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

is fictit i ous , a provisional construction respond ing to particular circumstances . They know very well th e relativity of all values. And yet, for this liberal multicultural ist, able to step back and appreciate the differences of all cultures, one privilege nevertheless remains: their very abil ity to do so. In this sense, it is they who replay the classic Cartesian gesture of mastery, in which we prove ourselves by suspending all our operative values. Or in Lacan's paraphrase: I doubt, therefore I am. In order to make this a l ittle clearer, we might turn to two important museum exhibitions involving questions of cultural difference, one international and the other Australian . Most art h istorians would be familiar with the famous debate between William Rubin and Thomas McEvi l ley over the 1 984 MoMA show "'Primitivism" in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and Modern'. Rubin , the curator of the exhibition , assembled an extraord inary collection of objects purporting to show the 'affin ity' between European h igh Modern ism and a number of 'tribal' trad itions (in what anthropologists call an 'etic' approach). McEvilley for h is part stridently attacked Rubin for adopting this approach , arguing that such 'art' is not to be understood in western terms, but must first of all be grasped in its own context (an 'emic' or internal approach). 5 Now, of course, there were obviously problems with Rubin's over-hasty analogies and transpositions from one culture to another. McEvilley is right. But what still strikes us as wrong about McEvilley's attitude, and ultimately as even more offensive than Rubin's? It is precisely that, for all its apparent modesty and taking into account of the other, it is in the end more authoritarian than the first - as though it could define itself as that empty point from wh ich the biases of all other cultures can be analysed, as though it could escape its own ideological over-determination and see these other cultures in a non-western way. We see something similar in Australia in the debates surrounding the work of the great Western Desert painter Emily Kngwarreye, and particularly in the excellent catalogue essay by Roger Benjamin, 'A New Modernist Hero', written for the retrospective of her work held at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1 998. In his essay, Benjamin seeks to explain what seems to him to be the unique way in which Kngwarreye's work so quickly found favou r with wh ite art audiences and critics - and he does so by showing how her work, seemingly so alien to western culture, in fact fitted many of its prevail ing artistic myths. Thus he analyses Kngwarreye's work under such head ings as 'The Abstract Disposition', 'The Cult of Formal Development' and 'The Suspended Feminine', demonstrating that in many regards she was an ideal · modernist hero'. What is the intention of this, finally? To reveal how such construc t ions necessarily misconstrue Kngwarreye's work, interpreting only through western eyes. As opposed to this, Benjamin advocates another approach , which he indicates briefly at the end of h is essay: 'What this requires is a criticism more attuned to Aboriginal cultural values: to begin with , an informed sense of what her painting means with in her own commun ity and the development of alternatives to the formalist and biographical readings that so dominate approaches to Kngwarreye's work at the present time�' 6 But, again , two question s . One: how would Benjamin (or, indeed, any outsider) simply be able to distance himself from the ruling ideologies and mythologies of his own society in order to produce this more 'attuned' criticism? And two: would not this more 'attuned' criticism in fact only repeat the same myths, always be shown to be merely another version of the Eurocentrism it contests '? To begin in conclusion to propose another way of thinking all this, we m ight look at one of Kngwarreye's last paintings, Untitled (Alhalkere) , 1 996. It is simply a series of broad strokes of white pa i nt, folded on top of one another, creating what looks like a kind of internal shadow in the pictu re. At this stage in her career, Kngwarreye has seemingly left beh ind any direct presentai tion of an iconographic 'content' that would render itself legible, whether in terms of ceremonial body painting, a mapping of lands or journeys , or even an evocation of nature. There appears to be nothing hidden or secret about the painting. And yet, at the same time, this very openness makes the painting more obscure and mysterious than ever. Why is th is so? In one way, we might say that th is work is the culmination of a long practice of 're­ marking' secret content. That is, it does not so much allow us to say what this secret content actually o s as tell us that it is secret by hiding or veiling it. There is in a sense no secret until this veiling marks it as such . M ight it not be possible, then , to think of this 're-marking' of the secret siimilarly to how Derrida uses this word with regard to Mallarme, as the 'hollowing out' of mean i 1 ng that takes place in the fold in a 'gestural' writing? 7 If so, in another way, we could 1 27