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

difference, and cannot do without something l ike the ideas of culture and identity. So James Clifford , for instance, describes himself as "straining for a concept that can preserve culture's differentiating functions while conceiving of collective identity as a hybrid, often d iscontinuous inventive process ." '2 It is enough, on this occasion , to enumerate several inflections with which the word culture has been used - vis a vis the un iversal exposition/ international exh ibition. There are three of many other uses of the term culture that I th ink merit a brief revisiting this morn ing. First, the idea that culture is some essence from some homeland . We already know this to be a dangerous idea that has, in fact, been deployed in vile racist ways . But while we know so - that we can no longer conceive of culture as racially or geographically determined or otherwise determined by some pure force - I bel ieve that the form itself of the un iversal exposition/international exhibition perpetrates and depends on and assumes that the people gathered, represent difference essentially forged in homelands - rather than d ifference defined through interrelationships during contact with others. It is in this sense of the word culture - an unreconstructed n ineteenth century inflection - that the n ineteenth century form of the universal exposition/international exhibition maintains itself intact to the end of the twentieth century. Second is the inflection of culture towards a profound localness - which gains definition in contradistinction to universalizing agents . This seems to me to be a continuing replay, in our times, of a particularly European contest, which again transpired in the n ineteenth century. For the sake of brevity, I'll take recourse in a quotation from a recent study on Culture by anthropologist Adam Kuper: 'The notion of kultur developed in tension with the concept of a universal civilization that was associated with France. What the French understood to be a transnational civil ization was regarded in Germany as a source of danger to distinctive local cultures.' That the words in this formulation of a nineteenth century contest should be so familiar to us now - local versus global - and that this contest should resonate so strongly in international exhibitions as the formulation of our problems: this is, again , the n ineteenth century upon us. And this is, again, the n ineteenth century upon us, sustained by the form of the universal exposition/international exhibition . Third is the inflection of culture as invention, surely a notion that reached high defin ition in the twentieth century. That we are all of us fabricating, constructing, social definitions - identities - through conflict, change and the shaping of memory - is an idea which has gained currency in recent decades and has certainly served to release us from the g rip of culture as originary essence. Yet, perhaps we ought to be wary, and be watchful that that potential of release from essentialisms is not dissipated by the way un iversal expositions/international exhibitions often convey culture as invention in a l inear, progress- or avante-garde-driven, evolutionary rhetoric. Which sucks us back to the nineteenth century, yet again : culture as invention as the celebration of a future, of progress. Which brings us to the matter of the future. Or, more accurately, to the term future. Beyond the Future We know that the great nineteenth century universal expositions were a rchitecturally, logistically, conceptually designed to revel in this word Future, to hark, and mark the arrival of this future. And indeed the future was called forth, conjured : the architecture of the crystal palace in the 1 850s London exposition , an architectural form marking the engineering wonder of connecting steel beams and delicate g lass - an architectural form that, not surprisingly, presaged the department store: the space and the l ife l ived in these spaces . Think only of the 1 900 Paris Exposition and the materialisation of the Grand Palais, the Trocadero and the Eiffel Tower. Think, as well , of the phantasmagoria of electric l ight and sculptures of water at Las Cascadas in Montj u ic in Barcelona, created Barcelona Exposition . The crystal palace, again, in El Parque de Buen Retiro in Madrid. Why I chose to speak of the n ineteenth century in a conference about the future is to do with an ache. I have an ach ing suspicion - a b it l ike a recurrent toothache - that the word culture, as deployed in the form of universal expositions/international exh ibitions, locks us in the 37