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

surface of its interiors. The sight of the edifice of home in ru ins also rem inds us of how Roderico Daroy lets movie billboards shed their skin , layer by layer, ineluctably betraying a pal impsest of past suspended d isbeliefs. It is also worth noting that the sentiment of the Phil ippines being a 'nation' is not shared by all Filipinos as foregrounded by the Islamic contention in the South . In art, this contemporary Islamic aesthetic may come in the form of intricately d rawn images of M indanao folklife from Saudi Ahmad who tests the limits of both Islamic proscription of figuration and Euro-American Modernism's contempt for 'pictures'. Ahmad's visual vocabulary and h is almost manic attention to detail of techn ical-pen precision are a constant sou rce of amazement and inspiration . The 'nation' is likewise fractured by the lesbian critique of patriarchy and Catholic nationality by way of Irma Lacorte's gallery of portraits of lesbians, whose faces do not only announce their emergence, but also retroactively claim the lives they have lived as sexual subjects. Finally, modernity is m iscarried in the conception of the city by Elmer Borlongan, Emmanuel Garibay, Jeho Bitancor, Alfredo Esquillo, and Neil Manalo who contravene triumphalist discourse of urban amelioration by confronting audiences with scenes of metropolitan excess and want, of the incompletion and incommensurability of modern civilisation . These artists, however, do not exploit th is sordid condition , but like bricoleurs scrounge for gestures and habits of life strategies amid formidable odds . Such rechartering of the city coheres with Lordy Rodriguez's fabricated maps of the Un ited States which give free rein to memory and its errance in marking place in the practice of d islocation and resettlement, homesickness and nation-state territorial ity. The notion of 'surviving tradition' gains rondure in the possibil ity of what Hal Foster, following Freud , calls 'deferred action' or 'uncanny return', or Derrida's proposition of the 'impossible' which is yet to take place, or Raymond Williams' prefiguration of a 'modern future'. As Pierre Macherey puts it: 'In fact, one does not inherit from the past of the past, and it must even be said that, from that which is dead once and for all and cannot return, there can be no inheritance. Rather, one inherits from that wh ich, in the past, remains yet to come, by taking part in a present wh ich is not only present in the fleeting sense of actuality, but which undertakes to re-establish a dynamic connection between past and future.' (Macherey 1 999) Movement The term movement can mean mobility or transit from place to place, but it can also signify social struggle rooted in specific material conditions as in a mass movement for revolution . Nunelucio Alvarado's centennial works succeed in denationalising struggle and wresting it from state-managed commemorations as they localise the trad ition of revolution and embed it in a social locus and h istory, which in this case is Negros, the sugar p rovince in the Visayas that has raised communities of plantation workers labouring under onerous conditions. Movement can also exemplify travel and migrancy as cleverly rendered by the works of Jose Tence Ruiz wh ich subject the Philippine d iaspora to the laws of customs and diminishing returns in projects as d iverse as boxes and su itcases. Gerardo Tan's installation at the Philippine Pavil ion of the First International Melbourne B iennial deftly d i rects the traffic of d iasporic signals and goods as l ived codes organised by the grammar of objects possessed , discarded, and exchanged across distances and domesticities. Moreover, movement is embodied by artists themselves who leave home and dwell in other spaces like Manuel Ocampo who is now based in the United States and extens ively exhib its there and elsewhere, but remains vigilant of h is culture's sign systems and their transformations, articulating them in defaced altars which worship money and modernity and through a Catholic Reformation but at the same time contra-clerical imaginary which scatolog ically inverts the western ideal of, in his words, 'simultaneous action of negation and construction . . . always capsizing into closure', indeed the eschatology of 'art'. (Ocampo 1 999, 62) Surely, the present cond itions and contexts of Philippine contempora ry art can only be addressed by a kind of transd isciplinal and enabling contemporary practice, theory, criticism , and curatorship that are keenly attentive to the subtle shifts and tenacious tendencies of local­ global technologies. Toward this end, we may explore areas of concern : 1 . Contemporary ethnography of local practice and popular culture. For instance, studies of Japan's cultural exports like the karaoke and television 68