essay | untitled

By Kamiliah Bahdar

A Non-Response:

It is common practice that artists collaborate with other artists to create ideas and art works. Increasingly, such approaches are deployed between artists and curators. The exhibition produced out of such contexts can sometimes be regarded as art works. It is not uncommon for artists to be curators, and curators to be artists. Explore the notions of a 'curatorial community'. (6 Modules)

Charting the Conceptual Topography of an Exhibition

This essay will take on a decidedly confessional tone.

With little to no formal understanding of art, much less any deep informal interactions with artists, I declare myself unqualified to discuss about artists, and their collaborations with other artists, in the creation of ideas and artworks. To attempt to do so would just be pompous. And although I am taking what could be construed as a crash course in curating, that does not make me a curator. Hence, I do not identify with a curatorial community – assuming there is one – and therefore do not presume to explore the notions of it.

But of all the fine points this particular module calls on me to discuss, having to pick one and run with, it would have to be on the exhibition. And even then, not ‘the exhibition’ as any sort of collective noun, but a exhibition – the one that I am currently working on with three other participants of Curating Lab (initially, there were four). We have been in the discussion about the upcoming exhibition for nearly three months now, and from the very moment of pre-conception there has been a lot of meandering, much of it through the wobbly terrains of inchoate ideas and shaky curatorial frameworks. And with slightly just over a month to our opening night, there is a lot of meandering still.  

(I wonder how the other two groups are doing. Are they on more steady grounds? Do they move more sure-footedly?)

Before moving this discussion along more concrete lines, let me first sketch a brief topography of the different terrains we have been hopping through, backtracking now and again, and then out of there, passing through a stretch of plateau, mountains, and valleys, to find where we are now – which is a fair distance from where we first began.

(Was it us who consciously moved through the terrain, or was it the conceptual topography that permutated organically?)

We were exploring different systems of collecting and displaying outside of the museum context, dwelling notably on the avid comic collector. What are his reasons for collecting? How does he arrange his collection? Which issues are given premier display locations and why? How are these prime issues displayed?

And from one type of collector, we moved to another. It first began with an analogy, when the connection between the karang guni man and his habits of collecting and displaying were made akin to that of the curator; a curator as opposed to a collector, because the display was often for the public’s consumption rather than personal gratification. This analogy was developed further, with the role of artist and conservator added to the karang guni man’s vocation. From this focus on the actor himself, we shifted to the objects collected – the waste of modernity, the old forgotten junk left unwanted. And it was at this point that a slight fascination with Faizal Fadil and his Study of Three Thermos Flasks developed.

There are two main strands that connected Faizal Fadil to the figure of the karang guni man. Study of Three Thermos Flasks is a readymade sculptural work that first exhibited at Sculpture in Singapore, which was curated by T.K. Sabapathy and held at the National Museum Art Gallery from 16 November to 15 December 1991. According to The Straits Times article published on 1 December 1991, Faizal Fadil bought his flasks for about five dollars each from Sungei Road. This local Duchampian figure had trawled Sungei Road for found objects – a location often associated with the karang guni man and the hawking of his junk-laden wares.

And with that, the conceptual topography shifted. The ground swelled: the crust beneath us raised by another layer of deposited sediments, newly arrived postulations providing resources to build steadier curatorial frameworks and strategies. Attention was now paid to the socio-cultural landscape of Sungei Road, and we further explored it on 29 September, a hot humid sweltering Saturday. Our search for the elusive Mr Poon Buck Seng, a karang guni personality we found on the Internet, brought us to Sungei Road where certain held assumptions were reformed. There, we met quite accidentally with an elderly Mr Tang – not a karang guni man (that would be insulting), but an antique dealer. We unearthed a very different type of space in how values of objects are negotiated. Our initial fixation on the agent as curator transposed itself to this space – we drew parallels between Sungei Road and the art market. Sungei Road was an alternative value economy, and for a while, we played with the idea of colliding these two worlds in the exhibition. Contextualising Study of Three Thermos Flasks in the present, Faizal Fadil’s work is a disruption of both spaces. I would even posit that his is a liminal element, an object truly straddling the in-between. The Singapore Art Museum’s acquisition of Faizal Fadil’s Study of Three Thermos Flasks does not cement its position as artwork. At its exhibit in Intersecting Histories: Contemporary Turns in Southeast Asian Art, held at the ADM Gallery in September 2012, I noted that it still elicited the comment “Is that art?” from at least one casual viewer. Conversely, the thermos flasks remaking by the artist’s hand meant that it was not just a pedestrian object either.

With this in mind, although possibly at the time it was not so explicit, we thought of exploring the mechanisms of status- and value-making by injecting disruptive elements into Sungei Road. What these elements were, how we would go about doing it, and to what point was something we had not quite formulated so precisely.

And we never did. We shuffled instead to exploring the circulation of objects in the secondary goods market, and how its social life adds values of other kinds besides just monetary.

This direction led us to a whole other area, far from where we started, though on hindsight, not too far. I certainly had to learn not to be too precious about ideas – that would not be productive otherwise. Where we first began, we thought of different contexts outside of the museum. Now we were jumping right back into the museum through the same pedestrian objects that interested us in the beginning, along with most of the ideas we explored in slightly new form. The conceptual landscape surrounding us was quite familiar. On Sungei Road, we spoke about the negotiation of value and the circulation of objects as goods. Yet, with the institution of the museum, it negates most value systems, and through an acquisition, removes these pedestrian objects from circulation to be held as inalienable.

Before setting out to type away at this essay, I was feeling frustrated from all the meandering and ambiguity about where this exhibition is going. But coming to this point, I realise that ambiguity gave this collaboration with the other participants fluidity and flexibility. I would like to think that all of us were free to travel in different directions in the outer space of our minds, discuss those directions and converge together again. This essay itself was an exercise in the journey out to space on my part, but with an end point in sight, in an effort to make sense of where we were before. It is riddled with my own subjectivity, and I would hazard a guess that if other members of my group were to chart a conceptual topography of this exhibition, it would be different.

I was especially frustrated because I had thought of an exhibition as a text, written by an author. And I thought, “If an exhibition is a text embedded with a message, then having multiple authors would dilute that message”. And so I struggled with understanding what that message in our exhibition is, thinking it was diluted. There are of course large bodies of sources that debate this understanding of exhibition as text, with many problematising and rejecting it, but I am ill equipped to enter that debate now, at this point. I decided instead to revisit Clifford Geertz and his interpretive anthropology. This might not be an original thought, but what if we understood exhibitions to be symbolic gestures, like the Balinese cockfight?

An exhibition is a symbolic gesture, like a wink, but on a larger scale. And curators are both performers of this gesture attempting to convey meaning, but also self-reflexive interpreters attempting to understand the context and giving a thick description of that gesture. In which case, collaboration is about working out an interpretation, a process that would not be as clear-cut as crafting a message, and would benefit from constant meandering.

Journal | Our Curatorial Darling

The blackboard on 6 Sept

The blackboard in the Prep Room has finally been put to good use. Thin white spidery legs crawl out from the centre of "ART" to diverse points, outlining the many aspects of art and the art industry - curated in the most haphazard way, chalked down as these came up in discussion, and squeezed in wherever there was space.

So what were the themes and problematic areas that we came across? I’ll try here to further break them down and group them in categories, drawing some connections within each and across categories. These categories are of course not mutually exclusive, with some points capable of straddling two or more categories quite comfortably.

Art as commodity

Fetish(isation)

Self-indulgence

Sensationalism

Potentially addictive and divisive

Lucrative market

Objectification

Escapism

Branding/marketing

Potentially nostalgic

Curiousity

Globalisation – circulation through networks

Commodity here is meant to be more than just the circulation of art as goods in the capitalist market. It is meant also to highlight the consumption of art. With the exception of performance art (On second thought, maybe not – it is bounded by time.), art is often bounded, and it is this boundedness that makes it easy to consume, to form relationships between viewer and object for the majority of those who encounter it. This poses a few questions: What about a commodity that makes it easily consumable? What ignites our interest in it?

Art as commentary

Moral judgement

Connotative taboo – not socially acceptable

Potentially slippery

Heteronormativity – internalising the male gaze

Site of resistance – as a political space

Critique

Social activism

Cannot un-see

-> Hero and victim – symbolic violence

-> Can you be desensitised?

-> Challenge moral judgement (subversive)

Not all art is explicit on this. Nonetheless, it is hard, dare I say even impossible?, to create art with no narrative. Narratives can consist of anything, be that of an ideal state, a perceived reality or a social commentary. From our trip to Bandung, we have seen artists as activists. Then there are also artists who occupy that slippery state between the acceptable and unacceptable, as Nobuyoshi Araki does with his pornographic photographs. There are also artists who challenge categories and definitions, as Morimura Yasumasa does with ideas of gender. This appropriation artist, with his work Vemeer Study: Looking Back (Mirror), challenges the male gaze and heteronormativity found historically in European art. But there are issues that arise from this – the symbolic violence that art wrought on its subject by objectifying it. Just as it can make its subject the hero, it can also potentially make it the victim. As we look at Vemeer Study, Morimura’s painful reconstruction from a Japanese male to a Caucasian female is a heroic sacrifice to comment on heteronormativity, but a sacrifice nonetheless that reminds us of his veiled victimhood. And how about art that seeks to be subversive? Does it also desensitise?

Art as production

Accidental

Mixed-media

Meticulous sense of detail

Perverse in productive sense

Aesthetic conventions

-> What is the ideal?

-> Fabricated

-> So real it becomes fantasy? – hyperreal, transcendental

-> Schema theory

Technology of empire and nation – exoticism

Audience participation

Educational tool

Can we separate the person from the act?

Art is the result of the artist’s work, which does not need elaborating. But art is also the production of meaning on the part of the artist who created it, the curators who exhibit it, and the viewers who consume it. It is also part of the production of power, representation and boundaries, and the production of history and identity.

Having said that, let me here move on to the other half of the blackboard and introduce Poon Buck Seng – the artist, curator, conservator and activist we have chosen to exhibit in January. An archetypal figure, Poon is the ideal subject. But is he only really so from the result of engineering on the curator’s part? The qualities that we have selected and presented combine to make him a curatorial darling. He is transgressive, potentially aspiring, an eccentric, a provocateur, eloquent, works the bureaucracy, evades authorities, garners sympathy, dramatic, brazen and daring, meticulous, socially conscious of the contemporary, passionate, a persistent collector, occupies spaces in a temporal manner, itinerant, an urbanist, obsessive, sentimental, a taste-maker, selective, a pragmatist, an idealist, and insist on authorial recognition. He is as much a curatorial fiction as he is real, our discussion laying bare the hidden hand of the curator in making the artist.

Journal | liminality

Taking Carol Duncan's The Art Museum as Ritual as a jumping board, I want to bring attention to and explore museum spaces in Singapore as a secular ritual site.  The Art Museum as Ritual is very much a layered piece, speaking of the site, the performance of moving through the museum, the ideological force of the museum and as where power and history intersects. Although these are all points that will bear down on what I am about to say, here I want to focus on the particular aesthetic experience that museums stimulate, and how the museum space in Singapore evokes that experience (or rather, fails to).

To just briefly summarise what was said, Duncan adapted the notion of liminality to the art museum to analyse it as a ritual site/artefact. She has spoken of art museums as "complex totalities that include everything from the building to the selection and ordering of collections and the details of their installation and lighting... this totality is best understood as a ritual setting, a ceremonial monument in its own rights and not just a container for other monuments." Duncan here has set the scene of the museum as a ritual site where a particular category of liminality, that of being betwixt-and-between the normal, that is, where a particular mode of consciousness operates, to elucidate how we encounter the objects on display. When Duncan says "like most ritual sites, museum space is carefully marked off and culturally designated as reserved for a special kind of attention - in this case, contemplation and learning", she is comparing the liminal experience to the aesthetic experience as a mode of receptivity thought to be most appropriate before works of art.

Do museums here in Singapore evoke that type of aesthetic experience?

I would say no. (I'll be frank and say I'm not that well read on history and policies here, so I'll be breezing through the points.)

The many points from Duncan that I had listed above are relevant here. Firstly, the performance of moving through the museum: If visitors to a museum are enacting a performance, then they are performers reacting to cues in scripts, and some visitors read these cues better than other. Are visitors here in Singapore clued in to these cues? Compared to European societies where museums have had a long history as an Enlightenment project, such history is lacking here. Are there other socio-historical factors at play? What are they?

Then there is of course the ideological structure of museums here. What can be said of museums that constantly have 'Open house' during public holidays or festivals? Is this in line with a particular vision and policy on museums? Perhaps my next point will shed some light on this.

Lastly, the site, which refers to its architecture and its surroundings. The building of Singapore Art Museum was formerly a school, the National Art Gallery was the City Hall and former Supreme Court, and the Asian Civilisation Museum used to house government offices. Do the histories of these buildings have any impact on the aesthetic experience? Well, I think they do. The obvious is that these buildings were not designed to be museums. Also, and perhaps this is reading too much into symbolism but I've always understood such urban planning to be a microcosm of society, what does it mean to house museums in former colonial/colonial-era buildings? What effect does the architecture have when it blends in with similar buildings next to them? Especially, as in the case of the latter two museums, they are located in close proximity to the buildings of state institutions and, in the case of all three, cramped in by shopping and/or business districts and offices on the sides?

In my view, the three museums here have failed in composing a dramaturgy. The liminal experience is one that occurs from the outside, betwixt-and-between the normal, yet the museums are located in the midst of such banal spaces as shopping centres and office buildings. And the buildings of the museums itself held normal day-to-day function of education and administration.

The National Gallery of Victoria (International), in Melbourne, Australia provides a telling comparison. And I've chosen NGV only because it is an example I am familiar with. The building itself is of monolithic proportions and its design, literally a large plain rectangular box, is one you won't see anywhere else in the area and sets it apart. At the front, it has a moat-like pond running around the side. Its large entrance is blocked by a glass panel with water running down, so that it channels visitors to come in from the entrance located on the right of the panel.  The exit is on the left. Each element serves its purpose to isolate the visitors. The moat-like pond is almost like a symbolic threshold separating the museum from its surroundings. And the glass panel, a permeable barrier. It is not just the design of the museum that adds to the dramaturgy. The NGV is located on the bank opposite the CBD - another separation by water, this time a river that cuts through and separates the city area. It faces the same street that leads up to the Shrine of Rememberance, itself a ritual site of national importance. Do such physical elements echo in our mind? Does it unconsciously prep us for an aesthetic experience? All I know is that each time I've passed through the entrance of NGV, I've always felt a tingling of trepidation.

I'm also interested to know if the aesthetic experience is the same if we were to encounter art in open public spaces. There is that slight disjuncture when you encounter something quite out of the ordinary. Could that experience be called liminal? But I think that's a topic for another post.

Journal | conservation

With coffee in our system, we headed off to the Conservation Studio to speak to one of its inhabitants, Lawrence Chin. Amidst all the organised clutter of ziplocked strands of cloth and fiber, a reused jam jar of cotton swabs, an experimental set-up, a tyrannosaurus rex affectionately named buddy, and of course, paintings, Lawrence gave us a very brief but candid introduction to the conservation of objects and how he works. Conservation is both art and science, as conservators must have a detailed understanding of the materials they are working with, but also make aesthetic judgements on their restoration work guided as they are by the ethical principles of minimal intervention, reversibility and the full documentation of their work on a particular piece.

But even with such ethical guidelines, there is still much unstable ground to negotiate through. Materials used by conservators are hardly manufactured for the sole purpose of conservation but rather, are appropriated from other industrial purposes. As such, in the principle of reversibility where the conservator should be able to undo his or her intervention, the conservator finds himself or herself often balancing the considerations of easy reversibility and strong durability. Similarly, the restoration of an ethnographic object is a matter of balancing aesthetics and minimal intervention. In restoring an ethnographic object, where does the conservator stop so that it still looks worn and aged yet is visually attractive? In restoring an artwork, most often, the conservator does the minimum so that it blends in from a metre away. But what if a large area needs restoration? What more if it is the focal point of the artwork? These are certainly considerations that curators should have a deep understanding of working as they are with the conservators, the artists and the institution in which the artwork is displayed in, all of whom have views on the presentation of the art.

Especially now with the contemporary art world making use of materials that have not been fully understood, such as acrylic paint, and branching off into various mediums, using ephemeral materials and creating installations that are complicated to take apart and even more complicated to put back together, what is the conservator and the curator to do?

Some weeks from now, when we're off tramping through the flea market at Chinatown and on Sungei Road, checking out shops run by karang guni men, and exploring the collection of systematic comic collectors, understanding how they go about conserving their collections is something we could explore too.