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

NEW MODELS/NEW ART/NEW CENTURY Pat Hoffie The music you are listening to comes from the introduction to a performance by the Municipal Water Puppet Theatre in Hanoi. The trad ition of water puppetry was established over one thousand years ago, during a more slowly moving time when farmers in the Red River Delta region fash ioned an entertainment to preoccupy them when, every year, their paddy fields became sullen and swollen during the annual rains. For over a thousand years the art-form was cloistered from audiences from the outside world . It was not until the 1 960s that this trad ition was opened to the eyes of others. In the brief decades since that time, the Water Puppet Theatre has been invited to perform to huge aud iences in countries across the world, and hundreds of thousands of visitors each year crowd to watch the performances in Hanoi. In th is soundscape the Vietnamese compile l ists - in English and French , but not in Vietnamese - the litany of countries to wh ich the water puppets have travelled. Yet what has happened to the unbroken tradition since that time? I n what ways have the puppets and their original performances become altered by the tidal wave of outside influences that have erupted across their watery stage? This sound track itself is evidence of the way in which elements of the original form are appropriated and overlaid and re-interpreted by those - like myself - who work from a position of inevitable misinterpretation . Exerpts from the original track weave between and in and out of digitised recordings of the voices of daughters of my friends . In a sense, my own position in the world is in that l iminal zone between the familiar territories of 'home', and the misapprehensions of 'away' . Interest in the art-form has spawned a range of other, similarly hybrid offspring - dolls and trinkets from which the bamboo pole that joined the puppets to their puppeteers have been removed . Those seeking 'authentic' souvenirs of other places might spurn the idea of such half-breeds, and dismiss the souvenirs or airport art - or perhaps even the 'expo-art' referred to by Marian Pastor-Races - as being of lesser value as cultural products. Yet for me - and for many others - these products have emerged from the richest sites of contestation . . . the so-called expo-sites of international art events that have been tilled by many artists as zones from which to sew new seeds of insurrection - the seeds of hybrid and grafted crops which can be returned to communities and cultures elsewhere to bear new fruits . In 1 976 Nelson Grayburn described the val ue of such cultural products 'in a world where communication , education and travel allow every group knowledge of and access to almost every other, now that tourism and travel have replaced colonialism as a prime source of intercultural contact'. 1 He reinforces the particular importance of artists in those l iminal zones - those watery stages of contact - where cultures collide. He describes how 'these artists, designated, of course, by the dominant society, are almost like religious leaders, being at the forefront of contact in movements of assimilation and resistance. In such cases, the arts have the power of carrying cross-culturally those messages that might be rejected in any other form .' Yet the bemoaning of the authentic continues and even i n conferences like this Graburn notes how 'European and western society in general, while promoting and rewarding change in its own arts and sciences, bemoans the same in others.' And it extends beyond the societies of the so-called West - to the literati of a range of other cultures who have some investment in perpetuating myths of the authentic in a world that pays h ighly for vestiges of the exotic. Those of us in th is room - those of us who are involved with fostering the seeds of cross­ cultural exchanges - can hard ly bemoan the transformation of trad itions. We are among those 1 52