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

Now, how are 'we ' to engage with this thesis? This 'we' represents a certain fact - it refers to a large number of persons from different places gathered together for the third APT, in this 'modernist bunker', as a Queensland Art Gallery curator put it. How for instance, does 'China' figure in Danto's analysis? Is China, once again , figured mainly as an 'Other' of western history? In recent imaginings, China appears to be the Other - imagined as the biggest potential market for global capitalism . The 'Real' of my title, therefore, is not the 'Real' as in 'the real thing' - that common phrase in everyday speech - but the 'Real' of psychoanalysis - which could be defined , after Jacques Lacan, as the philosophy of desire . The 'Real' is the object of desire which resists symbolisation , resists being seen for what it is: the object of desire; the big Other. The late Alice Yang argued that Danto , in his writing about contemporary Ch inese art, is part of a discourse of western Modern ism that has 'continually framed Chinese art in relation to its own crisis of representation . This tendency has, in turn , engendered another problem - the problem of representing Chinese art itself in western criticism . How do we re-frame this representation in ways that do not position Chinese art merely as the antithesis or as the analogue of western art?' 1 But I hesitate to echo Yang's critique of Danto - to read Danto as 'othering' the outside of western Modernism and western art history. Neither, however, am I prepared to defend him . As I said i n my title, I want t o pose some questions. I hesitate to situate Oanto's analysis in a log ic of the 'inside' and 'outside' of western history because I wish to entertain seriously the claim he makes for philosophy to be able to speak outside of any history. H is claim is that the philosophy of art is concerned with not j ust the crisis of representation in western art h istory, but that anymodern art is concerned with the crisis of representation . I hesitate to criticise Danto as reproducing western Modernism's un iversal ist claims in his discourse about contemporary art. To insist that Danto's analysis in principle always already 'others' China - rather than to argue that it is in his interpretive practice as a critic that he 'others' China - would be, in turn , to 'other' Danto's own position ; it wou ld be to insist that his kind of philosophical analysis can never enter into Chinese history - even a future history. Danto talks about Hegel's 'pale of history' . Western art h istory is not the sum of all its arts. There are possible art objects and events that fall outside the pale of art history. Art h istory is a d iscipline that defines what an object or event should be, in order to be art. But if, in Danto's post-historical era, art no longer has to be or do anything in particular to be art - except be read by whatever narrative at hand that reads the 'th ing' or 'event' in question as art - then there is no outside to contemporary art history any more. The End of Art was never a question of art no longer existing or continuing. Danto's contemporary art is prol ific, rad ically pl ural and situated in the midst of late capitalism and global isation . In that sense, Danto's post-historical art already has a h istory - there is a record of what happens. But as far as the ph ilosophy of art is concerned , the category 'western' does not demarcate a boundary any more, and as I read Danto, h is is an argument for dropping the 'western' from the field 'contemporary western art history'. Can we do the same for the field of contemporary art gathered at the APT? Or do we still need categories like 'Asia-Pacific', 'China', 'Singapore'? This is not to say that the art exh ibited at the APT should not be located . Or that there are no differences between the art from China and Australia. But it is a question of how one location 59