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

SPEAKER: M . A. Greenste i n In an era when secular empiricism has caught up with the insights of Buddh ist phenomenology, when the concept of the 'real' is quickly rethought in terms of the virtual, the expression, 'let's be real istic' seems to be losing its semantic grip on establish ing a common perception of the world. So I ask that you forgive me today as I invoke the archaic to begin my brief foray into futuristic prediction , pointing for a moment to the weirdly lopsided relationship between the enthusiastic, albeit, admittedly bourgeois projection of a brill iant AsiaPacific art tomorrowland and the increasingly bald facts of a 'Fast World' economy that will create a gargantuan social divide imagined only by the best science fiction writers of our day. That is to say, I beg in my soothsaying session with the acknowledgement that what we call 'art' in so-called First and Third World economies, will no doubt be orchestrated to a greater or lesser extent by economic power relations of e-commerce, the likes of wh ich have brought us together in Brisbane for the weekend and wh ich can be accessed by means of the soon to be col lectable jelly bean Macs in the Queensland Art Gal lery. Along those lines of thinking, I am here today to say that from a passport critic's and researcher's perspective wh ich has taken me in the last four years from Los Angeles to large and small cities in India, Japan, Australia and now Taiwan for the next ten months, I see a new polymorphously diverse generation of urbane, academically trained artists being prepared to enter into a world that extends to, but will not limited by, the exh ibition model of visual production. The profile goes something like this: 1 . Turns to Manga, channel V, and assorted Bollywood , Hollywood and Hong Kong action videos for aesthetic, moral, romantic and sexual instructions to l iving in a future mega universe of robotic and cyborg intelligences, 2. Watches Xena, Sailor Moon , or video re-runs of l rezumi, Fearless Nadia and The Tai Chi Master for spiritual insight into the power of psycho-somatic, social and political transformation, 3. Eats takeaway samosas, Big Macs and bean burritos to the sounds of technobeat, bhangra and punk mariachi, 4. Rethinks the writings of Jean Baudrillard and Homi Bhabha from the standpoint of interplanetary space travel . 5 . Surfs the World Wide Web for up to date information because: a) it makes up for the poor l ibrary holdings at their alma mater university, b) provides an evermore kaleidoscopic window on the power of gazing that is capable of encompassing the perspectival insights of Ital ian Renaissance painting, the dazzl ing styl ism of Ukiyo-e woodcuts, the hallucinogenic floating divides of Rajput narrative, c) offers a fantastically inexpensive theraputic means of self-healing and self­ reflective, post-migraine perceptual analysis with the endless Internet array of confessional chat rooms and downloadable music and video samplers; and d} it allows a new generation the opportunity to exercise immed iate gratification of desire by clicking on amazon .com . If the current profile of art navigators is any indication , I 'll hedge my clairvoyant bet that future generations, and here I am speaking precisely about the privileged numbers who will have access to biotech prowess, will be cyber hip, street smart, cosmopolitan, gender-bending , role playing visualisers for whom fashion capitalism, border cultural pol itics, and the corporeal transformation art practices of Orlan and Stelarc wil l be grounds for imagining sometimes ironic, other times sincere utopian analyses of individual and social unit existence. These eventual survivors of late twentieth century reality programs like AIDS, homophobia , right­ wing religious wars, and holier-than-thou Modern isms, will assume the visual, conceptual, and 1 59