Fifth Night (2010), Yang Fudong, HD video installation

A lady, groomed and elegantly dressed, is walking in the middle of a city square reminiscent of an old Shanghai. Her face is inscrutable, vacillating between vacancy and quiet anticipation. Her movements are poised, unhesitant. She ascends a platform and brushes her hand along the railing of a spiral staircase leading to nowhere. Behind her, a man passes; in another screen, he is the focal point. He appears shell-shocked, his face sweaty and blemished, oblivious to the other figures around him who each seem to inhabit a different metaphysical plane. Completing the scene are ricksaws, vintage cars, a crew of mechanics fixing a tramcar – all the humdrum unfolding against a soundtrack of nostalgic music punctuated by the ominous sound of hammering that haunts the space.

Such images, as seen in Fifth Night, a seven-channel video installation shown as part of Yang Fudong’s solo exhibition, One half of August, at Parasol unit, are in many ways characteristic of the Shanghai-based artist’s oeuvre. But beyond these overt resemblances, one can here discern a subtle but nonetheless significant shift in the artist’s approach towards his medium. Particularly when compared with his seminal work, Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, which directly references the historical figures of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, the socio-political specificities in Yang’s recent works are comparatively muted, with the emphasis seemingly placed instead upon the ocular. From the outset, Yang’s retreat into what appears to be a phenomenology of cinema seems like an implicit affirmation of the overriding, and possibly misguided, critical tendency towards reading his works in universalising terms – either in terms of a poetics of ambiguity or a vague existentialism – but such a reading obscures the fact that Yang has not abandoned cultural tropes entirely. As it seems, Yang’s interest lies less in visuality per se than in the act of rendering visible, referring specifically to the operations that make visibility possible on a global scale. Such operations, however, cannot be reduced to those of an Orientalism that has already been outmoded by a decentered postcolonial world. Instead, the Chineseness as seen in Yang’s films is more accurately a synecdoche of that which can be preliminarily called foreignness, and as such, the viewing subject that his films confront must necessarily refer not only to the West, but consumers of that nebulous category of cinema called “World Cinema”.

Since attaining global visibility, Chinese cinema has found itself perpetually embroiled in the politics of spectatorship, often accused of pandering to the Western gaze. This self-fetishisation can be best understood in terms of what Laura Mulvey, in her feminist critique of cinema, calls “to-be-looked-at-ness” – that which offers the viewer a voyeuristic pleasure made possible by the combination of spectacle and narrative. In this light, Yang’s films, with its bold aestheticisation of narrative tropes such as the nubile Chinese damsel and the ancient warlord, may appear less an elucidation than a symptom of this problematic. But yet, any sense of “scopophilia” described by Mulvey[1] is not entirely delivered, or is at least never brought to consummation, for the initial romantic promises of narrative are often, through the prolonged act of spectatorship, diffused in a cloud of ambiguity. In Fifth Night, for instance, the sense of foreboding conjured by the intense theatricality of the choreographed spectacle never culminates in a desired climax. The characters remain, in true Beckettian fashion, to be perpetually waiting, the Orientalist fantasy never allowed to complete itself – pure spectacle without narrative. The film nurtures spectatorship only to disappoint it with an existential impasse – existentialism used here as a means by which scopophilia is disrupted, rather than an end in itself.

But yet, one can never quite situate Yang’s work and practice as whole within the broader postmodern and postcolonial project of deconstruction typified by works like Tracey Moffatt’s landmark Nice Coloured Girls (1987) and Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989), in which the manipulation of the cinematic structure itself is central to her dissection of Aboriginality. Instead of fragmentation, what one encounters here is a film that despite its absence of narrative, is structurally coherent, for the logic of the montage remains entirely intact; a sustained, unitary gaze persists. Thus, it may be more accurate to say that Yang’s work is less deconstructive than descriptive. His gesture here is not so much a dismantling of an Orientalist gaze than the depiction of an emergent, post-Orientalist gaze that has become the dominant spectatorial mode following the collapse of the Oriental-Occident binary brought about by the reality of globalisation. The nature of this gaze is a peculiar one: without recourse to the sedimented background of meanings that constituted the Orientalist fantasy, it remains distant and panoptical, attentively surveying the foreign in an effort to make it intelligible, or to use a Heideggerian term, to make it “disclose” itself to the outsider-viewer. It is the gaze of the audience of “World Cinema”, embodied here in the film’s camerawork (and by virtue of our passivity, equated to the gaze that we, the audience, take on), which in its adoption of a vast range of angles and depths of field, its careful, measured movements and the austerity of its monochromatic colours, similarly manifests a panoptical nature. Significantly, Yang also foregrounds the inevitably frustrated nature of this gaze, by first encouraging it on with its enticements of “worldliness”[2], conjured by the seeming facticity of the meandering figures who appear just-there, who despite doing nothing of consequence, appear firmly settled in a self-contained, putatively undisclosed constellation of significations, before upsetting it through the viewer’s eventual realisation that everything is a mere semblance.

Ye Jiang (The night man cometh) (2011), Yang Fudong, HD video installation

What Yang seems to have achieved here is the capturing of the transitional moment of Chinese, and by extension, global cinema today as it departs from the myths perpetuated by Orientalism towards an uncertain future, a movement that can be explained through Roland Barthes’ theories on myth as semiology. In Mythologies, Barthes speaks of “myth” as a “second-order semiological system” that is built upon the first – that of language. What is the final term (sign) in language becomes the first term (signifier) in myth. He elaborates that in this transformation, the linguistic sign “empties itself”, its history evaporated as it prepares itself to “receive its signified” in its new function as the mythical signifier. This transitional stage from one semiological chain to the next is seen in Yang’s Ye Jiang (The night man cometh), a single-channel video set in a snowy landscape with a bizarre ensemble consisting of a vanquished warlord, a pensive-looking maiden, a white-suited man, another maiden in white, a hawk and a family of deers. As signs, these are images already laden with meaning, “a whole system of values: a history, a geography, a morality, a zoology, a Literature”[3] – values that have, however, been eroded by their recontextualisation, replaced instead by an anticipatory void. But this void is never filled, for the mythical signified never arrives to fill it: the film reads like a prologue that never ends. In place of myth, all we have is a mere mythic mise-en-scène – a stage devoid of narrative. It is a mere surface, a topos of myth.

Pushing this retreat to the surface to an extreme is the last and titular piece of the exhibition, an eight-channel video installation in which Yang projects scenes from his earlier films onto various architecture and furniture and films them. The work marks a strange turn in our experience of the exhibition, for suddenly we are wrenched out of the diegetic universe of cinema, confronting the mise-en-scène we have been dwelling as a mise-en-abyme. But while the entire idea of making a film of a film may sound trite in this day and age, this instrumentalisation of the artist’s own work for such a purpose renders it a profoundly self-reflexive act. In fact, there is something self-negating in Yang’s act of reducing his entire oeuvre to literal surfaces, which results in the collapse of figure and ground and by extension, that of cinema as a signifying system. While in Fifth Night and Ye Jiang, there is still an effort to reel the audience in with the promise of a world, a myth, the surfaces here cannot even accommodate the illusion of penetration. All we are left with is a pure materiality, the skin of film: figures brushing across the contours of a classical statue, warping as they pass over the edge of a shelf…

What is one to make of this nihilistic gesture – this complete upending of a gaze that has nonetheless already lost its ontological bearings? Does it, somewhat obliquely, point towards a gaze that is soon to be no longer tenable as a mode of grasping the foreign? If so, what else can we turn to? How else can we look? To this, the works of Yang proffers no answer. In their universe, there is only the gaze, and gazing alone, however pointless, must suffice.

Yang Fudong: One half of August was held at Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art from 13 October to 6 November 2011.

Notes

[1] Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Art in Theory, 1900 to 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (London: Blackwell Publishing. 2009), 984-86.

[2] Martin Heidegger, Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 59, 70.

[3] Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage Classics, 2009), 141.

The Cloud of Unknowing (2011), Ho Tzu Nyen, Installation with single-channel HD projection, multi-channel audio, lighting, smoke machines and show control system

In a decrepit housing estate in a remote corner of Singapore, something is unravelling. Of the denizens enclosed in their private dwellings, some are waiting, others, still absorbed in their revelries. A woman with a mop of curly hair stands by her window, hand heedlessly turning the knobs on her radio. Outside, along the corridor, an older woman opens a door and steps into a foggy room overrun by dense vegetation. In another apartment, a man, wrapped only in a sarong, stands beneath a ceiling of tinkering light bulbs, lost amidst his towering hoard of paraphernalia. Another man retreats to his bed. He lies down, closes his eyes. In a distance, one hears the drummer jamming in his acoustic temple of an apartment washed in the electric hues of spotlights. Then, there is the writer. He sits at his desk, poring over his books and furiously scribbling, driven by the intensity of his ruminations into graphomania.

In Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Cloud of Unknowing, Singapore’s entry to the 54th Venice Biennale, the camera distills presence. Time appears to have been suspended in this world where spaces, objects and characters persist in a state of unmitigated being. But the camera does not penetrate; it doesn’t gaze but graze, picking up and amplifying what is already there: the dented, flaking walls, the maggots squirming on the table top, the dissonant noise of television static, the nakedness of actor Rajagopal’s patchy, Vitiligo-afflicted skin… Through the force of these surfaces – textural, physiognomic, acoustic – emanates the thingness of the world. But the stillness that pervades is not eternal but premonitory. Against the deep bass of the percussion and the drone of domestic life is an ominous sound of heavy breathing, the source of which is eventually revealed as that of the eponymous cloud, embodied in the form of an Albino man – notice again the emphasis upon physiognomy – who is seen rinsing himself in a pool of water. He regards his reflection, following which both body and image dissolve into white fumes. The clouds, radiating with an immanent light, drift into the inhabited rooms. The denizens confront the cloud-as-man, who manifests itself before them in various ways – peeking through the furniture and in one instance, suspended rather ludicrously from the ceiling – but there is no rapture, no shock, only a quietism of recognition. Standing before the microphone in the room of the drummer and decked in a gaudy big wig, the cloud releases its final death growl: “Cloud…”

The cloud releases his death growl.

Undeniably, Cloud presents an arresting and utterly bizarre sequence of images, which can perhaps be made more intelligible (or otherwise, more mystified) by understanding the context of its making. Much of Ho’s past works draw directly from art history, continental philosophy, classical literature and popular culture, and Cloud itself arises from two points of departure: the first, a fourteenth century medieval primer meant to instruct aspiring monastics, in which the doubt experienced in the pursuit of the divine is described metaphorically as “a cloud of unknowing”, the second, Hubert Damisch’s A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, a semiotic study of clouds across the Western art-historical canon. In the latter, Damisch, beginning from an analysis of Correggio’s paintings, pushes for an understanding of the cloud as a “pictorial graph” that serves not just as embellishment, but also as a signifier that due to its formlessness is decidedly polysemic.[1]

Combining the two references, the cloud in Ho’s work, this nebulous matter that separates the earthly from the beyond, can thus be read as a signifier of the divine, or more generally, the transcendental. Returning to the notion of presence and relying upon the classical model of the sign that equates the signified with presence, the thing itself, one can then perhaps construe the incarnation of the cloud in the fleshy form of a man as the arrival of the transcendental signified – the presence that makes possible all presence – which if taken at the most literal level, must simply mean God. One enters topos noetos, that veritable, Platonic realm of pure ideality.

But, alas, Ho is neither a fantasist nor an illusionist. There is resolutely no interest in recreating a religious experience. One must look to that final growl of “Cloud…”, which with all its mock theatricality, marks the crucial turn from an onto-theological logic of presence to the Derridean logic of différance. Nothing is perhaps more ironic than the invocation by the putative thing itself of its signifier – in this case, the word “cloud”, but also its material form – uttered with all the definitiveness of a self-identification no less. With that terminal invocation, what is thought to be the thing itself, the present thing, exposes itself as no more than another signifier, or according to the logic of différance, a (perpetually) deferred presence.[2]

In this light, the figure of the cloud-as-man becomes reminiscent of Maurice Blanchot’s story of the coming of a Messiah that is often recounted by Derrida in his writings. In the tale, the Messiah arrives outside the city of Rome, dressed in rags meant to disguise his identity. Someone, however, recognises him and poses to him the enigmatic question, “When will you come?”[3] Herein lies the aporia: even when the Messiah is here, he must still be yet to come – a presence that exists in an absolute futurity. Here, one may very well replace “Cloud…” with the exhortation “Come.”

The writer confronts the cloud.

It does not end there. In the final shot of the film, the camera withdraws from the interiors of the apartment block onto its façade. Reflected upon the glass of the windows is the camera crew – the film itself exposed as construction, as signification system. The shot continues as a steady, portentous ascent, only to re-enter the dark abyss that lies behind an opened window. Emphatically marking the end of the film is the profuse spewing of smoke by smoke machines behind the screen, as if summoned into being by that last command. The pomp is deliberately bathetic, for the cloud, here manifested in tangible form, is, ironically, pure affect without presence – a simulacrum.

Even after the entire experience, a perusal of the exhibition catalogue only serves to bring the whole self-referential hyper-conceptuality to another level. In the credits, the names of the characters are revealed: the fervent writer is “The Scriptwriter”, the hoarder compulsively arranging his possessions, “The Editor”, the drummer, “The Composer”… and as for the cloud itself, he is, most befittingly, “The Actor”.

To viewers familiar with Ho’s practice, this self-reflexivity will come as no surprise. In the catalogue essay by Lee Weng Choy, Lee notes how it has become a recurrent strategy of the artist “to substitute the making of the thing for the thing itself”. This can be seen in how Ho incorporated footage from his auditioning process into the final film in The Bohemian Rhapsody Project (2006), the artist’s own version of a music video of the iconic Queen song presented at the inaugural Singapore Biennale, and also in one of the episodes of his television documentary, 4 x 4: Episodes of Singapore Art (2005), which features the making of the episode in place of the episode itself. Lee adds, “[n]ot only does the ‘making of’ replace the thing, but the ‘talking about’ replaces the thing too”.[4] For the latter, Lee is referring to The King Lear Project (2008-09), a trilogy of performances written and directed by the artist and co-directed by Ben Slater, each of which is a “staging” of a canonical essay on the Shakespearean classic. Notably, the third chapter of the trilogy, and possibly its most infamous, involved five repetitions of the ending of the play and its scripted post-show dialogue in which cast members played the roles of the audience posing questions.

Clearly, Ho’s works are, by their very nature, citational. A typical description of any of his works almost always begins with an introduction of the original work that the artwork “references” or is “inspired by”. Cloud itself features an abundance of art-historical references beyond the two texts that serve as its primary reference points, playing at times like a montage of canonical works: Caravaggio’s Narcissus, Corregio’s Jupiter and Io, Francisco de Zurbarán’s St. Bonaventure in Prayer, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Beata Ludovica Albertoni... One may easily dismiss Ho’s works as mere reiterations of the canon, but it is precisely this act of reiteration that forms the core of Ho’s “post-critical” criticality. As Gregory L. Ulmer writes, post-criticism “de-motivates” the original object “only to re-motivate them as signifiers in a new system”.[5] In Cloud, however, with that final exposure of the film as film, the artist adds to that movement yet another turn: the rupture of the sign.

Indeed, one can then conceive of Cloud as a series of movements, each taking the viewer farther away from the thing itself. Such movements are, however, fraught with tension, for the viewer is continually reined back into the now by the intense materiality of the imagery, in which every sensation, carefully sculpted, seems to proffer itself as presence which is immediately graspable. One notes also the use of purely diegetic music with the deliberate inclusion of a musician within the cast, thus maintaining the self-contained state of this world of pure presence. Frustratingly, we are caught between two diametrically opposed poles of experience: the first derived from the thing itself, the here and now, the latter, from its absence, in which the work itself is always elusive/allusive, always slipping away, always “to come”.

Perhaps then, the cloud of unknowing, with its indefinite ontological status, is a metaphor for this tension. In face of that which is the harbinger of what is to come, one must make the decision to either remain here or to venture into the absolute elsewhere. The movement, if undertaken, is unidirectional: one can never come back.

The Cloud of Unknowing was an event of the 54th International Biennale of Art, Venice, which took place from 4 June to 27 November 2011. The work was exhibited at the Singapore Pavilion at Museo Diocesano di Venezia, Salone dei Santi Filippo e Giacomo, throughout the duration of the Biennale.

Notes

[1] Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (California: Stanford University Press, 2002), 17.

[2] Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 9.

[3] Maurice Blanchot, Writing the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 141-43.

[4] Lee Weng Choy, “On Wanting & Letting Go: Ho Tzu Nyen, the Screen, the Frame and the Edges of Narrative” in The Cloud of Unknowing (Singapore: National Arts Council, 2011), 26-7.

[5] Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Washington: Bay Press, 1993), 92.

Frost Drawing for Kallang (2011), Gosia Wlodarczak, Performative drawing, pigment marker on glass

Space and process are the two curatorial strands running through the third Singapore Biennale. Conceived around the idea of “Open House” by artistic director Matthew Ngui and curators Russell Storer and Trevor Smith, the Biennale eschews an overtly issue-based approach in favour of probing the conditions that shape art-making, specifically how individual practices negotiate notions of space – both in terms of a physical locality and a contingent sphere of social relations. Underpinning the approach are two simultaneous acts of “opening”: the first referring to that of artistic practice, the second, to that of the city-space, through which the artist-outsider is invited to engage its peculiarities. In considering the albeit simplistic binary that contemporary biennales fall into – either esoteric in its city-specificity or overstretched in its pursuit of a global theme – this gesture of “opening” forms a middle ground, bringing together the local and the cosmopolitan.

The approach reflects a point of maturation for the young Biennale which has previously adopted the vague themes of “Belief” and “Wonder”. The results, however, prove to be rather uneven, for there still remains an overriding tendency for the curatorial formula to defer to the ineluctable obligation to please. Spanning four venues – the National Museum of Singapore (NMS), the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), the Old Kallang Airport and Marina Bay – the Biennale features an eclectic albeit modest range of works, of which the more successful are those that move beyond a mere staging of process towards an interpenetration of practice and site.

Exemplifying this is Thai artist Arin Rungjang’s Unequal Exchange/No Exchange Can Be Unequal, an installation at the Old Kallang Airport modeled after an IKEA showroom with an intriguing contract at work: on weekends, Thai migrant workers from the lower socio-economic stratum are invited to swap the urbane furniture with items brought from their homes. The acts of displacement the artist initiates, performed by a group of displaced individuals no less, become a sculptural gesture as the showroom transforms into a vault of personal artifacts over time. As the indexes of consumption are reclaimed by those toiling at the production end of the consumerist chain, we witness a temporal reconfiguration of social relations, a redressing of inequalities – the hallmark of social sculpture.

Nearby, we witness another act of displacement: in German Barn, artists Elmgreen and Dragset implant within the cavernous hangar a mock-Tudor barn – an icon of quaint rusticity incongruous to the metropolitan sprawl of Singapore. Inside, four shirtless boys sit upon haystacks in a display of homoeroticism and unproductive labour: spatial intervention becomes an institutional critique on the existing order.

Artists in the News (2011), Koh Nguang How, Installation with newspaper archive and on-going research

Meanwhile, at SAM, local artist-archivist Koh Nguang How’s Artists in the News, an installation-archive of newspaper articles documenting twenty years of local art history, sees space and process fusing into a symbiotic union, for the word “archive” itself connotes both a place and an act. The artist replicates the configuration of his apartment where he stores his collection, through which he highlights how the act of archiving implicates space-based processes of placement and classification – both in terms of the personal space of memory and the public space of history.

Also notable are the works that take a broader outlook of “site”, figuring it not merely in terms of an specified locality, but as nodes within a larger network of shifting geographies and temporalities, with the artist assuming the role of the “nomad”. Taking the term from Nicolas Bourriaud’s essay, “Altermodern”, such artists operate practices that are “vehicular, exchange-based and translative”, transforming ideas and signs as they are being transported from one place to another.[1] South Korean artist Kyungah Ham’s embroideries, for instance, offer a compelling example of the ways artistic process negotiates and circumvent cross-border geopolitical sensitivities. Her embroideries, some of which include images of nuclear explosions, are designed by the artist and handmade by artisans from North Korea – an arduous process involving the transportation of the designs and completed works in parts to avoid rousing the suspicions of the censorial regime. The resulting work is poignant but decidedly anti-auratic, its presence fragmented and thus all the more precious.

Devo partire. Domani (2010), Ming Wong, Five-channel video installation

Apart from space and time, this nomadism of the artist can also occur between signs in a semiological system. A simultaneity of all three movements – spatial, temporal, semiological – can be seen in Ming Wong’s ambitiously conceived video installation, Devo Partire. Domani, a recreation of the Pasolini’s cult classic, Teorema. The work, in an act of deliberate miscasting, features the artist playing all of the characters of the film – a characteristic feature of Wong’s practice which often involves mining the archive of world cinema for images of alterity. Crucially, the reenactments here transcend parody and mere exposures of performativity; they constitute an opening of the structures of performance, cinema and by extension, identity. A crucial move here is the splitting of the video into five channels, each playing in a different room, thus spatialising the cinematic montage and demanding the viewer to reconstitute it temporally by way of his or her physical participation in the installation. The filmic encounter turns both processual and spatial.

However, the curatorial formula falters when the processual becomes processional – a tendency that is understandably difficult to circumvent given how the format of a Biennale naturally lends itself to the building of spectacles. Gosia Wlodarczak’s Frost Drawing for Kallang, for instance, marker drawings on the windows of the airport that trace the shifting vistas, forms pretty constellations that are unfortunately only mere illustrations of process. Similarly, Michael Lin’s What a Difference a Day Made, a recreation of a daily goods store, displayed along with the crates in which the wares were shipped to Singapore and video footage of a performer juggling the various wares, appears like a vacuous charade, with the power relations surrounding these commercial items failing to gain a tangible expression. Most conspicuous is Tatzu Nishi’s overhyped The Merlion Hotel, a luxurious hotel constructed around the emblematic Merlion sculpture. While compelling in its professed intent of collapsing public and private space, the work, like the monument that inspired it, ended up as a disingenuous tourist spectacle. But, as an afterthought: can this degeneration into kitsch possibly be construed as “process”?

White Discharge (Built-up objects #10) (2009), Teppei Kaneuji, Found objects, resin, glue

The works at NMS bear the greatest disjuncture from the Biennale’s overall direction. Exhibited within a large, black and minimally partitioned gallery, they inhabit a nebulous void, decontextualised architecturally and curatorially and yoked into a bewildering concatenation. Shao Yinong and Mu Chen’s massive embroideries of obsolete currencies in Spring and Autumn (2004-2010), for one, appear too glossy under the theatrical setting. Compared to Ham’s more understated works, the political overtones here are significantly obscured by spectacle. Likewise, Teppei Kaneuji’s delicate figures in his White Discharge series, created first by amassing numerous consumer items, followed by their pseudo-taxonomic classification and abstraction with carefully dripped white resin, lose their complexity amidst the environmental pressure to see them plainly as visual curios. Outside, artist collective ruangrupa’s mini-exhibition, Singapore Fiction, which displays artifacts, images and anecdotes accumulated by the artists during their sojourn in Singapore, appears superficial in its methods. While entertaining, the postmodern hodgepodge it presents seems symptomatic of a half-hearted anthropological venture devoid of rigour.

The Biennale’s examination of space and process is certainly a worthy one, especially when seen against the contemporary surfeit of manufactured imagery, of which the truth of its production is often concealed by inscrutable veneers. One could only hope the endeavour was pursued with greater gumption, giving up some of the sheen to make room for works that are more inchoate, in which the negotiations between space and process are not expressed as mere postures, but actual dialogues that unfold in the encounter between art, spectator and site.

The Singapore Biennale 2011 was held from 13 March to 15 May 2011.

Notes

[1] Nicolas Bourriaud, “Altermodern” in Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009, ed. Nicolas Bourriaud (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), 23.

Homeland (2008), Nina Mangalanayagam, Series of 5 C-type photographs

Once the overloaded buzzword of postcolonial discourse, “identity” has of late collapsed into platitude. But at the same time, any attempts at pronouncing identity politics as passé are often readily squashed with charges of intellectual snobbery, even as the truth remains that there is little left to contribute to this already crowded field. Part of this tension arises from the half-formed, dissatisfactory conclusions that the decades of rambunctious debates have left us with, trapping us amid a convoluted mesh of discourses straining to reconcile notions of a utopian cosmopolitanism with those that preach the untranslatability of the cultural other. Clearly, there are loose ends to tie, knots to be undone, but the will to do so is quickly diminishing. The prevailing sentiment is that of a blithe, seemingly enlightened, contentment towards this present state of chaos, or as the exhibition ongoing at the Institute of International Visual Arts would call it, this state of entanglement.

Going by its title, Entanglement: the Ambivalence of Identity is a show that would not be expected to be in any capacity to revitalise the presently stale discourses on identity, hybridity, assimilation and the like, and neither does it promise to. It positions itself more as a mirror of current attitudes towards this troubling and troubled field of discourse. Its gesture is observational, to the point of being utterly apolitical, which in itself embodies the curious nature of identity politics in contemporary art today.

In the works of the five artists featured in the exhibition, no longer can we detect the aggressiveness that marked identity-conscious art of yesteryear. The dominant approach instead is that of clinical detachment, peppered at times with wry humour. This distance only appears all the more imposed when one considers the autobiographical nature of most of the works, for the artists themselves – among them, a South Africa-born Chinese, a gay British-Japanese and a Danish-Tamil born and bred in Sweden – possess amalgamated identities that are the products of intercultural encounters. From the outset, the prognosis is delivered: we live in a strange world where strange things enter into strange relations with one another. There are clear lines of tensions, at times palpably materialised, but there is no attempt made to advance beyond the mere statement of this problematic. The paradoxes are left as they are, identities entangled. We are left feeling quizzical and suitably ambivalent.

Book of Numbers (2011), Anthony Key, Wood, cotton and ink

Taking this notion of entanglement literally are the works of Anthony Key, made by fusing together everyday objects belonging to the putatively disparate cultural realms of the East and West. Upon a plinth, we see a Heinz ketchup bottle that has been refilled with soy sauce and beside it, a pair of chopsticks with one of its ends modified to form a minuscule and utterly useless fork and spoon. Sometimes, the objects are the products of painstaking labour: in Book of Numbers, wooden chopsticks, bounded together to form a long scroll, have each been labelled with a handwritten street address that contains telling signs of Chinese-ness, while in Trespassing, strands of noodles have been softened, disentangled and recoiled to assume the semblance of barbed wire. Strangely, while the politics complicit in Keys’ mutation of cultural signs are undeniable, the hybridised forms appear as nothing more than curios – physical facts claiming an innocent, unproblematic objecthood. The tedious labour that is meant to constitute a process of personal and cultural re-invention ends up appearing more as a quaint, almost slavish devotion towards the production (and reproduction) of cultural kitsch; political gesture reduced to the mute facticity that is the sorry state of “hybridity” today.

In Dave Lewis’ Contact Sheet, this observational stance turns anthropological – the common recourse taken by contemporary discourses bent on seeking in relativism a solution to the problem of cultural clash. Through the use of photography, Lewis mines both the ethnographic archives of Britain and everyday communities, uncovering the processes of identity formation and myth construction. His visual research, exhibited in the form of lightboxes, include his personal musings that are scribbled in as footnotes, positioning himself in relation to this pseudo-objective archive. Through the analysis of DNA samples, music singles, video stills taken from a surveillance camera and a bizarre procession in Wales featuring whites in blackface, the all-too-familiar notions of “contingency”, “positionality” and “performativity” are resurfaced. In face of such a thoroughly informed work, one cannot but give a polite, approving nod.

Contact Sheet (2009), Dave Lewis, Photographs and duratrans

Then, there’s Nina Mangalanayagam’s photographic series, Homeland. The artist and her Tamil father are seen in a series of comical tableaus, enacting sets of cultural rituals – painting eggs for Easter, decorating a tree for Christmas – attempting to be as Swedish as they can. In one image, the artist and her father stand erect facing the viewer, a ludicrous ring of candles resting upon her head, and in an accompanying silent film, Lacuna, she is trying in vain to master the “Indian Head Nod” as the subtitles relate her relationship with her Indian heritage. Her expression is deadpan; it always is. She doesn’t quite know what to make of the gaudy pastiche that is her intercultural self, and to be honest, neither do we.

Enclosed in a separate room is Navin Rawanchaikul’s installation of works on the Indian diaspora in Chiang Mai, often referred to in local vernacular as khaek, literally meaning “visitor”. Certainly, there is an elegant poetry to be found in the delicate interplay of the personal and the social in the three works presented here, and different mediums used complement one another to great effect: a film featuring the video testimonies of the Indian immigrants is nicely flanked on the left by a long, monochrome painting of the diverse community of Chiang Mai in the classic guise of a civilisational mural, and on the right, by a loving letter written by the artist to his Indian-Japanese daughter living in Fukuoka. But at times, despite the authenticity of the testimonies, they too slip into platitude. The narratives told sound blandly archetypal over time, always beginning from the troubled voyage across the seas and culminating at the immigrant’s social integration into the local community. And as one of the interviewees enthused over how the Thais are so “generous, kind and always happy”, it almost seems as if our suspicions of a pro-assimilationist rhetoric at work are being confirmed. But surely, that cannot be the case, for this is contemporary life presented as it is – a disinterested observation, a fact. As with all facts, we have to accept it as it is.

Hong Rub Khaek (2008), Navin Rawanchaikul, DVD

It may be notable that I’ve thus far abstained form any forthright dismissal or praise of the show, for as mentioned, it leaves me ambivalent. But should that not mean I should applaud it for achieving precisely what it had set out to achieve? Maybe. But perhaps, it would be more worthy to question the value of an exhibition that, in most parts, merely reproduces the present critical consensus (or rather, non-consensus) on the multikulti debate. What we encounter in Entanglement at times amount to nothing more than a litany of observations, presenting the problematics as they are with a zen-like difference that appears endemic to identity politics as a whole today – and here I’m speaking both in terms of the curatorial framing of the show and the individual works. Whatever happened to the exhibition as platform for making propositions, which however utopian or reductive, could at least serve to rouse the imagination from its present passivity? How often are we able find a show today with the bravura to go beyond the now-easy expression of “ambivalence”, beyond the contrived coexistence of oppositionalities made possible by the illogical logic of the “paradox”, to pursue what Neal Gabler calls in the brilliant New York Times article “the elusive big idea”?

But thankfully, in a darkened room at the corner of the gallery, art is reinstated as gesture. It is Artist’s Book Club: Hakuruberri Fuin No Monogatari by the half-British, half-Japanese Simon Fujiwara, who is here working in his characteristic autobiographical-fictive mode. The work is a video recording of a staged talk show in which Fujiwara plays a caricaturised version of himself discussing Mark Twain’s American classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In a faux but amusingly accurate Japanese accent, Fujiwara discusses the controversial language of the novel, in the process bringing up issues such as his mixed parentage and consequent geographical translocation, his black boyfriend and xenophobia in Japan. As the interview shifts unstably between myth and anecdote, Fujiwara becomes a curious expression of queerness that resists all typification, but at the same time, the work never allows itself to rest at the level of the problematic. As with the whole of Fujiwara’s practice, there is always a restlessness, an unsettled energy that takes his works beyond a trite revelation of the artifice of identity construction towards an attempted albeit difficult resolution. The artist seeks not to dismantle fictions but to construct them, to narrativise his own life – narrative figured not as contingency, but ontological necessity.

Artist's Book Club: Hakuruberri Fuin No Monogatari (2010), Simon Fujiwara, Video and mixed media installation

There is also another novel gesture that Fujiwara performs: the reclamation of race (and perhaps sexuality) as a worthy subject within the overly culturalist and anthropologically minded paradigm in which postcolonial discourse happens today. The way Fujiwara uses his own body invokes the biopolitical, the phenotypical – crude remnants of an old imperial order that were never quite extinguished before we went on with the culture talk. This harks back to the perhaps still under-examined thesis put forth by Paul Gilroy in After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? that the “postcolonial migrant needs to be recognised as an anachronistic figure bound to the lost imperial past”, and that “it was racism and not diversity that made their arrival into a problem.”[1]

Strangely, it is in this portrait of this utterly demure, interracial gay man that one finally finds a hint of the provocative.

Entanglement: the Ambivalence of Identity is currently running at the Institute of International Visual Arts at Rivington Place from 14 September to 19 November 2011.

Notes

[1] Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London/ New York: Routledge, 2004), 165-66.

Massachusetts Chandelier (2010), Video installation

“Eyeball Massage” is the fittingly uncanny title of the Pipilotti Rist retrospective currently running at Hayward Gallery, London. Ostensibly, it points to the overblown sensuality of the works of the Swiss video artist, which are marked by their riot of colours and often installed as part of a larger, immersive environ. The result is often visceral and psychedelic – a sensorium that induces in the viewer a visual orgasm of sorts. But the title also avoids reducing Rist’s oeuvre to a pseudo-utopian project in affirmation of sensual pleasure, for the notion of an eyeball massage also evokes queasiness, or even trauma. I’m reminded of that screaming face with the bloodied eye in Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin, from which Bacon took much inspiration. It’s a disconcerting image, in no small part due to the unfathomable sensation that we are made to imagine: that of our perception being ruptured through physical violence, the perception-image a surface shattered by way of brute force. While such violence isn’t explicit in the innocent, at times saccharine works of Rist, a hint of uneasiness persists, for when perception becomes a bodily experience, it becomes vulnerable to pain.

The retrospective is less a collection of works than a total work by itself, a gesamtkunstwerk, a phantasmagoria of otherworldly images seeping into one another. One walks through the gallery arrested by the vividness of the colour, the sheer surfeit of life. Motifs like flowers, grassy fields, deep waters, free-roaming animals and free-floating bodies recur. But it is not a leisurely stroll in Wonderland, for we are made to circumvent obstacles: a maze of diaphanous curtains upon which the videos are projected and on the floor, heaps of body-shaped cushions on which the audience rest as they take in the surrounding spectacle. Our bodies are rarely static – we have to lie, bend, kneel, stick our heads through holes and peer through narrow openings to access the works. Even at rest, fed with the stream of images – of bodies in suspension, expansion, dissolution – we are animated by the presence of the viewed/ viewing other. We desire escape into the screen, to be assimilated into the bodies unfolding in unmitigated splendor.

In Mutaflor, the naked artist looks up at us from a video projected upon the floor. The camera circles around her like a fly, enters the dark cavity of her mouth and in the next moment, emerges from her anus. The cycle continues. We orbit around the video frame as we vicariously penetrate her body time and again. Between our two bodies, a kind of awkward dance takes place. This seems to be the modus operandi for most of Rist’s smaller works, which are often approached with a sense of curiosity and play. But such interactivity can be facile, even gimmicky, if we were to truly speak of the relationship between the filmic and perceiving body, between ocularity and bodyness, and interestingly, we would find that it is in the works which concentrate solely upon the act of looking, which do not belabour this notion of interactivity, that we can find this relationship most profoundly explored.

Lobe Of The Lung (2009), Audio-video installation

In the theatrical, three-channel installation, Lobe Of The Lung, one is bathed in an alchemy of bright lights and hyper-saturated colours. We glide through a field of gigantic pink tulips, the forms morphing unstably in the interstices between one frame and the next – a serendipitous imperfection of the digitally imposed time stretch. A woman appears, her face so close to the camera one can trace her pores and count her eyelashes, and in her hand, a slimy, wiggling earthworm. Later, a pair of feet walks through puddles of rainwater, litter strewn all around, and in the adjacent screen, there is a garish concoction of green strawberries floating in pink water. There is also a wild boar sniffing its way through the grass, its swollen, glistening snout taking a whiff of the camera. All these images unfold at a languidly slow pace and at the proximity of an extreme close-up. It is in this intimacy that one begins to feel the sense of an assault. These are images pushed to the threshold of visuality, on the edge of becoming pure sensations impressed upon the retina. We no longer see through our eyes, that permeable, untouchable lens through which images of the world outside enters us, but our eyeballs. We are awakened to the frisson of sight, resensitised to seeing as a somatic experience.

Suburb Brain (1999), Audio-video installation

Rist’s works have been described to induce feelings of weightlessness, but they are clearly more the equivalent of an LSD-induced fantasy. While her works are in many ways, spellbinding, we are never really lulled into quiescence. At most, we may sense the dissolution of our bodily limits, and the tremulous anticipation of the body’s escape from itself, but never do we lose awareness of our own corporeality; in fact, we feel it more acutely than ever. This is most strongly felt in Administrating Eternity, the new commission that takes up a full room, where there is the presence of the bodies of fellow viewers constantly encroaching into our space. As we lounge on the cushions, watching sheep blithely pass us by in the projections on the hanging curtains, our experience is constantly disrupted by passing silhouettes, hurried footsteps, careless ruffling of the curtains. Our body is always placed in constant negotiation with the moving image, the surrounding space and other bodies, caught in a impasse between escape and entrapment, and what results is a renewed sensitivity to the body that we inhabit.

Perhaps it can then be said that the works of Rist presents not so much an affirmation of sensual pleasure than a rupture towards the assumed affinity between sensuality and pleasure. The sensuality of her works is one which incites, which aspires less towards sublimity than provocation. But at the same time, the provocation is rarely explicit, for despite the strident colours, her works are poised and cautiously paced. Her universe is still essentially that of the fairytale – one which, however, becomes too rosy for comfort the longer you fix your eyes upon it.

Detail of Suburb Brain (2009)

One section of the exhibition, however, stands out rather awkwardly. In the first room, there is a large diorama of a house standing alone in bleak, empty suburbia, as part of the installation, Suburb Brain. On the wall of that perfect family home is a video that hints at the bizarre events unfolding within: a family sitting silently around a table, dumbstruck by their plates that have been set on fire. Nearby, on the gallery wall, another video follows Rist in a car as she delivers an existential monologue on life, relationships, metaphysics, theology and the like. A larger, mural-sized video containing footage of the passing scenery and spanning two adjacent walls is projected over a quirky display of whitened domestic objects. And hanging from the ceiling is the cheeky Massachusetts Chandelier, a chandelier made from underwear donated by the artist’s friends and family. Admittedly, the feminist and socio-political overtones are more apparent in these works, but singling them out in a segregated space appears a misguided move, as if they cannot both lay claim to the sensuality as expressed by the rest of the exhibited works and at the same time deliver their critique.

In fact, the bold sensuality of Rist’s works is what gives them their critical edge. One does not just sit back and see “the things themselves”, for here, the things are looking back at us.

Eyeball Massage is currently running at the Hayward Gallery, London from 28 September 2011 to 8 January 2012.

R: The idea was really to have someone who hasn’t really been personally involved in the history of the Substation at all. And coincidentally, I’m the same age as the Sub, so it’s like we have both been growing together, but on separate trajectories. In a way, I’m now trying to reconstruct all these memories for myself, to understand and negotiate the gaps between my generation and the one which came before it. Eventually what we are looking at is not a documentary or a strictly factual archive. We’re thinking of using these memories and impressions more as raw material to create a certain object, but I’m not sure what this object is going to be yet. At the moment, we are looking more at a book, and it’s probably going to be more experimental fiction than anything else.

S: So you have already been talking to the various practitioners and other stakeholders who have been involved in the Sub, I presume? Before we start, can you just let me understand what is the kind of angle you are taking for these interviews and why.

R: I’m really trying to keep it as open as possible. But I suppose ultimately we all don’t want this project to be about nostalgia – not that there is anything wrong with nostalgia per se, and I do think there is a place for nostalgia in society – but I think we really need to move beyond that for the purposes of this project. We are still very much looking into the past, but I’m more interested in using these memories for the purposes of pointing us towards the future, not just for the Substation, but also the larger arts community. So to begin, why don’t you start by telling me about your relationship with the Substation?

S: Before we do that though… this is really like me turning the tables, can you tell me what has your association with the Substation been like?

R: My association? Are you referring to my background?

S: No no, that’s for another occasion. I mean, has the Substation featured in any way at all in your thinking, your being, in your activities, your socio-cultural or personal identity, prior to taking on this project?

R: Hmm… Well, I’m 20. I just completed my NS. And before that I did art when I was studying in JC. I suppose when I was studying, because of schoolwork and all that, you know, I didn’t really have much of an awareness of what was happening in the arts community here. I didn’t really watch any shows whatsoever. Going out to watch a play or an exhibition was something I rarely did. I think it’s pretty much the same for most in my generation. I suppose it was only after I graduated that I found the time to do whatever I’m doing now and that was when I became more exposed to the Substation – not that I never knew about its existence before. I had heard about it, mentioned here and there, but it was probably existing more on the peripheries of my conception of the arts scene. In terms of a formal or a personal relationship, there hasn’t really been one. It’s just really more of a place to see shows and this project here is really my first time working with it. I do somewhat gather the same sentiment for the people I talk to: that the Sub no longer holds the same value for my generation as it did for those who were here during the nineties. So this gap is something I want to address in this project.

S: I see. So you want to think about why the Sub doesn’t hold what you think it held for others a decade earlier. Just on that matter, for someone like you, coming through the mainstreams of being Singaporean, which is the education system with of course, junior college as the culmination, and then the national service which was a political obligation you had to fulfil, I’m wondering if there is any sense of place, any at all, which figures prominently in your life. Is there a place that possess for you some form of significance or strong resonance?

R: So you’re asking me about my past?

S: Yes, your past twenty years. In terms of a place, I’m curious to know. A place. Does the idea of a place mean anything to you? In terms of location – not rootedness, but location, where certain things happen to you and you happen to that place, and there is a kind of deep empathy connecting you to it. Any, at all?

R: Primarily the places where I grew up then, I guess. My school would be one such place, since I was there during a significant and formative period of my life. But of course, I’m not sure if that would change in the future. The feeling may become stronger, but it may also diminish.

S: I’m asking you this because I have strange premonitions and prejudices about these things. Premonitions that have to do with, generally, an increasing sense of placelessness… and I feel that very strongly. If I were to like you, think of the place I was born, the school I went to, the community I grew up with, none of them exist anymore, physically. And if they exist, they exist somewhere else. It’s like River Valley Road School not being on River Valley Road anymore, which is about the severest form of dislocation you can think about, the whole geography screwed up in a way. And I was just wondering because I have only one son and he’s thirty-five years old and I have very little connection to people of your generation. So I just do not know what you all feel about this sense of floating placelessness. That’s what prompted me to ask if you have any thoughts about this place… but you have already answered that.

R: I suppose before this, it just didn’t strike me as a place – you know, a place, as opposed to a space, though it is, in a way, both a place and a space. I just didn’t feel as if there was something special going on in it.

S: And I’m wondering if there are any such places in Singapore at all – places that strike one, that tell you there is something special and amazing going on inside.

R: I think that’s because the idea of a physical space is progressively something that my generation and perhaps even other generations as well don’t feel that connected too, because space these days is becoming a virtual concept. A lot of our interactions happen over the Internet. Most of us connect more online than physically.

S: So there is not even bodily contact, or not as much?

R: I’m not saying that it’s good or bad, of course. It’s just a different mode of communication.

S: Yes, of course. No judgement. I’m just curious about the phenomenal aspect of it. How it works out… the shifts in terms of the relationships between people, between spaces and between people and spaces… the kind of sensibility that people have today… You’re right. It’s just a different world we live in today, isn’t it?

R: Yea, I guess.

S: Well, now that we’ve got that cleared, let’s get back. My relationship with the Substation. I’ll wait for you to prompt certain things, but if I can just kick off by saying that as far as I recall, my connections with the Substation was virtually from day one…

Images courtesy of The Substation.

P: The problem here is that people are unduly afraid of discourse. What we really need here is not to avoid discourse but to allow it to happen in a safe space, and the Sub provides this space. I can’t think of any other better place in which this can happen. It’s tragic that a country with so much potential is being stifled internally by its own irrational fears. When I first came, I must admit I was ambivalent about censorship. I didn’t think much about it. I didn’t have a stand. But after what I’ve been through and witnessed personally, I’ve come to realise the evils of censorship. People lose the courage to speak up. There are very few people in the next generation who have the courage to serve as an intellectual vanguard for the community. Self-censorship is prevalent. And what troubles me most is that while people recognise this, they don’t seem to see any problem with it. What do we stand to lose anyway even if we have to shut up a little? So what if we are censoring ourselves? We can continue living our lives. But the thing is this: self-censorship is not just a socio-political phenomenon that concerns only the academic attention of the liberal fringe. It is deeply personal, even existential. Something at the core of our humanity is lost when we choose to silence ourselves. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to have a voice?

W: It’s interesting that you speak of self-censorship as an existential issue, because that would necessarily mean that whatever that’s causing it cannot be entirely institutional. It runs much deeper than that. We cannot simply just put the blame on the government. In any case, I do think the NAC and the government as a whole are changing their tone. There is a marked difference in the way it chooses to address artists or the citizens in general. In the past, it used to be the artists kowtowing to the NAC. Now, it’s more about engagement and discussion. Sure, things are not perfect yet, but our institutions are clearly adjusting themselves. The problem now really lies with us. I know because I’ve spent time in places like Vietnam, Malaysia and so on. Just look at Vietnam: Communist government. Strict censorship regime. But the people are so much more energised, courageous and creative. But us? We are too affluent, complacent. Perhaps we are not really crippled by fear, but apathy. The only one crippled by fear is the government. The rest of us just don’t really care.

P: But that in a way can too be attributed to the institutional apparatus. We are not evolving because we took the easy route to progress. We were made to follow a highly planned trajectory, based on rigid controls, fixed routes and tested formula. We did not grow naturally as a people.

Y: For me, I think culture does play a big part in the way we approach the arts and discourse. I’m talking more about cultural baggage here. You can see this in the different ways the media from different languages approach the arts. In my view, the position of the English media in the past decade has remained unchanged: that contemporary art is something that can’t be understood, and thus there is a need to keep questioning, to keep justifying its practice. There is really close to nothing when it comes to developing a discourse. Instead, they focus more on spectacles and shows with a human focus. It’s mostly an editorial thing, of course, for we know that our journalists are much more intelligent than the words that get printed under their names. The Chinese papers, on the other hand, are much better when it comes to arts reportage. They can understand and talk about the issues and the reviews are very heartfelt. My personal theory is this: that the Chinese come from a historical tradition in which culture was really the cornerstone of society. Think about the Chinese literati of the 60s. They were the agents for social change. Because of this legacy, there is a natural inclination for the Chinese papers to defend culture. For the English papers, there may be some vestigial anxieties about this colonial language, the sense that we are using a language that is being transplanted form elsewhere… as if we don’t have a culture to call our own.

W: Yes, speaking of the media in Singapore, whatever happened to it? I don’t think the English media was always like that. We had people like Hannah Pandian, Sasi, Susie Wong who were writing really deep, relevant stuff. Who’s filling their shoes now that they’ve left? In talking about discourse, we cannot ignore the role of the press. The press is important because it is the only constant over the decades. It chronicles the scene from its early days and provides continuity and memory. It is the best space that can help sustain discourse.

O: We have to be cautious when examining the relationship between the media and the state though, because it never really is about one genuflecting to the other. Sometimes the state takes the cue from the media. The Josef Ng incident is a case in point. Its scandalisation by the media made it necessary for a policy decision to be made. This also means there is a vicious circular loop in place, an endless mirroring between the the media and the state in all facets, which is anathema to what a functional artistic discourse should be. The entire institutional climate needs a paradigm shift. I’m really not optimistic about the general direction of things even now. Everywhere there is still the same philistine attitudes and media anxieties over art, the same default mistrust of artists. It’s all tied to the larger authoritarian culture…

T: Sorry to interject but I have to point out the elephant in the room. Everyone is criticising the government for this and that, but all of you seem to have forgotten that you are also receiving support from them. So what relationship are we maintaining exactly?

P: No, I don’t think any of us has forgotten that. We recognise that and that’s why there is so much frustration. In a place where the entire private sector also sings the same tune as the state, there really is little space left for us to manoeuvre. But that said, I don’t think we should be taking an antagonistic stance any longer. As W mentioned, perhaps the NAC is really willing to engage and discuss, and it’s only right that we partake in the dialogue. In fact, if anything, we must be the ones initiating the dialogue.

T: This goes beyond it being about us versus the NAC. It’s also about us versus us. You say they are willing to engage and discuss, but they are not doing so with everyone. It still has an agenda and will work only with those who can help fulfil its agenda. This has created a divide within the scene and the worse thing is that we have internalised it. Look at theatre. It was one of the art forms that benefitted most from the professionalisation of the scene. Like with the Esplanade, the theatre people opposed it first, but now they are all working with it. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. We should work with government, but we must also remember those who are falling through the cracks. Currently what I see is a bo chap attitude towards each other, or worse, antagonism. There are some artists thinking, why are all these political artists making life so difficult for all of us? Why must they do all this childish things like stripping naked and creating trouble? By that, you know I’m talking about performance art. I think there is also a class divide at work. The theatre people look at us and think we are just bad actors putting up bad performances.

O: Is there really a need to disparage theatre like that? I understand your concerns about the inequalities, but you speak as if we are fraternising with the enemy! Remember that it was theatre which first gave visibility to the fact of homosexuality. Without it, I don’t think we would even be discussing 337A today. Theatre was and is still the space to discharge social ideas. It’s unfortunate that we have developed a perception that theatre has gone all glossy and commercial because of its professionalisation, when it still is very much about the issues, about filling in the gaps of public discourse. We are all working towards the same aspirations. In fact, I find that there is too much theatre dabbling in political issues – bad theatre, in fact, for I don’t think theatre is actually the best medium for going into party politics.

W: Can we please don’t go into a petty argument pitting one art form against another?

O: Yes, I would gladly not want to myself. I think moping about the state of the arts is at times really just an excuse to cover up for the poor quality of the art here. Why do we have no great works of art here? Because the environment pampers us too much. And because our brightest people are doing law and medicine, instead of art. It can be as simple as that. Sometimes we just have to take an austere, uncompromising view: just focus on being great artist. With that, every other thing becomes immaterial. If you are good, you can thrive.

Images courtesy of The Substation.

D: I would propose looking at the history of the Substation in terms of three different decades. The first would be the nineties, defined by a strong, ground-up, DIY spirit, when the Sub was a space for people to encounter one another and for ideas to be negotiated. This was followed by the second decade, which was a time of institution-building, when it became clear that the earlier mode of operation was no longer sustainable and thus economic imperatives had to take over. I would say it became more of a space for presentation rather than process. And of course, it was also during this decade that the Garden was gone, which I think played a very big part in removing the community from the space. I remembered feeling very betrayed when I came back and found that the Garden was not there anymore. Most people felt the same. The third era would be now, I hope, when we see that things are beginning to change a little, although it remains to be seen what is the exact impact of these changes upon the Sub’s identity.

K: I have to take issue with the way you compartmentalised the history of the Sub, simply because we cannot be looking at the three decades so schematically in relation to each other. The nineties was a time of unprecedented growth and thus any period that followed it would naturally appear dull and uneventful. There is also the tendency to look at the past through a romanticised view. You mentioned the Garden. Truth be told, from what I’ve heard from Sasi, the Garden was actually underutilised when it was still around. You can count with one hand the number of events that took place there each month. We have to look at the history of the Sub in terms of the broader landscape that was evolving both because of and in spite of it. The Sub could maintain its identity as a locus of the arts community in the nineties because it was the only place where it could thrive. It was a time when the arts was still largely a fringe phenomenon and the Sub was this fringe. While I cannot say that the arts has become mainstream now, there has at least been an institutional normalisation of the arts which has farther led to its professionalisation as an industry. Now, even within the fringe, there is stratification between the so-called commercial and non-commercial artists and with the community itself fractured, it is only inevitable that the centre at which it gathers begins to vanish.

D: I’m not denying that external factors played a part, but internally, Sub as an institution had also changed after the nineties, no? There was a perception that Sub had become more serious, more academic…

F: But the Sub was already very academic from the start what, like the conferences, art vs art etc. But I don’t think there is anything wrong with it becoming more academic. The Sub needs to differentiate its identity. There is no obligation for it to be a community centre. Actually, from how I see it, a lot of the negativity surrounding the decade when Weng and Audrey were in charge was due to bad PR – the way decisions were made without consulting the community and how they were communicated. There was still a lot happening at the Sub at that time. It was still a lot about process.

P: I don’t think it was a matter of how many things were happening at the Sub. There were probably as many things happening in the two-thousands as in the nineties. The problem was that of curatorial dialogue. What is the discourse that is being generated by all these disparate activities? There were campaigns against everything from the death penalty to cat culling, while at the same time, you had people practising yoga and capoeira in the studios upstairs. The Sub just seemed to have lost its direction, as if it didn’t know where to go.

D: I think that was also the time when people were saying that the Sub was being hijacked by civil society.

K: I don’t agree that it was “hijacked”, because art and civil society have always been intertwined from the time of the Sub’s conception. I believe Pao Kun would have approved of the inclusion of civil society within the Sub’s programming, because he envisioned the Sub as the public space more than anything else. The operative word in “A Home for the Arts” is the word “Home”, which entails openness. The Sub needs to be open to the community and be shaped by its needs.

P: But was the Sub really conceived to have so nebulous an identity? One of the biggest misconceptions of the nineties was that it was all laissez-faire with no programming, as if it was really an empty space awaiting for artists to fill it. Not to say it wasn’t open to all forms of art and practices of course; but despite the porosity, there was a very strong curatorial programme running its core. Think New Criteria, Raw Theatre. Some of the works produced by these programmes defined the generation. The Artist-in-Residency initiative was also essential. Its successor, the Associate Artist Scheme, could never match up to its productivity.

J: Sorry if I’m deviating from the current discussion thread a little, since we have been harping on a lot about programming, but I think in talking about a space like the Substation, we too often forget the most important element – the physical space, the geography. The reason why Sub was able to function as a community centre was because it was literally the centre of a wider civic space. The National Library was nearby. There was S11, the kopitiam opposite and within the Sub, there was Fat Frog. The best part was that all these spaces seemed to spill over into one another. It was one continuous space. You didn’t know where you were stepping into because there were no demarcations. I think the loss of the National Library was the start of the decline. For one, Literature began to disappear from the Sub. All the book events that used to happen in the Garden – gone. The final straw was the loss of the eating places. Food and art has to come together and it has to be the right kind of food. Where can you go after you watch a performance at the Sub now? Timbre?

P: I think we need to stop thinking that removing Timbre would be the panacea to all our problems. Who is going to fill the Garden when we have it back? We have changed as a community. Amongst us, there is distrust and vanity at play. Artistic practice has become a largely become an individualistic pursuit. Nobody is interested in what each other are doing. I think the younger generation of artists are the best indicator of this. Do they even give a shit about our own history, our community?

K: I am wary about pursuing this line of argument though, because once again we are invoking the spectre of a quaint, communitarian past. I don’t think we have become more selfish, or at least not to the extent that it should be a cause for alarm. We are a much larger community now and thus it is inevitable that the sense of intimacy be lost. Besides, the more collectivist modes of art-making in the past emerged more from an economy of means than a communal ethos. We had to share and collaborate because resources were so sparse and there was only so much we could do if we were to operate individually.

F: Most of us also had more free time. Nothing much to do.

J: Yes, that was a factor too. Ideas need time to flourish. If it helps, I think we are beginning to understand again how important it is to give an artist time. The new Arts Creation Fund, for instance, is a good sign of that.

D: We also need to reclaim that sense of imagination. Isn’t that what we, as artists, are supposed to do – imagine?

K: Let us put our imaginations to work then. What do you imagine that the Sub can be in today’s ecology?

F: I think it needs to be the leader of the arts community. I don’t think a community can survive without leadership. It may not be official, but we already have people recognised in some ways as the ones taking the lead in the scene here. But they are all individuals and we cannot count upon them to be there all the time. But when an organisation takes the lead, there is continuity, because organisations have legacies that can be passed on even as the people leave.

P: For me, the Sub has to be a hotbed of discourse, simply because that is the best thing it is capable of doing and that there is no one institution fully committed to it at the moment. It is clear that the Sub has run its course as a physical space. There is no way it can compare to the bigger, glossier spaces out there. It must focus on artistic process and research.

J: If I have it my way, I will turn the entire Substation into a writer’s centre, simply because it makes economic sense. Writers, like all artists, need space. But all we don’t need a lot of space, just a small, no-frills room to call our own, which is readily available at the Sub. I would happily book a room at the Sub just to write.

D: For me, it’s very simple. It has to be about art – not just any art, but contemporary art practice.

K: That’s a very amorphous notion, D. But I’ll add to that another amorphous notion which we are all too familiar with; I think the Substation should continue to be a home for the arts.

Images courtesy of The Substation.

Members of the Memory Society in action

Seven Cardinal Notions of the Memory Society

1. The body is the world of pure reality, unlike the mind, which is the world of apparitions.
2. One must only use the body to remember feelings, not sights and sounds, for the latter belong to the world of the mind.
3. When remembering, one must keep the body in motion, for a body which is still cannot remember.
4. The body remembers through repetition: the more one repeats the motions, the more deeply the body remembers.
5. One must not use words to help in the remembering, for words belong to the world of the mind and would not be understood by the body.
6. When connecting, one must listen to the body of the other.
7. One must not ask the body questions, for the body is not the mind and cannot provide answers.

Image courtesy of The Substation.

Images courtesy of The Substation.