| Vishakha
Desai:
Good
evening and welcome to the Asia Society. It’s really a great pleasure
to see all of you here this evening. I should say that it was almost
ten years ago to the day that we organized our first roundtable on contemporary
Asian art. That moment was one of those moments when you almost feel
like, “My God! I wonder where we will go from here?” Little
would we have thought that we would be here today with as many of you
interested in contemporary Asian art. It’s a great honour for
me to introduce two friends and colleagues, both of them truly stars
in their own right. Apinan Poshyananda is an artist and an art historian,
one of the most distinguished curators in contemporary Asian art, who
has been involved with more exhibitions of contemporary Asian art across
the globe than almost anyone else. He has been a commissioner of biennales
and triennales whether you go to Japan, or Argentina or Brazil. He was
a commissioner for the Asian section of the Sao Paulo Biennale. He is
a scholar and he’s also a prolific writer. He received his Ph.D.
from Cornell University and in fact it was soon after he received his
Ph.D. and went back to Bangkok is when I had the opportunity to meet
him in 1991. He was a member of the first roundtable exactly a decade
ago. He was also a curator of our own highly acclaimed Traditions/Tensions
exhibition and he will be curating our upcoming exhibition on Montien
Boonma, one of the very fine Thai artists who unfortunately passed away.
Apinan is going to be joined with Okwui Enwezor. I think it’s
very hard to introduce Okwui because he truly has become an international
star. As some of you know, it was more than twenty years ago when he
came to this country. It was not to study art. It was to study political
science. While Okwui was studying political science, he started writing
poetry and art criticism. As he started writing about art, soon it had
to do with being around art and before you knew it, it was to really
begin to organize exhibitions. He was, in fact, the art director of
the Second Johannesburg Biennale and he has been involved in a number
of other exhibitions. The one in New York you might be aware of is Global
Conceptualism in which he was the co-curator for the African section.
He has also been a founder and one of the editors of one of the most
distinguished African art journals that began in the 1990s. Of course,
he is most well-known for being the art director of Documenta XI, the
last Documenta. As a number of art critics have said, Documenta is to
contemporary art what Olympics are to the world of sports. So please
join me in welcoming Apinan Poshyananda and Okwui Enwezor.
Vishakha
Desai:
These two told me that one of them was going to come in a wheelchair.
It has to do with whether curators are actually challenged people, because
they travel so much, both of them. I thought I would start with the
beginning of the awareness of contemporary art because you really can’t
talk about it as the beginning because as we all know, the contemporary
art world in the non-Euro-American centres has been going on for a long
time. So it’s really only the beginning for the western art world,
perhaps, in the 1990s. Both of you started more or less at that time
and I wonder if you might go back to that moment and talk a little bit
about what it was like then. How did it feel? Okwui, you were already
in New York then and Apinan, you had just gone back to Bangkok. What
was your perception? What was it like?
Okwui
Enwezor:
Well, it’s rather difficult to go back to the beginning because
it means that by going back one has to leave a number of things behind,
in order to talk about the beginning. You know, I think that for me
the trajectory of coming to where I am today as a curator really is
not one straight path. It was many different paths, many different attachments,
multiple attachments if you will, intellectually, culturally, politically
and otherwise, and so in a sense I come to where I am today with the
idea of these multiple attachments deeply entangled with each other,
and informing the sense that in order to think historically in the present,
that one in a sense has to begin from the process of unlearning certain
ideas that makes it quite burdensome to get into this very incredibly
heady space called the contemporary art world. I come from Nigeria and
I come from a place that has absolutely no museums such as we find in
New York. I don’t think many people here would appreciate that,
especially from the perspective of what it means to think and to really
look at art thoughtfully in a way that allows the possibility for that
art to have an impact on the way you experience it. So I must really
say that the 1990s is not a beginning as it were. It is a beginning
only in terms of the way in which people’s trajectories are suddenly
mapped, you know, you arrive fully born, already fully formed and not
as an infant. So I might say that it is an art world I confronted, I
engaged with, looking with a sideways glance, looking with a great sense
of preservation, a great sense of, shall I say, frustration, shall I
say, envy, if you will, because I come from a place that does not have
a museum of modern art, that has no right in any sense of the form to
demand a critical space in those discourses that one saw in all those
different museums. What I saw was great and also what I saw was a world
that seemed to me to have a certain type of historical amnesia. My work
as a curator began right from there. I mean, it was learning on the
job but to learn one has to really sort of come up with a makeshift
toolkit, if you will. You have to try whatever works in order to begin.
Vishakha
Desai: Like guerrilla warfare?
Okwui
Enwezor:
Well, in a sense. I don’t quite see it as warfare in the sense
that I really had no sense I would end up being the curator I am today.
It was really just, you know, a matter of a very ad hoc movement?I get
to make a slight intervention on behalf of my contemporaries, if you
will. I had lived in the United States since 1982 and I had worked in
as many different kinds of jobs you can imagine, you can say that I’m
the quintessential American story, if you will. The immigrant who comes
and makes it, in a sense. So this is for me the beginning, the beginning
of really thinking, reading, and I saw the world in a transversal manner.
I didn’t see the world in a straight, rigorous, narrow manner.
I saw the world in the context of the multiplicity of perspectives that
were right before me in New York, and that’s where I started working.
Vishakha
Desai:
Apinan, for you it’s about you really being in this part of the
world and
then going back.
Apinan
Poshyananda:
Like Okwui, I think I have to do a fast rewind back more than a decade
because I was born in Bangkok?we do have one or two museums in Thailand?but
I left Bangkok when I was ten, was sent to England to a prep school
and forced to talk with a stiff upper lip. Then I did my degree at Edinbourough
University, a fine art degree which was a mix between art history and
fine arts. I did return to Bangkok wanting to be an artist actually.
At the age of twenty-eight, I won three national awards at the National
Exhibition of Art and I thought my career was going to be an artist.
Then, mistakenly, I was given this fellowship to do a Ph.D. at Cornell
and I spent another five years there and I had to return to Bangkok
because I had to repay my university. That was 1990, you see. I met
my wife at Cornell, got married. I was going to be a civil servant,
a teacher, an artist, a little bit, then something happened because
this one curator came along. I didn’t really know what it meant.
I thought a curator was supposed to cure an artist, you know? You know,
massage the ego. I later found out it is vice-versa. Anyway, I had a
trial of curating at the National Art Gallery in Bangkok with seven
Thai artists in 1991. And the second exhibition I curated was representing
Thai artists at the Sydney Biennale. Then I bumped into Vishakha Desai
in Bangkok and my life changed. It’s been a really great experience.
During that time I was working for the APT, the Asian Pacific Triennale
in Brisbane that was going to open in 1993. The conference we had, in
fact I was here almost ten years ago giving this similar speech, I mean
I was much younger then, but it was an experience?the roundtable discussion,
because it was so lively, so vibrant, and there was a lot of expectation
in terms of what was going to happen. During the two days of meeting
at the roundtable discussion, it was almost like getting to know you
but not quite. Almost this gap where the testing the water was such
that sometimes it went very lukewarm, there were other times it went
very hot. Because, you know, in these early days, names, translation,
ability to represent or not represent the passwords such as local, global,
were not clear. Vishakha suggested that something could happen in terms
of exhibitions here in contemporary art. Here, ten years ago, I actually
was quite rude because I ended my speech saying to the Asia Society
it’s about time to show living art. It’s time for art and
Asian art to talk back and it talked back. Ten years since then it has
really talked back and I’m so pleased and so proud of the Asian
artists, the amount of leap?and I would call it leapfrogging?that they
have done.
Vishakha
Desai:
I think that’s in a way what both of you are suggesting. This
notion that “beginning” is really something that is just
beginning here but it is as you said, something fully arrived, kind
of an adult, but people don’t always treat you that way because
of the historical amnesia. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more
about that notion of historical amnesia that you refer to Okwui, and
I think to some extent that idea as if the art in other parts of the
world hadn’t happened until somebody else discovered it.
Okwui
Enwezor:
Well, for me the most instructive experience coming to the United States
is first and foremost learning that I was a minority and it really is,
I think, something that transforms you but at the same time in many
ways remains disturbing, if you will. I’m in an exhibition The
Short Century which was here earlier this year and want to say, picture
this, that in 1945, more than three-quarters of the world were colonized.
I mean, this was not three hundred years ago, this was in 1945. The
sheer numbers of people, billions, and to think that post-1945 that
the idea of self-determination was not just simply a question of politics.
It was a question of the affirmation of a sense of self-understanding
that has clear cultural, social and moral import. I think that coming
to the United States was the challenge that I met. I come from a post-colonial
world in which people like Chinua Achebe and many other people were
writing with such incredible force and clarity that their work has also
transformed what is known as literature in English. And why
is that possible and not in the visual arts? This is a question and
this is for me the gap of
understanding in talking productively in a trans-cultural sense that
is the difficulty of this historical amnesia. If anything I’ve
been constantly insubordinate to the idea that my passage through the
contours of the so-called western society is one that I ought to be
completely grateful for. I saw my work as a possibility to open up a
space of dialogue and equations and also to confront the limits of the
institutional domain within which we work. I carry some of these equations
with me all of the time because I think that it is ethical and demanding
of us to think much more critically and historically when we engage
the world. When we make judgements about art, we do not really necessarily
understand the motivation for making those works. What many people,
I’ll use an example, what many people may call political art here
may in fact have a whole different historical basis from which it arose.
So what do I do? I don’t always begin by reading people’s
catalogues. For example, for The Short Century, the title came from
my productive reading of Eric Hobsbawn’s book The Age of Extremes.
That’s where the title came from, The Short Twentieth Century.
I wanted to just imagine that if the twentieth century was that short,
how short will the post-colonial world be in this sense, post-1945?
So this is for me the work across disciplines, to think productively
across genres and not to become too fixated on the idea that one singular
way of experiencing and understanding art is passing through the wall
of established categories.
Vishakha
Desai:
It’s sort of an interesting segway into curatorial practice and
this idea of how one makes decisions and what is the space of curatorial
practice, especially in the kind of world we live in today. It has as
much to do with decisions artists make about the kind of work they make
and decisions that curators make about the kind of work they select
and for whom and where and then the decisions art critics make as well
as the audiences make. I wonder if you, because you’ve kind of
referred, Okwui, to this notion of the gap that somehow in literature
doesn’t seem to exist the same way, but in the visual arts we
seem to have an idea because it is historically determined, that art
must be transcendent. That art must be as, in fact, sometimes people
have said “sublime.” Therefore while we think about its
historical basis, it must be beyond history at the same time. So how
does that work out? Especially in the contemporary art practices where
things are colliding, colluding and connecting at so many different
levels. I wonder if, Apinan, you would talk about curatorial practice.
Apinan
Poshyananda:
Yes, but before I forget, I’d like to return to amnesia because
I think in Asia, and we discussed this also, regarding that short period
of colonization and the wounds of imperialism still throbbing and many
Asian countries which were colonized do want to forget this very painful
period. So it becomes a longing for nostalgia, the return of the pre-colonial
period where the ancestors, the forefathers, were there and this return
actually leapfrogged back to that time of pain in order to reinvent
what they had been missing and longing for. I think that for many countries
in Asia this time has also became a time of reinvention. This is where
art and culture came in and government created policies to promote certain
kinds of art that could revive these ideas of going back and looking
at our own “true art” with pride and in a way creating a
sort of Asiancentric view of non-western purity and focusing on privileging
what has been in the past!
This actually leads to how government has a certain control of what
is to be presented and the Asian Orientalist discourse by those who
were in power at that time. [They] actually created a sort of blockage
where they were trained to look at contemporary art, in this case contemporary
Asian art, as something derivative. We have two prongs here where the
western discourse may look at contemporary Asian art as not excellent
or third-rate from third-world but at the same time we get the kind
of feeling of inferior art within the Asian countries. But at the same
time, there was this idea of Asia as one that remerged. “Asia
as one” or “unity within diversity” actually became
a motto for many countries that wanted their pride back, this period
after, of course, independence. They actually wanted to have art that
became nationalistic so in that way if artists want to be successful,
a lot of them have to be quite safe, quite on the right side, right
track in order to be promoted and when in the early 1990s this Asian
spectacle exploded, that became something that challenged what was happening
or what was being placed in the infrastructure, within those governments.
So we can talk about that a little later.
Vishakha
Desai:
That opens up a place in which curatorial practices changed in the 1990s.
Apinan
Poshyananda:
Yes. Because “curator,” when it is translated in each country
it has many meanings, a lot of the times like those “who look
after art objects” and a lot of times it becomes those who only
do that, and the word, as you know, has changed a lot.
Okwui
Enwezor:
I must say, in regards to curating, I am fixated on this notion that
all discourses are located, they come from somewhere, and that they
have in that location a sense of how it sees itself being transformed
when it confronts other worlds and so on. So in this sense, I think
that when I make an exhibition as a curator I come with two things:
with the idea of the historical awareness of the space in which the
exhibition is going to be made, making it in the United States or in
Europe. It is very important to understand the art traditions there.
What are those traditions and what are the parameters of visual experience
and how do institutions work with these bodies of knowledge? Consequently,
one has to then try to find a space within such a discourse in order
to say something from whatever position you come from. So in this sense,
I think it needs repeating, especially in this age of endless dislocation
and fragmentation and movement and so on, nothing is really located,
nothing is authentic anymore, that ideas themselves are not that tangible.
You cannot just simply take them and immediately put them in a space
and voila it will have the same value. What I try to do in exhibitions
is really say that both for the public and for the institution it is
a process of engagement that requires a great deal of giving of oneself.
Beyond that, I think that my ambition as a curator has never really
been to go and to make the great exhibition of Rembrandt, the great
exhibition of Pollock. That does not mean one cannot aspire to do that,
but I believe there are so many people doing such great exhibitions
and that I can be a different kind of voice in order to be able to shape
and define what is contemporary in our experience. I think this is really
the question of how the presidia of the curator has to be understood
and people have to make the choices of what it is they want to contribute.
Vishakha
Desai:
But to some extent, one is always juggling between understanding the
context and changing it. For example, Documenta, on the one hand, has
a special importance in the world of contemporary art. One might argue
that you, and Catherine David before you, did actually try to do something
in which that institution of Documenta would be changed by the very
curatorial practice you brought to it. In that sense, one might say
you are an inside subversive, which is the way I describe myself. That
you understand the institution but you also try to change it at the
same time. And Apinan, in your case, it seems to me that you were also
thinking about this issue of how to change the institution itself through
the curatorial practice that you bring to the table. Both of you, I’d
like you to talk a little bit more about this idea of how to define
“contemporary” in the contemporary art world and what would
be your strategy to put it into practice. If you don’t want to
do the Rembrandt show, what is the strategy by which you redefine the
notion of contemporary? What would you want people to think about as
contemporary art in 2002?
Okwui
Enwezor:
Well, again it depends on the space and I think as you mentioned with
Documenta, I fully believed from the very beginning that Documenta ought
not to be a museum even though everybody christened it the “museum
of one hundred days.” I think it is a space of a different kind
of experimentation and I don’t think it is really that possible
to be subversive? simply because they will just hire the next person!
So everybody just has to do their thing. And I think that the work I
did for me, really, follows in the long tradition of what Documenta
has been and I’ve tried to respond back to Documenta historically.
I’ve tried to do that by attempting to be a good student of Documenta’s
history, looking at its historical speciality, looking at the way in
which it was founded on the basis of a national reconstruction or reconstitution.
What to do with that? I think these are really clear issues in Documenta
and I began by studying them. You mention Catherine David, but let me
just simply say, I categorically decided that there are three periods
of Documenta. The first period to my thinking, I called the Arnold Bode
years from 1955 to 1968, because these were the Documentas that were
really obsessed with the historical avant-garde. The second period began
with Szeemann and this is very important because I believe that Szeemann’s
Documenta was really the first time in a large-scale exhibition of that
nature, a temporary exhibition, where the subjectivity of the curator
became feasible. It was no longer just simply an arrangement of people’s
taste, an arrangement of sovereign judgment. It was the imperative of
the curator that was in full display and that’s what made it such
a seminal exhibition. Consequently, I think from Szeemann to Catherine
David, I believe that this period between Documenta V to X really represents
a second period. In as much as I see clear intellectual outlines between
my project and Catherine David’s, I see also a point of departure
that in a sense I think Documenta XI is really the third period because
finally post-1997, one could say that the very notion of globalization
had come to a space of visibility in which it was no longer something
that one could simply call a theme. It had some very, very serious contemporary
repercussions and so for us, how do we really think about some of these
transitions, or this world of permanent transition? This is the way
I think of the contemporary that the contemporary is a world of permanent
transition and so how do we come to terms with that? In a sense, many
people will say that Documenta XI was very documentary. Whether it was
or not is a different issue. One of its key questions was about the
social life of the world and how communities of ideas and practices
in different places are formed and what do we do with that? This was
our challenge. So we decided that Documenta could begin by being extraterritorial
in order to engage and confront its own limits and this is, for me,
one way I can begin to talk about the contemporary. That it is this
world of permanent transitions, however large, that we want to say is
a civilizational one. I don’t believe it is.
Apinan
Poshyananda:
I think there is this institutional burden that is always going to be
with the curators, especially those who work at various institutions
when they do curatorship independently. I think in Asia and the Pacific,
these so-called triennales or biennales have a young history but already
they have a burden within those particular decades, I mean in the past
ten years. As you know there have been an emergence, explosions of so
many biennales in Asia. We ask how do they define contemporary art in
that region in order to give it a counter-balance to what’s been
happening in the west, in Europe and America? By inventing these cultural
spaces, they actually have their own adventures, inventions, as well
as restrictions. I’m sure we’ll talk about censorship and
self-censorship later on, but everywhere there are certain amounts of
restrictions, wherever you are, in China, Korea or Thailand. I think
the audience is so important? the specificity of the place and the locale.
You bring certain artists from within the region or outside of Asia
to show to whom? To show to certain artists, to a certain audience who
we know that in some places have different agendas. The variety is so
great in terms of expectation and novelty, innovation. I was able to
work with the Queensland APT Gallery Asia Pacific Triennale for several
of their triennales. On the second APT, which was in 1996 in Australia,
I was invited to do the Australian section so they were giving this
a new slant. This Thai curator could come in and look at Aussie art
from a different angle, which was an amazing experience. I learned so
much. Destiny Deacon was one person who I admired for her ability to
create art. I visited her in Melbourne in her studio, at her house,
and we had a long conversation and I thought wouldn’t it be nice
to bring her sitting room to Brisbane to show it as a part of APT and
we did that. In Sao Paulo, when I organized the Asian !
section in 1998, we had to consider the Brazilian audience.
Vishakha
Desai:
Let me just stop you there. Does that mean that you always think about
what will play well in the audience and not actually give a full voice
to the range of expressions that might exist in contemporary Asia because
you are constantly, one might argue, playing with what would play well
in a particular community?
Apinan
Poshyananda:
You have to consider at a certain level?it depends on the budget also?you
can’t do everything, you know! They tell you, “Sorry Apinan,
congratulations?you do this section but we only have this amount of
money but do it well.” Now we come to smaller shows and I like
to do smaller shows and individual artists as well. The Japan Foundation
has been great in promoting art, just to move on from Australia to Japan
a little bit. They’ve created many international shows within
Asia and without. They had this policy, you know, especially in the
1980s, of sending Japanese artists to South-East Asia and literally
selecting without consulting. I felt there should be a counter-balance
there. They didn’t like that, of course, but things change. They
actually changed in the sense that they work more with South-East Asian
curators to create an arena where ideas could be exchanged. I was pushing
it a little bit further in terms of small !
exhibitions. I thought why not invite some really well-known Japanese
artists to Bangkok, individual ones. I started with Nobuyoshi Araki
and that was bad news for the Japan Foundation. Luckily, Araki came
and we had a really big show and he created a new series of works in
Bangkok. Then we invited Yasumasa Morimura, who spoke on the last night
of the show, but this time it was backed by the Japan Foundation, which
was great. So after Araki, the following year I did Yasumasa Morimura
in Bangkok and Morimura was so kind to come over. He showed many works
as well as did the performance in Thailand. Not only that, he invited
artists for individual shows from without Asia.
Vishakha
Desai:
I think partly what you’re talking about is that the role of various
different arenas in which artists get seen and art gets seen and all
of it is fodder for looking at globalization as a phenomenon where often
people have import/export model in which things come from that part
of the world to what we call the centres of contemporary art. I know,
Okwui, you’ve thought a little bit about this notion of centres,
imagined or real, and I wonder if both of you who’ve travelled,
and you’ve travelled because of the Documenta platforms to India
and to other parts, if you would talk a little bit about the energy
of contemporary art centres that are outside of the Euro-American axis,
and your sense of what is going on there and how does that play out
when you come back to a place like New York.
Okwui
Enwezor:
Well, just to pick up a little bit from what Apinan said about biennales,
triennales, their proliferation. I happen to be one of those people
who really think that it is great that there are so many biennales and
triennales. I have no problem that there are so many of them simply
because one has to understand the circumstances that made them possible.
For many places outside of Europe and North America, these proliferations
must be understood in relation to the ongoing questions of modernization
in many of those places. I think that these are powerful contexts within
which some of these biennales are being formed. I’ve traveled
to many of them from Fukuoka to Dakar to Cairo, of course, Johannesburg,
and so on. I think that what’s interesting in all these questions
is not only just simply that the exhibitions were great, they also offered
moments where people could really begin to think about art being produced
within these regions. They could begin to write about them, speak about
them in intelligent ways. They could begin to produce ideas around them.
I think it’s not so much that one makes an exhibition, of course
people always make exhibitions, but they provide opportunities for other
activities around art. It creates contexts for artists to be aware of
each other, aware of what’s happening elsewhere and spurs on new
conversations and so on. So even though some of these biennales may
ultimately not be as good as we would wish for them to be, they also
do provide very serious services and questions that linger on in places
where they have been done. In relation to the ideas of centres, I truly
believe it’s complete nonsense to talk about a centre or centres
because there really isn’t such a thing. Maybe ten, fifteen, twenty
years ago, one could talk about a centre. Let me just say very briefly,
in the place I come from, Nigeria, 1986 was a year of incredible catastrophe.
Catastrophe came in the guise of the Structural Adjustment Programme
which the government signed. I’ll tell you, between 1986 and now,
ninety percent of active producing intellectuals have left the country.
Now that’s a disaster, right? I think they are spread all over
the place. What is happening today is there’s a kind of understanding
in which people do not want to see themselves nudged into the idea of
a centre. Going to India was very instructive for us because it suddenly
showed the distance between Kassel and the rest of the world. Kassel
became that much more isolated. That much more disengaged. In a sense,
because the Indians had this uncanny way of converting everything into
an Indian problem, particularly a problem that they had already dealt
with twenty years ago. They said to us, “you guys are coming here
to talk about it now.” But it was very interesting to be confronted
with the vitality of ideas that were being produced. We were there for
five days. Of course at the end of each day, we would run out of time!
because it was no longer possible to continue a conversation. We always
had to go outside to continue. This is particularly interesting because
the idea I learned much more clearly was the idea of the artist intellectual.
The model could be really from the few Indian artists I met in the audience
because of their worldliness, because of their breadth of their ideas
and knowledge. This was particularly good for Documenta. As the volumes
from the different platforms come out, it begins to really say clearly
that the very question of talking about centres is no longer for me
the way that is most productive to work, but really how to work on a
multi-lateral transcultural basis.
Vishakha
Desai:
We’re going to move to a different question and then we’ll
open it up to all of you in the audience. I want to actually have you
talk a little bit about art itself. What kind of work really excites
you both, that interests you? The kind of art you really like to look
at. And, if you were to project out five-ten years, especially in light
of what the world has gone through in the last year since September
11th, what do you think the world of contemporary art is going to be
like when we move out, especially from the perspective of non-Euro-American
contemporary art? The first part I’d love for you to talk a little
bit about the kind of stuff you like to look at and what it is about
that kind of work.
Apinan
Poshyananda:
I like to look at artists…because they make art. You know a lot
of the time I have to look at the art I don’t like because that’s
the profession of curators. You don’t just look at the art you
like. You really have to look at the art you don’t like as well,
and a lot of it. You have to ask yourself why you don’t like it.
Because otherwise, everybody’s prejudiced. But it’s to the
point where, because we do so many shows and so many audiences, it’s
very reciprocal at different places. Sometimes you have to?one example,
I just did the Irish Biennale earlier this year in Limerick. And in
the end, we showed seventy artists. A lot of the northern Irish, from
Northern Ireland, as well as from the Republic but juxtaposed with Asian
artists as well as European artists. Part of the deal was that I had
to look at a lot of Irish art. You have to be objective to a certain
extent, in the end when you cut the pile you have to decide.
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