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THE participants to the semi-nar came from Singapore, Aus-tralia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Netherlands and host country Indonesia. Malaysian gallery

owner Valentine Willie asked the fi rst per-tinent question: Who is telling what, how, to whom and for what reasons? Artist and

art historian Nguyen Quan from Vietnam, added: in what language do we tell the his-tories of art in this region? Opting for Eng-lish inherently limits some of the partici-pants and audience, while the use of the outsiders’ language could bring out the ‘ex-otic’ in ourselves. The seminar’s organiz-ing committee used an elegant solution: the

presentations and interaction with mem-bers of the audience were either in English or in Indonesian, with simultaneous trans-lations. And if we were genuinely interest-ed in art practiced elsewhere, Sutee Kunav-

Art History:

The Aporias of Modernization in Southeast AsiaThe Visual Art Study Program of ITB, supported by The Getty Foundation, the University of Sydney and ITB’s Soemardja Gallery, recently organized an international seminar on art history and visual culture in Southeast Asia, titled ‘Gathering of Histories.’

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DECEMBER 9, 2012 | | 77

The Gathering of Histories seminarat the Bandung Institute of Technology, Bandung.

ichayanont, an associate professor of art theory from Thailand, proposed that par-ticipants translated and published more of their works. His suggestion was in response to Thomas Berghuis’ comment, a lecturer of

art in Asia at the University of Sydney, who said that while the academic lingua franca was English, art speaks multiple languages.

Art history, according to fi rst speaker Professor Mark Ledbury from Sydney Uni-versity, was a young academic discipline. It is, therefore, often a self-refl ective dis-cipline that borrows methods and theo-ries from a wide variety of academic fi elds, and the discipline is ambitious and anx-ious at the very same time. Furthermore, he said art history was as much the prod-uct of modernity as it produces modernity. The next speaker, Yustiono, senior lectur-er at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), focused his presentation on the am-bitions, anxieties and setbacks in develop-ing art history as an academic discipline in Indonesia, a country where no university has a department of art history, which is as unfortunate as the fact that Indonesia does not—as yet—have a public art museum.

Of course, Indonesia today has quite a few private museums. However, as Ber-

ghuis commented, a museum should be more than a building with a collection, it should also facilitate research. Singapore is fast becoming a hub for art in the region. In 1997, the Singapore Art Museum opened its doors to the public and according to Sin-gaporean Dr. Adele Tan, so will the Nation-al Art Gallery in 2015. Her presentation, however, came across as a sale’s pitch to which Bandung-based artist Tisna Sanja-ya responded with his usual passion that if art were considered a part of the so-called creative industry and the emphasis was on the latter, then art was merely at the ser-vice of the tourism industry to increase the country’s GDP. The question of how art is or could be connected to the wider culture is then ignored. ITB lecturer and director of Soemardja Gallery Amunidin TH Siregar, in turn, emphasized that a museum’s re-search facility should not only make sure that what is collected will withstand the test of time, but that the authenticity of the collected works is assured (art history can, of course, be told with fake paintings, but at what cost?).

The discipline’s ambitions and anxiet-ies have much to do with questions relat-ed to temporal and geographical inclusion as well as porous boundaries of the fi eld of inquiry. How far back does the study of art history need to go (especially since the na-tion-state is a relatively recent invention)? What are the boundaries between art and other visual domains? John Clark, a pro-fessor from Sydney University, wanted art historians to study advertisements and kitsch as well. And how cosmopolitan can or should the study of art history be? Se-nior curator Jim Supangkat, from Indone-sia, discussed the latter question by analyz-ing the term global art, which has been in vogue during the last decade. He claimed, however, that it was more related to how the art market operates in today’s era of globalization. On the other hand, is it real-ly a problem if the West only pays lip ser-vice to inclusivity? There are so many inter-esting developments in the arts in Asia that it would be the West’s loss if it chose to re-main ignorant.

A question that did not emerge dur-ing the seminar was whether it was actu-ally possible to study art history in the ab-sence of a public art museum, as is the case in Indonesia. Hopefully this will be one day turned into a blessing in disguise by having learned valuable experiences from other countries, experiences that are exchanged at seminars like this recent one at ITB’s art school in Bandung. ● ROY VORAGEN