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

ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes. This is clearly a reworki ng of the older Marxist base and superstructure model of the world: the fi rst three dimensions - ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes - correspond to base, and the last two - mediascapes and ideoscapes - to superstructure, or ideology. Despite its simplification, I 've found this formulation very useful for thi nki ng through the complexities of contemporary art, and the ways in which d ifference is negotiated in crosscultu ral dialogue. Where does art fit in to Appadurai's scheme? As a subset of 'ideoscapes', the complex of Enlightenment ideas, includi ng rationality and democracy, that have been exported by the West and indigenised elsewhere. This includes the notions of a 'national' cultu re , and the entire panoply of cultural institutions which befit a modem nation state. The key concept Appadurai mobilises is the idea of disjuncture . Appadurai a rg ues that: 'The new global cu ltural economy has to be understood as a complex, overlapping , disjunctive order which cannot any longer be understood in terms of existi ng center-periphery models', and that 'The complexity of the current global economy has to do with certain fundamental disj unctures between economy, culture and politics which we have barely begun to theorize'. 8 Such a situation is ripe for contestational and even subversive actions and images which undermine what Appadurai calls the 'imag ined worlds' of the official mi nd . Which i s where the work o f artists comes i n . I n different cultures, different parts of these maps relate to each other i n ways q uite dissimilar from their relationships elsewhere. Appadurai suggests, quite correctly, that there exists between d ifferent cu ltural and social phenomena a 'globally variable synaesthesia' which should u rgently be investigated , that is, that d ifferent cultural modes intercon nect and reinforce each other. His example is a Korean audience respondi ng to the subtle codings of Buddhist or neo-Confucian rhetoric buried in a political speech . 9 A more recent example from the field of contemporary art: in Singapore it seems that the very idea of public acknowledgment of bodily abjection is threatening to the official sense of public o rder. When Joseph Ng snipped a piece of h is pubic hair in a performance in 1 993, back turned modestly to the audience, his action exceeded social (and certai nly official) notions of bod i ly propriety and harmony, both of which were l inked in this performance in a way that was so 'dangerous' that experi mental performance was henceforth very highly regulated in Singapore . Finally, back t o d isj uncture. I t is crucial, in t he context o f international exhibitions like the Triennial, to claim a space for disjunction, for difference, and, paradoxically, even for the deferral of certainty about the very developments we are working to comprehend - contemporary art practices in the region. I n the business of crosscultural exchange, there is a special burden that those of us in the art worlds of participating countries have to bear. That is, most precisely, to resist the lure of the spectral 'international' art world whi ch is being constructed again and anew through a reconfiguration · of part of Appadurai's 'ideoscapes'. It is chimeric, that sense of i nternational exchange that slides i nto a comfortable sense of a common g round shared by people with mutual i nterests. I am arg ui ng for 'crosscu ltural' exchange being an exchange of meanings dependent on different cultu res, different contexts, d ifferent histories. And I am suggesting that the entire poi nt of a project like the Asia-Pacific Triennial is to release different meanings, a broader range of mean i ngs than would otherwise have been possible for those works, those artists, and these audiences. I n t h e context of postmodem communications, the different particularities of t h e liaisons between artists and their many aud iences seems more urgent than ever before. Artists who participate i n 'international' exhibitions offer i nsights that expand the horizons of their new audiences, while remaining irreducibly linked to their own cultures, their own communities. It's an arg ument for a broader world , not a narrower one. 1 . Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Chatto and Windus, London, 1 993, especially the section of Chapter 1 entitled 'Discrepant Experiences', pp. 35-50; Vicente L. Rafael, (ed . ), Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures, Anvil Publishing, Manila, Temple Press, Philadelphia, 1 995. 2. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Ob j ect, Columbia University Press, New York, 1 983, p. 1 6. 3. Fabian, p.24. 4. Fabian, p. 1 46. 5. Fabian, p. 1 65. 46