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

is a small part of that process which commenced in the postwar period and has accelerated since the 1980s. It is a process not simply endured but ceaselessly interrogated by artists and intellectuals. In 1991 Apinan Poshyananda, the Thai historian and curator, demanded at a conference in Australia how long the West thought it could control the idea of modernism and post- modernism? In 1993 the Philippines critic Marian Pastor Races wrote about Umberto Eco's image of the cannibal wearing the clock around his neck, transforming the poignant and ironic image of Eco's text into a potentially robust icon of independence in her own. In 1994 the artist Cai Guo Qiang spoke in Tokyo about abandoning history but not the past, as a way of reinvestigating the East and what he called, 'our land and traditions'. 13 For Australians, these matters of historical and temporal location, and of interpretation, are ambiguous but essential. In a post-colonial settler society like Australia, both indigenous Australians (the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples) and the descendants of the Europeans living 'South of the West' 14 have a stake in rethinking our relationships to the ruling mythologies of Western historicism. It is in our interest, ultimately, to abandon adherence to universal knowledge and temporal uniformity, and the pretension to singular, universally valid notions of value. How else are we to register-as we must, and simultaneously– memory, pain and loss, hope and love, and the endless energy life demands? Julie Ewington,Senior Curator,Museum Education,Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney,Australia Jam caret, literally rubber time, inBahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia. The dawn ceremony was part of the exhibition 'WA.A.: Whatu Aho Rua:AWeaving Together of Traditional and ContemporaryTaonga',curated by Rangihiroa Pancho for the Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui,Aotearoa/New Zealand,which toured Australia in 1992. The most famous anthropological account of the social ordering of time is by Clifford Geertz writing about Bali in'Person,Time and Conduct in Bali'. in The Interpretation ofCultures, BasicBooks, NewYork,1973,pp.360-411, especially pp.391-398. Geertz says of Balinese calendars: 'They don't tell you what time it is,they tell you what kind of time it is',p.393. Edward Said, Culture & Imperialism, Chatto & Windus,London, 1993, especially the section of Chapter 1entitled 'Discrepant Experiences',pp.35-50; Vincente L. Rafael, (ed.), Discrepant Histories: TranslocalEssays on Filipino Cultures, Anvil Publishing,Manila,1995. From 'ANZART in Auckland'. 1985, to 'Artists' Regional Exchange', Perth, Australia,1995. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: HowAnthropologyMakes Its Object, Columbia University Press, New York,1983,p16. Fabian,p.24. Fabian,p.146. Fabian,p.165. John Clark, 'Modern Art inSouth-EastAsia: ArtandAsia Pacific, Sample Issue, 1993,pp.35-37 and John Clark (ed), ModernityandPostmodernity in Asian Art, Peony Press, Sydney, 1994, for Clark's introductoryessay and other contributors passim. Kuroda Raiji, 'The Potentialof Asian Thought',Paper presented to the Contemporary Art Symposium,The Japan Foundation ASEAN Cultural Centre, Tokyo,1994, pp.99-111. 10 4th Asian ArtShowFukuoka 1994:Realismasan Altitude [exhibition catalogue], Fukuoka Art Museum,Fukuoka,Japan, 1994.See especially the essayby Ushiroshoji Masahiro, 'Realism as an Attitude:Asian Art in the Nineties', pp.33-38 11 See Homi Bhabha, The Location ofCulture, Routledge,London,1994, especially his essay'The post-colonial and the post-modern:The question of agency', pp171-197. 12 Aedza Piyadasa,of Malaysia, inalectureat Canberra School of Art, March,1991; and Rod Paras-Perez,the distinguished Philippines critic and art historian, is the 20 ES SAYS leading contemporary voice creditedwith speaking of the Philippines baroque sensibility. See however his 'The ASEAN sensibility:South-East Asian sense and sensibility: ArtandAsia Pacific, vol.1, no.4,October 1994, pp.67-73. 13 Apinan Poshyananda'squestion at the 1991 Canberra Conference has continuing resonance,and was quoted anonymouslyby CarolineTurner (ed.), Tradition and Change: ContemporaryArtofAsia and the Pacific, Queensland UniversityPress, Brisbane,1993,p.xvii;Marian Pastor Races, 'Ethos bathos pathos:Contemporary art practice inThe Philippines', ArtandAsia Pacific, Sample Issue, 1993,pp47-51; Cai Guo Qiang, 'The Potential for Asian Thought', pp.127-129. 14 The phrase is borrowed from the title of Ross Gibson's South of the West: Postcolonialism and the NarrativeConstrue/ion ofAustralia, Indiana University Press, Bloomington,1992. Top Brenda Fajardo Babae at Bayan (Women and Country) (from 'Cards of life– Women'sseries') 1993 Pen and ink with goldleaf on handmade paper 47.5x66cm Collection: Queensland Art Gallery.The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art Bottom Bohn-Chang Koo Inthe beginning 1 1991 Gelatin silver photograph, cotton thread 128x88cm Collection: Queensland Art Gallery. The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art AShort Walk in the Hindu Kush 1 David Elliott Some weeks ago I was asked by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb to give a talk on the artistic policies of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford where I have been director for the past twenty years.They stressed that it should be with particular reference to the central role these policies had played, since the late 1970s, in articulating arguments about centres and peripheries in contemporary art. My chosen title, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush: The Flora and Fauna of Modern Art, set out to do this. It was intended ironically, and a little facetiously, to compare the role of the curator with that of the tourist, botanist, anthropologist and explorer– people who in their different ways intrepidly confront the great unknown. The Hindu Kush is a massive mountain range which bridges northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the idea of a short walk in it is an absurdity. In this almost mythical territory, the natural world becomes like a mirror in which you perceive only those things of which you are already aware.The process, however, does not stop here because the act of perception may become a point of departure for another, more significant journey. This, in a rather rambling way, became an extended metaphor for the institution of the Museum of Modern Art itself, the function of which is to institutionalise that area of human activity which should naturally resist being institutionalised. A central theme of the talk was that, although ideas concerning centres and peripheries were at one time important in pinpointing the innate neo-colonialism of the Western art world, this battle had been fought throughout the 1980s and was to a large extent won. The discussion had moved elsewhere and the whole subject had, in a sense, become peripheral. In the process, the distinctions between peripheries and centres had become eroded, and the old modernist denunciation of the 'derivativeness' of non-Western contemporary art no longer had its sting. Cultural influence between east, west, north and south could now be understood as a reciprocal process in which changed context as well as misunderstanding played vital transformatory roles. 2 In contrast we have now entered a period of what could be described as universal relativism. Although one would still expect to see the greatest change and growth at the edges of culture where there is still room to move, many artists do not care to be categorised as peripheral. Whatever their origins, they want to transcend their ethnicity and context and see their work in relation to a mainstream. 3 The recent revolution in communications and information technology has meant that the universalist discourse about what constitutes