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

Today it is h ighly in fashion to talk about globalisation - of economy, of culture , of democracy and of everything - as if globalisation was the real hope to l iberate us from reality which is divided , limited and repressed by borders, differences and all kinds of obstructions, a l l kinds of walls. The mass media, especially, the global information network inca rnated by the Information Super Highway or the I nternet, seem to be the avant-garde of the wall breaking troops. They seem to be able to penetrate into every corner on our planet and broadcast , communicating t he voice o f t he good , wh ich comes mostly from t he West, t o a l l those who are confined behind the walls. However, under the emancipating appearance , new walls are actually being constructed fast and efficiently: in the 'non-Western' countries, consideri ng the information diffused by the mass media and I nternet as mostly Western ideological and cultural i nfluences, the authorities are establishing filtering systems to 'guarantee the public health' (one can see this clearly in China at the moment) ; whilst in the West, the first debates on the I nternet are focusing on the censorship of 'marginal messages' which , agai n , in the eyes of the authorities, are harmful to 'public health '. New walls are under i ntensive construction. Behind all of this, there are, of cou rse , thousands of reasons, especially, economica l interests. At t he same time, one should not overlook that t he obsession o f ideological and cultural 'health' or 'purity' is still, maybe, stronger than any period in history , the psychologica l foundation o f political exercises and t he resou rce o f controls and new hegemonical powers. If the Cold War wal l , incarnated by the Berlin Wal l , wh ich divided the earth i nto two ideological military camps, has been destroyed , today, other new walls are bei ng bu ilt everywhere. Facing the globalisation which is, doubtless, a process of the expansion of the West-centric economy and its cultural and political system, 'non-Western' countries are building new wal ls to protect themselves from loss of power and identity, although their market'S are more and more open to Western economic and industrial powers. The contradiction between the efforts to build new wal ls and the factual impossibility of isolating oneself from the global economy is bri nging those who intend to build new walls to an unsolvable paradox. However, new walls, both Western and non-Western , are still being built, higher and thicker. The walls of the twenty-first century will perhaps be much more difficult to surmount than those of the twentieth century . Behind them, again , is being laid a psychological complex, the complex of power. Here one can be reminded of a performance by Joseph Beuys in which he suggested adding five centimetres to the height of the Berlin Wall. With such a suggestion Beuys intended to state the truth of the Wal l : as a symbol of power and defence of power it was a psychological wall rather than a physical one. To surpass it, to l iberate oneself from its enclosure , one should li berate oneself from the obsessional 'complex of power'; if one succeeds i n such a liberation , a Berlin Wall five centimetres higher can no longer prevent one from the action of going beyond the 'dictatorship'. In contemporary art duri ng and after the Cold War, many artists have considered and i ncorporated the image of the wall in their works as a way out for cultu ral transformation and pursuit of an ideal future . Christo's Valley Curtain (1 970-72) and Running Fence are among t he most remarkable works using the metaphor of the wal l . They represent the 1 960s Avant-ga rde optimism which , resorting to the i mage of the industrially-made plastic wall, tries to convince the public that a new, almost paradisiac world can be aspired to and envisioned through invention of a new nature. The confrontation between the man made nature and 'first natu re' itself will lead to a veritable emancipation. I n a certain sense, it is another side of the same coin of P i nk Floyd's striking song The Wall, which reclaims for subversion of all ki nds of oppression, symbolised by the image of the wal l . On t he other hand , interest in the 'Other's' culture is also an opening towards transcendence of the wall of one's own cu lture . The image of China's Great Wal l - the only humanly created structure visi ble from the moon - has seduced many non-Chinese artists. Marina Abramovic 1 38