Travelling Without Moving

In the last two decades, Thai contemporary art has secured a small but conspicuous niche on the international exhibition circuit, despite the country's meagre infrastructure for art education, presentation and promotion. To advance professionally today, Thai artists must navigate between two distinct but overlapping spheres – each with its own practical, aesthetic and political constraints – one national, the other post-national. In this article Thai contemporary art is historicised within this dual framing. It is argued that its current state of intellectual exhaustion is inextricable from a wider failure of the national project, all too obvious in the country's ongoing constitutional meltdown. The author locates key historical precedents in the 1930s, when an institutional modern art first emerged, in line with the imperatives of a modern bourgeois nationalism with aspirations towards international standing and recognition. There is then a survey of the relationship between modern art and the modern state since, charting their convergences and divergences. Here, Georges Bataille's theoretical distinction between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous affords a byway around conventional notions of state and non-state agency, specifying a kind of sovereignty – these days perhaps peculiar to Thailand – that is neither pre-modern, nor fit for today's globalised world. Keywords: David TehThai contemporary artnationalismmodernityThainessKing Taksinpost-nationalart and politicscontemporaneitycuratorshipApinan Poshyananda Notes 1. Apinan Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Oxford University Press, Singapore, 1992, p 47 2. Taksin (1734–1782), originally known as Jeung sae Ing, was the dynamic general under whom the Siamese regrouped after their capital, Ayutthaya, was sacked by the Burmese in 1767. In 1768 he founded a new kingdom with its capital at Thonburi, just across the river from present-day Bangkok. He was deposed and put to death in 1782 by one of his generals, Chao Phraya Chakri, progenitor of the dynasty that rules from Bangkok to this day. 3. The sum quoted by Apinan – over five million baht – was then equivalent to roughly a quarter of a million US dollars, or around two million dollars in today's money. The Italian expatriate artist Corrado Feroci (1892–1962) arrived in Siam in 1923 and in 1933 founded the art school that later became the elite Silpakorn University. 4. Poshyananda, op cit, p 47 5. Thad Ngam, ‘King Taksin Day’, Somboon and Suthira Duangsamosorn, trans, Siam Rath Review, republished online by the Ministry of Culture at http://www.m-culture.go.th/ 6. Phibulsongkram (born Plaek Khittasangkha, 1897, died 1964) was dictatorial leader of the new nation of Thailand from 1938 to 1944, then again from 1948 to 1957. 7. Luang Wichit was Director-General of the Department of Fine Arts, 1935–1942. On the fascinating vacillations of this seminal bureaucrat-artist and ideologue, see Scot Barmé, Luang Wichit Wathakan and the Creation of a Thai Identity, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1993, p 127 and ff. 8. These notions are apparently no less appealing today; witness Thaksin Shinawatra's recent bid for affiliation with Taksin. See Voice of Thaksin, January 2009, at http://khamerlogue.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/thaksin-both-victims-of-chakri-family/. 9. This characterisation should be read against a deeper archaeology of power in which formal political order might even be anomalous rather than normal. In a bold attempt to see beyond this region's state-centric histories, James C Scott suggests that it may be more accurate to think of interregnum as the rule, rather than the exception. See his The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut and London, 2009, pp 32–33. 10. Citing Luang Wichit's consecration ceremonies for the new constitution, Rosalind Morris has scrutinised the cultural logic through which the elites theatricalised representational politics and ‘made of constitutionalism a null spectacle rather than a model for transformation’. Rosalind C Morris, In the Place of Origins: Modernity and its Mediums in Northern Thailand, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2000, p 220. 11. Morris finds a similar irony in the viral signifier of the traffic jam in 1990s Chiangmai, describing ‘a metropolitan sociality... stretched between commencement and dissipation’. Morris, op cit, p 243. An obvious art historical touchstone would be Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, so suggestive for Walter Benjamin as global conflict loomed in 1939. 12. Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’ (1939), in Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Beacon Press, Boston, 1984 13. Feroci, quoted in Pandit Chanrochanakit, ‘Feeling Contemporary: The Politics of Aesthetics in Rirkrit Tiravanija's Art’, in Nothing: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Chiang Mai University Art Museum, Chiang Mai, 2004, p 44. As Pandit observes, though, this ought to be read alongside Feroci's peculiar relation to the Thai state, as an alien who sought naturalisation to avoid internment under the Japanese occupation. Years later, his faithful student, Khien Yimsiri, would come to see in these terms a dilemma for artists: ‘whether to adhere to traditional forms or to express their individuality disregarding any relation with the past’. We note another terminological slippage here: the alternative to traditionalism is not modernism as such but individualism. Pursuit of self implies alienation from tradition, a notion that would prove fundamental not just to critiques of consumerism in the 1990s, but also to the synthesis in the 1980s of modern and traditional styles, and the bourgeois appetite that drove it. Khien Yimsiri, ‘Contemporary Art in Thailand’, remarks at the Fourth General Conference and Seminar on Fine Arts, Bangkok, undated photocopy, p 2. 14. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, Alan Stoekl, trans, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1985, p 155 15. The fourth pillar of the Democracy Monument is perhaps an index of the unease. See Apinan, op cit, p 27. 16. T K Sabapathy, ‘Commentary’ in John Clark, Maurizio Peleggi and T K Sabapathy, eds, Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience and Practice of Modern Asian Art, Wild Peony, Sydney, 2006, p 112 17. Morris, op cit, p 219. See also, on the latter stages of this process, Hong Lysa, ‘Twenty Years of “Sinlapa Watthanatham”: Cultural Politics in Thailand in the 1980s and 1990s’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol 31, no 1, March 2000, pp 26–47. 18. While the economic footings of its majesty have changed, the royal institution has been reinvested with a near-feudal reserve, the notionally non-political person of King Bhumipol restored to a quasi-divine authority. That this sovereign now stands as the only viable repository of civic trust is what makes the country's current political crisis seem like an all-or-nothing game. Paul M Handley, The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006. 19. Morris, op cit, pp 13–14. Some historians consider this to be characteristic of all of Southeast Asia's pre-colonial states. See Scott, op cit, pp 79–80. On the heterogeneous origins of Siamese visual art, see ‘The Threshold of Modern Art in Siam’, Apinan, op cit, pp 1–27; and John Clark, Modern Asian Art, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, p 75. These days, even conservative agencies have abandoned the idea of a single font of Thai cultural heritage; witness the syncretic myths of origin now prevailing in ‘contemporary’ institutions like the Museum of Siam. According to one pamphlet, Thainess ‘is firmly based on various grounds as the ability to selectively adopt and adapt to achieve one-of-a-kind character’. Hong Lysa, op cit, charts the dismantling of an older, monolithic Thainess in the pages of Sinlapa Watthanatham magazine since 1979. 20. Albert Paravi Wongchirachai, ‘Art for God's Sake’, Far Eastern Economic Review, vol 155, no 13, 2 April 1992 21. See Clark, op cit, pp 84–87. 22. See Sandra Cate, Making Merit, Making Art: A Thai Temple in Wimbledon, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 2003, pp 133 and ff. Art was not the only channel to benefit from these investments; Morris notes the parallel transformation of the media more generally: Morris, op cit, pp 182–183. 23. This group could include Sutee Kunavichayanont, Manit Sriwanichpoom, Vasan Sitthiket, Chatchai Puipia and Kamin Lertchaiprasert. 24. ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions’, Asia Society, Grey Art Gallery at New York University and Queens Museum of Art, 1996–1997; and ‘Montien Boonma: Temple of the Mind’, Asia Society, 2003 25. See neo-traditionalist firebrand Thawan Duchanee, who studied at Amsterdam's Rijksakademie in the 1960s, but whose inclinations and career thereafter were more parochial. 26. Obrist and Hou were the initiators of the ‘Cities’ franchise but did not curate the Bangkok iteration. If ‘curators’ were traditionally attached to collections – a connotation retained by the Thai translation (pantarak) – today's ‘independent’ variant is (like his or her ‘projects’) itinerant. Curators are not ‘from’ somewhere, but only ‘based’ somewhere. They are in every sense native to the lateral networking of advanced capitalism, specialists in a kind of topical cultural arbitrage, in stark contrast with the archaeological imperatives of their sedentary forebears. On the vocation's regional peculiarities see Patrick D Flores, Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia, National University of Singapore Museum Press, Singapore, 2008. On the independent curator and the ‘project’ logic, see Pascal Gielen, ‘Curating with Love, or a Plea for Inflexibility’, Manifesta Journal 10, 2010, pp 14–15. 27. See David Teh, ‘The Perils of Utopia: Sakarin Krue-on's Terraced Rice Fields Project’ (in Thai), Aan Journal, vol 2, no 2, 2009; pp 140–151. An English version is available on the journal's website at http://www.readjournal.org/ann-english/. 28. In 2006, Thaksin's cabinet approved Apinan's promotion to Permanent Secretary of the Culture Ministry, but the decision was reversed after the 19 September coup d'état. Instead, the army-installed cabinet of General Surayud Chulanont made him Chairman and Acting Director of OKMD, a position he held until 2008, when he became Deputy Permanent Secretary of the Ministry. 29. The Tsunami Commemoration Project took place in 2005–2006. The author worked as an assistant on the project. 30. ‘Imagine Peace’ was curated by Apinan, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Sansern Milindasuta. Exhibition website, archived at http://www.bacc.or.th/exhibition/past 31. In fairness we should note that these were the first contemporary art exhibitions to fill the unwieldy and cavernous BACC and thus begin, in terms legible to ribbon-cutting officials, to justify its considerable cost. This is a complicated task requiring three sets of ribbon-cutters – not only representatives of the palace and the national bureaucracy, but also that of the city which administers and funds the museum day to day. 32. See also Lee Weng Choy, ‘Just What Is It That Makes the Term “Global-Local” So Widely Cited, Yet So Annoying?’, in Gerardo Mosquera and Jean Fisher, eds, Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2004, p 12. 33. At eighty-four, Bhumipol is the world's longest-reigning monarch, but has been in very poor health for years. For many Thais the prospect of a future without him is as unspeakable as it is inevitable, the more so since his unpopular heir is widely considered incapable of rule. The country's latest constitutional derailment, brought to a head by the coup that deposed Thaksin in 2006, is irreparable without resolution of this crisis of sovereignty. 34. We could equally say Wit's A4 canopy gestures towards a traditional architecture, his photo-morphs or fruit to Thailand's ethnic diversity; and Manit's portraits could certainly be read in the humanist register of photojournalism. Yet the fact remains that the curators carefully kept these contemporaries separate, rather than articulating their connections. 35. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edition, Verso, London, 2006 36. The military have long been vociferous in policing cultural standards. Predictably, the post-coup period saw a string of censorship incidents involving culture deemed threatening to social and religious order. Notable amidst the usual slew of lèse majesté cases was the banning of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film Sang Sattawat (Syndromes and a Century, 2006); and the controversy over a prize-winning drawing by student Anupong Chanthorn, depicting Buddhist monks with crow-like features. A post-mortem ‘Ramakien’ symposium was planned once the storm had abated, but no suitable venue could be found, the subject apparently too sensitive for the city's cultural institutions. 37. May Adadol Ingawanij, Hyperbolic Heritage: Bourgeois Spectatorship and Contemporary Thai Cinema, doctoral thesis, University of London, 2006. Carr had planned, and banked, on taking ‘Ramakien’ on a grand homecoming tour of the Kingdom. 38. See artist Amrit Chusuwan's comments in Rathsaran Sireekan, ‘Reflecting on Thai art at Venice Biennale’, Bangkok Post, 1 October 2009. 39. The inclusion of film-maker Suporn Shoosongdej – a novice in the contemporary art game – is harder to explain, although his technical skills must have come in handy in the emergency. 40. Phatarawadee Phataranawik, ‘Thailand's Art Scene Plods Along Despite Financial Turmoil’, The Nation, 21 February 2009 41. It bears remembering that previous missions to Venice have not over-played the Thainess card. Alongside Nipan Oranniwesna, Amrit Chusuwan and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, the spiritual conceptualism of Montien – not remembered as a great patriot – was perhaps the most conspicuous dose of kwampenthai to date. 42. Under new director, Prisana Pongtadsirikul, OCAC has made the Silpathorn Award biennial and merged it with the Venice commission. The first pavilion under this new schema, by Navin Rawanchaikul (2011), further entrenched the self-exoticising mode, but as this article was written before it took place, it escapes critical dissection for now. At the time of writing, Apinan was running the Culture Ministry's new Department of Cultural Promotion

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