Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

JULI E EWINGTON Negotiations In this Asia-Pacific Triennial , and in other recent contemporary projects, artists have been exploring the interstices between customary practices, and the potentialities of major art exhibitions as national and international arenas . These are purposeful and knowing interventions, which track new paths between local and global contexts. I n th is paper I want to tease out some of the complex inter-relationsh ips between these d ifferent arenas for action in an interrogation of the unsatisfactory shorthand 'global/local', and to sketch the ways in wh ich these questions are, at th is very moment, crucial for the future engagement of Australians with other cultures, both near and far. This is a topical paper for a very difficult week. For it now seems important to me to affirm , to reaffirm, the ways in wh ich artists from different cultures and beliefs work together in peaceful and productive projects; in addition, I also want to draw attention to the immediate context in which most of us here - artists, writers, curators, art educators - are engaged, that is, in contemporary art and its institutional locations - art galleries and museums, art magazines and art colleges . For if we do not attend closely to the priorities and pol itics of our own working world, we will, I am arguing, neglect the precise relationships between the local and the global that we are best able to understand and effect. There are three major points I want to make here - a brief introduction and two particular projects that I will d iscuss. Paths Between the Local and the Global In most discussions of the issues signal led by the topic 'Global/Local', the vertiginous disjunctions between local customs and cultures, and the global networks of commod ity distributions and communication , are most often emphasised - Coca-colonisation versus the local product, CNN versus Star TV in India, for instance. What I want to argue here, in the context of the international world of contemporary art, is the specificity and particularity of circuits of interaction, exchange and commun ication which I bel ieve exist in the conceptual and actual interstices between these excessively summary terms. In my observation and experience of contemporary art, the global/local d ichotomy is hardly meaningful , existing as a conceptual paradigm which bears little explanatory relationship to exhibition practices . What interests me is, precisely, that particular art worlds, exhibitions and journals concern themselves with certain national/inter-national groupings, conglomerations, and not with others . These are partial and powerful decisions, exerting inclusions and exclusions along certain well-understood but hardly articulated l ines. Each international exhibition, for instance, purportedly 'international' in the widest terms, is always constructed around preferences and alliances with its own developed h istories . As one example, the Indian Triennial in New Delhi, wh ich I attended in 1 986 at the very tail­ end of the Cold War (though we hardly knew that at the time) was inflected by super-power contention between the Soviet bloc and the United States. There were lavish representations by Eastern Bloc countries, a perfunctory presence by the Americans, and intense Indian interest in countries with in its own ambit - political, historical and cultural . I was fascinated to see then, in New Delhi, that 'international' exhibitions are not universal. Similarly, at the Venice Biennale in 1 990 I observed the marginal isation of artists from Asia, and the attempts of American museums to introduce African artists against the background of the main game, which was the evident anxiety of European exh ibitors that the Americans would walk off, yet again, with a main award . (Jenny Holzer did, for the record , win the prize for painting . ) The preferences and alliances of these international arenas do change, however, as the history of more recent Venice Biennales has shown . And it is worth noting that the Asia-Pacific Triennial project would never have been born without the existence of the evident gap in the international art cal endar that it now, a decade later, fills. All international art exhibitions, then - biennales, triennials, Documentas and so on - exist with in h ighly-developed networks and customary practices that are not entirely local, although control led by local interests, yet never thoroughly 'international' in the sense of the ambitions 1 07