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

where, regardless of the material or subject on which the artist chooses to work, its metaphorical individualism and autonomy will assert values and freedoms which cannot be traduced. David Elliott, Director, The Museum of Modern Art,Oxford, UK The title was taken from Eric Newby'saccount of his journey to Nuristan; it was published in London in 1958. Misunderstanding has long played astrategic creative and liberating role in modern art. The adoption of the objet trouve by the surrealists, for instance, wasasignificant form of wilful misunderstanding. In aless reflective act of appropriation between different cultures the issue of understanding is irrelevant. Anumber of artists of Australian Aboriginalorigin have strongly made this point. TraceyMoffat refuses to be described as an Aboriginal artist; Gordon Bennett sees his work as relevant to the contemporary Aboriginal discourse as well as to other less contextual concerns. Notable exceptions are military dictatorswho have achieved or prolonged power in coups.The present government of Myanmar is aclassic example of this. David Elliott, 'Expressionism:Ahealth warning', in eds S.Behr,D. Fanning and D. Jarman, Expressionism Reassessed, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1993, p.48. Arevisionist view of the innate authoritarianism of the historical avant-garde was postulated by Boris Groys in The TotalArtofStalinism:Avant-garde,Aesthetic Dictatorship andBeyond, trans.C.Rougle,Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1992. See also ArtandPower:Europe under the Dictators 1930-45 [exhibition catalogue),Hayward Gallery, London,1995. Art as an autonomous self-referential field was first postulated in the European and North American aesthetic movements of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The originsof this were based on aWestern adaption and misunderstanding of Oriental-particularly Chinese and Japanese-arts and crafts. See Linda Nochlin, 'The invention of the avant-garde.France 1830-1880' in The Politics of Vision, Essays on Nineteenth-CenturyArtand Society, Thames & Hudson, London, 1991, pp.1-18. See ArtandPower. The broader subject of postwar political art can be related back to the conflicts which came to ahead in the 1930s. 10 In the space of ashort article this argument must be compressed,but a distinction needs to be made here between the historiography of modernism, which was positivist,and modernism itself which was-and is-multivalent. Revisionist,anti-positivistic histories are now beginning to appear which look at non-progressive models of modernism.An implication of this viewpoint is that, in the visual arts at least,post-modernism,far from being abreak in history, is a decadent form of modernism inentropy.See D.Elliott, 'Duchamp's endgame: The fertile impossibilities of "modern art"', in Heart ofDarkness, Rijksmuseum Kroller-MUller,Otterlo, 1996. 11 Some artists had consciously been dealing with such issues long before the 1980s (Marcel Duchamp, Bruce Nauman et al) but it was at this time that the nature of the politico-artistic discourse changed.Critical theorist Louis Althusser had prefigured this change in his writings. 12 Many of these artists, rather like the Russian Sots Art painters,commented satirically on the propaganda of the Cultural Revolution (Wang Guan Yi); others experimented with new ways of making work as well as how this related to earlier Chinese culture (Gu Wenda, Huang Yongping,Cai Guo Qiang).There was also a strong movement, in literature as well asart, towards ugly realism (Fang Lijun). See China Avant-Garde:Counter-Currentsin Artand Culture, eds J. Noth, W. Pohlmann,K.Reschke,Haus der Kulturen derWelt,Berlin;Oxford University Press,Hong Kong,1994. 22 ESSAYS J. Swaminathan Untitled (from 'Symbol becomes sign'series) 1992 Bees wax and linseed oil on canvas 84x119cm Two or Three Things About Ourselves Geeta Kapur After an exercise in addressing US Americans on the question of Asian art, 1 facing eastward and writing about the same things is like getting out of military fatigues and putting one's feet in the water ...The silt of ages sculpts my feet, the eyes seek an island called serendipity. In saying these two or three things I know about her/about ourselves, 2 I propose to drop the ramrod identity and historical vigil that Euro-American culture provokes. This is on the pretext that Australia is Asia which it is, and it isn't. No it still isn't as though we were talking in, say, Hanoi, ducking from the cocked gaze of international curators, happy to share slender means in order to circumvent white institutional patronage and define the politicality of aesthetics from that perspective. In this daydream of alternative solidarities, I want to quote a dialogue where several fragilities of intention combine: Trinh T. Minh-Ha of Vietnam/United States and Laleen Jayamanne of Sri Lanka/Australia (and Leslie Thornton from the United States) talk to each other. 3 Jayamanne comes from the mythical Swarnadeep (golden island), mispronounced in colonial times as serendipity, a word that acquires a utopian aura; mispronounced again as Ceylon (and changed by its inhabitants to Sri Lanka in 1972). For her feminist-anthropological film she ironically adapts another Orientalist title, A Song of Ceylon 1985, 4 which she says 'explores the narcissistic body, the masochistic body, the hysterical body and maybe a few other bodies .. .' 5 adding that by dissolving the gendered binary opposition within which these bodily states have been conceptualised, 'the film becomes a spectacle not only of but also for the body in extremis'. 6 The theme of (bodily) transgression is elaborated by Trinh T. Minh-Ha who comes from a country that will be forever marked historically as the land of a people who survived the United States holocaust. In her important film, Naked Spaces-Living is Round 1985, and in her writings, Trinh defies the dubious protocol attached to Western anthropological discourse around the inside/outside binary, whereby she develops her own diasporic politics. She deliberately 'displaces' herself onto a devalorised reality of a village community in Africa. She enters a distant space in the form of an intrepid being, and with the device of an immensely expanded time, an almost excruciating time-image with the cinematic affect of cumulative pensiveness, she gains for all concerned a prolonged, self-referential imaging of otherness– her own, theirs, ours. She is the Inappropriate Other/Same who moves about with always at least two/four gestures: that of affirming 'I am like you' while persisting in her difference; and that of reminding herself 'I am different' while unsettling every definition of otherness .. .7 In this dialogue between continents, Laleen Jayamanne brings up another Godard (and Gorin) film, Wind from the East, where the Brazilian avant– garde film-maker, the late Glauber Rocha, stands at an intersection of roads with his hands extended Christ-like and a pregnant woman with a camera asks him: 'Which way to political cinema'. Rocha gestures in one direction, speaking of a marvellous Third World cinema, but the pregnant woman strolls off in another direction: 'I like the way', Jayamanne says, 'the pregnant woman negotiates the intersection via a simultaneous gesture of engagement and deflection'. 8 I am aware that this light-footed meandering in Asia as in the Third World is something of a privilege among cosmopolitan intelligentsia-so let us talk of the situation at hand. Cultural cosanguinity is achieved for the moment via the hospitality of Australia which sponsors the occasion to chart a conceptual topography of Asian cultures. Cleft, riven and traumatised, our contemporary cultures can be represented figuratively as clinging to the shaky ladders that spell diachronicity along the Western scale. But as they recognise, nevertheless, a synchronous complexity between themselves, it is an occasion to chart a topography that is geographical, civilisational, and draws out the immanent peculiarities of the Asian Now. But no, before this turns into pan-Asian-regression 9 let us resume an ironical Orientalism within a construed mise en scene of shared pasts and answer the sphinx's riddle. So as to reveal an identity less tragic than Oedipus because more androgynous, more patient, more provocative, more reflective– and ultimately less metaphysical in that it is not sealed by its own obsessional hermeneutics and is more historically resilient, after all. I am trying, as you can see, to get out of any deterministic movement and to take up-in imitation ofvanguardists during tricky times-the two steps forward and one step back technique of advancement. This is also how the colonial strategists proceed towards liberation politics, putting up a masquerade resembling a rite of passage with feet bleeding from the debris of civilisations pressed underfoot. Trinh says: As for me, rather than talking about death, I would like to talk about threshold, frontier, limit, exhaustion, and suspension; about void as the very space for an infinite number of possibilities; about ... making possible the undoing, the redoing, the modifying of this very limit ... this seems quite different from either escaping or annihilating meaning.10 I am trying to work out a non-narrative way to say three things about the past, present, and future. About the past, I think we may gain by re-learning the lesson of narcissistic self- absorption, whereby one looks into the well of tradition and recognises in all vanity some aspect of oneself reflected back.