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

THE 'REAL' CH I NA - HAS MODERNISM'S 'UNIVERSAL' BECOME THE CONTEMPORARY 'GLOBAL'? QUESTIONS FOR ARTHUR DANTO. Lee Weng Choy With my Andy Warhol esque fifteen minutes , I can 't hope to do more than explain my title, so that is what I will try to do. For the third APT, I am the Co-curator for Singapore, which is where I l ive. But I am a Malaysian citizen . I grew up in the Philippines, was educated in the US . I h ave never been to China. That's it for the biographical admissions. I toss these facts out, without ethno-apology. There's one more th ing I should admit: I don't know much about China, its h istory, its culture, its contemporary art. So how is it that I dare - how is it possible - for me to talk about the 'real' China? But what is it that makes a discourse about 'China' an expert discourse? How is expertise predicated on demarcating 'inside' and 'outside'? And how can non-expert questions be relevant? It may seem odd to begin a presentation at such a major conference with professions of ignorance, but if my questions are relevant, then what I don't know about China shouldn't matter to my argument. My concerns here are with questions of the philosophy of art. At the second APT, T. K. Sabapathy tal ked about the challenges of writing and thinking a regional art h istory. I too am concerned about how one might write and think about regional art h istory, but my questions come from a philosophical rather than historical perspective. There is of cou rse a difference. To put it simply: h istory cannot ignore the facts. But isn't philosophy a form of knowledge that is in some sense predicated on a certain ignorance? For a large part of what is philosoph ically valid is val id precisely because it is val id before the facts - it is a priori. The reference to Arthur Danto in my title is not just because he is a ph ilosopher who writes both philosophy and art criticism . It's not j ust because, as a philosopher, he is not ignorant about art - as he says, h is 'writing is so stained' by the h istory of twentieth century art. Though he too, I imagine, would not claim any expertise about China . I refer to Danto because he has become noted for proclaiming the 'End of Art'. 'The mythic scenario of Dante's - sorry Danto's - epiphany [Here I'm q uoting from Saul Ostrow] - in which he comes to realise that art has come to its end - is set in 1 964, against the backdrop of Andy Warhol's exhibition at the Stable Gal lery. Danto mistakes Warhol's Brilla boxes (Brilla, in case some of you don't know, is a brand of kitchen cleaning sponges) for the real thing.' Danto asserts, 'Pop and Minimalism were in effect philosoph ical exercises, for each was groping toward something that had finally to be recogn ised by ph ilosophy itself: whatever was to distinguish art from reality was not going to be someth ing evident to the eye.' For Danto, Pop and Minimalism are significant not just because - l ike all modern art - they confront the art movements that just precede them - but because they confront the entire self­ revolutionising h istory of modern art. Pop and Minimalism, on the one hand , again like all modern art, are located h istorically. There's no denying that. Yet on the oth er hand - or so Danto argues - Pop and M inimalism 'mark a mutation in the historical nature of art itself. Without trying to summarise the h istory of western modern art in 60 seconds, as I understand him, Danto privileges Pop and Min imalism because they finalise the break between Art and Image. How one decides on what is a rt is no longer dependent on what it looks like. And this break between Art and Image radically opens up the field of Art. As Danto sees it, this opening is so radical, it marks the 'End of Art', that is, the end of a h istory of Art. Art today - contemporary art, what Danto cal ls 'post-h istorical a rt' - is the art of radical pluralism . 58