by Kenneth
Loe
Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore
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| Image:
Kenneth Loe |
“torrent (ˈtɒrənt)
n
1. (Physical Geography) a fast, voluminous, or violent stream of water or other liquid
2. an overwhelming flow of thoughts, words, sound, etc
3. (Computer Science) computing a file that controls the transfer of data in a BitTorrent
system. See BitTorrent
I admit. My childhood fixation with 17th century
buccaneers and their wayward seafaring ways never really went away. From
plundering the “Horrible Histories” series in the children’s section at my
neighborhood library for books on them Vicious Vikings and Plundering Pirates,
which in hindsight was my first encounter with the authority of alliteration,
to building and running my very own pirate haven as Pirate King on the PC game,
Tropico 2: Pirate Cove, I was
acquainted with infamous pirates, from the can(n)onical Blackbeard and Anne
Bonny to the fictional Captain Hook and Long John Silver. Needless to say, I
was hooked, line and sinker.
A whole decade later, as I mull over my month-long immersion at the
Centre of Contemporary Art, I find myself hearkening back to those formative
years and digging for doubloons. Incidentally, I had recently re-watched Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, the
glib repartee of the roguish Captain Jack Sparrow meets piratical
phantasmagoria of sword-wielding lobster bisques and anthropomorphic barnacles.
Something I gleaned from all three films was how the responsibilities of the
crew were in perpetual flux in relation to its captain. Every crew member wore
many hats (literally and figuratively), its multifarious directional approach
in collusion with a compass that pointed to what one wanted most instead of
mere magnetic North, a captaincy that was bound to the whim of the tides and
the looming presence of the enemy, be it the nefarious Davy Jones and his pet
kraken or the “it’s just good business” armada of the East India Company, the
indeterminacy of a life at sea, a never-ending balancing act between one foot
and a pegleg and a bottle of rum in between.
Before I expound on my experience further, perhaps I should
explain in pseudo-etymological terms, within rhyme and reason, how I arrived at
this farrago of a word, “curatorrent”. There is a bot on Twitter that goes by
the handle @portmanteau_bot, a bot that for a period of time tweeted the most
wondrous of algorhythmically-generated portmanteaus but in recent times have
slumped into incomprehensible gibberish. “Curatorrent”, an obvious portmanteau
of “curator” and “torrent”, was born in my attempts at hacking together a word
within a set of self-imposed conditions:
- The word has to contain
some form of the word “curate”.
- The word has to rhyme
(kind of) with Caribbean.
- The word has to make
enough sense while sounding absurd.
The past few years have been inundated with news of the clamping
down on countless Torrent sites in the name of copyright, forcing them to set
sail, go under before re-surfacing over and over, the online cousin of POTC’s
Flying Dutchman and its undead crew, namelessly and tirelessly toiling, seeding
and ferrying torrents of data to and fro-yo ho! And if we look at definition
no. 2 of “torrent”, as “an overwhelming flow of thoughts, words, sound, etc”,
you would be looking at a one-word tour d’horizon of my experience in the deep
undulations of theory and theatricality.
On my first day at CCA, I was introduced to a book that I was to
spend the next month and a half ploughing through by Anca Rujoiu, CCA Curator Exhibitions.
“Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary
French Thought”, a book of essays edited by Timothy Murray, I was told, formed
the basis of Theatrical Fields, the
exhibition curated by Ute Meta Bauer, CCA Founding Director, and Anca, first
presented at the Bildmuseet, Umeå in Sweden and currently exhibiting at CCA. I
was tasked with assisting in the areas of research and public programmes for
the exhibition.
The next month was spend swashbuckling with a diverse range of
texts, some denser than others, from Derrida’s circuitous reading of Artaud’s
Theatre of Cruelty to the super abstract but immensely enjoyable text by Luce
Irigaray titled “The Stage Setup”. The essay reinterprets and subverts the
phallocentricity immanent in Plato’s myth of the cave, the necessity of which lent
itself to my watching of Mass Hysteria
Relapsed!, a remarkable spoken word performance by the AmOk Collective that
sought to “to re-act and negotiate the hysterical and the historical”,
performed in late August as part of Indignation Festival, Singapore’s annual
queer pride season. I was to spend a whole week on the text, albeit in
disjointed spurts and long bouts of pondering double negations and complex
conjunctions in a torrential jouissance
of theorizing by Irigaray, before the gaze gave way to this light which is not
one nor the sun.
Looking at this idea of the “curatorrent”, which if I were to
elaborate would refer to “the deluge of information one devours in endeavoring
to knowledge production through curatorial labour”, I can safely say I have
never read so intensely or successively in a field of thought or re-oriented
that radically the lens through which I approached and perceived something as I
have when working on Theatrical Fields.
Having always struggled with while relishing in being a “Jack of all trades”,
dabbling into whatever I fancied or found an opportunity in, Curating Lab not
withstanding, I was utmost daunted in the beginning by the task ahead of me and
utterly grateful at the end to be inducted into a methodology I’ve always
maintained I never had the tenacity for.
While my commitment in the month of July was primarily anchored to
CCA, I still had obligations at the gallery I worked at to attend to.
Concurrently, my fellow CCA mates and I had to conceptualise the workings of an
exhibition that we are co-curating in January 2015. I saw myself constantly
shuffling between roles, shuttling from working on research and public
programmes at CCA to administrative work and managing an exhibition at the gallery,
to learning the ropes of what curating an exhibition entails alongside my peers.
The parallel I observed happening in the scenes of POTC resonated strongly with
me, the switching between modes of existence a crew member assumes, from rigger
to powder monkey to becoming cannon fodder, the swapping of captaincy from Jack
Sparrow to Barbossa to the crew becoming captain. Of course, the perils of what
I imagine to be a life at sea is but an analogy inflected by my 14-year-old
self, a Peter Pirate Pan who decided not to grow up.
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Image:
Ogeeku.com
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The Curse of Monkey
Island,
yet another pirate-inspired adventure PC game I fell head over heels for while
growing up, is a charming cartoon-ish cabal of object-based puzzle-solving and
insult swordfighting in a marvelous display of wordplay. In one scene, the
protagonist and playable character, Guybrush Threepwood, a buffoonish self-proclaimed
“mighty pirate”, finds himself on a ship he stole and a crew he gathered from
the local barbershop comprising of Cutthroat Bill, Haggis McMutton, and Edward
Van Helgen. On boarding the ship, the hapless pirates break out into a song and
dance that’s all rhyme and ridiculousness that feeds off Guybrush’s/your
responses by turning it into a verse. The only way that Guybrush/you can stop
them is to foil their scheme by coming up with a sentence that is metrically
impossible for them to find a rhyme to. The scene ends with the following
exchange:
“Guybrush: We'll
surely avoid scurvy if we all eat an orange.
Haggis: And...!
Haggis: ...um...
Bill: Well...
Edward:...err...
Bill: Door hinge?
Edward:No, no...
Bill: Guess the
song's over, then.
Haggis: Guess so.
Edward: Okay, back to
work.
Guybrush: Well gee. I
feel a little guilty, now.”
“In
civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of
adventure, and the police takes the place of pirates.”
As I rest my feet at this port of call before the next journey beckons, Foucault’s
assertion that “the ship is the heterotopia par excellence” floats to mind. I
console myself that oranges are not the only fruit and what I’d really like
right now is a Bloody Mary sans guilt. Avast, me hearties!
