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

centrist ideology on hold for the moment, forcing an encounter between the right-wing Hindu fundamentalist party with a broad alliance of secular forces. With regional dalit and minority aspirations riding high, a new federalism is on the cards in which the communist parties, by modifying their rigid forms of sectarianism, can play a key role. The representatives of the people (the only time this phrase can be used literally and meaningfully) are churning the oceans to evaluate the people's mandate. But mythologies aside, the historical dialectic is enlivening the people's imagination and the weary question of identity finds a rebirth in the volatile body-politic of India. It is deeply instructive to witness the dynamic of political identity formation-to witness how even the 'passive revolution' works out its own dynamic, however pragmatic and even at times cynical its motives. In the ground swell of political mobilisation, the much chastened citizen-subject of India attempts hugely vexed but ingenious and renewable forms of secular transcendence. At this juncture, civilisational memory and the aesthetics of a living tradition in the hands of the folk-which were the first two things on my itinerary-are overwhelmed by the energies of a restless polity. Indian modernity has in its own complex history since the nineteenth century posed the concept of a syncretic selfhood. Artists are perhaps crucial here: they are inclined to figure, and trans-figure, the civilisational certitudes of an (Indian) identity into vulnerable form and an acutely temporal aesthetic. Geeta Kapur, Art Writer, New Delhi, India Iam referring to my own recentlywritten catalogue essay for an exhibition, 'Traditions/Tensions' organised by the Asia Society Galleries, New York, curated byThai art historian and critic, Apinan Poshyananda, it will comprise twenty-eight contemporary artists' work from five Asian countries. It will open in NewYork in October 1996 and run simultaneously with the QueenslandTriennial, raising polemical issues about Asian art, the location of its practice/exposition/discourse. The title of this essay takes off from the title of Jean-Luc Godard's .film: FNo Or Three Things I KnowAboutHer, 1967. The conversation between the three women on issues around feminist/avant· garde film culture titled,'If upon leaving what we have to say we speak: Aconversation piece', has been reproduced in Discourses: Conversations in Pas/modern Artand Culture, eds R. Ferguson,et al., The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NewYork and The MIT Press, Cambridge,1990,pp.44-64. 4 After BasilWright's 1935 British documentary The Song ofCeylon. 5 LaleenJayamanne, 'Speaking of "Ceylon", aclash of cultures', in Questions of Third Cinema, eds J. Pines and P.Willemen, BFI, London,1989, p.155. 6 Jayamanne,p.166. 7 Trinh T. Minh-Ha, 'Outside in inside out: in Questions of Third Cinema, p.145. 8 Laleen Jayamanne, 'If upon leaving what we have to say we speak: Aconversation piece', Discourses, p.45. (italics mine). 9 RabindranathTagore'sViswa-Bharati Universityat Santiniketan playedamajor role in the inter-waryears in developing an Orientalvision at acreative and pedagogic level.The pan-Asian resurgence,distorted duringWorld War II,puts the quest in something of ashadow. So does the critique of Orientalism in more recent years. The fear of pan-Asian regression does not reduce the benign significance of Tagore's institution and its influence all over Asia in the first half of this century. 10 Trinh T. Minh-Ha, 'If upon leaving what we have to say we speak: Aconversation piece', Discourses, p.59. 11 Trinh T. Minh-Ha, p.63. 12 See K.G. Subramanyan's three compilations of essays: Moving Focus: Essays on Indian Art, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1978; The Living Tradition: Perspectives on Modern Indian Art, Seagull Books, Calcutta, 1987; and The Creative Circuit. Seagull Books,Calcutta,1992. 13 In 1982 J. Swaminathan, the artist-critic-polemicist of Indian art was invited to become Director of Roopankar, atwo-part museum of contemporary folk/tribal art (of Madhya Pradesh) and modern urban art, in amulti-arts complex at Bharat Bhavan ,Bhopal.He built up aremarkable collection. Swaminathan died in 1994. 14 J. Swaminathan, The Perceiving Fingers:Catalogue ofRoopankarCollection of Folk andAdivasiArt from Madhya Pradesh, India, Bharat Bhavan,Bhopa\ 1987,pp.17-18. 24 I ESSAYS AMisfit in Nowhereland Pat Hoffie I read recently in some tabloid publication that experiences of deja vu are on the increase. The essay suggested that the phenomenon was due to a mysterious global increase in heightened states of subconsciousness. This particular publication had been designed to appeal to a growing audience of 'New Age' advocates. However, in a range of articles written for other audiences,this topic has been repeatedly dealt with in a number of approaches, all equally idiosyncratic in their own way. In 1995 Vaclav Havel had what could be described in post-modern terms as a 'Lyotard experience'. 1 Sitting in a restaurant table in Singapore, he imagined himself to be by the Vltava River in Prague. Later that year, in an address he delivered to commencing students at Harvard, he used this experience to develop ideas about the changes in attitude necessary to move the world closer to a 'Politics of Responsibility'. The premise that the world is moving towards a single, homogenised global culture has been a focus for post-modern theoretical analysis for at least the past two decades. More recently, discussions have moved from the often arcane language of cultural theory and philosophy to terms shaped by the slide and friction of lived experience. In Havel's address, his recognition of both the benefits and the negative effects of this contagion of sameness, seems, at times, almost phlegmatic. He writes: . .. we now live in a single, global civilization.The identity of this civilization does not lie merely in similar forms of dress, or similar drinks, or in the constant buzz of the same commercial music all around the world, or even in international advertising ... our planet has, for the first time in the long history of the human race, been covered in the space of a very few decades by a single civilization-one which is essentially technological. 2 Inevitably, Havel's role as president of the Czech republic has honed his awareness of the struggles of cultural groups to reassert their cultural differences from underneath the imposed 'epidermis of world civilisation'. While he is quick to point out the positive potential of worldwide communication and the possibilities of a coordinated means of global defence, he is equally keen to warn of the suffocating effects on cultural diversity brought about by this enveloping 'epidermis' of trans– national culture. Havel draws from his experiences with the Czech republic to reconfirm his belief that communities will continue their struggle to reclaim specific cultural differences from the grip of all assimilating tendencies. Although these urges to assert difference often result in the all too familiar bloodshed of recent regional insurrection, they are also the passions that fuel ongoing contemporary reinterpretations of traditional cultural expressions. At present, the tendency to bemoan the sameness of transnational experience has almost become fashionable. Among theoretically 'enlightened' audiences in the late 1990s, it is far more acceptable to describe transnational wanderings in terms of homogenised 'Travels in Hyperreality' 3 than in terms of the searches for the exotic that characterised nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century descriptions of travels to elsewhere. Commercial signage, generic fast food, muzak and standardised ambience have created instant vacuum-packed experiences in forever-and-nowhereland in a range of far-flung destinations. But even more interesting experiences occur in the surprises that happen when, in spite of all the levelling sameness of internationalised familiarity, sensations of difference and regional specificity continue to erupt when (and where) least expected. Chungking Express, the fourth major film by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai, presents themes that are at least as old as Hollywood: unrequited love, mistaken identity, intrigue and romance. Even the stylistic genres are familiar: a pastiche of Generation X moral ambivalence, martial arts extravaganza, and plenty of cues from good old gangster stand-bys. With a recipe like this, the film could have easily slipped into being identified as yet another Tarantino clone. By pure coincidence, I first saw the movie in a cinema slap-bang in the centre of Hollywood: Laemmle's Sunset Cinema, where the view from the foyer stretches across Sunset Boulevard with its steady cruising stream of over-sized vehicles, and extends straight back up to the teetering mansions of the West Hollywood hills. It may be that the Hollywood setting heightened my awareness of having spent time in an imaginative space that was far, far removed from Hollywood; it may have been nostalgia and homesickness for 'the region'; but I exited from the film hyper-aware of my alienation from that world outside the cinema. I guess I had what could be described in terms of this essay as kind of 'anti-Lyotard experience'. Maybe it was the incongruity of the setting that made me temporarily 'homesick' for Hong Hong. Maybe it was the glee of recognising more familiar haunts, like the Chungking Mansions. Maybe it was the seductiveness of Christopher Doyle's cinema– tography. I don't know. But as soon as the film rolled it was apparent that the audience was entering a realm where time, spaces, and the relationships between things were a whole different dream away. In spite of the familiarity of the celluloid themes, in spite of the recognisable blandness of fast foods, and in spite of the repetitive seductiveness of 'California Dreaming', an undeniably Hong Kong ambience saturated the screen.