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As I sat on the bus after viewing Metro Arts' exhibition, Tolerance, I read a United Nations High Commission on Refugees promotion which told me to smile at a refugee today! It was one of those laugh or cry situations as I realised that in this United Nations Year of Tolerance, inscriptions of otherness become all the more entrenched through vapid enunciations of Western liberalism. I had a momentary flashback to the 1980s when a group of rock stars were singing 'we are the world .. . '. The incongruity of co-existing peacefully in the midst of the military-mediaindustrial complex becomes increasingly glaring.
The concept of tolerance evokes notions of boundaries and difference by which that separation of self and other stand irreconciled. The questions 'for whom? for what' remain largely unexplored in the broader political and cultural realm, silenced by flatulent exhortations of multiculturalism and pluralism. However, the Tolerance exhibition sought to provide a forum in which those questions could, at least, be addressed from the personal perspective of nine Queensland artists.
In the course of the project, Metro Arts' Exhibitions Officer, Julia Buss organised a series of meetings in which the artists could discuss their ideas about the issue which they sought to address. As is evidenced by the work the artists discussed their apprehensions about the concept of tolerance; about its lack of coherence for a society struggling with the implications of feminism, postmodernism and pos colonialism, of diversity and difference. The multifarious connotations of the word drove the artists to amend their brief to 'look beyond tolerance'; to recognise it, not as a benign gesture, but as an exercise of political power against which the will