The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

GRAHAM FLETCHER New Zealand b.1969 Untitled (from ‘Lounge Room Tribalism’ series) (detail) 2010 Oil on canvas / 150 x 120cm / Purchased 2010 with funds from the Estate of Lawrence F King in memory of the late Mr and Mrs SW King through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery TRANSCULTURAL SPACE AND ART HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS PETER BRUNT What does it mean for the Kwoma people that artists from their tribe have been invited to recreate a sample of their spirit house paintings for APT7? Perhaps that is a question that only the Kwoma can answer, except the exhibition puts those paintings in dialogue with thousands of APT visitors, and with the event itself as an institution in a global art world with a history and a context. Neither perspective on its own can adequately explain the significance of the paintings — for that lies in the transcultural space opened up between them. That space has never been easy to negotiate. In 2006, for example, the anthropologist Ross Bowden raised the ethnological point that we make a cultural error when we apply supposedly universal concepts of ‘art’ and ‘artist’ as they have developed in the West since the Renaissance, to the spirit house paintings and carvings of the Kwoma. For them, he argues, the artist (until recently) was not regarded as a special individual endowed with unique powers of creativity but as a kind of skilled technician. Their term for artist — woyi siipiikwina neeki tawa yikapwa — translates literally as ‘adze-and-brush-holding boys’ or, more poetically, as ‘sons of the adze and brush’. 1 Their carvings and paintings are not valued for their originality, nor are they preserved by the tribe for posterity in a manner equivalent to the preservation of objects in national museums. 2 In most cases, when they have worn out or served their usefulness, they are discarded (or sold to tribal art dealers), and replaced if necessary with replicas. In fact, their carvings and paintings are nothing but replicas after replicas. They are not admired as art as we in the art world (or ‘art cult’, as Alfred Gell put it 3 ) admire art, but serve as vehicles for manifesting tribal spirits in a context that is essentially religious. But what does it mean for some of these ‘sons of the adze and brush’ to choose to collaborate with QAGOMA to make spirit paintings for APT7? The point of Bowden’s account is not to fix or essentialise the art of the Kwoma and the West as two incommensurable schemes, but to question how they are to converse with each other in museum or art gallery spaces. The history of modern art in the West has been nothing if not a radical interrogation of its own meanings in which there are more than enough points of correspondence with the art of the Kwoma — around issues of originality, replication, commodification, the status of ‘the artist’, the yearning for transcendence and the role of art museums — for a robust and interesting dialogue. Art today is not a fixed and predetermined Western concept, but is open for reflection and renegotiation in the convergence of many ‘art histories’. However, here is where there is a striking disparity in the discourses that might inform the transcultural space of contemporary exhibitions. On the one hand, we members of the ‘art cult’ know next to nothing about the art history of the Kwoma — or that of the Asmat, the Iatmul, the Abelam or any of the other tribes from Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian province of Papua, who are making a splash at APT7. It is not that they don’t have one; the art they have made for the exhibition bears complex histories in which it has had to negotiate its survival and transformation in relation to the impacts of missionaries, colonial administrators, collectors, national bureaucracies, the tribal art market and more. Those histories can be framed as projects of colonial resistance, cultural survival, empire and decolonisation, modernism and nationhood, religion and secularisation, the global diaspora of material culture and cultural memory, tribalism and the global art world — the list goes on. But those are stories barely told or understood in the consciousness of the contemporary art world. On the other hand, we know too much about the art history of the West. Its copious narratives, accumulated over centuries or more, fill whole libraries, dominate university departments, determine the collection and display of art in museums and underpin to this day the historical consciousness of contemporary art making, curating, exhibiting and writing. Furthermore, not only does this history dominate the conversation with its own story, it obscures the dialogical possibilities of other stories — say that of the art of Papuan modernity or other Pacific peoples — not by ignoring them, but through the place it assigns them in its story. Since the exhibition ‘Arts of the South Seas’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946 (to take decolonisation and the beginning of the end of the imperial system as an historical marker), the indigenous arts of the Pacific have entered modernist discourse under a deeply entrenched ideological division between art as self-reflexive, historically progressive and metropolitan — dominated, as we know, 72