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

Patrick D. Flores (Session Commentator) Popular Culture: Metaphors for Change (Making Change Popular: Making Art Change) The Second Asia-Pacific Trienn ial had to confront the bruising reality: that the process of restaging the local I ndigenous ritual on the global stage is disseminated by the power of a specific system of popu lar culture forged by diasporas and the 'ploys of mass media . ' I n this performance of cultu re , the State and the market act on 'art' and appropriate its mu ltiple endowments as 'popular' object of identity, investment, and idiom of exchange. The terms implicated by the theme, 'Popular Culture: Metaphors for Change' are crucial in rethinki ng the modes through which local knowledge and resistance must grapple with the diligent attempts of an increasingly globalising world order to render everyday life i n the image of the ma rket, as well as with the hegemonic strategies of the State to i ntegrate the native into the n ational. Popular Cultu re The term signals a sign ificant shift from an amorphous mass to a network of audiences and commun ities whi ch actively negotiate culture not only as signifying a system of codes or political economy, but also as an aesthetic of making meaningfu l l ives at determinate conjunctures of subject-positions and identities. Veeri ng away from the notion of people as an inert mass governed by false consciousness, popular culture makes itself accountable through the acts of agents constituting cultu re as lived practice and as embodiment of strategies which , while structured by modes of production, structures conditions of possibilities for and epistemic access to a more humane future. Mark 0. Justinian i's Jeepney and Takashi Murakami's gadgets try to weave a new ethnography of contemporary l ife. Justi niani's aspi ration to recover the people the Jeepney represents and reorgan ise the itinerary of the vehicle from a fixed route to some form of carnivalesque 'parade' of pun , mimicry, and doublespeak coheres with the construction of the Third World as an intersection of semi-feudal, semi-capitalist social formations in which forms of coloniality are not simply reproduced but refunctioned . Fredric Jameson , in his paean to Kidlat Tahimik's celebrated fi lm The Perfumed Nightmare, tends to mystify this hybridity by i nscribing in the Jeepney 'neither the ceaseless destruction and replacement of new and larger i ndustria l un its (together with their waste by-products and their garbage) , nor a doomed and nostalgic entrenchment in traditional agri culture, but a kind of Brechtian delight with the bad new things that anybody can hammer together for their pleasure and utility if they have a mind to. ' (Jameson 1 992 , 2 1 1 ) The Third World's ability to 'make do' o r 'endure' is i n many ways fetish ised and reified from political economy or from the very conditions under wh ich it is forced to 'make do' and 'endure'. That Jameson privi leges the Jeepney factory as a 'space of human labor which does not know the structural oppression of the assembly l ine' (Jameson 1 992, 2 1 0) ensures that the Jeepney as popular cu lture is al ienated not only from its colonial past as 'America's g reatest contribution to modern warfare, ' (Torres 1 977) but also from the actually existi ng forces of labor a nd capital which produce the Jeepney in the face of, let us say, the failure of the State to develop a mass transport system and infrastructure or how the Jeepney virtually holds its clientele hostage to daily peril in terms of pollution and reckless driving . In other words, the Jeepney as artefact or theoretical analytic begs to be fleshed out as 'ethnog raphy' and must never be reduced to folk motif, u rban exotica, or native ingenuity. After a l l , one lead i ng Jeepney factory in the 1 970s would already make 300 u nits monthly, as well as manufacture utility veh i cles and tractor implements and distribute Japanese diesel-engine tractors and l ight trucks. (Torres 1 977) Mu rakami's gadgets, on the other hand , configure urban culture as l ocus of technological innovation in an era which has prefigu red the end of work. While the artist transacts technology as an instrument that is made to resist the resistance of technology to be tamed, he fails to histori cise this praxis and artistic labor in the context of the post-war generation 1 30