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When art was political: Historicising decolonisation and the Cold War in Southeast Asia through curatorial practice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 June 2020
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In Asia, and in Southeast Asia in particular, the Cold War was far from cold, witnessing the most deadly conflicts and political massacres of the second half of the twentieth century. Also, the clash of ideologies there did not follow a binary logic but included a third force, nationalism, which was rooted in the anticolonialist movements of the interwar years and played a significant role even in countries that decolonised peacefully after the end of the Second World War. The Cold War thus overlapped with the twin process of decolonisation and nation-building, which had its founding moment at the Asian-African Conference at Bandung in 1955, where the non-aligned camp, which advocated a neutral position vis-à-vis the two rival blocs, coalesced (one year ealier, the anticommunist Southeast Asia Treaty Organization had been established). Postcolonial aspirations to national progress that tied socioeconomic development to the civic and cultural elevation of the citizenry were widely shared among newly decolonised countries. By the mid-1960s, however, the utopian ‘Bandung Spirit’ had lost ground to Cold War realpolitik; intra-Asian and communal conflicts fomented by Cold War enmities (the Sino–Indian War of 1962, the Indo–Pakistani War of 1965, Indonesia's anticommunist purges of 1965–66) along with the escalation of the Vietnam War and the consequent exacerbation of regional divisions, belied governments’ earlier commitment to human rights, Third World solidarity and world peace. The authoritarian involution of several Asian countries that were often American allies, redoubled by the opening of their economies to multinational corporations, led many artists and intellectuals to embrace political activism. The conception of art as a revolutionary instrument in the service of the masses had been famously articulated by Mao Zedong at the Yan'an Forum in 1942. In China, Mao's prescriptions on art were sidelined, though never officially repudiated, only in the early 1990s, following the end of the Cold War and the adoption of a socialist market economy, by acknowledging the necessity ‘to respect and guarantee the creativity of individuals’.
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References
1 Lee, Christopher J., ‘Between a moment and an era: The origins and afterlives of Bandung’, in Making a world after empire: The Bandung moment and its political afterlives, ed. Lee, C.J. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), pp. 15–17Google Scholar.
2 In India, a state of emergency was declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi from 1975 to 1977; in Indonesia, Suharto's New Order (1966–98) made the military politically paramount and routinely repressed dissent; in the Philippines, President Marcos (in office 1965–86), ruled under martial law from 1972 to 1981; in South Korea, martial law was in force from 1972 until 1979 under president (General) Park Chung-hee (in office from 1963 until his assassination in 1979); in Taiwan the ruling Guomindang (Kuomintang) Party upheld martial law from 1949 until 1987; in Thailand, military governments were in power from 1957 until 1980 (and, again, from 2014 to 2019), bar the three years from October 1973 to October 1976.
3 Tse-Tung, Mao, Talks at the Yenan Forum on Arts and Literature, 2nd ed. (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1960)Google Scholar. In addition to regular quinquennial celebrations, the 70th anniversary of the ‘talks’ was commemorated by the PRC Ministry of Culture in May 2012.
4 As reported by Wenyibao (9 Mar. 1991), cited in Geremie R. Barmé, In the red: On contemporary Chinese culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 35. The changes in the Chinese Communist Party's official line on art are usefully periodised by John Clark, Asian modernities: Chinese and Thai art compared, 1980 to 1999 (Sydney: Power Institute, 2010), pp. 209–11.
5 The social and cultural historiography of Cold War Asia has grown considerably over the past decade. See, among other, Tuong Vu and Wasana Wongsurawat, eds., Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, identity, and culture (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009); Tony Day and Maya H.T. Liem, eds., Cultures at war: The Cold War and cultural expression in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University [SEAP], 2010).
6 Louis Menand, ‘Unpopular front: American art and the Cold War’, New Yorker (17 Oct. 2005); https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/17/unpopular-front (accessed 20 Jan. 2020); Frances Stonor Saunders, ‘Modern art was CIA “weapon”’, Independent (22 Oct. 1995); https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html (accessed 20 Jan. 2020). See also Frances Stonor Saunders, The cultural Cold War: The CIA and the world of arts and letters, 2nd ed. (New York: New Press, 2013).
7 Social Realism had, in fact, originated in mid-nineteenth-century France as a reaction against academicism, hence it was a precursor of the turn of the century modernist avant-garde, even though in the USSR under Stalin it functioned, in the triumphalist ‘Socialist’ Realist style also adopted in the People's Republic of China, as a barrier against (bourgeois) modernism. For a recent critical reassessment, see Socialist realisms: Soviet painting 1920–1970, ed. Matthew Cullerne Brown and Matteo Lafranconi (Milan: Skira, 2012).
8 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational aesthetics (1998), trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with Mathieu Copeland (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002).
9 See Sam Gaskin's review for Ocula, ‘Aesthetic radicalism in “Awakenings” at Singapore's National Gallery’; https://ocula.com/magazine/reports/awakenings-art-in-society-in-asia-1960s1990s/ (accessed 23 Jan. 2020). Apinan himself acknowledged that his video ‘paid respect’ to Beuys, as well as Bruce Neuman and Nam June Paik, in an interview contained in the catalogue of Suddenly turning visible, pp. 245–6.
10 Susan Silas and Chrysanne Stathacos, interview with Arahmaiani, The Revolution will be Sponsored/ la revolucion sera patrocinada; https://larevolucionserapatrocinada.wordpress.com/2016/12/18/arahmaiani-sacred-coke-1994-2014/ (accessed 28 Jan. 2020). Cf her painting, Linga/Yoni (1994). The term ‘Green Revolution’, semiotically denoting both ‘agriculture’ and divergence from communist (‘red’) revolutions, made its debut in a 1968 speech by William S. Gaud, director of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). For a critical appraisal see John H. Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution: Wheat, genes and the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). On the Rockfeller Foundation's funding of the study of Asian art, see Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, ‘Art history and the global: Deconstructing the latest canonical narrative’, Journal of Global History 14, 3 (2019): 424.
11 Adele Tan, ‘From political travesties to aesthetic justice: The ugly in Teo Eng Seng's D-cells’, in Ugliness: The non-beautiful in art and theory, ed. Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widirch (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), pp. 147, 153; see also Tan's essay in the catalogue of Awakenings, ‘On the inadequacy of art, or ruminations on the year 1987’, pp. 221–2.
12 Harsono, in an interview given in February 2019 to the Korea Herald (repr. in Jakarta Post, 11 Feb. 2019) for the Korean inauguration of Awakenings, said (jokingly?) that he would have shot the director of the art school from which he was kicked out.
13 Oliver W. Wolters, History, culture, and region in Southeast Asian Perspectives perspectives, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: SEAP; Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999).
14 See Andrea Buddensieg and Hans Belting, eds., The global art world: Audiences, markets, museums (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009); Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal and Solveig Ovsdetbo, eds., The Biennial reader (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010); Sabine B. Vogel, Biennials: Art on a global scale (Berlin: Springer, 2010).
15 Joyeux-Prunel, ‘Art history and the global’, p. 429.
16 There are exceptions, of course. The Korea-born Nam June Paik studied in Tokyo in the early 1950s before going to Germany in 1956. He returned shortly to Japan in 1963 before moving finally to New York.
17 The Latin American countries ruled by long-term military dictatorships were (in chronological order): Ecuador (1963–66 and 1972–78), Guatemala (1963–85), Honduras (1963–66 and 1972–82), Bolivia (1964–1982), Brazil (1964–85), Argentina (1966–73 and 1976–83), Peru (1968–80), Panama (1968–89), Chile (1973–90), Uruguay (1973–84). Among the ample literature on this subject, see the classic study by Alain Rouquié, Military and the state in Latin America, trans. Paul E. Sigmund (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
18 For two critical overviews, see Ades, Dawn, Art in Latin America: The modern era, 1820–1980 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Carranza, Luis F. and Lara, Fernando Luiz, Modern architecture in Latin America: Art, technology, and utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014)Google Scholar. John Clark notes in Asian modernities (p. 22): ‘The Asian modernities are much more a discursive construction than the Latin-American, since their casual relations are much less closely interlinked, but they are similar in that they propose a common set of issues and constructions.’
19 The movement's manifesto was penned by the art critic Germano Celant, ‘Arte Povera: Appunti per una guerriglia’ [Arte Povera: Notes for a guerrilla war], Flash Art 5 (Nov.–Dec. 1967), p. 3; available in English at: flash---art.com/article/arte-povera/ (accessed 27 Jan. 2020).
20 National Gallery Singapore, Exhibition catalogues; https://www.nationalgallery.sg/discover-learn/publications/exhibition-catalogues (accessed 27 Jan. 2020).