ABSTRACT
What is the place of contemporary art practice within the global dispensation that emerged from the 1980s? Did the triumph of capitalism mark the end of History? The attempt to obliterate temporality is witnessed by the Hegelian revivalism of Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 The End of History and the Last Man (1992), with his thesis on the end of ideological conflict after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fredric Jameson has commented that the 1980s ‘seem to mark the end of the modern in all kinds of ways, from communications technologies and industry all the way to forms of art’ (2003). Do all forms of contemporary art inevitably embody the ‘end of temporality’ that, Jameson argues, is endemic to a general condition of postmodernity? I suggest that the contemporary of contemporary theatre in parts of Southeast Asia is less a period style but more differing artistic responses in various (though linked) contexts of desired economic growth to the end of temporality as a situation. The idea of contemporary theatre entails, as a presupposition, the existence of an idea of the contemporary. The structure of temporality, in turn, is to be comprehended as the way time is understood and lived out in society. The contemporary is both an idea of the present time and a goal of reacting more effectively to the demands of that present.
