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LEE Weng Choy: The question discomforts me. The "yet unknown"
does not seem to refer to the present moment, even though the "contemporary"
is supposedly its context. Rather, the vision invoked appears future-oriented.
So how different is this from asking what we wish for in the "better
tomorrows" of our own design? I would like to think of myself
as a proponent of change -- there is so much that is wrong in our
world today. But if I am wary of the desire for the next new thing,
it is because often our imagination of the future is predicated
upon frozen images of the past.
These days, when I hear the words "the future", I do not
think about the future so much as remember people from the
last century -- white, middle-class, suburban Americans of the 1950s,
for example -- all chirpy and a little smug, beaming with hopelessly
naive good cheer. I imagine them captivated by the latest advertisements
in lifestyle magazines that illustrate "the modern style of
the future", or sitting in front of brand new black and white
television sets, watching with mouths slightly parted as some gentleman
in a grey suit declares: "in the future ... aeroplanes
will be supersonic ... every home will be fully automated ... and
families will holiday in outer space". The desire for "the
future" often strikes me as a peculiar form of nostalgia. As
Jacques Derrida might say, the future is spectral: it is a dream
of what is to come that belies dreaming of what is to come back.
True, a "yet unknown" suggests something radically open.
But the way the question is structured, whatever instability this
unknown may have had seems domesticated by the query's implicit
and overriding "futurism". What if this "yet unknown"
did indeed refer to the full complexity of the present, or, as I
want to suggest, the Real? Here, I am referring to Jacques Lacan's
concept -- that which resists representation -- but also the word's
everyday uses: real life, real experience, reality. I would like
to define the "present" by its resistance to representation,
by its "realness". Only when the present moment becomes
history, or is projected as the future can we pin it down and speak
about it. Yet I should also say that I firmly believe in the imperative
to try to historicise both the present and the Real.
In a recent essay of mine, "Biennale Time and the Spectres
of Exhibition", I wondered aloud what we could ask of contemporary
art. I'll quote from that essay's last paragraphs, which could stand
for an answer to the question above.
In his preface to the Documenta 11 exhibition catalogue,
Artistic Director Okwui Enwezor begins with an admission that his
enterprise is haunted: "Almost fifty years after its founding,
Documenta finds itself confronted once again with the spectres
of yet another turbulent time of unceasing cultural, social, and
political frictions, transitions, transformations, fissures, and
global institutional consolidations ... . [T]he prospects for contemporary
art ... could not be more daunting and demanding." But, for
me, what Documenta 11 as a whole seemed to demand most from
its viewers was guilt. A peculiar guilt -- guilt as a defensive
reflex, an admission of not knowing how or not being able to confront
our historical burdens; guilt as a symptom of the last century's
defeated self-reflexivity.
Yet, guilt and its twin, blame, are not adequate responses. To denounce
something like colonialism is not enough to exorcise its spectres
in contemporary art. We -- this largest of we's -- are the reluctant
heirs of colonialism and other legacies of our troubled past. And
we have to work through this inheritance -- but how? In Farewell
to an Idea, T. J. Clark confronts modernism's failures -- and
as responsibly as anyone else. But unlike those who take as a foregone
conclusion that modernism resides in history's dustbin, he emphasises
its shared history with something he believes was worth fighting
for, even if it too was not the solution: socialism. The debts are
not merely old, they are still topical. Don't get me wrong, I am
not suggesting that we look for what's best in colonialism, and
try to recuperate it. I am arguing for the historiography that Walter
Benjamin advocated: to imagine events not in a fixed sequence of
past, present and future, but as radically adjacent to each other.
To confront the burden of history is not to recognise it as distant
or past, but fully present. It is not to project ourselves into
history, but history into our selves. I suppose this is another
way of saying that what I want from the grand biennale is for it
to demand something more from me than just my guilt or my time spent
in its exhibitions. A reconciliation with the Real is too pat, so
let me leave it to an art work to try to articulate what we could
ask of our contemporary visual culture:
To see Alfredo Jaar's installation at Documenta 11, you entered
a darkened room; on the grey walls were three texts, their white
letters emitting their own light. The first text talked about how
there were videos and films of Nelson Mandela's release from prison
but apparently no photographs; moreover, during his long detention,
he had worked in the lime mines, which were so blinding white, it's
said that his tear ducts no longer work because of that. The second
text referred to an American business venture that intends to protect
vast archives of images by burying them underground in a nuclear
bomb-proof shelter. The third text spoke of how the US military
recently took control of satellite and air surveillance images of
Afghanistan. To exit the installation, you walked through a dark
corridor into a room where you confronted a wall-sized screen of
intensely bright white light. The piece is called The Lament
of Images (2002).
Lee Weng Choy
Singapore
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References
Clark, T. J., Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of
Modernism, New Haven: Yale University Press (1999)
Enwezor, Okwui, Documenta 11 Platform 5: Exhibition catalogue,
Hatje Cantz Verlag (2002)
Lee, Weng Choy, "Biennale Time and the Spectres of Exhibition",
focas: Forum On Contemporary Art & Society, vol. 4, Singapore
(2002)
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