mMK n AAA
HistoriCITY

HC:AP is supposed to be ending today, or more correctly, HC:AP comes to an end today.

Law Man Lok, Tsang Tak Ping, Stella Tang and Leung Mee Ping have their works installed. However, works by Tozer Pak , Lee Kit, Luke Ching, James Wong and May Fung have not. I hence apologized to AAA for this situation.

I thanks AAA for allowing this art project to have the rare fortune to emphasis on a "work in progress" execution. By "work in progress," I try to see it as an open-end exploration on the subject matter, which is perhaps a bit too demanding (/ not demanding enough) for most institutions.

I am ready to admit that I did not pushed hard to have all works installed in time. But in my opinion, the commitment of the artists to the project, should be directed towards what they have gained from / could contribute to the subject matter, not solely the physical piece of artwork within the time frame.

Actually, work by Tozer Pak has already been passed (emailed) to me some weeks ago. (I am still thinking and has been discussing with Tozer on how to best present it, for that is part of the task that Tozer tossed to me, and that I believe it could be in a non-physical form more adapt to the theme.)

After attending the roundtable, James Wong has also made up his mind too, on what to contribute and how, in our meeting last week. (The art work is meaningful to me (/ the project) particularly because it took the form of not being an artwork and will have its afterlife in AAA.)

Work by Lee Kit is constantly in progress, and he suggested that it might take him a whole year to really finish it. So should the artist rush to finish it or think of another idea instead? To me, it is really the same unfinished process as in the work of Tsang Tak Ping (just that Tsang revealed this process as performance in AAA).

Luke Ching has shifted from his original idea and has been now working on the new idea with the assisted help from AAA, and we are expecting report on his execution very soon. As for May Fung, I am still trying to devise something with her that could be able to approach the project meaningfully. Ofcourse, this could be an excuse, but even though I admit my trip away from Hong Kong affected the progress, I do however think our art today should really not just support but encourage a possibility for alternative ways in art production and reception.

Stay Tune for what is to follow.

Owe to the fact that I was away, the progress of the art exhibition in AAA unfortunately came to a temporary halt last month, but it is moving on again, with Leung Mee Ping's latest work installed just today.

some notes on HistoriCITY – Art historical Writing in and on Hong Kong Roundtable Symposium, Sept 29, 2007

“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me.”

[– Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, tr. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1973/1999:6.]

This series of questions is written as a text that furthers the lines of thinking generously made available in the Roundtable. It is derived from the questions that I posed to individual speakers via email a short time after the conference [I managed to respond only to the English and Cantonese speakers because of my bumpy Putonghua], an emotionally and intellectually challenging experience, because of how dear the issues were, and how much (too much?) were demanded from them in so little time, and how carelessly I slipped those demands on persons and not issues. To rectify this, I decide not to mention names of persons who spoke in the Roundtable in this writing, although it is inevitable certain issues and questions recall the memories of some. I have revised the questions here in the hope that they would rekindle some sparks that made brief appearances in the Roundtable but were quickly snuffed out for different reasons which I did not fully comprehend. Here, I preface the specific questions, which I have not attempted to answer nor develop with several general ones concerning the conditions the Roundtable set out for itself and those it found itself already embedded in.

I let them be guided and framed by Jacques Derrida’s essay “What I Would Have Said?”[Jacques Derrida. Negotiations : interventions and interviews, 1971-2001, tr. by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002: 57.] The essay was a reflection of his own silent participation in an academic conference. In silent attendance, he signaled approval and solidarity to the conference and its concerns. And yet he remained silent, until he put into words his thoughts on this “public demonstration” of approval and solidarity. One primary responsibility, he says, of participating in a public demonstration must be exercised in “asking publicly—in one form or another (a certain silence for example),” the following questions:

1. Who is really behind things, at every moment of the process?
2. Who is mediating it, by what means, in view of what?
3. Who is excluded from it? for “[h]owever transitory it may be, no community can identify itself without exclusion.”
4. In what way does it not simply translate the presumed interests (no doubt themselves largely overdetermined) of the organizers, of all those to whom the initiative may be attributed?

I cite Derrida at length for three reasons – first, for the similar starting point of reflection; second, for bringing something foreign and arguably irrelevant to the topic the Roundtable proposed for itself, in order that it would face some questions that it had not placed upon itself; and lastly, my need for a path that would order my own thinking that at times fails by going astray.

The invitation sent out by the organizers read, “What matters is not who is going to write art history for Hong Kong but what kind of knowledge and interpretation of Hong Kong art history is presented in each publication.” (my emphases) The “who writes” is posited but immediately subsumed under the “what is written and how” - the work presented as publication (made public in writing) rather than the identity of the writer is declared the “matter” of the Roundtable. And yet, while affirming the need for “multiples perspectives” in understanding history, it is self-consciously aware that this “multiple” has historically failed or is yet to include “local voices” (it is not clear what the organizers mean by this), hence “their absence” in the history of Hong Kong art. Instead of continuing its traditional course of challenging and subverting Eurocentric subjective positions of knowledge-production, “multiplicity” has become a permissive and liberalist label that disguises closure and exclusion in the experience of Hong Kong art history writing.

Interestingly, during the Roundtable, the discursive framework of multiplicity, plurality, interdisciplinarity, diversity, etc. was energetically produced, circulated, and advocated, as if the exclusion (however vaguely) identified by the organizers, specific to the Hong Kong art history writing “context”, another much welcomed catchword in the Roundtable, ought to be dismissed and talked past (in order to move on). I am suspicious of this discursive framework not because I am against multiplicity per se; in fact I do not intend to take a stand here. Rather, I would like to ask what this discursive framework has become in the Roudtable? How was it allowed to determine the approach of Hong Kong art history writing, and at the expense of what other ways of understanding? Within this discursive framework were questions like “Whose histories?”, “Whose voice?” repeatedly posed by several speakers, which gave even greater force to the “imperative of giving everyone a voice.”[Rey Chow, “Listening Otherwise, Music Miniaturized, A Different Type of Question about Revolution” in Writing Diasporas, Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993: 145.] Rey Chow has critically revealed how posing these questions that is already a form of privilege “mostly affordable for those who can stand apart and view the world with altruistic concern.” These questions also fail to put their own condition of possibility into question:“The question that this question cannot ask, since it is the condition of its own possibility, is the morefundamental inequality between theory—the most sophisticated speaking instance, one might say—and the oppressed.”

I am thinking of those situations, places, interests, for which such a “public demonstration” of and on Hong Kong art history writing as a Roundtable would be “unthinkable, undesirable, and impracticable.”[Derrida, ibid., p.56.] Had the solidarity expressed with these concepts adequately understood its own contexts - the Roundtable itself and its concern, namely Hong Kong art history writing, or was it driven by the rule of “compulsory discursivity”[Wendy Brown, Edgework, Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Princeton University Press, 2005:85.] that repeated the inequality of power in Hong Kong art history writing, if one intends to argue this inequality exists?

This relates to the term “local”. More than once, in public talks and including this Roundtable, I have noticed that the term “local” created a demand on some to announce he/she is “qualified” as “local” in order for his/her voice to be heard in a different, as if more legitimate, way. A term made present by the organizers (as an adjective that refers more to tendencies) to compensate for its absence in the past became coercive for some, for it created the demand of having to pass as a “local” (a noun to refer to the identity of a person). During this Roundtable, some speakers proposed that the meaning of “local” could be so unstable and caught in the binary produced by the ideological “global”, that it couldn’t usefully inform the project of writing Hong Kong art history. It is always easier to dismiss binarism in theory than to practice thinking without it through and through. At the same time, there is a case to argue for duality without falling into the trap of dualism. I personally do not find critical currency with the term “local”. But the very fact that it was used within particular situated moments and had been conferred some form of currency is itself interesting. Recently in a gender studies class on public space, I posed the question “What makes a ‘local’ local, if there is such a person?” Students came up with such ideas as the sense of (belonging to) places and time (as everyday, continuous) that highlight the quality of the relation of themselves to what takes place and takes shape in our immediate environment (however changing and contingent). These ideas were able to articulate the concept of the “local” so much so that this term became redundant. My point is, it is only when the Roundtable understands itself as taking place in a specific space-time as a specific, though tentative, public that it would begin to understand its responsibility, and this public and those to come would benefit from this understanding being exposed, discussed, and negotiated.

Now, the specific questions.
The first three questions relate to issues that I noticed being raised but not further discussed:
Art works as pure objects versus art works being “texts” to be read – there was noticeably interests on both sides. In-between positions could have been mentioned, too, like Appadurai’s “art today is trash tomorrow”[Appadurai, Arjun, “The Thing Itself” in Public Culture, V.18:1, 2006, Duke University Press], which highlights the material and symbolic conditions art is always already embedded in.

The relation between history and memory:
one speaker specifically pointed to the meaning of the project of history making for herself as an individual - the need to be “connected to the past”. The affective dimension of history and memory is also well taken. But what was at stake seemed not just to be about who could remember by choice, but where that happens. The question becomes how the “a wholesale preoccupation with the individual psychology of remembering”[Nora, Pierre, “Between Memory and History” in Representations, Spring 1989, V.26:15.] relate to history writing as a social and public duty?

If the Roundtable made a mark in Hong Kong art history, what kind of social world had it built around itself? I am thinking how the moderator and some speakers dropped in names into their presentations and speeches. Some were names of authority announcing the speakers’ intellectual affinity; others announced affective ties; some, for reasons explained, hence more apparent than others. My questions are, when do these acts of names dropping expand the discussion and when do they become acts of closure that exclude others not familiar with those names? If art worlds are partly manifested in these names, what kinds of art worlds are encouraged and what others are excluded?

The following three questions regard points of order, of how the Roundtable was organized with respect to its being a “live” event:

What is the task of the moderator in a Roundtable? What has been done, and what could have been done, in order that the “live” nature of the Roundtable was respected? I am thinking about time-keeping, the time for speakers to respond to each other and for the audience to participate. What could be done to avoid letting a “live” Roundtable event become an accumulation of monologues?
Why was there the need for so many speakers, if not the imagination of, or the failure to suppress the desire for, some kind of “completeness”? What kind of “completeness”, however tentative, was constructed in terms of the choice of speakers, the way they spoke (or briefed by the organizers to)? The Roundtable had not exposed itself adequately to the risk of improvisation, costing it the kind of energy that could have conjured up in the live event.
Why didn’t speakers’ synopses accompany the e-invitation to the Roundtable, or even just one sentence describing the content of the speakers’ presentation? Instead, there was only the circulation of names and institutional or social affiliations, which reproduced existing power structures around these institutions, and reinforced a star system frequently used in consumerist practices to deliberately empty out the meanings of the names to give them the highest exchange value.
If simultaneous translation was important, could organizers give it more thought to make it professional and available, and simultaneous translation for Cantonese as well? Effective translation could have encouraged much more discussion.

A different reading of the Roundtable could have been simply this: the text you weave must prove to me that it desires me.

YY and all,

Before taking up the many worthy questions that YY raised, let me first make the following THREE points:

(1) After writing and consuming history and working through many philosophical and narrative issues, my expectation for reading/writing history has become rather simple. As a reader, I want to know and learn something about the past (after working through the discursive position, rhetorical strategies and performative tactics)... As a writer, I devote myself to demonstrating the power of details to make clear a position that is defensible, can be substantiable, but only tentatively conclusive. I am, after all, and after Foucault, FOR "positive knowledge production" -- NOT positivism as in scientific realism or pure empiricism.

(2) In relation to (1), Foucault has often been misused due to a lack of full view of his works. People tend to isolate one of two of his thesis, such as discourse and power domination, and see much less of his other key point. In my use of Foucault, the following are his credentials for discursive practices (itself embodying challenge of power structure via the concrete act of revisionist historiography): problematization, genealogy (productive suspicion of "beginnings" after N), and archaeology. The lattest is the least understood. In Foucault's own historical works, "archaeology" takes up most space (pages), without which problematization and genealogy would be reduced to just another act of ideological criticism. (How often we only hear people repeating Foucault's conclusions about sexuality, body, etc. without realizing what materials and details he assmebled and how he assembled is the key.

(3) The term I would use to describe Foucault's rigor in archaeology is "ethno-methodologies," a term brought to the domain of Cultural Studies after many years of debates, especially as a result of a/ the engagement with Foucault, and b/ the rising concern for role of historiography (and here Megan Morris wrote one of the first essays on the topic). This switch is important because it facilitates the making of local knowledge. Ethno-methodologies are possible as a result of the bringing together of theoretical works and methodologies from sociology, literary studies and anthropology, especially the last one. Archaeology, genealogy grounded in "ethno-methodologies" are, to begin with,
interdisciplinary.

(4) Interdisciplinarity is not everything to me, but it is the imperative for the conception of a methodological paradigm, and I can see we can go backward. What is inter-disciplinarity is debatable, and it should be so. My approach...I prefer a more analytical method: to diagnose a situation, a problem, an object (such as a painting, or a movie), and see what different issues it embodies so as to see what disciplinary wisdom (plural) should be mobilized. I prefer to break down and further break down an issue and vocabulary from individual disciplines to the lowest possible level so as to seek possible dialogues... I am not for interdisciplinary purely as a language game although in other areas, the language game is all that there is. Lastly, inter-disciplinarity is an important axiom for breaking down a purely introverted art history paradigm that ends up only reinforcing the supremity of art. When I use the term "spatial approach" in response to interdisciplinarity, I did not mean it the way Leungpo used it... But that should be another conversation. I simply haven't got the time to make that point clear.

(5) History for the present. This certainly describes Foucault, but that only a good qualifier, not everything. Certainly, "history for the present" is the general position of New Historicism, not only Foucault's, and this position should be scrutinized for what exactly it means.

Back to YY's questions (although the above is also part of my answer):
*WHAT DO WE WANT FROM HISTORY?
I don't think there's one answer. I have pointed out what I want: to receive new details about the past with which I can learn something and yet start thinking how these details form a kind of persuasion and whether it opens up more questions for me. And if I fail to answer the latter, at least I learn something that was not already obvious or significant for me.

*WOULD ANTHROPLOGY TAKE OVER HISTORY?
This question is a bit mis-construed. Of course, a simple answer is "no" -- for when anthropology was brought in, it was not the entire system of anthropological thinking, nor its entire history, but a methodology that has itself evolved in many forms over the past century, and a particular mode of practice that many cultural studies scholars felt would open up new modes of knowledge production dominated many years by sociological and literary mode so thinking. The method in anthropology is "ethnography," but "ethno-methodologies" are more open and embracing. The core, I pointed out, remains the same: a materialist approach that is dialectical, the belief that a/ the past
can be understood and accessed, and history can be written, via what is empircal, and b/ the space for negotiation, to make sense of history is acknowledged.

*HISTORY NECESSARY? WOULD IT BE SMALLER THINGS LIKE MEMORY? Someone out there who cares for the writing up of our local history, or local art history, should just do it. Momentarily more essential...?

I have one last point to make last Saturday which I didn't have the time, it's on inventive historiography -- given the variety of narrative modes already explored, and given narrativity the final construction and performative function of history. I also have in mind what Frank said in section one, history writing as artistic practice... But this really would be a few more separate
discussion.

Best,
Linda

(Jaspar, I still have one more response to write to YY's revised version. Don't think can make it until weekend. Please also check spelling mistakes and typos for me, if found. I'm also waiting to respond to Kith with a few references.)