Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

110 SESSION II
expansionism. And while they are definitely not “subaltern”
because they have access—no matter how limited—to
the economic and cultural capital made possible
by a relatively more affluent Japan, they also work in the
margins of the established global and local art world.
Idemitsu Mako, for example, is widely acknowledged
in Japan as a pioneer of Japanese experimental film and
video art. Her filmography spans more than 30 years
and starts in the late 60s and early 70s in America, where
she came in contact with the pioneering American artist
Judy Chicago’s Woman House and consciousnessraising
events, and occurring almost at the same time
when the more mediagenic Nam June Paik and his
Fluxus cohorts were starting their experiments. Yet,
except for an essay on Japanese electronic explorations
by Barbara London in Art in America (1992, 125-126),
and inclusions in such exhibitions as “Private Visions,
Japanese Video Art in the 1980s”, (Nakamura, 1990)
there is hardly any mention of female pioneers like
Idemitsu in more general, and dominant global, US
and Euro-centric histories.
According to Marita Sturken (1990), one reason for
this selective “metanarrative” of video history is the
“emerging field’s need for a central hero” (Paik) and a
“utopian moment” and vision that will battle, not only
the increasing commercialization of the art world
during the 60s and the 70s, but also the mediatization
of everyday life, involving among others, the repackaging of
icons into palatable sound bites through television and
television commercials. While Paik and other more renown
60s cultural symbols were challenging the television
and media behemoths, women artists like Idemitsu
were more preoccupied with seemingly “lesser” domestic
concerns revolving around her mundane daily life as
mother and homemaker. Idemitsu’s body of work, in
other words, are very “localized”, and small scale—what
Foucault would call “subjugated knowledge” - and does
not fit into the romantic metanarrative of avant-garde
artists and “great men” fighting the evil giants—television,
media and mass culture. Thus, we can also see that
video history and the development of video as a medium
embodies the many binaries endemic to Western
thought, particularly, the binary between private—the
female domain of the mundane, the small scale and the
domestic—and public spheres—the male domain of
momentous and large-scale events of History.
As “The Other That is Not Other Enough”, artists like
Idemitsu are the Other of patriarchal Japanese and
Euramerican art world system. As “Asians”, they are the
Other of a “West” that never formally colonized them,
but from whose imperializing and globalizing pull, they
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
are not entirely free. At the same time, these women are
not Other enough: Japan was a colonial power, although
today an economically embattled one. (Kelsky, 2001)
They have access to the economic, technological and
cultural advantages that allow them to practice their art
in relative comfort and convenience, especially when
compared to their more economically deprived
counterparts in Southeast Asia.
However, even the Japanese woman’s Other is similarly
not Other enough. Although there are particularities
among women artists I cannot discuss in detail here,
it is safe to say that as academics, as art historians, as artists,
and as public intellectuals, I and the women artists
I will talk about are, on one hand generally privileged,
elite, and active participants in dominant structures;
we are not entirely separate, and are even dependent
on the hegemonic discourses that exclude and erase the
subaltern as subject. On the other hand, we are also marginalized
in our efforts to participate in those discourses—
as women, as feminists and as workers in a field—the
visual arts—generally perceived to be esoteric and thus
irrelevant to the economically deprived majority of the
third world.
From this position of otherness-that-is-not-other
enough, how then can the woman artist speak? There
are many productive ways that women have responded
to this question, but for reasons of space and focus, I
can only cite a few of the many women artists I have
encountered during my year-long fellowship
to Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Japan. Taking
the cue from the British art historian Griselda Pollock’s
(2005) 2 explorations into the visual poetics of gendered
shame and trauma—an emerging and still inadequately
theorized feminist field of investigation—I will discuss
how some women artists give shape to the notion of art
as transport-station of trauma, memory and healing and
of the artist as site of transmission. These two concepts
demonstrate how women artists interrupt the deadly
deeds and tales of patriarchal cultures, now themselves
mutating and multiplying through global circulation.
THE ARTIST AS A PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL:
ENANLIMANG SEKARANG (SIXTY-FIVE NOW)
Let me start by citing the Malaysian artist Nadia Bamadhaj,
an API Fellow herself, who went to Indonesia in 2002-
2003 to do an art and research project on historical
memory. On September 30, 2002, the day she first set
foot on Yogyakarta to fulfill her fellowship, she noticed
the announcement instructing civil servants to fly the
Indonesian flag in half-mast. This was in memory of the
generals killed in the “aborted coup” of the same day