The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

by the Euro-American avant-garde — and art as tradition-bound, rural and positioned in relation to Western art as historically static, dying or decadent. The persistence of that division should not be underestimated. The 1989 exhibition ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ famously canvassed the global panoply of what might count as art under the rubric of the ‘contemporary’, only to prompt a retreat in many of the biennials and triennials that followed to the more easily assimilable practices of multicultural urban artists already in dialogue with the Western avant-garde. As Hans Belting writes, ‘We prefer artists from other cultures when they already live in the West and have become successful in the Western art scene’ 4 — a statement that arguably could be extended to the ‘Western art scenes’ established by settler cultures in countries like Australia and New Zealand. Against this, the representation of the Pacific in the APT over the last 20 years has done more than perhaps any other exhibition of its kind to question this preference, and bring rural and customary artists into conversation with urban artists about the nature of the contemporary — with surprising resonances between them. For what this division has most obscured is the histories that underlie the contemporaneity of art in the Pacific, which has been about taking up, challenging, and ultimately deconstructing these divisions between the rural and the urban, the traditional and contemporary, the ethnic and the post-ethnic, the pre-modern and the modern or postmodern. Such binaries merely repeat the dualities of an earlier modernism. The artists from the Pacific in APT7 are not opposites. Nor in the context of the Triennial do they simply represent particular ethnicities or nationalities. Rather, they occupy different but related places within a common historical ‘constellation’, defined by the withdrawal of empire and everything that has followed in its wake. 5 Two Pacific intellectuals — Albert Wendt and Epeli Hau’ofa — grasped the significance of that constellation for the Pacific Islands under the rubric of ‘Oceania’. For Wendt, writing in 1976, it was the post-imperial project of decolonisation and nation building, a quest for a ‘new Oceania’. For Hau’ofa, writing in 1998, it was the global circuits of migration, travel, communication, and cultural production and exhibition. 6 In both cases, Pacific communities of every size and location have been drawn into this historical constellation. And in both cases, they saw a crucial role for art and artists. All the artists in APT7 have been marked by this history and reflect its turbulence in their work. The Kwoma and their tribal compatriots have not brought unchanging art traditions to the APT. In some Iatmul villages, male initiation ceremonies were all but abandoned as the result of Christian missionary activity, and then resumed for various reasons, including the interests of foreign travellers, in the 1980s. Artistic production among the Iatmul is inseparable today from the impact of cruise ships that travel up the Middle Sepik. 7 The Asmat, after the Indonesian takeover of Netherlands New Guinea in the 1960s, endured the violent repression of their cultural rituals and the destruction of their men’s houses and painted carvings. Only after the formalisation of Indonesian sovereignty was this ban relaxed and artistic activity revived under the influence of Catholic missionaries and the cultural liberalism of the United Nations. 8 There is no tribal artist in New Guinea or its surrounding archipelagos who has not pondered his or her relationship to either the ‘State’ (Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Britain), Christianity, anthropologists, the tribal art market, the museum world, expatriate kin, urban relatives or the past or future. I make these random points only to indicate the historical depth and cultural complexity that underlies their art in APT7 and to raise the question of what it means for their art to inhabit the space of the modern art gallery. They have been there before — how is it different this time? At the other end of the spectrum, so-called urban artists only raise the same issue. Their ‘Pacific heritage’ is a euphemism for genealogical histories of intimate cross-cultural entanglements, hybrid cultural lives, experiences of migration and resettlement, immersion in the mixed-up cultural banalities of their everyday world — all of which give rise to the particular forms of historical consciousness articulated in their work in APT7: Sopolemalama Filipe Tohi’s formal extensions of Tongan lalava patterns; Greg Semu’s melodramatic staging of imaginary scenes from colonial history; and Graham Fletcher’s meditations on the ambiguous domestication of tribal art by the aesthetic spaces of modernism, exemplified by the serial representation of fashionable 1950s and 60s interiors — the subject here of my own reflection. Tohi’s work is an important bridge in this collective. It is a kind of modernism, demonstrating what is artistically possible for an indigenous visual language when seized by an autonomous individual artist in the contemporary art world and permitted the same historical agency and formal development we take for granted in the history of Western modernism or perspectivalism. Artists like Fletcher and Semu of course mark a break from that kind of stylistic continuity. Yet what is interesting about their ‘postmodern’ aesthetics is the way it registers both an historical break — their distance to one degree or another from ancestral visual traditions — and an attempt to discover and communicate as broadly as possible the historical parameters of that break through the visual languages of contemporary art. GREG SEMU New Zealand/Australia b.1971 Sacrifice for glory (from ‘Sacrifice for Glory’ series) 2009, reprinted 2012 Digital print on PVC canvas, light box, ed. of 10 / 120 x 180cm / © Greg Semu / Image courtesy: The artist and Galerie Metropolis, Paris 74