‘Cultural identity’ is a term so frequently used and misused, that it is in the same basket of generalities as ‘romantic’ and ‘real’. It began its course in popular parlance in the 1970s and has retained its currency with the rise of globalisation. One of the slyer paradoxes of our contemporary ‘global’ culture is to heap praise on cultural identity, while at the same time to undermine it. In international Biennales, why is one artist chosen over another? Because of cultural flavour, a cultural look; an artist looks the part. Meanwhile every country has the same shop in the airports, every city has a McDonalds and someone anywhere can be seen wearing Nikes and Levis. But this is an unwelcome fact that the curatorial tourism in art fairs and festivals would rather forget, since it erodes the most important selling factor: novelty. It is in a country’s best interests to have a distinctive culture to sell, lest it pale into the haze of global uniformity. Pat Hoffie’s latest series of works, You gotta love it, is a confrontation with the way in which culture is both consumed and manufactured. Her object is Australia’s recreational ‘backyard’ of Bali, which, together with its neighbours Vanuatu and Fiji, is among the best examples of the self-consciously reframed other.
Reframed othering, if it can be called that, occurs when a culture manipulates itself into a shape congenial to its consumption by another power. One of the most dramatic instances of this, in fact, occurred in 1868 in Japan when the new Emperor Meiji opened the formerly closed doors to the rest of the world. But the manner in which this was done was carefully