Exhibiting Southeast Asia in the cultural Cold War: geopolitics of regional art exhibitions (1940s-1980s)

Abstract

Our contemporary understanding of Southeast Asia is often defined by the national membership framework of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which was established in 1967. Yet, as a representation of the region, ASEAN is a consolidation and culmination of attempts by political elites during the Cold War in Southeast Asia to imagine the region for myriad political, social and financial reasons. ASEAN’s national framework is not the only way we have imagined Southeast Asia. The construction of Southeast Asia as a regional identity involves a more complicated history that includes agents other than diplomats and politicians towards whom historians have traditionally turned in writing a history of the region. Taking an intellectual history of regional art exhibitions as a lens, Exhibiting Southeast Asia in the Cultural Cold War: Geopolitics of Regional Art Exhibitions (1940s–1980s) excavates this broader and often overlooked history in which multiple actors have imagined many versions of Southeast Asia as a region and the exhibition as a ‘cybernetic’ technology that can produce a regional consciousness through systems of feedback. The thesis focuses on three exhibitions of art from the region, each spearheaded by individual exhibition-makers, instead of institutions or nation-states. These are: Bali, Background for War (1943), an exhibition of Balinese artworks presented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and developed by the British-born American anthropologist Gregory Bateson; the First Southeast Asian Art Competition and Conference (1957), an exhibition of modern art in Manila organised by the Art Association of the Philippines; and Toward a More Meaningful and Responsible Painting (1982), an exhibition in Jakarta of paintings from the Futuristic Experimental Art Center Balai Seni Toyabungkah, organised by Indonesian linguist and philosopher Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana. While different in nature and scope, these examples all privileged the exhibition as an operation that not only represented Southeast Asia, but also imaginatively and discursively produced the region as a consciousness and idiom that could intervene in and even remake the prevailing international world order. This thesis is based on research conducted in the archives of several private foundations, museums and family estates in Southeast Asia, as well as both private and institutional archives in museums, foundations and universities in the United States, and declassified files from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Exhibiting Southeast Asia in the Cultural Cold War studies these exhibitions through focusing on what I term the bureaucracy of exhibition-making, wherein archival traces make visible the geopolitics and other agonisms that define the exhibitionary process. This in turn reveals how exhibition-makers were able to engage with and even influence the international order while still functioning within local and regional art worlds—in museums, art associations and art centers—and without official political station. By focusing on US cultural diplomacy and funding in Southeast Asia, this study proposes an alternative genealogy of exhibitions in the region as being distinctly postwar twentieth-century technologies in and of themselves, rather than being wholly inheritances from colonial nineteenth century museums. Furthermore, in interrogating the geopolitical agency of exhibition-makers and of regional exhibitions from the 1940s to the 1980s, this thesis contributes to discourses in Southeast Asian art histories, as well as histories of international relations in the region, and studies of the Cultural Cold War in Southeast Asia.