Abstract
This chapter explores the principles and operative procedures that might characterize an independent archive documenting the emergence of modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia. The author takes THAI ART ARCHIVES™, a non-profit archive of modern and contemporary art in Thailand founded in 2010, as a case study to examine the rewards and challenges of creating such an archive. The author considers the pragmatic and idealistic goals of such an archive and the stakeholders it serves, highlighting the cultural and political complexities that arise in the creation and curation of a relational and decolonial visual art archive in Asia.
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Notes
- 1.
The pluri-versal is not to be understood as synonymous with “pluralist,” as pluri-versal denotes not merely a diverse “array” of histories (in the sense of a “plethora”) but, additionally, that each of those histories implies unique worldviews that do not lend themselves to the universalist, globalist dream of their eventual integration; on the decolonial rejection of (implicitly imperialist) universalism in politics, knowledge development, and cultural identity formation, and the substitution for that ideology with a pluri-versal worldview “in which many worlds can co-exist,” see Walter D. Mignolo, “DELINKING: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality,” Cultural Studies, 21:2–3, 2007; 449–514, also available at http://waltermignolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/WMignolo_Delinking.pdf (accessed 9 January 2019). I am arguing for an adaptation of Mignolo’s concepts to the realm of writing pluri-versal modern and contemporary art histories in the visual art archives in Asia.
- 2.
Much of this phenomenon has grown out of contemporary artists’ engagement with archives (and archiving as a practice) in their work since roughly the mid-1990s; see Okwui Enwezor, “Archive Fever: Photography between History and the Monument,” in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, exh. cat., International Center of Photography, New York, 2008, pp. 11–51; and Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October, Vol. 110 (Autumn 2004), pp. 3–22.
- 3.
See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).
- 4.
See Charles Green and Anthony Gardner, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016); Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2012); and Paul O’Neill, Mick Wilson, and Lucy Steeds, eds., The Curatorial Conundrum: What to Study? What to Research? What to Teach? (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2016).
- 5.
Enwezor (as in footnote 2).
- 6.
It is notable that Relational Art does not merely invite audience participation; rather, it demands or commands it in order that the artwork realizes its own time-based enactment (or becoming) and completion, after which the artwork settles into an archival condition retrospectively by way of its castoffs, or composite body of evidence of “what recently transpired.” Critically important are the mutually reinforcing terms of audience collective and cooperative action, the latter denoting that audience’s coming together not merely passively, as in “drifting together” (even though an element of chance formation is always inherent to the occasion), but very purposefully, i.e., to get something done in a composite way that could not be accomplished according to the former way things were done in individual isolation (i.e., the lone art observer contemplating the work of art as she stood before it). It is in this distinctly “cooperative” sense—as in the 1960s and 1970s fresh market food co-op in which each member had to invest labor in relation to others in order to sustain a community-based economy—that Relational Art may be understood as an implicit act of resistance to capitalist consumer-oriented practices; see Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012); see also Claire Bishop, ed., Participation, Documents of Contemporary Art (London and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press and Whitechapel, 2006); and Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 1998).
- 7.
This question becomes especially urgent as new, revisionist histories are written in the region that, understandably, seek to “decolonize” our knowledge of the past but run the risk of promoting equally distorting histories arising from their authors’ own contemporary, socio-political context and its potential for giving rise to various kinds of confirmation bias.
- 8.
The historical emergence of Thai contemporary art from a long modernist past and a more recent, postmodern “prehistory” is an object of continued debate, although most observers would now agree that the era stretching roughly from 1986 to 1996 was a formative one; for a pioneering perspective, see Apinan Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford, New York, and Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1992); for a more recent, revisionary and critically-engaged thesis on the advent of Thai contemporary art, see David Teh, Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2017).
- 9.
In the decade subsequent to its founding in 2000, Asia Art Archive (AAA; Hong Kong) enlisted regional representatives throughout greater Asia for the culling, in situ, of important archival materials (mostly secondary sources and publications, as befitting a developing library) for housing and preservation at its platform in central Hong Kong. As AAA approached its 10th Anniversary in 2010 and publicly announced a shift towards research and special projects (over collections development, per se, much as this endeavor earnestly continues to the present), this founding operative arrangement was discontinued in favor of a more centralized program. Notably, at no point in its development, to date, has AAA spearheaded any collaborative partnership with independent regional archives in Asia or elsewhere; for a general overview of AAA’s archival mission (there is currently no comprehensive developmental history available to the public), see https://aaa.org.hk/en/about/about-asia-art-archive (accessed 24 November 2018). For an example of AAA’s most recent work abroad as characteristically directed by its own staff (signifying a more institutionally centralized, over collaborative methodology), see “Asia Art Archive Projects in South Asia: A Talk by Sabih Ahmed,” at http://www.aaa-a.org/programs/sabih-ahmed-at-asia-art-archive-in-america-2/ (accessed 11 January 2019).
- 10.
For a parallel argument in the realm of biennial curating, see Okwui Enwezor, “The Black Box,” in documenta 11 (2012), pp. 42–55, Kassel. Enwezor conceived such a profoundly para-curatorial aspect of documenta 11 that explicitly encouraged the dispersal of the curatorial function among so many parties that he could rightly caution the observer not to regard the exhibition itself as some kind of “culminating” phenomenon, but merely a complementary, publicly-accessible component of a much larger, time-based, and profoundly collaborative project (the latter entailed the convening of several major conferences, or “platforms”—on various socio-political themes—in Vienna, Berlin, New Delhi, St. Lucia, and Lagos prior to the exhibition in Kassel).
- 11.
The rethinking of the independent (non-institutional) auteur-curator tradition and its hegemonic tendencies is being driven by a host of new issues and challenges facing independent curators and new art production today, among them the rise of new media; the expansion of the curatorial function and exhibition-making beyond traditional art spaces; and the ever-expanding discursive, or “para-curatorial” aspect of exhibition production; see Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012); Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, eds., Curating Research (London: Open Editions, 2015); Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2010); Magdalena Malm, ed., Curating Context: Beyond the Gallery into Other Fields (Stockholm: Art and Theory, 2017); Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver, “Curating in/as commons: posthuman curating and computational cultures,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, February 2016, accessed at https://www.academia.edu/29844696/Curating_in_as_Common_s_Posthuman_Curating_and_Computational_Cultures (15 November 2018); Joasia Krysa, ed., Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems (DATA Browser 03), accessed at http://www.data-browser.net/db03.html (15 November 2018); and the various articles (mostly in German, with some available in English translation on the publication’s website), Springerin, “The Post-Curatorial Turn,” Winter 2017.
- 12.
See Kate Fowle, “Action Research: Generative Curatorial Practices,” in Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, eds., Curating Research: Occasional Table (London: Open Editions/de Appel, 2015), pp. 153–72; see also in the same anthology, Simon Sheikh, “Towards the Exhibition as Research,” pp. 32–46.
- 13.
In addition to being featured in various major group and solo exhibitions in Asia, Europe, and the United States throughout the 1990s, Montien was a key figure in the watershed exhibition Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions, curated by Apinan Poshyanada, at Asia Society Museum, the Queens Museum, and the Grey Art Gallery of New York University (all New York), in 1996. Only months later Montien enjoyed a critically acclaimed solo exhibition House of Hope, at Jeffrey Deitch Project Space, in New York’s legendary SoHo district (October 1997); see the Traditions/Tensions exhibition catalogue (as herein cited) and http://www.deitch.com/archive/exhibitions/house-of-hope (accessed 26 November 2018). The best general introduction (in English) to Montien’s life, work, and historic stature is Apinan Poshyananda, Montien Boonma: Temple of the Mind, exh. cat., Asia Society Museum, New York, 2003.
- 14.
Alfred Pawlin (b. 1951) directed Visual Dhamma Gallery, in central Bangkok, from 1980 to 2000, its programs having become by the mid-1990s almost exclusively focused on Montien; Alfred Pawlin in text conversation with Gregory Galligan, 26 November 2018; see also Gridthiya Gaweewong, “Interview: Alfred Pawlin,” in [Montien Boonma]: Unbuilt/Rare Works, exh. cat., The Jim Thompson Art Center, Thai Art Archives, and Estate of Montien Boonma, 2013, pp. 44–58 [In English and Thai].
- 15.
Much to his credit, Jumpong Boonma has recently established Montien Atelier, a modest archival platform housing and exhibiting his father’s artistic legacy; see Khetsirin Pholdhampalit, “Memories of Montien,” The Nation, 5 March 2017, http://www.nationmultimedia.com/detail/art/30307914 (accessed 17 November 2018).
- 16.
Independent visual art archives in Southeast Asia run considerable conceptual risks in soliciting or accepting any funding from regional governments, especially at a time when conflicting political ideologies are prone to co-opting any cultural program for their own interests (thus raising the specter of potential censorship or other kinds of meddling in the archives’ daily operations and mission).
- 17.
The monies paid out to the Indonesian Visual Art Archive by the Ford Foundation between 2007 and 2008 represented two collections digitization grants of $51,956 and $478,844, respectively; see https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/our-grants/grants-database/grants-all (accessed 26 November 2018).
- 18.
From 2013 to 2016, Thai Art Archives curated four exhibitions (in Bangkok, New York, and Hong Kong) highlighting the importance of archives and archival ephemera to the understanding of Thai modern and contemporary art histories; for details, see thaiartarchives.mono.net (especially “Home” and “Special Projects”).
- 19.
For the reader who may be wondering, the author is not advocating for the abolishment of the “auteur-researcher” model of scholarship; rather, this essay intends to suggest the salutary possibility of developing a dynamic, complementary, and expressly collaborative alternative to it.
- 20.
It is notable that just as montien was achieving worldwide recognition in the mid-1990s with his mixed media and installation work—at that time relatively new, experimental genres in Thailand—Rirkrit Tiravanija (b. 1961) was already emerging, in New York, as one of the most compelling of a new, globally ascendant “relational” generation that would soon effectively render installation art a virtually historicized genre (indeed by the early 2000s); see Vichoke Mukdamanee, Mixed Media and Installation Art in Thailand (Art Center, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, 2002).
- 21.
Poshyananda’s elision of Montien’s artistic concerns with expressly Buddhist ideology is readily evident throughout the majority of his writings on the artist, which, in tenor, tend toward the elegiac (if not the eulogistic); for a widely accessible example written not long after Montien’s death, see Apinan Poshyananda, “Montien Boonma: Paths of Suffering (dukkha),” in Montien Boonma: Temple of the Mind, exh. cat., Asia Society Museum, the Queens Museum, and the Grey Art Gallery of New York University, 2003; pp. 9–39. It is notable that Poshyananda’s earlier account of Montien’s life and work, one written when Montien was just emerging from graduate studies in Europe in the late 1980s, is comparatively more wide-ranging and grounded in Thai social and political topics; see Poshyananda (as in footnote 8), pp. 216–20. The stark difference between the two approaches is not solely due to Montien’s own increasing engagement of spritualist-leaning themes in his work after the tragic death of his wife Chancham (to breast cancer) in 1994; in addition, historical accounts of Montien have in every instance, to date, been written by former close personal associates and friends, and thus, such accounts and “histories” are permeated with notably subjective, eulogistic sentiment; see Navin Rawanchaikul and Gridthiya Gaweewong, “Dearest Montien: A Tribute to Montien Boonma,” ArtAsiaPacific, Issue 89 (July/Aug 2014), accessible at http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/89/DearestMontien (accessed 11 January 2019). It was TAA’s express intention to resist this subjective impulse in its archival research and exhibition—the author, a co-curator, adamantly discouraged the inclusion of personal Montien family ephemera anywhere in the show or catalogue—in order to lend the artist a more objective, deserved historical stature (indeed one that might be in keeping with Montien’s actual, historic achievement).
- 22.
While we have direct material evidence that Montien was impressed by the work and ideology of Beuys, Boltanski’s influence is a more conjectural matter. Boltanksi’s postwar, elegiac work was by the late 1980s achieving global acclaim, while the artist taught open-door studio classes in Paris that many followers selectively audited. That said, a recent query made to Boltanski on this subject (before his death in 2021) revealed that he cannot personally recall ever encountering Montien or his work; Boltanski in email correspondence with the author, 9 September 2014.
- 23.
Despite Montien’s diverse interests and sources, Poshyananda implicitly promoted his primarily Buddhist reading of Montien’s work in his inaugural Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB; 19 Oct. 2018–3 Feb. 2019), for which, as artistic director and chief curator, he installed Montien’s sculptural ensemble Zodiac [or Zodiacal] Houses (1998) in a Buddhist wat in the Thai capital, indeed even though Montien intended for the composite, audience-participatory work to be perceived as an expression of non-denominational spirituality, one ironically occasioned by the artist’s aural and spatial experience of the daily clanging of church bells in the towering cathedrals of Stuttgart (Montien enjoyed a several-month-long artist’s residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in the late 1990s); see http://www.bkkartbiennale.com/venues-detail/?venues=3 (accessed 9 January 2019).
- 24.
For an English-language history of Thai modern art, as well as the historical emergence of Thai Neo-Traditionalism, see Apinana Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 194–207. The primary characteristic of Thai Neo-Traditional art is its direct incorporation of traditional (or ancient) Siamese design and architectural motifs, as well as allegorical subjects drawn from Thai Buddhist literature, all functioning as shorthand for denoting the artwork’s “Thainess” (in express contrast to Western modernism’s abstract and minimalist tendencies of the postwar period); see John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), especially Chapter 4, “Formation of the Neotraditional,” pp. 71–90.
- 25.
For background of Obrist’s ongoing Unbuilt Roads project, see Hans Ulrich Obrist and Guy Tortosa, Unbuilt Roads: 107 Unrealized Projects (Berlin and Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1997); a reprint of the mid-2000 correspondence between Obrist and Montien is provided in [Montien Boonma]: Unbuilt/Rare Works, exh. cat., Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, 2013, pp. 90–95.
- 26.
It is worth noting that in keeping with the archival, relational, and curatorially anti-hegemonic nature of this undertaking, TAA (in collaboration with the Jim Thompson Art Center) also recovered from the Montien Boonma Estate a surviving series of work by Montien’s artist-wife, master printmaker Chancham Mukdaprakorn (d. 1994), and ultimately set aside a small gallery for its unprecedented exhibition; see [Montien Boonma]: Unbuilt/Rare Works, exh. cat., The Jim Thompson Art Center, Thai Art Archives, and Estate of Montien Boonma (Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, 2013), pp. 106–11. An introductory portal to video documentation of the conference “Montien Boonma: Other Dimensions, Life and Work” (9 May 2013, Jim Thompson Art Center) is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--YqWXz8voI (accessed 24 December 2018).
- 27.
On Thailand’s “internal colonialism” of the late nineteenth century, see Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994); also Winichakul, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’: A Geographical Discourse of Civilizational Thinking in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Siam,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 3 (August 2000), pp. 528–49; and Michael Herzfeld, “The Conceptual Allure of the West: Dilemmas and Ambiguities of Crypto-Colonialism in Thailand,” in Rachel V. Harrison and Peter A. Jackson, eds., The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Thailand (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), pp. 173–86. In addition to the “internal” issues raised here, Peter Jackson also point out Siam’s ambiguous “semicolonial” status in relation to its early twentieth-century neighbors; see Peter A. Jackson, “The Ambiguities of Semicolonial Power in Thailand,” in The Ambiguous Allure of the West (as cited above), pp. 37–56.
- 28.
The prospect of a current of auto-orientalism as arguably figuring in Thailand’s early modernist, national development—first proposed in this context—will be taken up by the author in a forthcoming essay, “The Diorama and the Siamese Cat Show: Thailand, Futurism, and Auto-Orientalism at the New York World’s Fair, 1939–1940” (publisher to be announced); open-access to be provided at https://mono.academia.edu/GregoryGalligan (accessed 9 January 2019).
- 29.
On the conceptual vagaries and syncretic complexities of Thai Theravada Buddhist practice, see Justin Thomas McDaniel, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). As McDaniel states, “Despite having certain cultural axioms, there is no core of Thai Buddhism” (p. 15). Thailand’s most recognizable “Buddhist” practitioner today is Kamin Lertchaiprasert (b. 1964), but even Lertchaiprasert’s practice has recently gravitated to Zen Buddhism for its accessibility by the public by comparison to Theravada Buddhist praxis; see June Yap, “This: Kamin Lertchaiprasert’s Timeless Present Moment,” in The Timeless Present Moment, exh. cat., Maiiam Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, 2017 (n.p.). Finally, Zen Buddhism arguably constitutes “Buddhism” in most global discourse surrounding co-called Buddhist content or expression in contemporary art, a phenomenon stemming largely from 1960s Western countercultural ideology; see Alexandra Munroe, “Buddhism and the Neo-Avant-Garde: Cage Zen, Beat Zen, and Zen,” in The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009, pp. 199–215.
- 30.
Crucial support for TAA’s occupation of a small experimental space at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre was generously made possible by former BACC director Chatvichai Promadhattavedi (founding director 2008–2011) in the form of a rent-free lease; after a pilot period of roughly two years, TAA managed to raise enough funding from private donors (primarily local art gallerists) to pay a modest monthly rental fee that helped the BACC sustain its own museum programming.
- 31.
For an account of a potentially more “grounded” and regionally “connected” curatorial practice than what is currently represented in the figure of the jet-setting, auteur-curator (and auteur-researcher), see Nancy Adajania and Ranjit Hoskote, “Notes towards a Lexicon of Urgencies,” in Journals, 1 October 2010: Independent Curators International (ICI). http://curatorsintl.org/research/notes-towards-a-lexicon-of-urgencies (accessed 17 November 2018).
- 32.
On the original use of the term “misprision” to refer to the artist’s “poetic misreading” of one’s precursors so as to surmount their influence and imply a “correction” of their historic achievement, see Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 5–16. The present author is taking poetic license with the term in adapting it to refer to the misreading of history (whether by individuals or institutions, and whether purposely or unwittingly) for contemporary political or social agendas.
- 33.
On Warhol’s ambivalent relation to archiving, see Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Publishers, Ltd., 1975), pp. 144–45.
- 34.
On the subtle complexities of artistic influence and a rejection of the “billiard ball model of artistic creation” (according to which one force simply strikes and compels another in a certain direction), see Göran Hermerén, Influence in Art and Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975).
- 35.
See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). On the dualistic nature of visual cognition itself, by which everything seen is preserved in the mind by being shifted to an unconscious realm of archival traces or imprints, see the interesting analogy made of consciousness to a “mystic writing pad” (or “magic slate”) by Sigmund Freud in the early twentieth century: Sigmund Freud, “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad,” in Charles Merewether, ed., The Archive, Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press and Whitechapel, 2006), pp. 20–24.
- 36.
On the “Colonial Matrix of Power” said to be yet operative in all post-colonial contexts, see Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” in Nepantla: Views from the South, Vol. 1, Issue 3 (2000), pp. 533–80; digitally accessible at https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/347342/mod_resource/content/1/Quijano%20(2000)%20Colinality%20of%20power.pdf (accessed 9 January 2019); and Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking” (as in footnote 1).
- 37.
For documentation of the exhibition, see the “Exhibitions” and “Artists” pages of Bangkok CityCity Gallery, at https://bangkokcitycity.com/ (accessed 30 December 2018); and Kong Rithdee, “Space Oddity,” Bangkok Post, 12 December 2018, at https://www.bangkokpost.com/lifestyle/art/1592342/space-oddity (accessed 29 December 2018); for background on Phinthong’s archival practice since the early 2000s, see http://www.gbagency.fr/en/49/Pratchaya-Phinthong/#!/Works/tab-46 (accessed 30 December 2018); and David Teh (as in footnote 8).
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Galligan, G. (2024). Re-visioning the Archives: On the Creation and Curation of Relational and Decolonial Visual Art Archives in Asia. In: Pan, L. (eds) The (Im)possibility of Art Archives. Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5898-6_3
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