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

SESSION 6 : GLOBAL/LOCAL SPEAKER: Vishakha N . Desai 'The willfully isolated Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan has finally let TV inside its borders. Can its ancient Buddhist trad itions survive the tube?' read one recent head l ine in the Sunday Magazine section of The New York Times. ' Fist raised , moustache bristl ing, Jose Bove, a Parisian-turned sheep-farmer declared to an appreciative aud ience as he handed himself in to French police, "My struggle remains the same . . . it is the battle against global isation and for the fight of the people to feed themselves as they choose." Ransacking and demolishing a McDonald's restaurant nearing completion in the southwestern French town of Millau [he] carried out his battle.' Another account in New York and London Times. In both of these descriptions, the implied contrast between global forces and local patterns is at the heart of the story. Also implied is the sense that in the face of the onslaught of the global forces, the local traditions are bound to lose and/or become corrupted. I n geo-political and economic terms, the discussion around the terms 'global' and 'local' has normally centered on binary definition of the terms. They have also become so over-used in the last decade that it is difficult to talk about them with a degree of specificity and complexity without the cliched expressions of multinational economies, McDonaldisation and Disneyfication of the globe, or the collapsed distances in the age of the Internet. I ndeed , when I was first asked to chair th is session entitled 'Global/Local', I wondered whether there was anything new to say about the subject. As I began to think about not just the terms themselves, but their general usage, I thought it might be useful to make a few observations that may be helpful to our deliberations. 1 . While the story of the TV age coming to Bhutan makes it into the international news of the western world , the stories about Bombay rap, wh ich are based both on popular western forms and on Bollywood films, hardly ever get covered . In other words, the contrasting expressions of global and local are newsworthy, but the forms that may arise out of the multi-layered combinations of local and international trends don't make the cut that easily. In the context of APT3 we may ask ourselves: How do we receive the work in the context of the global/local trajectory, and what kind of hierarchy do we apply to the work and to the trajectory itself? 2 . The term 'globalisation' or even the term 'local' i s used quite loosely, often conflating a number of different elements. Thus, sometimes, globalisation really implies the threat of American popular culture, as in the case of the McDonalds' story in France. At other times, it is used to suggest the new trends - the TV culture , the Internet world, and interconnected financial worlds - which threaten to collapse time, distances, and cultural differences . As Thomas L . Friedman mentions in his recent book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, the globalisation system is a dynamic ongoing process, involving inexorable integration of markets, nation-states, and technologies to a degree never witnessed before. It is done in a way that enables individuals, nation-states, and corporations to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before and in a way that is also producing a backlash from those brutal ised or left behind th is new The term 'local', on the other hand, is sometimes equated with those forces that are left behind as described by Friedman. It is often seen as something homegrown , 88 powerful -________J;b�y'..___ S ' system .