"As a literary-cultural observer who has an interest in aspects of Southeast and East Asian contemporary art in its various forms, it is provocative to see what is now called ‘cultural theory’ present in the conceptualising of art...
more"As a literary-cultural observer who has an interest in aspects of Southeast and East Asian contemporary art in its various forms, it is provocative to see what is now called ‘cultural theory’ present in the conceptualising of art biennales and contemporary visual art exhibitions, whether it be the ‘2006 Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact’ or, say, Hou Hanru’s and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s blockbuster ‘Cities on the Move: Urban Chaos and Global Change – East Asian Art, Architecture and Films Now’ (1999).
As part of its curatorial formulation, the latter exhibition had assertions such as this: ‘A kind of mixture of liberal Capitalist [sic] market economy and Asian, post-totalitarian social control is being established as a new social order [in capitalist and urban East Asia]. Culture, in such a context, is by nature hybrid, impure and contradictory.’ There is a certain intellectual genealogy behind such a statement, and thus there are authors ‘present’ here, whether they have been directly read or not. Among the animating ideas would be literary critic Homi K. Bhabha’s ‘hybridity’, coming out from the 1980s, and cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s notions of unexpected disjunctive ‘cultural flows’ in the world economy and cultural resistance from the bottom up, from an influential 1990 article. Cultural theory – not only dealing with issues of class, race and gender, as Terry Eagleton mentions in the epigraph – and how it has encompassed postcolonial theory, and then through the influence of journals such as Public Culture, become what might be called transnational cultural theory, should not be simply sniffed at though, for they have enabled new research and thinking of the question of how culture, along with peoples, circulate around the world. But the question that Eagleton poses is valid.
Does cultural theory as it is sometimes used still enable analyses or does it descend into orthodox caricatures of what we now expect to see in ‘approvable’ artistic and other culturalist production: various resistance to the global oppression of transnational capital, resistance that could even lead to alternative modernities from outside the metropolitan centres that will upset or at least unsettle the present global hegemon. The result of the inflexible application of theory might be the misrepresentation of the artistic-cultural work examined, along with the valorization of only certain sorts of work.
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