The Longue Durée …

After Evil Empire, it’s Post-Museum’s turn to close shop next month. We take a look at the brief lives of two independent art spaces. By Mayo Martin.

In a shophouse at one end of Rowell Road, the sounds of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band filled the air. It’s a typical early evening on a Wednesday, and the place, quaint vegan resto Food#3, had just opened for the day.

But in a few hours, people would start trickling in to grab a drink or a bite before heading upstairs to watch the award-winning documentary Darfur Now.

Two days after that, local musicians, artists and writers gathered for an exhibition and a talk on conversation sounds. And over the weekend, there was a nine-hour nonstop DJ gig and a mini-bazaar where everything was free.

By the end of next month, it’s all going to end. After four years, Post-Museum is closing shop and calling it a day.

Bringing up baby

From the moment it opened its doors on Aug 30, 2007, with a 56-hour durational work by performance artist Kai Lam, this unassuming independent art space in Little India has practically been everything to everyone – a venue for visual art exhibitions, film screenings, symposia and gigs; precious studio space for its artists-in-residence; and a meeting point for artists, students, civil society activists and even the occasional cubicle-bound office folk looking for something new. Heck, even its in-house eatery Food#3 was conceived as an art project.

Operated by husband-and-wife artists Woon Tien Wei and Jennifer Teo, Post-Museum was the logical extension of what they had previously been doing as part of the curatorial collective p-10. The latter was formed in 2004 as a reaction to the artist-centric atmosphere of the art scene. The group opened the doors of their own apartment space in Perumal Road for exhibitions and events that gave equal emphasis to the work of curators, arts administrators and critics, among others.

But it was, as Teo remarked, “still confined to visual art. We felt the impact was quite limited and we were really just interacting with art people”.

One interaction proved serendipitous. A businessman, who was also a painter, offered to lease out a nearby space at a discounted price.

“We were moving beyond just visual art and were actually looking at culture, how museums operate and how governments use culture for their own purposes. With Post-Museum, we were looking, in a way, of reclaiming this idea of culture,” said Teo.

Considering themselves “custodians”, she described the place as a living, breathing entity. “It’s like you have your baby and it kind of becomes its own person depending on the influences and what it learns. We kind of looked after it but anyone could come in and (contribute) whatever they thought could do good for the art scene and society. The idea was to be as open as possible.”

And that meant everything from student shows to talks by opposition party members to singles nights for vegetarians to organising soup kitchens for Little India’s less fortunate denizens.

But for artists with zero experience in something of this scale, it was a steep learning curve. “We learnt everything from scratch,” Teo recalled.

One of the biggest lessons perhaps was the difficulty in running an independent art space that is, well, independent from both government subsidy and corporate sponsorship. And this “social enterprise” hasn’t been working out.

Financial woes are one thing (it runs on roughly S$8,000 a month and has been “losing money every year”) – but even its utopian aims of having people from various fields coming together hasn’t exactly panned out.

“We realised that there were still many people who only came for things they were interested in and stayed in their own comfort zones, when what we really wanted to do was to get more people exposed to other things. We felt the potential hasn’t really been met. It’s not really happening the way we thought it would!” she laughed.

Empire strikes out

While The New York Times recently published an enthusiastic article about Singapore’s “expanding cultural realm” (offering as proof mostly trendy and hip boutique stores), it would seem quite the opposite when it comes to a number of independent art spaces.

Post-Museum’s impending closure comes at the heels of others. Last September, non-profit space Blackhole 212 at Syed Alwi Road, “an independently run community space for anybody who is interested in alternative lifestyle, music and arts”, hung up its guitar straps. In April, Evil Empire shut its doors over at Niven Road.

The brainchild of artist/curator Alan Oei, the cheekily named arts space presented some of the most unusual and exciting exhibitions and events, from holding a drawing contest and a faux auction, to hosting experimental theatre group Cake’s fifth anniversary performance-cum-installation event, to organising the highly successful Open House exhibition at a Marine Parade HDB estate.

Evil Empire, which officially opened last April with the exhibition Child’s Play, was “an accident waiting to happen”, said Oei, who had previously organised two exhibitions held in unusual places: Blackout (held in a warehouse) and the initial Open House.

“I wanted to do smaller shows that were a little more academic and not just large-scale popular shows,” he said.

Juggling overhead costs from between S$5,000 and S$10,000 a month – and coughing up an initial S$20,000 to renovate the shophouse – it was for Oei, like it was for the folks behind Post-Museum, a labour of love. Funded mainly by his own art consultancy and corporate projects as well as sales of his own paintings, the experiment didn’t make him rich but the space did manage to cover its own costs. “Evil Empire wasn’t the huge financial trainwreck that I thought it’d be,” he quipped.

Drawing an audience also wasn’t a problem. “Most of our shows had a few hundred people coming in and what I really liked was that they weren’t just from the art community but different segments,” he said.

Oei shut Evil Empire down because of other factors – such as the lack of interesting artists to work with.

“Thinking back, I didn’t want to continue because, frankly speaking, there weren’t enough artists around. It was getting clear that Singapore was a quite small pond in the end,” said Oei, who now continues to use the shophouse space as his private studio. After a year of dedicating his life to the tenets of the quirky but thought-provoking Evil Empire, “it wasn’t worth my time and effort anymore”.

De-centralised

As for Post-Museum, Teo said that while their Rowell Road haunt will definitely close shop, it may morph into something that’s “decentralised”. She revealed that there have been offers for them to continue what they’ve been doing in venues including office spaces and even beauty store Beauty Emporium at House in Dempsey Hill. The series of projects is tentatively called Outpost.

Between now and then, however, the Little India venue will come alive with a series of fundraising events, including an online crowd funding project (where folks sympathetic to their ideals can pool together resources for Post-Museum’s post-July efforts).

And as one of the final last hurrahs, they will also be hosting a roundtable discussion on what it means to be an independent art space and an exhibition on activism. “It’s the whole idea of having some ideals and acting on it, which is what Post-Museum is about and what we want to encourage people to do,” said Teo.

Kicking it all off is House Of Incest: An Ob/Scene Surrealist Cross-Disciplinary Art Rave. The mini-festival inspired by Anais Nin’s book of the same title starts tomorrow and is co-organised by literary collective Grapheme Zine Lab. It will include an exhibition, film screenings, lectures and a DJ music party.

Post-Museum may not have spawned a revolution of group hugs and peace signs among its multi-faceted crowd, but it has inspired at least one person.

After a visit to the art space last October, House Of Incest co-organiser Vanessa Ho eventually decided to help out, working in Food#3, and later organising the Ob/Scene series of programmes revolving around gender issues.”I really liked the laidback vibe and meeting like-minded people. I enjoyed talking to everyone from bankers to artists. It’s the one place where I find solace,” said Ho.

On the closing of Post-Museum, she shared: “Maybe it’s not something people wanted strong enough just yet. But I’m curious to see where they’ll bring it next.”

House Of Incest runs from tomorrow to July 5 at Post-Museum, 107+109 Rowell Road. For details on this and other fundraising events, visit www.post-museum.org or their Facebook page for updates.

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