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

Consistent with this policy our only presence inside the Gallery is a live-to-a ir video transmission of images captured by a surveillance camera mounted outside, interspersed with scenes of journeys over land in the desert. I nside audiences, who are rarely black, can have a sanitised view of urban black reality at a comfortable distance by watchi ng the screen . This splendid theatre of cultural transaction being played outside not only parodies itself, the Aborig inal art industry, but also undermines and dismantles codes of entry by wh ich Aborig inal artists gain acceptance i nto white power structures. With due disregard for European hierarchies of media, genre and authorship the cultural terrorists of the cattle truck re-align through dissolution of boundaries between high and low art, the original and the mass-produced , the excellent and the ethnographic, past and present and the artifi cial division of u rban and traditional. The Campfire Group refuses to capitulate to aesthetics external to the culture and signals of an era of post-otherness, which cou ld be defi ned as that vast void of emptiness where no boundaries exist and where infl uences from withi n and without coalesce and create tensions that erupt into creative directions with unknown destinations. Big name, little name and no-name artists co-exist in this arena, defined by the cattle truck, where the mantle that bestows greatness on some is no longer visible, a concept reinforced in the portrait of the artists designed for incl usion in the catalogue. Roles are reversed in this i mage. The Director of the Queensland Art Gallery, Doug Hall, wi llingly plays the role of a 'black' serving boy i n that i nner, secret, 'sacred site', known as the Boardroom, in which he is usually chief custodian. Aboriginal people with anonymous black faces seated around the oval table take over. The collective rules supreme. I ndividuality is obscured by the wrap­ around protective glasses painted with iconic crosshatch ing and dotting designs worn by the players, making it only possible to view the world through Aboriginal eyes. My final poi nt is that the Triennial in its entirety can be viewed as an i nstal lation piece brokered by the Queensland Art Gallery. Here I d raw on Marion Pastor Roces's suggestion that by using 'calibrated term inology' in descri bing this segmented work we can dispense with the hierarchical use of terms like hybrid and syncretic; terms of convergence and singularity which are Western-inspired and intellectually colonising , and which deny the diversity, mu lti­ directionality and layering that exists in this organic growth called the APT. To further disperse readings in all directions we could substitute calibrated termino l ogy with calibrated metaphors and i ntroduce other metaphors that mix and blend , corrupt and confuse, and refuse to be stabil ised . The whole Triennial, then , may be viewed as a single installation of many elements whi ch has some th i ngs in common with the cattle truck i nstallation . The Trienn ial is also preceded by a journey with many i nterventions and develops from the memories of previous exh ibitions connected by three staging posts - three Trienn ials. Artists involved also produce commodities consumed by the audience in a process of cultural exchange. The cu rators rather than the artists in this i nstallation are the cultu ral brokers in a dynamic u rban ceremony involving the i nternational arts community. It too has rituals and sacred places, collective expressions focusing on visual production in an i ntegrated system. And one could go on . . . However if we fold in the critics and commentators and assign them the role of bidders, we can easily 'morph ' this into the image of the stock exchange. After all, their bids do affect the stocks (the works) on the board , whether we feel comfortable with this reality or not. They raise and lower the values, which in this scenario become units of consumption, scrutinised by those i nvesting in the art futures market. The APT's ability to attract i nvestors from many sectors embracing the economic, intellectual, emotional and artistic is also played out i n this market. The concept of future is the third part of the trilogy and the focus of the next Triennial. At the risk of over-extendi ng the analogy we cou ld incorporate stock market tal k. By replacing references to the columns of figures in the investment pages of any newspaper with the spi ritual and the emotional monitor, similarities are discernible, especially in the lead u p to the Triennial. Those o n site would relate only too well to the fol lowing examples: 'I nflation 78