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

CONSIDER POST CULTURE Marian Pastor Roces Let me describe for you an object, made in the late nineteenth century, that I saw recently in an exhibit at a museum of ethnography in Europe. It consists of several tiny figures of men carved out of a black-brown wood , each no more than three inches high, made to stand on several points of a small, dark, wood tablet. The figures wear the tiniest of loincloths, and together they were carved to represent a scene from a ritual. Or at least, there seems to be a ritual because there is one more tiny figure ensconced in a tiny coffin in the middle of the other carved men. The viewer is cued , in any case, by this obvert suggestion of a ritual being described by, or with , this object - to thus read this object as 'ethnographic'. Also, for reasons that are well worth elaborating on in another paper, one is led to th ink that this object was carved accord ing to carving conventions specific to some tribal society in some obscure part of the earth - and is thus cued even if one does not know the specific origin of this piece. The viewer who goes through the exh ibition quickly - goes away thinking this object to be an antique example of traditional carving . The museum did tell viewers that this object was acquired during one of those fabulous universal expositions in the 1 880s. The museum did tell viewers that this object comes from the interior mountain regions of Northern Philippines, carved by a people known through colon ial records, travel writing and missionary accounts, as the lfugao. Materials and people from the Philippines, and from all other European colonies, were of course staple and very popular exhibits in this and other universal expositions at the end of the nineteenth century. Today, those who know something of the carving conventions of the lfugao people will know that lfugaos - erstwhile head-hunters and builders of incredible rice terraces - indeed carved the object in question . Most will leave the matter at that, bringing with them some strange memory of a tribal people who created scale models of their rituals. I was transfixed and irritated and entranced by this object - mainly because it played tricks with how it might be apprehended . Firstly, I am provoked to say that th is object, though carved in the lfugao traditional way more than a hundred years ago, cannot possibly be lfugao. But as soon as I say that, I need to qualify hastily: the object cannot be lfugao in any simple, straightforward way. The object is, in fact, a maquette, a scale model. So far as I know, lfugaos did not and do not have a trad ition of carving maquettes . The exhibition catalogue names this thing as an ensenificacion. This is quite precise. A more extended description wou ld be: a three dimensional representation of a ritual, executed by lfugaos in the tradition , yes, of lfugao carving, or a slightly modulated instance of lfugao carving, but also, sculpture executed in the tradition of European scale modelling, or a slightly modulated instance of European scale modell ing . It may be supposed that such a thing could only have occurred, or come into being, in the context of a u niversal exposition; for an international exh ibition . I have certainly come around to thinking that while it matters that this object comes from lfugao, the object doesn't figure unless understood clearly as having been made for this international event. A century ago, therefore, there was some kind of curator, or curatorial entity, who, preparing for a universal exposition, caused the carving of this thing , via some means available at that time for commissioning a product, a thing, an authentic a rtefact for exhibition . This thing thus produced is, of course, an artefact made by lfugaos. Perhaps we can more accurately say that this thing is an artefact of a moment of lfugao cultural history - wh ile its status as an artefact of lfugao culture should be regarded as a matter for rich debate. Such a debate will obviously lead us to seek a renewed 'take' on the history of the word culture. Such d iscussion will, furthermore, be assisted by acknowledging this thing as, first and foremost, an artefact of the universal exposition that occasioned its making . I chose not to show a slide of this object because there are many other objects l ike this in museums in Europe and the Americas, and indeed everywhere else. It is important not to single out this one item , even as I fix on this one example as a starting point, because I wish to say, precisely, that such objects - objects made specifically for international exh ibitions - are not at all rare. And whenever we espy one, we know that each represents, not single, 34