Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

in the gentrified district of Thong Lor. It was at the top
floor of a mid-rise commercial complex housing a book
and music store, a furniture outlet, and a Starbucks. Its
first exhibit involved Sakarin Khrue-on, an artist keenly
attentive to Thai spirituality and its contemporary condition.
And before heading for Manila, in Jakarta, ruangrupa’s
OK Video opened, a large international exhibition of
video art at the National Gallery with the theme of
piracy; it was funded by the subsidies of an ensemble
of agencies, foremost of which is Hivos. The latter justifies
its support for ruangrupa, which has evolved into a
non-governmental organization, under its culture and
development rubric. At a time when the United Nations
Development Program dispenses monies to MTV for
AIDS awareness among the youth, this is hardly
surprising and something that adumbrates a different
relationship between art and culture and the present
structure of globalization. Interestingly, this kind of
bu s t l e i s n o t v e r y e v i d e n t i n T h a i l a n d ,
where infrastructure is relatively secure and the
relays of resources are more streamlined. Nevertheless,
it can be said that these so-called alternative modalities
of expressive production are well within global
economies that sustain a certain “fascination with
newness and difference” (Clark: 2005, 557) as to
be detected in the projects of Rain, which has taken
interest in the Indonesian contemporary art scene. It
supports ruangrupa and had organized the Fixing the
Bridge event in Jogjakarta. This newness and the
alternative may become a fetish and re-branded like a
commodity.
Without the positioned mediations of the artist, the
exhibition, and the curator, will contemporary art finally
abdicate its entitlements to a popular culture or everyday
life that is nearly thoroughly saturated with spectacle,
immersed in neoliberal self-absorption, and reified
through aestheticization and mediatization? How it can
recover an affective moral world and a selfless intimacy
proves to be the challenge to any curatorial project that
seeks to redeem the basis of its mediation. As Apinan
apprehends the contemporary:
The word “contemporary” means being in the
same period of time. Being
contemporary ten years ago, however, was pretty
much different from today. “Contemporary”
contains its own dynamism similar to the word
“culture” whose root is defined as developing
force…Different generations hold different definitions
of “contemporary culture”. I am saying that being
extreme is like perceiving culture from the perspective
of seventy-year-old versus seventeen-yearold
individuals. Although coming from different
HERITAGE, IDENTITY, CHANGE AND CONFLICT
circles, there must be some similarities when the
two meet. If they remain mutually exclusive, two
opposite poles, teenagers in spaghetti string tops
versus elderly in Thai silken royal pattern uniform,
will occur. As a matter of fact, they should socialize
and mix since they do live in the same period and
society. (Apinan: 2004, 33)
In this context, the role and contribution of the curator
in Indonesia and Thailand in contemporary art
making consists of creating conditions so that the
following could take effect:
1. discourse and critique, theory of contemporary
art, parameters of commentary;
2. value and taste;
3. local and international recognition;
4. infrastructure and professionalization;
5. audience and public consciousness and appreciation
for and engagement with contemporary art;
6. networks, platforms, notions of the alternative;
and
7. coteries and communities.
Based on this list, we can derive the motivations of curators
and the impulse of their practice:
1. extension of creative activity and theoretical/
discursive reflection;
2. art education and communication to the public
on contemporary art;
3. institutional power; and
4. professional development.
It is in this regard that we draw a link between the
curation of contemporary art and the politics of heritage,
democracy, and globalization. The discourse of the
contemporary is bound up with the issues of modernity
and identity, which had been ratified quite strenuously
by nation building projects in Southeast Asia from the
sixties through the eighties. These accrued to a certain
construal of “nation” that was imbued with a native
civilization, on the one hand, and an international aspiration,
on the other. One of the most cogent instruments of this
ideology was art, which was endorsed as a testimony of
allegiance to a liberal democratic order. Carol Duncan
(1994) cites two cases to clarify this point:
1975: Imelda Marcos builds the Metropolitan Museum
of Manila in 29 days in time for the International Monetary
Fund meeting. Inaugural exhibitions comprised loans
from the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, and the private collections of Armand
Hammer and Nathan Cummings.
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
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