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

prevenance. In this context in which the prominence and success of indigenous art is in stark contrast with societal intolerance the foregrounding of ind igenous art seems to be double-edged. It seems to offer white audiences the opportun ity to avoid their own historical consciousness. Perhaps though to quote one speaker this egoism need not necessarily immobilise. Its extreme self-consciousness in which the double historical traumas of modern ity and settler history (and the two are not the same although they're too often conflated in the literature in Australian art in an over-easy notion of non-place . ) This possibility though sets in train the equation identified earlier in this Conference by Geremie Barme. Beyond the Future perhaps equals beyond the self bounded by who I was born as and what I was taught and told. 8.4: Commod ification/Patronage/Censorship Chair John Clark I would like to endorse what Laleen said about the need for more creative encounters. My session dealt with issues of commodification , patronage and censorship. I spoke on new ways of looking at the circulation of objects at the international art level . Oscar Ho spoke about the situation in Hong Kong and his relationship to certain exh ibitions which came from China. Jean-Hubert Martin spoke about the categories that he was developing and the way in which they were being developed for his important exhibition in Lyon next year. I'd like to mention an issue wh ich wasn't discussed in my panel but wh ich I had intended to raise, and which I noticed in looking at these panels has not actually been raised in the symposium structure itself, wh ich is the artist's experience of selection and placement of work in curatorial categories for their exhibition value. This is an issue for artists and certainly an issue for any kind of critical art history which does not necessarily have to accept the consecration of international art mediators or curators. In interviews with artists I have asked them what they thought about their selection or curator's choice, and they have all immediately said 'This is not for the record, don't mention I said this' and some didn't see that it is the artist's role to discuss this in public since they presented their art. It is however a very important subject for the canonisation of certain kinds of art objects and for their circulation at the level of international art expositions. I notice it is systematically excluded from the discussions at this symposium, and I th ink it should be included . It is a taboo subject as we know. To go into the concrete details we discussed in the panel, I proposed that the shift of art historical attention should take place from art objects and art mediators to the kinds of circulation which actually occurred at the international level, the most important of which of course is the absent circulation . Many art works do not reach the level of international circulation They are not privileged in that discourse. I gave reasons for it. I then noticed that some artists appear in international art circulation and then very rapidly disappear. There are various reasons for this but it is a phenomena of the process of international art circulation that people are not continually circulated . The third issue was that of deviated circulation - that what appears at the international art level is a circulation of art works outside their discourses of origin and sometimes in a way which is unrepresentative of their discourses of origin . The fourth is the emergence at the international art level of denied circulations, that is to say where art works can only appear at the international art level because they are denied circulation domestically. Oscar Ho spoke on the Chinese government policies wh ich have meant that forms of experimental art and pol itical satirical imagery have been excluded from exhibition in Ch ina systematically for the last ten or so years, and that this had resu lted in what he called an 'export art market', an art which is produced solely for foreign curators and patrons wh ich had paradoxically meant not only the survival of those artists who made it and the survival of a kind of experimental art in China, but also the complete d istortion of the relationship of that output to whatever was the Chinese taste in various parts of China and certainly at the official level . He also commented on the marginalisation of Hong Kong by its incorporation in a new, larger Chinese entity and the marginalisation of its cultural practices. 1 4 1