Rituals of rapprochement
The day after the Asia-Pacific Triennial conference, I walked through the exhibition whose opening crowds had dispersed to reveal the holiday visitors within. The buoying atmosphere of art 'legitimised by a discourse' as Derrida put it in 1986, was replaced by a melancholy atmosphere in which a largely visual experience drifted away from its vicarious sense of community. The experience to this point had in fact been aural rather than visual. And as well as listening, it had involved talking, not to mention eating and drinking. Now the silence was not broken by the Queensland Art Gallery's public programmed regional maps, extended labels and didactic panels.
Now I walked around as a tourist-as someone not briefed beyond the didactic panels and regional maps that contextualised the art works. I realised, looking at the art from China, that I knew nothing about its reception in China. I did not know what economy supported it, nor what discourse 'legitimised' it within that economy. I had no idea how value was constructed by, or for, the work; nor how meaning was constructed in it. I did not know whether it represented a modernist rupture from history, or a postmodern return to history. I had no idea what kind of agency the 'Bureau of Culture' referred to in the case of the artist Li Lei, might be. I realised how entirely inadequate-how rudimentary-was my visual experience of this art. After this, I went as a tourist to the Beyond the Java Seas show of Indonesian artefacts in the Museum behind the Queensland Art Gallery. Then I walked back to town. I was confused because, while the ethnographic museum show offered me a context in... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline