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

Ju lie Ewington Time , Space and Discontinuity Time and the world are telescoping now. I n China, Thail and , Australia and elsewhere, the startling efficacy of commun ications and travel is speeding the process of i nternational and i ntra-regional contact. The Asia-Pacific Triennial is a small part of that process, wh ich has accelerated since the 1 980s. It is a process not simply endured but ceaselessly interrogated by artists and intellectuals. Plotting courses through histories in the making and new landscapes requires careful planning and exact coordi nates. For the new geographies of contemporary art in Asia, the Pacific and Australia, the time-honoured tools of history and critical analysis are bei ng refitted and reworked . I will argue, following the anthropologist Johannes Fabian, that fundamental Western notions of time must be reconsidered if contemporary culture is to be adequately conceptual ised and honoured . And I wil l suggest, taking my cue from the provocative schema put forward by Arjun Appadurai, that the present complexities of g lobal cu ltu re flows cannot be understood th rough existing models of centre and periphery, that what we need for contemporary art must be altogether more flexible and al ive to difference . Brisbane is one o f t he newest sites o f international traffic in contemporary art across national and cultural boundaries. I work in this trade. I support it - not least because I enjoy the particular perverse pleasure it offers - being baffled . But the question of global homogenisation of artistic practice is necessarily engaged when one considers the development of the new arenas and circuits of exchange in which Australia and the artists assembled here a re engaged . In the interests of perversity, and despite the relative success of this newish cargo cult, what I want to argue for today, is the importance of deferring certainty, and the certainty of understanding, i n favour of an extended sense of the d ifferences which mark us - differences which do not so much separate but mark us. So here is the paradox: that the business of cultural exchange should intensify the appreciation of difference, not smooth it over. So to the fi rst term i n my title: Time. This interest comes directly from two moments in my recent experience with artists from other cultures. I n 1 992, at Canberra School of Art Gallery I hosted 'Whatu Aho Rua' (Two Threads Twi ning) , an exh ibition of contemporary and trad itional Maori art. A dawn ceremony to welcome the exh ibition was planned . I had du ly consu lted the Bureau of Meteorology in Sydney for the exact time of dawn on the appointed day, only to be told by the Maori kematua and kuia - ceremonial leaders and elders - that the correct time for the dawn ceremony was when they arrived at the gallery. The second trigger for these ideas was a conversation at 'ARX - Artists' Regional Exchange' i n Perth in March 1 995, wh ich a number of participating artists here also attended . I n a break i n the conference a group of us sat down to lunch and fell to talking about time and h istory. A profound and fascinating disagreement emerged; one camp saw time as universa l , subject to the scientific laws and therefore, predictable. The other i nsisted that time is not only experienced d ifferently in different cultures and communities, but that for all i ntents a nd purposes, time is different: that incommensurable temporal systems reign in d ifferent parts of the world . There is only so far a complex debate can go i n a lunch-hour, but the key poi nt was the implications of this discussion for understanding the cultural practices and i nterests of diverse peoples, and , since we were at an artists' conference, the implications of these issues for artists and their work. The implications of universal , rational and European notions of time, history and progress have not been l ost on artists, historians, anth ropologists and theorists working in Asia , Clifford Geertz's famous essay o n 'Person, Time and Conduct i n Bali' comes t o mind. For the histories demanded by these diverse societies are pl ural, heterogeneous and discrepant, to borrow Edward Said's term describi ng the productively contradictory histories of colonisers and colonised . This very term , discrepant, has been applied by the Filipino h istorian Vicente L. Rafael to recogn ise the profound incompatibilities between subjective experiences of imperial bonds. I have to thank Patrick Flores, from The Philippines for drawi ng my attention to Rafael's val uable anthology Discrepant Histories. 1 44