The Big Picture: Interview with Thai Art Archives co-founder, Gregory Galligan

Founded in 2010, the Thai Art Archives (TAA) is Thailand’s first independent archives dedicated to recovering, studying, exhibiting and preserving the ephemera of Thailand’s modern and contemporary masters. Now in its seventh year, the TAA continues to host a variety of programmes, including public and educational events, micro-exhibitions, and international collaborations.

ART REPUBLIK speaks with director and co-founder Gregory Galligan to find out more about the origins of the archives, the significance of its mission, and what lies in its future.

The Thai Art Archives is the first and only one of its kind in the nation. What drove you to start the archive?

I happened to be visiting Bangkok several times with my Thai partner, Patri Vienravi, in 2006 and 2007. It was a time during which I was busily writing a doctoral dissertation at New York University and simultaneously working as a contributing writer at Art in America and ArtAsiaPacific. While writing a story on the Thai contemporary art world for Art in America, I interviewed two professors at Silpakorn University who mentioned that they were deeply concerned that Thailand lacked an archive of Thai modern and contemporary art.

There were rumors that sketchbooks or notebooks by Montien Boonma, Thailand’s most celebrated artist of the 1990s, had gone missing after his premature passing in 2000 to brain cancer. They pointed out that even though he had a young son, virtually nobody in the professional art world looked after his artistic ephemera, indeed even as major exhibitions were being mounted to celebrate his historic achievement. Given that I had recently managed a museum archival and collections project in New York, they asked if I might take up the cause in Thailand. There was no funding, but I was intrigued by the mission and eventually secured a Fulbright research fellowship to explore what might be possible. That’s essentially how we were able to launch our research and development.

You started the TAA seven years ago in 2010. How has the journey been in setting up TAA? What are the challenges you have faced in maintaining and growing the archives?

The journey has been replete with virtually every kind of experience one might imagine! There have been tremendous challenges, among them incredulity early on from the Thai art world that an endeavour like this was either important or even possible. It had been attempted before and failed due to lack of widespread support and funding.

In addition, the Thai art world is fragmented and tends towards factionalism, something that doesn’t bode well for widespread, collaborative undertakings that seek to transcend circles revolving around various universities, regions of the country, or other divisive social and professional cliques. A scene of constantly fractious politics has also been a dogged problem; the longer the various political frays have lasted, the more Thai society has become divided and untrusting of any institution that might be assumed to be a platform of the government or other nationalistic undertaking. There is a longstanding romance here with the independent, artist-initiated project, and even recently a major curator of the scene broke with us over whether Thailand should have its own archives or whether such a preservation effort was better left to individuals or even other countries better equipped for the task. That attitude reflects a certain exhaustion of the Thai art world in relation to constant political frictions.

On the bright side, a new generation “gets it”, and we’ve had wonderful successes demonstrating what’s possible given the right circumstances in the future. The biggest stumbling block at present is funding; without the proper endowment to keep everything moving swiftly forward, we find our progress is halting and often subject to changing energies of volunteer efforts, limited research grants, and so forth.

As director and co-founder, how involved are you in the operation of the archives?  

Patri and I set up the TAA as a non-profit, heritage-preservation division under the umbrella of her private architectural firm. In this way we were able to maintain our non-profit mission, all while holding onto the reigns of TAA to ensure our energies would not be scattered due to having to account to a formal board of trustees, which can be both a blessing or a curse, depending upon its makeup. We maintained a small staff for the first several years in order to manage the physical platform, periodically enlisting others for project-based assignments, and taking in interns. But since closing the hub at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in mid-2016, I am essentially managing the mission as a research-oriented curator and publicist, while seeking to raise an endowment and transitioning the TAA to a more web-based resource for the foreseeable future.

TAA is a non-profit organisation. Do you get any financial support from the government? If not, what are your main sources of funding?

We have never, by both design and intent, received financial support from the Thai government.

I was cautioned early on not to seek that, as once acquired, financial support from national sources tends to take over the mission in order to serve others’ purposes. Originally, we combined some very limited personal resources with occasional support from local art galleries, with the latter going exclusively to the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre to pay the rent, for which we were happy to provide some visibility for various galleries’ exhibitions and publications. But that was never enough to establish a formal endowment and daily operating budget, so for some time I’ve been pursuing foundation support, whether it be in Asia, the United States, or Europe. That avenue has been, to date, disappointing, as applications and numerous meetings have fallen short of solid support.

Several major international foundations are no longer active in the region, while others have found our mission is not a “perfect fit” with their own current interests. Others have told me that “Thailand is simply too small for this kind of attention”. In addition, private collectors and business people here are more preoccupied with their own projects, some even building their own museums, which is a far more sexy undertaking than this kind of endeavour. We’ve often heard that while the mission is laudable, it’s all too academic for the typical Thai sponsor. Nevertheless, even universities are resistant to considering new kinds of public-private collaboration. So we are at a threshold where perhaps within another year or two we will know what may or may not be possible for moving this project to a more dynamic level of development.

What is the importance of cataloguing and preserving the work of modern and contemporary artists, especially in the context of Thailand’s art scene? And in this age of modernisation, what plans do you have to keep the archives relevant and up-to-date for future generations?

This is an era of new art histories, when a new generation of scholars, curators, artists, and others are developing a dynamic sense of Thailand’s modern and contemporary relevance to a global, even transnational art world. Without the proper archival resources, new histories will reflect certain confirmation biases of individuals making do with what they can uncover, often according to their own contemporary interests.

One of the greatest aspects of an archive’s mission is to uncover, preserve, study and exhibit the actual historical realities underlying various topics. Indeed, often the things others either willfully or unwittingly overlook while they pursue their own agendas. There is no real art history possible where research is driven only by individuals’ private interests; an archive represents a much wider picture, one that possibly has its ever-burgeoning resources integrated in such a way as to shed new light on topics that might otherwise receive only scant attention, if indeed any attention in the first place.

An archive represents a platform that holds the working ideal of objectivity, rigorous research and curatorial investigation to a very high standard. Without that, it’s an every-person-for-themselves scene. Thailand deserves better than that, and its future art histories should not be left for others to write second-hand i.e. without a daily, working sense of how this country’s historical and contemporary dimensions come to bear on its artistic projects. There is a tremendous argument to be made for the importance of such an independent platform to current and future generations.

How do you decide what works to include and exclude?

As is the case with any museum, for instance, there are both objective and subjective factors to consider. Objectively, a great archive tries its best to exclude individual taste and preference from the picture. One may not personally “like” a subject, but it may well be historically important and therefore begging attention.

While individual academics and curators working in universities and museums largely get to ignore what they aren’t personally interested in, that’s simply not true with a curator working hard to build up an archives. And despite all the pitfalls of subjective decision-making, one must simply begin somewhere, or at least make a stab at it in order to set in motion a process that has infinite, future dimensions. We have tended to focus on the most progressive, avant-garde aspects of the Thai scene from the 1950s to the present, sometimes working backwards in history from the contemporary and reaching into its origins or so-called “pre-history”. This is essentially an unacademic approach to the subject, in that there is a whole school of Thai modernism deeply rooted in what are now rather dated traditions of painting, sculpture, and so forth, whereas we’ve been most interested in documenting the emergence of a globally-informed and invested Thai contemporary contingent. Others could one day enrich the earlier era, thus shedding new light on aspects of the scene today that we currently understand only piecemeal.

Could you tell me a bit about your 2017 special research project, ‘Robert Rauschenberg & the Rise of A ‘Thai Contemporary’’? What inspired the project, and what themes does it examine?

As we all know, Rauschenberg was one of the most internationally renowned modernists of the last century. His work was well-known in Thai professional art circles throughout the 1970s and 80s, and indeed artists speak of racing to the university library every month to look at American art magazines in order to understand what was happening abroad as they sought to develop their own modernist practices. Rauschenberg visited Thailand in 1983 and met with a host of artists here, even visiting various institutions and wanting to interact with the local community. It was a tremendously charged moment in Thai art history, where Thai artists were beginning to turn away from overseas influences in search of their own idiom.

I thought it would be interesting to take Rauschenberg’s visit as a defining moment, by which we might use his actual, physical presence in the country as an opportunity to look at what he represented both in terms of positive and negative energies, and how after his departure, Thailand suddenly swung in a very different direction. Others want to place the origins of the Thai contemporary in the mid 1990s, but I think that’s a mistaken notion based on a certain confirmation bias born of current political and social tensions. We need to look at the historical reality, which was complex, very nuanced, and often self-conflicted. Rauschenberg provides one way of doing this kind of “micro” investigation.   

What challenges do you envision for the archives in the future, and what plans have you made to overcome them?

Financial, financial, financial! There is no lack of mission, no lack of materials to be uncovered and catalogued to productive purposes, no lack of energy to get it all done. But nothing can happen without the proper financial support. A very famous curator in New York once told me, “Gregory, you need to find your Peggy Guggenheim.” Well, we are not likely to find one person who can support this endeavor, but we may well find a host of resources that, once combined, might float a real, operative Thai Art Archives well into the future. It could conceivably be a department of a major museum, a wing of a major university, or so forth, if it can’t remain the kind of ideal, museum-like venture I had originally envisioned. Only time will tell.

With the country, I was recently told by an only slightly less famous curator, “You know, it’s too late for Thailand.” I don’t quite accept that. Even as regional countries move ahead within new museums and are even doing their best to take advantage of Thailand’s own slowness. We are currently seeking to put a necessary constellation of material factors together while also tending to more immediately manageable projects.

Do you have any long-term goals for TAA?

I would be happy to see TAA achieve a strong, online presence in the near future, so that we might provide an international public with resources as we develop them, in real time, so to speak. While it would be best to also maintain a research hub to carry out all our educational, curatorial, and preservationist mission, that may have to wait for a more ideal moment. But we continue to hope and work towards that ideal while tending to our own, more modest “garden” at the moment.

ERRATUM: In Art Republik Issue 17, it was printed that the co-founder and director of the Thai Art Archives is Gregory Gilligan. It should have been Gregory Galligan.

ilyda chua

 

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