Present Encounters : Papers from the conference of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1996

Yet, this theoretical work about time and discrepancy is not the sole province of i ntellectuals, nor a d isembodied symptom of postmodernity. It follows on the heels of lived experiences of difference which are typical of the present. What traveller has not happened across experiences which re-order their sense of time, place them for a brief surreal moment in a different time, as well as in a different cu ltu re or country? At such times, it is apparent that one is present at a social drama taking place not in universal time but in several social constructions of time, simultaneously. Standing at the corner of a crowded street in, say Yogyakarta , bustl ing , noisy, preoccupied, I see clearly that this i ntersection is not merely physical but temporal. The d ifficulty is to account for such disjunctive moments. I n the one physical location, co­ existing cultural frames and practices map onto each other, each distinct and separate but indelibly there, like sheets of transparent film with their own text or diagram, each with their own significances, each prescribing different protocols and demanding different responses. Here is the village, the city, the global world of instant communications, present in the one instant. This reality mocks the fiction of universal time and the schematic 'timeline' of school history lessons. Yet this schema is the habitual substrate of crosscultural analysis u ndertaken from Western perspectives. At numerous crosscultural exchange events in the last decade , I have heard artists and critics of all theoretical and critical persuasions cheerful ly assign difference to a moment located in the past, either the past of personal experience or the imagined ambience of another time. ('This place is ten years behind the times . ' Or, 'Th is must be what Paris felt like in the 1 950s'.) This thinking derives its potency from fundamental Western convictions about the ordering of space and time. But help is at hand . The anthropologist Johannes Fabian has analysed the ways a nthropology was formed under the rule of natural and un iversal Time, which privi leged Eurocentric cultural categories and h istories, and placed all other societies on its own temporal and evolutionary scale. He wrote : 'Ever si nce . . . anthropology's efforts to construct relations with its Other by means of temporal devices implied affirmation of difference as distance'. 2 In the Western evolutionary scheme, distance in time signified primitive orig ins, and all cultural difference was assigned to the underdeveloped past. To remedy this woeful scenario Fabian argues for an entirely different notion of time: 'l ntersubj!3ctive Time'. Fabian suggests l ntersubjective Time is not an impersonal regulator standing outside social action but an i ntegral component of human communication , that time is 'a constitutive dimension of social reality . . . a dimension, not just a measure, of human activity. ' 3 And if time can be conceived of as multid imensional , and at different times 'coeval', this permits ' . . . the problematic simultaneity of different, conflicti ng, and contradictory forms of consciousness'. 4 and it allows 'ways to meet the Other on the same ground in the same time . . .'.5 I n short, coeval time offers coequal status. For the most part, the notions of coeval time and status across cultures have not been realised i n the practice of art criticism and history, and in curatorship, its executive expression . Art is one of the multiple signs of modernity in Asia. Yet it is an ambiguous guarantee, since artists in China or Thailand have taken different paths from their European or American colleagues. But the greatest difficulty in theorising Asian art is not the waywardness of multiple local developments, but the threat of an imposed un itary Euro­ Ameri can historical schema, which insists on a pre-ordained progression of artistic styles seen as evidence of progress. Art in Asia does not follow established Western chronologies, and artists partici pating in the process of modernisation have manifested their own personal, loca l , ethnic and political agendas for adaptations, i ndigenisations (and indeed rejections) of imported styles i n art. (Here I am i ndebted to the work of John Clark in theorisi ng Asian modern art.) 6 And now to my second term: Space . Arjun Appadurai is an anth ropologist of South I ndian tri bal origi n who works with the processes and effects of globalisation. 7 His work is situated in the familiar contemporary debate which considers whether the processes of global culture are leading to homogenisation or are being resisted heterogenously. Appadu rai has put forward a schema for thi nking through contemporary global isation which I th ink is very useful . He suggests that t he contemporary global cultural economy and its flows can be usefu lly thought of through five major interconnecting , but always shifting , dimensions. He calls these 45