focas Forum On Contemporary Art & Society

Biennale Time and

the Spectres of Exhibition
Lee Weng Choy
One could, perhaps, describe this essay as a play between texts and tourism. My itinerary is 'as follows:
I begin by rehearsing some of the arguments of "Consider Post Culture", Marian Pastor Roces's conference
presentation at the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. APT3, as the Third Triennial is
also known, was titled Beyond the Future; it opened in Brisbane in September 1999.
After the Marian text I look at Pause, the recent Gwangju Biennale. I spent a weekend in Korea in
March 2002 courtesy of the Biennale organisers, who invited me as a focas correspondent. I
won't, however, presume to review this mammoth project on the basis of a three-day vis it.
Preliminary observation and analysis, which comprises a lot of what I have to say about the
exhibitions I saw, runs the risk of being less "art writing" than "travel writing". And, I'm afraid,
not of your Bruce Chatwin variety but the kind found in your better airline in-flight magazines.
Although it is this risk-possible only because of the privilege of mobili ty-that I want to address
in playing my own art tourism against the texts I've selected.
Apart from reflecting on the reportage on biennales, I am also, of course, interested in the
phenomenon itself. From my first-ever visit to Korea I turn to my first-ever visi t to Germany, to
look at one of the most important events on the international art calendar: Documenta. My trip in
June 2002 was sponsored byThe Goethe Institut and the Federal Republic's Press and Information
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OUR
ViLL AGE.
NOW S
Cartoon by Olav Westphalen.
Originally published in NU: The Nordic Art Review, No . 1/99
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Biennale Time and the Spectres of Exhibition
Office, and thanks to such benefactors, European and Asian, this year I've travelled more than
usual, getting a glimpse of the life of the jet-set art class.
But before I relate my novitiate-like traveller's tales of the exhibition in Kassel- which constitutes
the 5th and final platform of Documenta 11-I offer a reading of "Between Truth and
Reconciliation", Rustom Bharucha's presentation at the Platform 2 conference. That conference,
Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes o/Truth and Reconciliation, was held
in New Delhi in May 2001 .
Perhaps I've tried to cover too much ground in this essay, which is much longer than intended-
so much so, I feel I should apologi se in advance to the reader. But it has been the comparison of
these four elements that has provoked and troubled me, and I could not leave out anyone.
* * *
Marian Pastor Roces begins her presentation by evoking an object, spotted in a museum of
ethnography in Europe, that "transfixed and irritated and entranced" her. I It was acquired during
one of those universal expositions of the late nineteenth century, and comes from the Ifugao, an
ancient people from the Northern Philippines. "It consists of several tiny figures of men carved
out of a black-brown wood ... The figures wear the tiniest of loincloths, and together they were
carved to represent a scene from a ritual. Or at least, there seems to be a ritual because there is one
more tiny figure ensconced in a tiny coffin". Thus the viewer is "cued" to read the object as both
authentic and ethnographic. But can this object really be what it seems to be? What is it, if not also
What we have then, is a taLe of one century
being haunted by another. And the site
of this haunting: the internationaL
exhibition.
a scale model, a maquette? "So far as I know", Marian asserts, "Ifugaos did not and do not have a
tradition of carving maquettes. The exhibition catalogue names this thing as an ensenificacion.
This is quite precise. A more extended description would be: a three dimensional representation
of a ritual, executed by Ifugaos in the tradition, yes, of Ifugao carving, or a slightly modulated
instance of Ifugao carving, but also, a sculpture executed in the tradition of European scale
modelling, or a slightly modulated instance of European scale modelling". While it matters that
the object indeed comes from the Ifugao, Marian contends that it "doesn't figure unless understood
clearly as having been made for [an] international event" like the universal expo.
At this point in her presentation, Benedict Anderson and Jose Rizal make their appearances. The
title of Anderson's book, The Spectre o/Comparisons (1998), is a phrase borrowed from Rizal's Noli
Me Tangere (1887) . Rizal, lest we forget, lived for a while in Europe during the time of the great
universal expositions. In his novel, Rizal wrote about disturbing situations of doubling, where a
witness cannot but compare one thing with another, however separated by space and time. He
called the agent of this experience, el demonio de las comparaciones. Marian accedes: "So now I
borrow from Anderson, who borrowed from Rizal, for the demon has entered me, too, as I am
bedevilled by this seeing of an object made for international exposition in the 1880s, and cannot
help but see, simultaneously, the objects and texts we have made for this international exhibition
[APT3] .. . and for others like it, at the end of our century. "
What we have then, is a tale of one century being haunted by another. And the site of this haunting:
the international exhibition. "It was during my possession by this demon of comparisons ... that
I began to nickname the category to which the 1880s exposition object might belong, 'expo art' .
At first, the expo showcased objects and
peoples from the colonies-race and the
exotic were the unapologetic constructs
for difference. Then it became the nation;
and today, the preferred term is culture.
This sounds a bit specious, I know, like when, for instance, we say 'tourist art'. But I must confess
to rather liking this nickname because the term art is ironically expressed. I should also like to
suggest that we consider the products we have prepared for showing in this event here-and for
other international exhibitions-as expo art as well. Or expo products". Marian reminds us that
the contemporary art biennale belongs to a certain category of event-the modern spectacle of
displaying anthologies of authenticity-which has its beginnings in the universal expos of the
nineteenth century. At first , the expo showcased objects and peoples from the colonies-race and
the exotic were the unapologetic constructs for difference. Then it became the nation; and today,
the preferred term is culture. A term, as Marian emphatically notes, which is not unproblematic.
Culture, even in today's appearances, is an "unreconstructed nineteenth century inflection ... the
universal exposition/international exhibition maintains itself intact to the end of the twentieth
Culture still presumes and privileges the social differences "essentially forged in
homelands", still frames the contest in terms of the local/particular versus the universal/global; it
is still in the service of social progress-if it is not quite "originary essence" anymore, it is invention
for the furure perfect.
"We know that the great nineteenth century universal expositions were architecturally, logistically,
conceptually designed to revel in this word Future ... Why I chose to speak of the nineteenth
century in a conference about the furure is to do with an ache. I have an aching suspicion-a bit
like a recurrent toothache-that the word culture, as deployed in the form of universal expositions/
international exhibitions, locks us in the nineteenth and hence other previous centuries of European
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history .... We do need to slip beyond ... notions of the future formed in previous centuries. Those
notions of the furure are as antique, and as charged with sad histories, as the expo art maquerre
with which I started. Those notions of the furure are, furthermore, at the decayed core of the expo
art we produce today."
* * *
I will return to Marian and the nineteenth century. But I want now to talk about my trip to Korea.
If Marian's text demonstrates a reflexivity necessary to the occasion at which she spoke, might I
suggest that, in keeping true to my experience of Gwangju, a certain self-indulgence is permissible?
To mention travel to today's international art professional is to bring on a litany about too much
travelling. Who doesn't hate to fly, but then it's three days here or one week there; did you catch
"X"?, oh you must see "Y". These protestations of an excess of mobility, are they not sometimes
followed by parodies of the anthropologist's anxiety? (Describing the state of his discipline, Clifford
Geertz wrote: "What is at hand is a pervasive nervousness abour the whole business of claiming to
explain enigmatical others on the grounds that you have gone about with them in their native
habitat or combed the writings of those who have. This nervousness brings on, in turn, various
responses, variously excited: deconstructive attacks on canonical works .. . unmaskings of
anthropological writings as the continuation of imperialism by other means; clarion calls to
reflexivity, dialogue, heteroglossia, linguistic play, rhetorical self-consciousness ... ") 2 In my own
The role the international curator has played
in recent history has been to accelerate the
production and circulation of art and
spectacles of art. Biennale curators have
become the stars of the system; they are
like stock-brokers on Wall Street, wagering
on the next hot art investment.
rum, I express my qualifications sincerely, even as I want to enjoy the irony: 1 won't presume to
review the whoLe show on the basis of a weekend visit; my commentary is Less art writing than traveL
writing, etc. Yet an apology, no matter how nuanced, one has to admit is inadequate. Reflexivity is
not all that is necessary here; more is required. Let me try to explain with my report about the
Gwangju Biennale.
Gwangju's theme avowed to reflect upon the mechanics of the international art exhibition; it
invoked an intervention instead of business as usual-not a full stop, mind you, wouldn't that
have been something, but a Pause. (Apparently, one cannot assume such self-reflexivity is de rigueur,
it seemed lacking, for instance, at Documenta 11, but more of that later.) What I saw at work in
Korea, however, was not quite "pause", but more like the usual hurry--though perhaps a lot less
organised than usual. Could Gwangju, or any exhibition with over 300 participating artists, have
come together without the haste? Hasn't the biennale, as a category of event, become the epitome
of promptitude? Could they happen any faster? Imagine what it would entail to stage these things
annually. Without the resources of, say, Hollywood or a U.S.-led military campaign, two years
seems the de facto speed limit for mounting such extravaganzas. The role the international curator
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has played in recent history has been to accelerate the production and circulation of art and
spectacles of art. Biennale curators have become the stars of the system; they are like stock-brokers
on Wall Street, wagering on the next hot art investment. (In contrast, the museum curator of a
generation ago behaved, for better or worse, more like an art historian.)
So how plausible was it to expect the people behind an enterprise like Gwangju to put a pause on
surveying the art world, championing the latest trends, and celebrating the famous or almost
famous? No matter how well-meaning the curators of Pause may have been, they did not come
close enough to realising their interventionist intentions. To put it harshly, the theme ended up
like an advertisement. (And we all know that what advertisers want is to keep the buyers in an
eternal state of wishing, not to give us what we wish for.) But the critic of the biennale is as much
a part of this circuit. The discourses that prepared the way for a theme like Pause first staked their
place as critical discourses. No less than curators, although in different ways, critics are compli cit
in the acceleration of art-notwithstanding their protests to want to interrupt or slow things
down. The sincere, self-reflexive amateur anthtopologist-type art writer who has the meta-reflexivity
to laugh at himself as he dishes out a critique of the whole system and his own complicity-who
enjoys spanking herself, as Lucy Davis would say-is perhaps, to put it also harshly, another
promulgator of "pause at speed".3
We-let me use the "we" here-critics of the "biennale" often act as if we are the most important
audience. We half-forget that these things are very popular, that citizens of the host cities and
countries visit them in large numbers and seem to enjoy them. When I saw children running
around laughing in Gwangju, I was thinking, half-seriously, that the true public for the biennale
is children, not the adult art crowd. The problem, however, is that such family publics are conceived
of mainly as mass publics. And there are many other publics that are no less important for being
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small. The small community that forms around an independent art space, for example. Indeed,
the most significant, if not unprecedented, feature of the 2002 Gwangju Biennale was the inclusion
of over twenty "alternative" art organisations. They each had separate pavilions and constructed
their own mini-shows within the larger show. The focus on these smaller groupings dovetailed
perfectly with the idea of "pause". And for this, Pause's Artistic Director, Wan-kyung Sung, and
the invited curators, Hou Hanru and Charles Esche, deserve some credit; their ideals had promise.
Here was an opportunity: bring a whole bunch of people from all over the art world to Gwangju
for a few weeks and create within the large biennale halls several smaller spaces, where artists,
activists, curators, writers and, very importantly, audiences can really spend some time together.
As if what mattered most was spending time with cultural workers, not the display of their expo
products. I mean a substantial encounter, and not your three to four days of schmoozing at
international art openings and conferences. That was the aspiration, if I understand correctly;
alas, it did not materialise.
Although it's not as if Gwangju's failure to live up to its ideals was a big surprise or disappointment.
This is Marian's point, is it not, that the high-minded ideas behind today's biennales, which aspire
to make the big international exhibition something other than what it has been since the nineteenth
century, these ideas have invariably failed to work. That is, they never quite do the work they set
out to do: to transform the fundamental premises of the big international exhibition. We have not
exorcised the ghosts of the nineteenth century universal expo, and they continue to haunt us in
the early twenty-first century biennale.
I suppose one hardly needed to have left home to say what I've just said about Pause. It's too easy,
I admit. Again, if these criticisms of the premises are necessary, still more is required. To report
that going to Korea confirmed my suspicions is not enough (and I could claim the same about
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Kassel) . So what can' I say that marks the difference between armchair reflection and going out
into the field, that demonstrates the experience of having actually been there? Well , I've gathered
anecdotes, and there are art works I want to describe. A lot of my time in Gwangju was spent with
friends who were participating in the show, and my experience of the Biennale was very much
framed by their company. They told me stories, like the one about Elvis, the bottle-neck tech.
Apparently, there was only one person handling every single technical issue, and he was named
Elvis. He had dyed-blond hair, and looked perpetually troubled. A friend pointed him out. Poor
Elvis, we conjectured, he could not walk three metres on the biennale environs without an artist
coming up to him, asking ifher DVD was ready yet, or if she could have this particular equipment,
or whether he had followed-up on some other urgent request. But would such requests ever get
past number two on his list of things to do? I'm sure that no sooner had he promised to do
something, a more important person would stop him in his tracks and demand he attend to
something else immediately. During the opening weekend, a number of projects were not up and
running. Then there's the story of the four young women coordinators-it wasn't their fault that
everything was so complicated and disorganised. But it was they who had to handle the torrent of
complaints and demands from frustrated artists, and if that wasn't enough, their male superiors
repeatedly scolded them. Another friend pointed out how you could visibly notice the poor women
break down as the days progressed: their complexions got worse, they fell sick, and they would
burst into tears every so often.
One artist friend told me about a smoke-filled artists "waiting" room with an exercise bicycle in
the corner. There were complications with his project, and he knew that sending faxes and emails
and making phone calls from his home country wouldn't solve the problem. So he came out early
to Gwangju to camp out, and everyday he tried to meet with either a curator or someone from the
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BiennaLe Time and the Spectres of Exhibition
biennale office. It was like a long chess game, entailing a lot of diplomacy, patience and careful
moves, but he eventually managed to get things done. I was still in Singapore when he described
to me the room where he would spend a good part of his days waiting. When I met up with him
in Korea, he pointed it out. Then, one night, I was hanging out with a group of artists from
Malaysia, and we went back to the biennale hall after dinner-they wanted to finally get the badly
needed per diem money that was promised them. So, some of them went to the office, and the rest
of us ended up in that room. And we waited. It took about an hour before the dijll. vu hit me.
The biggest drama I caught sight of was when the alternative art groups found out they were only
going to get one catalogue per group. If you invite activist-oriented people, you can't expect them
to remain passive to such a slight, certainly not after the frustrations they went through putting up
their exhibitions. The artists confronted the curators and administrators; it wasn't pretty but I
don't think it was especially ugly either. For instance, it never got remotely close to a general artists
strike. They got their catalogues soon enough. And it's not like they were humourless about the
whole thing either; we joked how the organisers should have known the cardinal rule-at the end
of the day, artists must be pacified with their catalogues, otherwise they' ll go berserk. The following
day, a contingent of Malaysians (representing Artis Pro Activ and University Bangsar Utama)-
I'm not sure about the others-made a point of meeting with the coordinators, administrators
and curators to reconcile.
However, I have this to say about the chaos in Gwangju. As an outside observer, in hindsight, it
was indispensable comic relief I imagine if the whole thing had gone down smoothly and searnlessly,
the slick spectacular success would have been truly frightening. But planning for chaos is one
thing, if that's possible at all, not treating people well is another. Administrative ethics is essential:
We joked how the organisers should have
known the cardinal rule-at the end of the
day, artists must be pacified with their
catalogues, otherwise they'll go berserk.
one of the most important tests of a major event or exhibition is whether or not, in the course of
administrating the project, everyone has been treated with respect.
Before leaving Korea, I'd like to describe two art works, which were among my favourite. Large
shows tend to disappoint critics (and there's an essay waiting to be written on the reasons why).
I've read reviews about Gwangju that argued the art wasn't as interesting as the event. My disposition
has been not to judge exhibitions in cumulative terms; if there are many works I like, they don't
necessarily add up to a great show. Often, my aim is to find and focus on a few that excite me, and
much like having a meal at a buffet, once I've studied these few, I will have had my fill-sure, I
sometimes overeat, both at buffets and biennales, but I try to limit my consumption. The
comparison is inevitable, is it not, a biennale visit is tourism, like a great buffet during a holiday.
(In contrast, to properly report on a big show requires a certain devotion. You should make like a
pilgrim, and stick around for some time, so that the daily consumption is modest, and you can
religiously and slowly make your way through all the works.)
Pause was organised around four separate projects. Projects 1 and 2 were held in the main biennale
hall. Project 1, also called Pause, presented the alternative art groups and a number of individual
artist projects. Project 2 was entitled There: Sites of Korean Diaspora. Project 3, Stay of Execution,
was sited in a highly charged location: the reconstructed military police camp in the May 18
Liberty Park, which was constructed as a memorial for the Gwangju People's Uprising. 4 Project 4,
Connection, was situated at the former South Gwangju Railway Station, and had architectural
history as a theme.
AcddentaL pLaces are the onLy reaL pLaces Left.
Seung-young Kim's work for Project 3 was a video and sound piece installed in a room of the
former military police office in the May 18 Liberty Park. The video shows the artist propping up
an unmounted, large black and white photograph against a wall. The photo itself is a full-length
picture of what I presume was the artist standing with his back against that same wall. After being
propped up, the photo would slowly buckle, then crash down. The artist would pick it up and
prop it up again; the whole thing would happen over and over. The sound of the photo crumpling
and falling was amplified, and if I recall correctly the video portion of the photo falling down was
in slow motion. I watched it for almost 10 minutes (I regret not returning to watch it some more),
and as far as I could tell, it had not yet looped. I don't know how long the artist kept repeating
these actions.
5
In Project 1, In-hwan Oh, of the Seoul-based Loop Alternative Space, created a lost-and-found
office in the main hall, which then became the actuallost-and-found for the Biennale. In his artist
statement, Oh talked about the theme of "accident" in this work; if someone came to retrieve a
lost object, the artist would meet this person, and take a Polaroid of their unplanned encounter.
Thomas de Zengotita has argued in "The Numbing of the American Mind: Culture as anesthetic"
that our daily experience is "saturated with fabrications to a degree unprecedented in human
history. People have never had to cope with so much stuff, so many choices".6 It's not that we
cannot make fine distinctions about reality, and de Zengotita lists over a dozen "reals": from the
"real real" of falling down the stairs to the "staged real" of weddings; from the "staged hyperreal"
of Oliver Stone movies to the "real unreal" of robo-pets. But the reality is we don't care; we don't
pause to make distinctions. We allow television, magazines, billboards and outdoor video screens
to bombard us with calculated messages to wish for this or that. Often we only get relief when we
stumble across something unexpectedly-"'stumble' is the key concept here. Accidental places are
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Lee Weng Choy
the only real places left", Zengotita says. I wanted to give the Loop people a couple of issues of
focas , but couldn't find anyone, so I just left them as "lost" objects.
So, in the end, is this what it's all about? To single out some works that you like? Is this what we
should want from the artists, the curators, the organisers and the biennale? No, I don't think so. But
my encounter with Gwangju gave me no answers about what to ask of it, or the biennale in general,
or how to write about it. If I've maintained at the start that critical reflection of the premises is not
enough, then "anthropological" thick description, while also needed-although that is hardly what
I've accomplished here-is not enough either. Neither is the selection of favourites. I have tried in
this section to coincide my limitations of reportage with the biennale's own limitations to reflect
upon what to do with itself. I shall return to these questions of what to ask of the biennale when I
turn to Documenta 11. But next on my itinerary is Rustom Bharucha's text.
* * *
My reading of Rustom's "Between Truth and Reconciliation" is focused on juxtaposing it with
Marian's "Consider Post Culture". If the nineteenth century haunts us with "culture" and
"anthropology", its outdated frameworks of constructing and representing difference and otherness,
then what haunting is characteristic of the twentieth century? I think Rustom provides us with an
understanding of this question. Moreover, in my reading here, his text anticipates an encounter
with Documenta 11. With its pre-exhibition platforms-with themes like Democracy Unrealized;
Experiments with Truth; Creolite and Creolization; and Under Siege: Four African Cities-Documenta
11 made, arguably, the most ambitious claims of a commitment to poliricising art of any Documenta.
Of course, Documenta has always been political. Started in 1955, it was like an answer to the 1937
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Degenerate Art exhibition staged by the Nazis, who had deemed modern art to be anathema;
Documenta was like a statement of Germany's return to the values of modern art and liberal
humanism, albeit with its horrific Nazi past unexorcised. (It is no coincidence that the two biennale-
rype projects I write about here have roots in twentieth century historical trauma, WWII and the
Holocaust and the Gwangju Uprising.)
Rustom's essay traverses a series offragments-"stories, anecdotes, memories, and testimonials"-
and attempts to "reflect on the instabilities of truth and reconciliation within the relatively marginal
sites of theatre and public culture."? He will speak, for instance, of workshops he has conducted
with the Siddi, indigenous people who descended some two centuries ago from Mrican slaves,
some of whom now live in the state of Karnataka in India. However, what looms like a horizon,
haunting his narrative is a certain historical moment: the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation
Commiss ion of South Mrica, which has since become the model for Truth Commissions and
Truth and Reconciliation discourses around the world-"no reflection on truth and reconciliation
today, in whatever context, can afford to ignore its spectral omnipresence". But Rustom cannot
speak directly about this discourse; if his intention is to expose some of its "sacred cows", he must
do so obliquely. "What is marginal need not be valourised, but it has the potential to offer another
perspecti ve on dominant narratives, if not to deflect their hegemonic assumptions. My intervention
in the Truth and Reconciliation discourse is one such 'experiment' in telling a different story".
His key srrategy is "to infiltrate the seemingly innocent conjunction 'and', in order to open up its
troubled dynamics". Rustom wants to "stress these ' instabilities' not only because truth and
reconciliation mean different things to different people in different cultures at different points in
time, ... more critically, I would emphasise that the relationship between truth and reconciliation
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Lee W't?ng Choy
is essentially volatile. And yet, this would not appear to be the case when we see these terms
coupled together as it were, bound by a seeming causaliry". He quotes Hannah Arendt's Between
Past and Future (which may have provided a structure for his own "Between Truth and
Reconciliation"): "To the extent that the teller of factual truth is also a story-teller, he brings about
that ' reconciliation with realiry' which Hegel ... understood as the ultimate goal of all philosophical
thought".8 But then comments: "Perhaps this is a magisterial assumption on Arendt's part, even
though it is generous in its qualification (' To the extent that the teller of factual truth is also a story
teller ... '). There is no such qualification in the Report (1998) that emerged out of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of South Mrica, where it becomes only too clear that the teller of
factual truth is not a story-teller, or more emphatically, that the story-teller is no teller of facts".
What does Rustom mean by this? He is concerned about people such as the Siddi, who, unlike
Australian or American Aboriginal peoples, cannot claim any primordial link between land and
memory; they are "the unacknowledged blacks of the subcontinent ... [living] for the most part an
extremely marginalised existence on forest land, which is, technically, illegal".
"From the Siddi I learned that memory is not a 'storehouse of the past' ; it is more like a processual
agency that is constantly transforming 'the present' into an historical record. Significantly, the
primary source of mnemonic transformation for the Siddi is song ... there is no separation for the
Siddi between what is remembered and what counts as evidence". However, the state in India has
its own criteria for what counts as evidence and facts, and the Siddi's songs-their stories-don't.
"[In] their struggle for political identiry, the Siddi seek to be categorised within the official
nomenclature of the state as Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes-these categories come with
specific benefits and privileges ... The difficulry concerns the negotiation of this language of the
state with the oral tradition in which Siddi history is documented and lived". In a workshop with
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Siddi actors on "Land and Memory", Rustom confronted this schism when the Minister of Social
Welfare from Karnataka paid a "thoroughly meaningless visit", during which he spewed forth
"paternalistic non-sequiters directed at a bunch of 'lazy natives"' .
"'Why don't we imptovise the minister?' I suggested to the Siddi. In the re-enactment that followed
the minister's visit, the actor-minister, apptopriately masked, sitting regally on a red plastic chair,
demanded to see the documents of the Siddi: 'You're liars. You don't have any rights on this land.
Where are your documents?' To which one of the Siddi women pointed out some trees-'See those
trees, we planted them with our own hands some twenty years ago. Those trees are our documents' ....
This is not the place to elaborate on how the process of conscientisation through theatre can be
activated in real life. What I would emphasise is that my work with the Siddi could only begin after
I had confronred their seeming ' reconciliation with reali ty' through song. Only by rupturing this
tradition of song through improvisations and exercises was it possible to arrive at some critical
confrontation of political truth. I had to move from reconciliation to truth, thereby reversing the
dominant assumption that reconciliation is only possible through an exposition of truth".
In a different workshop, involving fifteen actors from different partS of Karnataka, Rustom led
them in improvisations with a drinking glass, which got transformed into various objects. Then
he asked, "Can you believe that this is a saligrama?" (A saligrama is a small sacred stone that
embodies the godhead.) "While some of the upper-caste actors had no difficulty in caressing,
anointing, and prostrating themselves before the object, the low-caste actors either retreated from
the 'saligrama' altogether, or else, tried to touch it with great diffidence. It was a very moving and
painful revelation of the differentiations of caste, which were surfacing for the first time in our
group. Needless to say, our secular solidarity was completely shattered". At this point Rustom
intervenes with another fiction. "Entering the narrative of the actors as an actor in my own right,
In these workshops, Rustom appears more
concerned with examining moments of
IIreconciliation with reality" and working
through them, than with establishing
truths, then moving on to reconciliations.
I thought aloud: 'This was a glass which we took entirely for granted. At some point it became a
bomb. Then it became a saligrama, in which some of you believed, and others didn't. But now,
when I look at the 'saligrama', I realise it's only a glass of water, from which we can all drink in a
ritual of our making. ' We pass the glass around, and when it returns, I ask: ' Does the glass feel
different from the time when you first started the exercise?' ... I could feel that it was very different,
because we were different".
In these workshops, Rustom appears more concerned with examining moments of "reconciliation
with reality" and working through them, than with establishing truths, then moving on to
reconciliations. If Rustom's emphasis is on unpacking this chain of causality, this "and" between
Truth and Reconciliation, my own interest is in introducing another term into this coupling,
namely, the Real. (Here, I am referring to Jacques Lacan's concept-that which resists
representation-but the word's everyday uses are also what I mean: real life, real experience, reality.
Moreover, if we return to Arendt and ask, so what is between Past and Future, the obvious answer
would be that this "and" in between, it's the Present. I would like to define the "present" by its
resistance to representation, by its "real ness". Only when the present moment becomes past, or
projected as the future, can we pin it down and speak about it. But I should also say that I firmly
believe in the imperative to historicise both the Present and the Real .)
Why I am interested in the Real is because what troubles me are exhibitions like Documenta 11,
which could be described as exhibitions of "truth".9 Yet what they also exhibit is their failure to
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I
reconcile with the Real. It is one thing to criticise biennales and their global fetish for the (culturally)
authentic, but do we want an art that has no interest in an ethical commitment to the Real ?
Exhibitions like Documenta 11 are in a very significant way constituted by artistic interventions
that seek to tell the truths of such traumatic histories as those of Mrica, the Middle East or Eastern
Europe, or of marginalised peoples-women, workers, minorities (histories that remain, as far as
global politics is concerned, still marginalised). They are exhibitions predicated on self-reflection
as self-expression, and for the purposes of "truth" . Yet if these exhibitions privilege artistic evidence
as truth, once this truth feels earned, what seems forgotten is to keep working through the fraught
and perhaps indeterminable experience of reconciling with the Real. Doubtless, the great traumas
of the twentieth century continue to haunt us with their terrible content and facticity, but as we
try to move toward reconciliation, and cannot, isn't this failure as powerful a spectre? Is this what
we seek release from our twentieth century, not so much the horrors themselves, but our sense of
defeated self-reflexivity?
* * *
Typically, after three hours oflooking at art, I will have passed my limit, so the several hours a day,
four days in a row that I spent in Kassel trying to cover the hundred-over artist exhibitions was
relatively hard work. But a first visit to something as "momentous" as Documenta seemed to
demand the diligence. While it's absurd to try to epitomize Documenta 11 by a single project, I'd
like to offer my experience of Shirin Neshat's Tooba (2002) as exemplary of my experience of the
entire show. The installation was a simple juxtaposition of two screens, with benches in between
for viewers to sit on. The whole film lasted under 15 minutes, and looped continuously. Viewers
could enter and leave as they pleased. I came in shortly after the sequence started, then watched
again from the very beginning. One screen focuses on a woman standing against a lone tree on a
Is this what we seek reLease from our twentieth
century, not so much the horrors themseLves,
but our sense of defeated seLf-reflexivity?
hill ; the tree is surrounded by walls on all four sides. The camera begins with a tight close-up on
her face, and then pulls back slowly. On the other screen is a barren landscape; the camera pans
across it; then people dressed in black appear; they are striding toward the woman/tree on the hill
(though it takes a moment to realise this, and by this point, the first screen sporadically duplicates
images from the second) . Intermittently on the second screen are scenes of men gathered in a
circle, chanting vigorously. The piece climaxes with the two screens converging as the crowd in
black surround the woman/tree.
While in Kassel I talked about this piece with a couple of people I had met there. One person who
seemed to know Neshat's work quite well said she liked Tooba's tensions and theatricality, arguing
that the cinematography and the orchestration of the two-screen dialogue were done beautifully.
Not having sufficiently studied the piece, I could concede this point. While it was not wanting in
sophistication, its juxtapositions overtly presented its main subject, the woman, as the object of a
patriarchal gaze (and this was surely knowingly doubled by the fact that many of the audiences in
Kassel would see the people in the film as .lranian/ethnic others). The film's content seemed to
demand somber contemplation. My own response to Tooba was that I disliked its spectacle, or
rather, was disturbed by it, but in the same way as when I watch the news on television (even if
Neshat's work is more allegorical than "documentary"). With the news, solemn attention is also
appropriate, but I'm not so much moved by the tragic events themselves-of course they are
terribly upsetting-I'm more provoked by their spectacularisation. What's most disturbing to me
is that the screen is made more present than the Real; that "evidence" is made available only as
momentary spectacle (to be soon followed by another traumatic image-byte or a commercial for
mobile phones or women's sanitary pads) . This is not to say that all video or film is futile; of
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course there are many compelling screen works (and some were shown at Documenta 11). But for
some reason, I didn't feel that Neshat's piece truly offered a critique of patriarchy, "spectacle" or
the passivity of viewing, and perhaps because it seemed to relish too much in its aestheticised
moral posture.
In contrast, the Atlas GtoUp was like a perverse pleasure. IfNeshat's work could be said to be exemplary
of Documenta 11, then their ptoject might be described as exceptional. It had a sense of humour
which, more often than not, seemed lacking in the show. Founded in 1999 with the purported aim
of researching and archiving materials of recent Lebanese history, the Atlas Group's contribution to
Documenta 11 comprised exhibitions of alleged "documents" concerning the Lebanese civil wars of
1975-199l. These included the videos, I Think It Would Be Better If I Could Weep by Operator #17
(Anonymous) and Hostage: The Bachar Tapes by Souheil Bachar, as well as pages from the notebooks
of the Lebanese historian, Dr Fad! Fakhouri: Notebook Volume 38: Already Been in a Lake of Fire and
Notebook Volume 72: Missing Lebanese Wtzrs. The video by Operator # 17, according to the Atlas
Group, appears to be part of a series of surveillance tapes of a seaside walkway, once a "favourite
meeting place of political pundits, spies, double agents, fortune-tellers, and phrenologists". ~ u t the
operator of camera # 17 seemed more interested in the sunsets than his designated targets, and was
dismissed in 1996---although he got to keep his sunset video footage. As for Notebook Volume 72,
the Atlas Group provides the following information:
"It is a little-known fact that the major historians of the Lebanese civil wars were avid gamblers. It
is said that they met every Sunday at the racetrack: Marxists and Islamists bet on races one through
seven, Maronite nationalists and socialists on races eight through fifteen. Race after race the
historians stood behind the track photographer, whose job it was to capture on film the winning
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horse as it crossed the finish line, to record every photo-finish. It is also said that they convinced
(some say bribed) the photographer to take only one picture as the winning horse arrived. Each
historian would wager on precisely when the photographer would expose the frame-how many
fractions of a second before or after the horse crossed the finishing line. Each of the following
notebook pages includes a photograph clipped from the post-race-day issue of the newspaper, Al-Nahar,
alongside Dr Fakhouri's notes on the race's distance and duration, the winning time of the winning
horse, calculations of averages, the historians' initials with their respective bets, and the time discrepancy
predicted by the winning historian. Each page also includes a briefparagraph in English. Dr Fakhouri 's
widow, Zainab Fakhouri, has attributed these to her husband's habit of including short descriptions of
the winning historians in his notebooks. "lo
Examples of these descriptions include: ''A potent shadow and a legend that has grown into an
officially sanctioned cult"; "Avuncular rather than domineering. She was adept at the well-timed
humourous aside to cut tension"; "He is not only miserable but is brilliant at it. There seems no
event, no matter how trivial that does not arouse him to a frenzy of self-mortification".
When I viewed the Atlas Group's exhibition, comparisons with David Wilson's Museum ofJurassic
Technology immediately came to mind (only later did I recall Jorge Luis Borges's fictions). I have
yet to visit the MJT, and want to make a pilgrimage to it one of these days (it's housed in a
shophouse on the west side of Los Angeles). I know of it from friends who've mentioned it, and
from a book by Lawrence Weschler, Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder. Weschler, speaking of an LA
art critic who's a fan of the MJT, writes: "one of the things he most likes about the place is the way
it deploys all the traditional signs of a museum's institutional authority-meticulous presentation,
exhaustive captions, hushed lighting, and state-of-the-art technical armature-all to subvert the
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very notion of the authoritative as it applies not only to itself but to any museum. The Jurassic
infects its visitors with doubts-little curlicues of misgiving-that proceed to infest all his other
dealings with the Culturally Sacrosanct". II
My visit to Kassel was as part of one group among several who were invited by the Goethe Institut
and the German Press Office. The Goethe people had arranged meetings for us with some of
Documenta 1 ]'S curators, including Mark Nash, who teaches film and video history in London.
From our brief meeting, I got the impression that questioning the hows and whys of "exhibition"
was not a priority for the curatorial team (Artistic Director Okwui Enwezor, Co-Curators Carlos
Basualdo, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Ute Meta Bauer, Octavio Zaya and Nash). I asked why,
if Platforms 1 to 4 had themes intended to engender debate, didn't Platform 5 have a theme as
well, and why wasn't it "exhibition"?-why didn't they choose to problematise "exhibition" in this
exhibition? Nash admitted that it wasn't their plan, but did not elaborate. What he did say was
telling: their approach to installing the works was, for the most part, to establish a certain levelling.
Notably, they tried not differentiate the "white boxes" which contained installations of art objects
of one kind or another, from the white boxes gone black, which showed the video and film
installations. As if to say that what is most important is what they have in common: they are all
instances of contemporary visual culture. While I can't say if! felt that video and film dominated
Documenta 11, there was certainly a lot of it. But I have to wonder about the prevalence of the
screen-would it be untimely to suggest that it has become the new "flatness" that contemporary
art is driven towards? Do we need to revisit and re-theorise Clement Greenberg's arguments about
the ineluctable flatness of the pictorial plane in modern art? If the flatness of Abstract Expressionism
laid claim to being the te/os of the history of Western painting-if "flatness" was the te/os of
modernism, it seems to have re-appeared as the te/os in our age of spectacle. The spectacle: the
ultimate view, teleology itself; it flattens out the panorama, conflates everything with everything
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Lee Weng Choy
else, yielding a spread of images that appear to vary but make no difference. Much like the news
on television, replete with commercials.
Because of the many video/film works (some were brief, while others were hours long, and Stan
Douglas's didn't loop, but permutated for the show's entire lOO-day duration) and also, of course,
because of the sheer scale of the event, Documenta 11 demanded so much-so much of one's time.
In hindsight, however, maybe it demanded too little. It was just another big exhibition, albeit with
several arguably good works of art. Could more have been meant, if it was scaled down? For all its
claims of marrying art with the social and political, and despite the levelling of its presentation, what
could not be denied was that Documenta, like all (self-)important exhibitions, is also about (future)
canon formation. Not only is there a hierarchy vis-a-vis other international exhibitions, but within
Documenta 11 hierarchies were evident-there were "stars" like Neshat, Douglas, Leon Golub and
Hanne Darboven, and there were others like tsunamii.net from Singapore. One can always debate a
curator's or art historian's privileging of certain artists and works over others, and these debates, I'll
maintain, are legitimate. But in a platform like Documenta, a more general question begs to be asked:
is excellence in art a defensible value? And for what purpose?
In his preface to the Documenta 11 catalogue, 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 .... [Tlhe prospects
for contemporary art .. . could not be more daunting and demanding. "12 I would, however, argue
that many of the privileged works in Documenta 11 weren't that demanding-or rather, 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
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historical burdens; as a screen for the desire to escape from the ghosts of the nineteenth century;
guilt as a symptom of the twentieth century's defeated self-reflexivity.
But guilt and its twin, blame, are not adequate responses. To denounce something like colonialism
is not enough to exorcise its spectres in social formations like culture, disciplines like anthropology,
discourses like modernism, or events like the international art biennale. We-this largest ofwe's-
are the reluctant inheritors of culture, anthropology, modernism and the universal expo. And we
have to work through this debt-but how? In Farewell to an Idea, 13 T J Clark's book on modernism,
the art historian confronts its failures-and as responsibly as anyone else. But unlike many other
critics who take as a foregone conclusion that modernism already resides in history's dustbin, he
emphasises modernism's 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 current. 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 in history, but history into our selves. 14 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. To say 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
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Lee Weng Choy
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) .
Endnotes
1. Marian Pastor Roces, "Consider Post Culture" in Papers from the Conference of the Third Asia-Pacific
Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2000, pp. 34-38. All citations of Pastor
Roces are from this text.
2. Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988,
pp. 130-131. I should contrast the picture of the self-doubting anthtopologist with the intellectual who, for
all his or her self-questioning, remains committed to critical inquiry. Geertz, of course, is an example of that
person. For a concise defence of the legitimacy of academi c criti cal inquiry, see Mary Louise Pratt's "A Reply
to Hatold Fromm" in "Race'; Writing, and Diffirence, ed. Henry Louis Gates, J r., Chicago: University of
Chicago Press) 986, pp. 400-401. Pratt was responding to Fromm's criticism that today's "critical" academics
are ironic reproductions of the colonialism they object to. Fromm argued that these academics acquire
professional capital by appropriating the li ves of marginalised others into their academic discourses. But
Pratt's rejoinder is that "it is not all academic activity that Fromm is objecting to, only some and notably
mine"; the aim of some academic activity is precisely to intervene in the general production of knowledge,
and "the name for such interventions is not colonialism, it is critique ... They are attempts to change the
culture one li ves in".
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3. There are of course a number of excellent anthropologists and art writers; in this same volume offocas
there's a commendable essay by Ashley Carruthers, "Simryn Gill , Dalam".
4. Some background on the Gwangju People's Uprising: In October 1979, President Chung-hee Park was
assassinated, and martial law immediately declared. Kyu-ha Ch' oe became the interim president, but the hard-
liner General Doo-hwan Chun soon seized effective control of the government. Nonetheless, in the first months
of 1980, President Ch' oe eased civil restrictions, and students and workers demonstrated for freedom and
better working conditions; the demonstrations intensified in April and early May. A National Assembly was
scheduled for May 20, but on May 17 General Chun cancelled it, imposed full martial law and arrested
dissidents. In Gwangju, university students held demonstrations on May 18. Chun responded by sending in
Special Warfare Command paratroopers. The attack was brutal, bur it prompted larger demonstrations, and
students, workers, and citizens drove the army from the city by May 22. A citizen's committee in Gwangju
tried to negotiate for amnesty for the demonstrators, bur the government, on May 27, sent in regular army
troops who retook the city by force, and hundreds of lives were lost. From Donald Stone MacDonald, The
Koreans: Contemporary Politics and Society, Boulder: Westview Press, 1996, pp. 58-59.
5. It is common practice in travel writing to change names or to leave them our altogether in order to
protect the privacy of persons, and facts often take a back seat ro sheer storytelling. Parodies of travel writing
aside, I thought I should nonetheless fact-check my impressions of Seung-young Kim's work. The title of
the work is Room of Memory (1999) and the photo in question is indeed a self-portrait; however, as of press
time, I could not yet confirm the length of the video.
6. Thomas de Zengotita, "The Numbing of the American Mind: Culture as anesthetic", Harper's Magazine,
April 2002, pp. 33-40.
7. Rustom Bharucha, "Between Truth and Reconciliation: Experiments in Theatre and Public Culture",
presented at the Documenta Platform 2 conference, Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the
Processes of Truth and Reconciliation, New Delhi, May 2001; publication is forthcoming from Hatje Cantz
Verlag. All citations of Bharucha are from this text (which is not yet paginated).
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Lee Weng Choy
8. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1993, p. 262.
9. As Kevin Chua shared with me (from personal correspondence): "One lamented the number of
documentary or documentary-like videos being exhibited-the documentary seemed to have become a
baseline of art practice: invariably politicised, aiming ultimately at some realist conception of truth". Moreover:
"So many artists at this Documenta seemed to play the 'recovery of forgotten places' card: ego Ravi Agarwal
(South Gujarat, India), Michael Ashkin (New Jersey), William Eggleston (Southern USA) , David Goldblatt
(South Africa), Santu Mofokeng (South Africa)".
10. From the Documenta 11 exhibition and catalogue (Hatje Cantz Verlag 2002). For more information on
the Atlas Group, check our: http://www.thearlasgroup.org
II . Lawrence Weschler, Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and
Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, New York: Vintage Books, 1995, p. 40.
12. Okwui Enwezor, Documenta 11 Platform 5: Exhibition catalogue, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2002, p. 40.
13. T J Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodesftom a History of Modernism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
14. For a discussion of Walter Benjamin's ideas on history, see Richard Sieburth, "Benjamin the Scrivener,"
Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.