We are not the worldÂ
WITH its smaller number of participating artists and scaled down curatorial infrastructure, this year's Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) makes a significant departure from the three that preceded it. How might we characterise the altered framing of this year's Triennial? How does this reframing affect the kind of experience that the Triennial offers?
I would suggest that what most noticeably recedes from view in the case of the APT 2002 is the objective of representing the state of contemporary art in the Asia-Pacific region. It is evident that many of the debates about - and criticisms of – curatorial decisions, structures and strategies informing past APTs have tended to imply the supposition that the Triennials' goal was to offer the best possible representation (or 'picture') of the art of this region - and to provide a powerful image of Australia's place in it. (Yet in many senses, perhaps, what these exhibitions have most vividly represented is not Australia's place in the region but rather an Australian desire for such a place.) We might recall Martin Heidegger's characterisation of modernity as the 'age [or 'time'] of the world-picture (Weltbildes)' and his alignment of pictoriality in this context with the modem desire to 'conquer the world as image' and, furthermore, with all forms of systematic representation designed to secure the centrality of a mastering subject - a subject, in other words, which attempts to assert itself through its capacity to grasp the heterogeneity of things in and as (objective, coherent, pictorial) representation.1
To be sure, the image or picture that was presented in previous Triennials accented cultural difference and diversity. It often set out to highlight ‘hybrid' encounters between specific cultural... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline