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

Jean-Hubert Martin described his exhibition in Lyon next year as trying to avoid the succession of movements of modern art into post modern , the temporal succession series we're so familiar with in European art, and move towards a special ised conception. In order to do this, he was interested in what artists theorise as art history wh ich he and many other art historians have noticed is almost always different from the theory presented by art theorists. He chose for h is advisers anthropologists to validate associative sets of works provided by three curators one of whom was himself, all of whom were French and all of whom were male. The question was raised : was or was not th is new kind of culturalism another strategy for European dominance? He tended to agree with this but said simply that it was better than the previous ones. Someone also made an interesting comment about the screening of a second order discursive reflection accord ing to international art criteria . The problem that I have alluded to earlier is the reluctance of artists to discuss why their work is selected or whether in fact they like their work being selected for exh ibition values wh ich are not necessarily their own . 8.5: Popu lar Culture, Street Art, Art of the Mega City Chair Kajri Jain Rather like Laleen's panel, our session was somewhat disparate and perhaps needed a much narrower focus and I have to say that I'm envious of the regional sessions which seem to have been really focused with a greater opportunity for discussion . I 'm afraid I didn't have Souchou's panache in totally hijacking the theme we were g iven to work with . It's hard to really isolate any coherent themes emerging from this panel , which as I pointed out in my paper brings together a problematic aggregation of terms which only really works in that constellation for a certain Euro-American narrative of modern ity. It doesn't for instance speak to the way in which Indian calendar art is produced and circulated outside the large urban centres. A lot of people have referred to it as urban popular art: it actually isn't quite that. Laine Berman used a host of specific examples to illustrate how the street in Indonesia has been a performative site for negotiating various kinds of symbolic meanings and identities : a theatre for repression , subversion and transformation. Both our papers touched on the replication of larger structures of dominance in the relationship between modernist art practice in these countries - India and Indonesia - and what might be loosely termed as 'the realm of the popular'. N i kos Papastergiadis began with some comments on this APT and its peculiarly alienating m ixture of discourses and he put forward the intriguing tropes of the stranger or outsider as witness and the witness as martyr as a possible basis for an alternative model . Apparently in Greek there's a connection between, or perhaps its the same word , for witness and for martyr. He then turned to the question of how art might come to embody the experience of the city and here he contrasted the early modernist celebration of the city with a more recent fascination with decline and neglect, and with what he calls the parafunctional spaces of cities - those that no longer have a clear or proper function . An example is the d isused centre of the once bustling colonial manufacturing city of Manchester. Then we had the telephonic presence of Hou Hanru - a kind of voice from the heavens, an all-hearing presence. He reiterated his interest in the new urban condition as a new territory for exploration by artists. So there wasn't really much time for discussion , other than one question relating to Hou Hanru's 'Cities on the Move' and curatorial practice, and another pertinent observation on the absence of gender as a category of negotiation on Indonesian streets. But as Laine Berman pointed out, in this particular arena of the Indonesian street there have been other no less important but perhaps more urgent battles to be fought. 1 42