b. At the conclusion of the auction, the successful bidder will have the option of receiving the digital token as an Ethereum blockchain ERC-721 https://auctions.webbs.co.nz/m/lot-details/index/token; catalog/ act=5&aid=425&lid=94210&current_page=0STUDIOS-Charles-Frederick-Goldie-at-His-Easel?u425/lot/94209/RUPERT-FARNALL-

BY 20 HK FASHION DESIGNERS Act13 Act12 neuro-design blockchain project VR fashion show organised by Osage Art Foundation @ Asia Society Hong Kong Center 29.10. - 30.11.2022 BY MAURICE BENAYOUN Act11 Supported byProject Grant 藝能發展資助計劃 Arts Capacity Development Funding Scheme 香港特別行政區政府 HKSAR Government