Undoing Europe in Southeast Asia: Contexts of a New Contemporaneity

Abstract

Vesting Southeast Asia with contemporaneity or contemporaneousness, and therefore making it a con temporary site or a site of the contemporary, either contains its differential expression under the aegis of affiliation or entitles it to critique the very history of modernity that aspires to such accountability. The political economy of the exhibitionary practices girding contemporary art haunts the construction of the said category and recalls the process by which art as the privileged civilizing trope had come to constitute such modernist artifacts and technologies as the nation, the museum, visual representation, and the ethical personage of the viewing subject. The search for a cognate of the contemporary in current art may dispel the allure of authenticity as the cherished telos of the discourse of identity and the conspiratorial totality of any global coalition as the only acceptable endgame of globalization. In this »cognitive mapping,« contemporary art carves itself into high relief as an »enunciative present« that discusses and actively reinvents notions of everyday life, postcolonial modernity, and the geopolitical construction of Southeast Asia itself and the crosscurrents among localities and communities.