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

WITHOUT THE STORY, THE PAI NTI NG IS NOTH I NG Margo Neale Video: Babakiueria Australia, Sydney ABC 1 986 . Written by Geoffrey Atherden. Dir: Don Featherstone A satirical look at white culture in Australia from an Australian Aboriginal viewpoint. Indigenous people, previously the captives of anthropological d iscourses, increasingly interrogate the exo-colonial ist practices or the conventional imperial practices and discourses that define them as 'other' and 'lesser'. They engage in self-li berating practices that release them from old plot lines of imposed narratives . These new and redeployed strategies of accommodation and resistance have enabled ind igenous agency to survive colonialist traditions in a process de Certeau refers to as 'a way of using' the systems and contexts of the dominant order in order to subvert and re-shape them . While many ind igenous people and artists, particularly in this forum , may overtly obey the rules, their obedience is a tactic redeployed tactically in a 'non-compliant compliance' that challenges foundational narratives . In splendid theatres of cultural transaction - such as the spectacle we witnessed last n ight with the Pacific presentation of the 'fighting of the bulls' in Poi tau vaga (The challenge] - indigenous artists often use the potent weapon of parody and humour, creating new storylines which have no end . Because I will be discussing how ind igenous people can author their own stories (without the aid of intermediaries) I've taken the line, 'Without the story, the painting is noth ing', from Michael Nelson Jagamara whose paintings are in the APT. This paper draws on selected works from the Pacific to challenge a view that trad ition is something moving in a linear progression , singular and embedded in a place that's always behind you . Instead I propose that relations to traditions are plural, and that trad ition is simultaneously in the past and the present, and that our connections to traditions are structured in terms of everyday practices we can describe as 'endo-relations' because they are not linear, because they don't radiate from a single point of origin and because they can be conceptual ised as 'networks of lines that interlace', the name of a chapter in ltalo Calvino's novel If On A Winter's Night A Trave/er. It is not d ifficult to conceptual iise the idea of the meshing of trad itions if one visualiises certain pertinent metaphors. [IMAGES] Like a fishing net or throw-net, trad ition draws all with in its reach . It encompasses the transmigration of d iasporic people and the changes with in and betvyeen the communities. Another related conceptual visual isation - another network of interlocutory lines - which is also historically pertinent is a view of trade routes and the migration paths that traverse the oceans of the Pacific in which the trad itions of many cultures collide, coalesce, are exchanged , enriched or subsumed . In Australia a network of pathways criss-cross the continent, tracing the movement of Aboriginal people along trade-routes and songl ines where stories are embedded in features of the landscape travelled . In a map of mythic Australia drawn by David Mowaljarli of the Kimberley region, the square nodes represent stories: the l ines linking each story are lines of communication between tribal groups. Australia according to this late elder and senior artist is therefore not just a 'landmass' but also a 'storymass'. At the intersections where stories carried by d ifferent groups cross over, ceremonies can be performed because each group holds d ifferent parts of the story. Each engagement brings with it and generates new interpretations or innovations within the trad ition . What 'tradition' means in th is model is defined by one's position at any one of these intersections in this mobile 'network of lines that interlace', at any point of time. It is always with you and not beh ind you . It is a story that never ends. 83