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

Within contemporary art itself, the domination continues. The Third World's artists have to make their works/expressions/idioms/visions conform to contemporary art 'conventions'. Some have succeeded, some have not, and some have had to betray their artistic vision. The majority of Third World artists, however, stay outside this 'exclusion/ inclusion game' of contemporary art. In the Third World, the domination began when local artists, art historians and art critics started to use the term 'contemporary art', again without pressure. And no doubt it was the discourses around contemporary art which criticise the absolutism of modernism and opened the awareness of pluralism which later developed into an awareness of differences in contemporary art. One way or another, the domination is related to intermingled developments which can be seen as discursive elements which should be mediated in finding the discourse of the world's contemporary art. However, up to now, these discursive elements have been blocked and could not develop into an acceptable platform. In my opinion, it is because the identification of difference concentrated on different cultural backgrounds that it became so easily confined to bipolar thinking. Within the mainstream, differences have been identified through a perception similar to Orientalism, where cultural backgrounds in the Third World were always seen as related to traditions and ethnicity; in a word: uniqueness. In representing realities within the Third World, most of the analyses were trapped in elaborating otherness. The representations have become false since the realities represented were not really considered within the process of representation. Based on the spirit of seeing differences, the social and cultural backgrounds were forced to become 'the others'. Differences in contemporary art are difficult to mediate because within the Third World, there has been continual reaction to concepts of otherness in the West. This stance has resulted in the same errors in identifying differences through cultural backgrounds. In the Third World, cultural background has become a tool to show national identities or other defensive identities. In the case of South-East Asian art, noted Japanese curator Masahiro Ushiroshoji wrote that: The basic approach of Southeast Asian artists was to search for their identity on a narrow path passing between the West and their own tradition.The tendencies of nationalism and orientalism were dangerous and seductive traps set along this road. 8 Seeing how difference has been discussed both in the mainstream and the Third World, I realised that the effort to find a platform for discussing the world's contemporary art has resulted in another confrontation, misinterpretation and misunder– standing. This condition is an indicator that contemporary art discourse has been trapped in the frame of post avant-garde/post-modernity. Too much effort has been taken to include what Honnef pointed out as general events and tendencies in society and culture as a whole. Within this tendency, artistic aspects were overlooked. It is only through its artistic aspects that contemporary Third World art can be properly understood. An understanding of contemporary art cannot avoid its contradictory connection with modernist development. In the mainstream, this contradiction is clear; while in the Third World, the connection between modern and contemporary art is obscure because the development of modern art is itself unclear. Viewing Third World contemporary art through the frame of post avant-garde/post– modernity is pushing obscurity towards a more obscure condition. The development of modern art in Third World countries was obscure because of the domination of Western art theories. Until now, the obscurity of modern art developments in the Third World has been ignored within contemporary art discussions. This denial is related to a strong tendency in contemporary art to refuse any discussion of modern art, modernism or modernity. Not only have curators of the mainstream demonstrated this refusal, but also, curators of the Third World dealing with contemporary art, who have tried hard to adjust their attitudes in return for acknowledgment. In the international art world, the Third World has never really had the opportunity to find (or understand) its own artistic development, either within modern art, or now, within contemporary art. Black British film– maker Martina Attile writes: Black representation must confront modernity, and question whether our understanding of modernity embraces Black experience. For us to leap to the postmodern would be to overlook the unfinished business of modernity: how they shape new societies, new cultures, new vocabularies, and new accents within the modern world. 9 However, it is not just the Third World who have neglected to clarify modernity/modernism. The discourse of contemporary art is also not finished with modernism. That is why contemporary art only fits mainstream development. Discourses which refuse to evaluate the effects of modern art in the Third World, never really deny totality; which is the crux of the difficulty in understanding Third World art. Hence, the discussion of absolutism in modernism should be elaborated within contemporary world art. It is important for creating awareness of different artistic development, which in my view, is more important than elaborating difference in cultural background. There is nothing new in cultural difference, it is already clear that globalism, like internationalism, does not make the world follow one value system. We can start discussing different artistic developments with reference to Nederveen Pieterse's opinion on the unpacking of the specifity of Western modernity; or modernity's absolutism and totality. In regard to this we can ask if modernist development is a result of an ideal which came from the world of ideas (meaning it did not follow an empirical approach). In his essay 'When Was Modernism', Raymond Williams stated that: 'Modernism' as a title for whole cultural movement ... has been retrospective as a general term since the 1950s, thereby stranding the dominant version of 'modern' or even 'absolute modern', between, say, 1890 and 1940. 10 Williams's opinion answered a question which had been in my mind for a long time. This answer made me aware that modernism is not purely an ideal. Thus, its absolutism and totality as a belief should be questioned. Modernism is related to a retrospec– tive concept and relates directly to reality. Since its beginning the concept was based on Western reality, it is a Western modernism-a part of modernism as a whole. Thus the modernist development that resulted is just one way of development. Then I came to a realisation. If Western society could come to modernism through its realities, why couldn't societies outside the West. If societies outside the Western world could chart their modernist development which had been related to the process of modernisation and modernity since the eighteenth century, we would possibly find a pluralist modernism based on continents, regions, nations, societies, or even groups of people and societies within one nation. There is a common perception that the world outside the West adopted both modernity/modernism and Western culture after World War II. This is perhaps the reason why modernism outside the West has been described as an adaption or even imitation of an 'ideal'. However, this is not true. For example, in countries like Indonesia and The Philippines, which were colonised by Western nations, Western culture has been influential since the seventeenth century and has resulted in hybrid cultures.Within these cultures, the spirit of modernisation (commonly identified through the emergence of the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and democracy in America) was influential in the eighteenth ESSAYS I 27