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

You may say that this is not a fair comparison . You could say that the anonymous lfugao who was required to carve a maquette d id not have, or was not allowed to exercise, agency. In the face of the monumentally acqu isitive, omnipotently transformative un iversal expositions, we may well imagine this unknown artist as passive body. One could argue that, in contrast, the Filipino contemporary visual artist who decides to become an installation artist in order to transact business in art currency, is exercising agency in a clear and wilful way. Yet surely the contrast collapses when we choose to view both situations in terms of where power is concentrated. Obviously, there is some similarity between the late nineteenth century maquette maker and the late twentieth century artistic changeling, in that both face the inevitability, or the desirability, or the profitabil ity, of quick shift; of the q u ick-change act. Furthermore, it is contemptuous not to cred it the nineteenth century maquette maker with a will. And in a related vein, to automatically cred it the contemporary artist with purposive response to power is to miscalculate the scale of that power expressed in international events. And a further qualification : to see that power, unid imensionally, as simply and only malevolent, is perhaps a malevolence. In l ight of this kind of spiral of assertions and qual ifications and assertions and qualifications ad infinitum , I find myself finding a rather stable locus in the phrase 'expo art' - and wonder if we might employ it with a positive charge. It could be one way of exorcising the demon, the spectre of comparisons. For by focusing on sites of impact, on the spaces where rad ical and quick transformations are demanded by the form of contact zone, it may be easier for us to understand d ifference, not in terms of isolated pure essences from our homes - but precisely in the specific and very d ifferent forms created in the interfaces we craft - with wiliness, or with wisdom, or with lack or wealth of choice - between local and global. In this sense, it is what we share that produces the d ifferences between us, which in turn depend on our interrelationships. Culture As a Problem To me, the one set of problems that shows up with great clarity - with th is focus on the changes wrought, or products created for or in the context of the universal expo/international exhibition - are those to do with the word culture. After all, there could not have been such a thing as a universal exposition, and no such thing as an international exhibition today, without the idea that people and th ings come from and somehow represent various societies, various nations, various cultures. The spectacle is about d isplaying all sorts of authenticities. The nineteenth century exposition brought together people and things from various colonies. Those were of course times when the category race was used without troubling anyone. With the emergence of national states, the universal expositions operated with the word nation. As in: various nations were brought together, and this formulation of gathering representatives or representations of national ities has persisted well to the end of this century. Sometime through this century, the word nation proved t o be inefficient - and I believe exh ibition organ isers are still struggling with this inadequacy of category. Yet through these changes in words to describe the different peoples brought together, indeed to make spectacle out of difference - the word culture has been service-able as a malleable and seemi ngly, deceptively unproblematic word to signal that which is d ifferent. But the term culture is not unproblematic. I understand that it has been a particularly important worrisome word within anthropology for a long time - which should make us worry, because anthropologists are supposed to be studying culture. We need not tarry with the footnotes, which are voluminous. Whole libraries have been written about the troublesomeness of the word culture, for which , of course, no one can yet find a suitable replacement. I will quote here a gist provided by a recent study on the word culture, and then move on : '. . . critical multiculturalists (to d istingu ish them from essential izing naifs) shy away from the conclusion that identity is primordial, inherited, even biologically given . Their d iscourse on identity is pitched against biological determinism and every kind of essentialism . . . They insist moreover that both culture and identity are made up, invented , u nstable, discursive fabrications. Every culture is fragmented, internally contested , its boundaries porous. The pursuit of identity is a desperate existential struggle to put together a life-style that can be sustained for at least a brief moment . . . And yet they are committed to the value of 36