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

TWO TRENDS I N RECENT POST-COLON IAL ART WRITI NG Rex Butler And Morgan Thomas Take a passage from recent Australian art writing, typical of so many others. It is an article by Louis Nowra, 'Blackness in the Art of Rover Thomas'. In it, he compares the work of the East Kimberley artist Rover Thomas to that of the post-War American abstractionist Mark Rothko: Rothko lays colour upon colour in an attempt to create a sense of semi-transparent depth . H is use of colour is so attractive that his work resembles at times not so much an act of spiritual description but a preen ing dance that glories in its own technique . . . One enters the many layers in order to be baptised into Rothko's own church of colour. It is an extraordinary and exhausting egoism and Rothko remains, along with Frida Kahlo, one of the great narcissists of twentieth-century art. Compare Rothko's works with two paintings by Rover Thomas . . . 1 And here is Norman Bryson's read ing of the Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura and his remake of Manet's Olympia, Portrait (Futago), 1 988: Morimura's image made the dimension of race [in Manet's Olympia] inescapable by inserting a non-European body into both of Olympia's figures, black and white. The gesture outl ined another power ratio at work in Manet's Olympia, one that had been rather mysteriously elided: male over female, bourgeois over working class, yes - but also white vision and white art over nonwh ite vision and art. 2 Mark Rothko as a preening 'egoist'? Olympia as elid ing its debt to European colon ialism? Why is it that writers on post-colonial art (and Aboriginal art is increasingly considered within the general rhetoric of post-colonialism) are so often compelled to characterise the western art they oppose it to in such simplistic terms - unambiguous, unreflective, falsely universalist, embodying the Cartesian ego and bel ieving in the myth of original ity - when it is j ust this lack of complexity they condemn in previous understandings of post-colonial art itself? Why, in order to construct its own rhetorical space, does this writing on contemporary art have to erect this 'straw man' Modern ism so that it can knock it over? Were things ever as straightforward as it would suggest? In fact, the self-contrad ictory nature of this first tendency in post-colon ial art and writing is revealed in the second trend we would like to identify, wh ich is in a way its opposite. Here it is not a matter of a hegemonic European mainstream and its post-colonial alternative, but of this European mainstream being revealed as itself post-colon ial. That is, seen from a post-colonial perspective, the coloniser's art is already fictional, lacks any fixed point of origin , speaks of its indebtedness to the other's culture. Thus, for example, the work of the Australian landscape painter Sidney Nolan is not simply a pastiche of Cubism, but shows that 'original' European Cubism was already such a hybrid {Ian Burn). 3 Similarly, Gordon Bennett's appropriations of Piet Mondrian demonstrate that the apparent 'purity' of Mondrian's work was derived from Modernism's fascination with the 'primitive', Mondrian's love of black jazz (Ian Mclean). 4 Here the coloniser and colon ised are not so much opposed as equally subject to a general logic of coloniality. But colonised by what, we m ight ask? By the forces of multi-national capitalism perhaps, wh ich always seek to decentre existing cultures and markets in order to tap new reserves of original ity and difference, in a suggestion that might be worth taking up on another occasion . . . To begin to think the relationship between these two tendencies in post-colonial thinking, we m ight say that what is raised here is the problem of the position from which we speak. That first model would begin by attacking a supposedly monolithic Modernism in the name of hybridity, difference and decentring , only to find - this is the difficulty to wh ich the second model attests - that Modernism is already informed by these values. The second would circumvent this by seeing itself as speaking from a position emptied of all determinate content. That is, from where does that second kind of post-colon ial critic speak? They are able to diagnose the artistic shortcomings and ideological misrecognitions of all societies, including their own . They are able to speak of the way that every assertion of national identity 1 26