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

quality or edge in contemporary art has become compressed in both space and time; artists can now choose whether they wish to participate in this or other related discourses. The talk in Zagreb went down like a lead balloon -the multiple ironies, backtracks, blind gullies and screes which revolved around the effects of ideology, politics,, mass media, multiculturalism and tourism on museums and on their classifications of modern art were not appreciated by most of the audience. Rather, the impression had been given that my role as curator was somewhat akin to that of an old colonial District Inspector: khaki-shorted, complacent, red-faced and full of good intentions, but essentially there to keep the natives in good order. The meaning of the metaphor and the point of the ironies had been obliterated both by their changed context and their translation. We live in what we describe as a post-colonial world. But how 'post' is it really? The nineteenth– century empires are now either in ruins or in terminal decay, but have what we regarded as centres and peripheries remained the same, or have they changed fundamentally? There can be little doubt that during the past forty years political, economic and cultural transformations have taken place across the world which together have constituted some kind of watershed. Satellite television and information technology have shrunk distance, and economic power is no longer so firmly rooted on the shores of the Atlantic Rim. Yet if we look back to the last great watershed of European culture-the Enlightenment and the new sociopolitical ideologies and systems which resulted from it-we can see that although essential ideas about individual freedoms and rights have evolved since that time, they have not changed in any fundamental sense. After the revolutions in America and France, the despot could only seize control if he (never she) claimed to act in the name of the people. Most modern dictators derive their power from the same claim. 4 Modernity-however we care to define it-was a Western invention which developed out of the technology generated by the Industrial Revolution as well as out of new ideas about the nation state. It was quickly exported, along with other concepts and commodities, to the rest of the world where out of it grew the seed of modernisation-the key to future development. In the process of its translation, however, the meanings and priorities of modernity were transformed. I have written elsewhere that in a world of many cultures, one man's irony can too easily become another man or womans' oppression. This has occurred particularly where the barriers between art, life and political action have become confused. 5 Here lies a central paradox: the freedom or autonomy of art is a paradigm of other, broader freedoms, yet when misunderstandings occur concerning the separation between art and life and the artist becomes an activist, this may lead as often to forms of closet authoritarianism as it does to any ideal sense of universal liberation. 6 Away from the metaphorical field of art, freedom for some can easily become oppression for others. Freedoms can only be relative if they are to have any universal application. And this is close to the fallacy of modernity itself. Modernity enshrines individualistic rights and freedoms, yet when they are brought together in a social form, they must inevitably become compromised. Within the field of modern aesthetics, the origins of which can also be located in the late eighteenth century, art became established as a field separate from but parallel to life. Kant's seminal idea of the autonomy of art grew out of an individualism which was mediated and made intelligible by a universal ethical and aesthetic sentiment. By developing as a parallel field, art was eventually to become a form of reflexive ideology in itself.7 Yet, in practice, a distinction between life and art could never be simply drawn. From the time of Courbet onwards, innovatory realist artists have depicted the dislocated and alienated worlds of the rural and urban poor; yet genre painters had done this long before. It is not his subject matter alone which makes Courbet an important painter, but the way he saw and depicted these subjects in his paintings. It could be argued that a politically radical dimension is inscribed within the very notion of the avant-garde and that this is the cause of this longstanding confusion. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, such pre-Marxian revolutionary thinkers as Saint-Simon and Fourier identified the artistic with the political avant-garde. 8 It was the role of art to envision the new society. Although this had a relatively limited effect on artists at the time, a spirit of non-establishment radicalism entered the discourse; this, with the counter-cultural impetus of the anti-bourgeois vie boheme, consolidated the link between radical aesthetic and radical lifestyle. The great utopian dream of the historical avant– garde also aggressively tried to erode the distinctions between art and life; in revolutionary Russia the constructivists tore down their ivory towers in favour of the pylons of industrial design and production for the masses. As a result, the ideology of art as an autonomous field became subsumed within political ideologies which acted directly on the real world in order to change it. Radical art and radical politics were linked and, in the minds of many artists, critics and ideologues, remain so today. 9 In the West the term avant-garde has become historical and now has ironical overtones when applied to the present. Opinions differ as to exactly when the avant-garde fell off its perch, but the reductivism, conceptualism and dematerialisation which characterised the most advanced art of the early 1970s are generally accepted to mark the period of transition. These closely focused, often politically charged, isms were superseded by the anything goes, free market aesthetics of the 1980s, in which a voracious historicism and eclecticism replaced the positivistic progressions of earlier decades.10 In Europe and America politics were not excluded from the new art of the 1980s, but they were no longer class-based and revolved around networked issues of representation-of ecology, of identity, of ethnicity or of gender. 11 The dialectical tradition in art and its politics no longer seemed convincing, and this obviated the need for and function of an avant-garde. In a time of fragmentation there could be no single cutting edge. It was in the Far East-in China, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan (and to some extent in Singapore and Korea), where the mix of economic development, artistic discourse, modernity and political power was radically different from that in the West, that the concept of an avant-garde still seemed valid. In addition, these countries had not directly experienced the advanced Euro-American art of the 1970s. The seminal exhibition 'China Avant– garde', held in the Beijing National Gallery in February 1989, showed the work of generations of artists who had tried to exorcise the ghosts of Mao's Cultural Revolution, not only by re-establishing the idea of artistic autonomy but also by envisioning and agitating for new forms of democratic government. 12 Many of these artists had to leave China a few months later following the savage repression of the Student Democracy Movement. Rapid economic development creates inevitable strains on the fabric and infrastructure of any society. Poverty does the same yet, for obvious reasons, modernity rarely becomes an issue. In a society undergoing dynamic change, dominant views emerge as to the benefits or rewards which will result. Ideology and religion may provide a focus because they articulate goals and offer social cohesion and, in such situations, differences are often minimised or eliminated by a deafening torrent of orchestrated applause. Modern art, if it is to benefit and survive, has to distance itself from such blandishments. In the short walk I have traced here, it has to head for the high ground Es sAvs I 21