The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

In Time Julie Ewington 'You have the clock but we have the time.' Ivan Illich quoting a Mexican friend. Every person of Western culture comes equipped with an internal clock. Not merely the quotidinal tyrant that rules with metronomic insistence, but a larger schedule that slots her into history. But the clock stops and history fails when the West is left behind. Stepping beyond the borders of Western art as it is practised in Australia, and setting off for South-East Asia, the critic finds that not only the forms but the temporal frames of culture are radically different from those at home. (Ghosts play merry hell with history.) This essay honours jam caret, Koorie time, and the Maori kaumatua and kuia who told me in 1992 that the correct time for their dawn ceremony was when they arrived. 1 For it is now abundantly clear that 'history', and its temporal frame, is no longer incontestable, not only in its local details nor in the permission it gives or denies to speech but in its very methodological formulations. The implications of the imposition on their cultures of universal, rational and European notions of time, history and progress have not been lost on artists, historians, anthropologists and theorists in Asia who are addressing the urgent necessities of post-colonial societies. 2 For the histories demanded by the diverse experiences of these societies are plural, heterogenous and discrepant, to borrow Edward Said's term describing the productively contradictory histories of colonisers and colonised, and employed by Filipino scholar Vincente L. Rafael to title an anthology recognising not only the necessary inter– connectedness of distant powers and populations, but also the profound incompatibilities between subjective experiences of these bounds. 3 This theoretical work is not the sole province of intellectuals, nor a disembodied symptom of post-modernity. It follows on the heels of lived experiences of difference which are typical of the present. What traveller has not momentarily registered an unscheduled epiphany which re-orders their sense of time? Places them in a different time, as well as in a different culture or country? At such moments, it is apparent that one is present at a social drama taking place not in universal time (located somewhere between nought and twenty-four hours of Standard Time) but in several social constructions of time, simultaneously. Standing at the corner of a crowded street in Yogyakarta, bustling, noisy, preoccupied, I see with preternatural clarity that this intersection is not merely physical but temporal. Coexisting cultural frames and practices map onto each other, each distinct and separate but indelibly there, like sheets of transparent film with their own text or diagram, each with their own significances, each prescribing different protocols and demanding different responses. Here is the village, the city, the global world of instant communications, present in the one instant. These circumstances mock the fiction of universal time, and the schematic 'time-line' of history lessons. Yet this schema is the habitual substratum of cross-cultural analysis undertaken from Western perspectives. At numerous cross-cultural exchange events in the last decade, I have heard artists and critics of all theoretical and critical persuasions cheerfully assign difference to a moment located in the past, either the past of personal experience or the imagined ambience of another time. ('This place is ten years behind the times.' Or, 'This must be what Paris felt like in the 1950s.') 4 This way of thinking exceeds the boundaries of art theory, deriving its potency from more fundamental convictions about the ordering of space and time. Johannes Fabian has brilliantly analysed the ways anthropology was formed under the rule of natural and universal Time, which privileged Eurocentric cultural categories and histories, and placed all other societies on its own temporal and evolutionary scale. 'Ever since', he wrote, 'anthropology's efforts to construct relations with its Other by means of temporal devices implied affirmation of difference as distance.' 5 In the Western evolutionary scheme, distance in time signified primitive origins, and with one conceptual stroke all cultural difference was assigned to the underdeveloped past. To remedy this woeful scenario Fabian argues for an entirely different notion of time, 'lntersubjective Time', which suggests that time is not an impersonal regulator standing outside social action but an integral component of human communication, 'it has to be recognised that Time is a constitutive dimension of social reality ...a dimension, not just a measure, of human activity'. 6 Fabian suggests that this multidimensional conception of 'coeval' time permits 'the problematic simultaneity of different, conflicting, and contradictory forms of consciousness' 7 offering 'ways to meet the Other on the same ground in the same time'. 8 In short, coeval time offers coequal status. Coeval time and status across cultures– encompassing different conceptions of social interaction and cultural value-is an as yet unrealised hope for art criticism and history, and for curatorship its executive expression in contemporary culture. Art is one of the multiple signs of modernity in South-East Asia. Yet it is an ambiguous guarantor, since artists in Indonesia or Thailand have taken different paths from their Euro-American colleagues. The simultaneous coexistence in Asia of multiple artistic modes has, in recent years, been registered by art historians as a kind of 'problem' to be solved. But the greatest difficulty in theorising modern Asian art is not the waywardness of multiple local developments but the imposition of a unitary Euro-American historical schema, insisting on a preordained progression of artistic styles seen as evidence of progress. For it is clear that art practice in Asia does not follow established Western chronologies and that artists, participating in the process and practice of modernisation, have manifested their own personal, local, ethnic and political agendas for adaptations and indigenisations (and indeed rejections) of Euro-American art. 9 In the last two decades the dominance of modernist notions of progress, exemplified in visual art discourses in the writings of the American Clement Greenberg, have been largely discredited. But the broader substratum of notions of progress and development has not faded away in the light of post-modern 'plurality', nor the lingering sense that the archetypal experiments in modern art belong to the canonical figures of the West. It is with this authoritative statement of their own 'inauthenticity' that all non-European artists are contending, in practice and in theory. There are histories of Asian art, but they are not to be identified with Western histories. As might be expected from the diverse modernisations of several dozen countries and many more regional groupings and ethnicities, these Asian histories of modern art are plural, heterogenous, even contradictory. This is the frame within which recent exhibitions of Asian art are situated. The '4th Asian Art Show Fukuoka 1994: Realism as an Attitude' pointed to the emphasis by Asian artists on the social circumstances of the 1990s, and their registration of the immense social changes being wrought in the context of a rapidly changing world order. 10 This emphasis on the present was not merely reflective of current social developments, however, but enabling at a theoretical level. It suggested that the Fukuoka curators were abandoning the problematic of Asian modernism and ignoring the exhausted dichotomy of tradition/innovation. 'Realism as an Attitude' was a bold attempt to outfox the traps of the available dichotomies: East/West, past/present, timelessness/history, in favour of a focus on what Homi Bhabha calls 'the enunciative present'. 11 (It is clear now that previous attempts by Asian critics to formulate a 'South-East Asian aesthetic' or a 'baroque sensibility' in The Philippines had, despite their essentialisms, the great merit of attempting to evade the tyrannical linearity of 'history'.) 12 Time is telescoping now. In China.Thailand, Australia and elsewhere, the startling efficacy of post-modern communications and travel is speeding the process of international and intra– regional contact. The Asia-Pacific Triennial Es sAYs I 19