[Non-review] Building as a Body

Image from The Substation site. 

The facade of the Substation is currently swathed in a screen of black and white PVC slats. The installation is the brainchild of a local architect and a designer, Randy Chan and Grace Tan, titled Building as a Body. The work, as that moniker suggests, imagines architecture as anatomy. According to Tan:

The façade becomes bare and neutral, but powerful and dynamic beyond the surface. Subsequently, Randy and I started talking about the parallel between the body and architecture. Over the course of our dialogue, the notion of constructing a layer/skin to cover the façade came naturally to us.

By shrouding the façade, we are removing and masking the ‘face’ of the building, which is the most critical, visual, and symbolic physical representation of The Substation.

(See an interview with Tan here.)

The correlation between built structures and somatic structures is not a new one:

… Renaissance building owed its special qualities as an “architecture of humanism” to its analogies, in theory and physical presence, to the human body. A confessed Wolfflinian himself, Rowe would seem to agree with the ascription of a corporeal psychology to the experience of architecture, a response of the human body to a building that, for the building to be successful, would have, so to speak, to be matched and instigated by the building itself. We sense an echo of Wolfflin’s conclusion that “we judge every object by analogy with our own bodies.” Wolfflin wrote of the “creature”-like nature of the building, “with head and foot, back and front” ……

For Geoffrey Scott, the building’s “body” acted as a referent for “the body’s favorable state,” the “moods of the spirit … power and laughter, strength and terror and calm.” Translating the long tradition of Renaissance bodily analogy into psychological terms, Scott identified two complementary principles at work: the one, founded on the response we have to the appearance of stability or instability in a building, is our identification with the building itself: “we have transcribed ourselves into terms of architecture.” The other was founded on the fact that with this initial transcription we unconsciously invest the building itself with human movement and human moods: “we transcribe architecture into terms of ourselves.” Together, these two principles formed, he asserted, “the humanism of architecture.”  … Thence Scott’s impassioned plea for the body in architecture: “architecture, to communicate the vital values of the spirit must appear organic, like the body.”

(Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny [1992, MIT Press].)

Comparisons to the large-scale outdoor projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude aside, Building as a Body strikes one as an informed intervention in the urban streetscape: cloaking the physical presence of a well-established local institution in a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t play of shifting chromaticism, the work perhaps functions as an oblique comment on the Substation’s diminished influence in the arts scene hereabouts, a game of optical hide-and-seek to mirror its vicissitudinous wax and wane in the public eye …

A write-up in The Straits Times last week, reproduced below.

—————

VEIL FOR SUBSTATION

Artists turn the arts centre into an art installation for its 20th anniversary.

By Denise Cheong. Published: 3 February 2012.

One of Singapore’s landmark arts centres has itself been turned into a work of art.

Take a stroll along Armenian Street and you will find The Substation shrouded in interwoven black and cream plastic strips.

The arts centre-turned-art-installation was commissioned by the National Heritage Board and the Singapore Art Museum.

Singapore artists Grace Tan, 32, and Randy Chan, 41, created it to celebrate The Substation’s 20th anniversary. Their work, quite an artistic and architectural feat, is titled Building As A Body.

It is a 15m-tall and 10m-wide matrix of 471 PVC strips, each between 5m and 9m in length and 3cm in width. These strips are connected to steel poles using square rings and conceals the entire facade of The Substation building.

The 80kg structure was completed on Jan 10 and is on display till March 28. It is supported by steel scaffolding clamped to the building’s pillars, and took three days and 10 construction workers to build.

On why the artists concealed the arts centre, Chan said he was disappointed that since the National Library and a well- known char kway teow stall (Armenian Street Char Kway Teow, now at Block 303, Anchorvale Link Coffeshop in Sengkang) were relocated, the area was now often deserted.

‘The idea was to personify the building. If you look at it one way, the veil represents a woman’s coming of age as a young bride. However, it can also stand for something more morbid, as a veil is also used to cover a corpse,’ he said.

Tan added: ‘This is why we chose the monochromatic colour scheme instead of something more striking. The polarity is very symbolic.

‘The image of a veil in itself is very elusive and mysterious. This can be paralleled to how The Substation means different things to different people.’

The Substation artistic director Noor Effendy Ibrahim, 38, said: ‘I hope the installation will activate a new imagination of The Substation, not only as a home for the arts but also as a platform for design and sculpture.’

He added: ‘The Substation already stands out in gentrified Armenian Street. This installation disrupts the clean lines of this neighbourhood. I like it and I think it’s an important statement.’

On the use of PVC strips, Chan said: ‘As this is a public art installation, we were very strategic about the materials used. Instead of just draping a big cloth over the building, which will eventually get wet and heavy, we went for this idea of weaving so that wind can flow through it.

‘PVC material is water-resistant and also very light, making the veil structurally sound.’

This is Chan and Tan’s first time collaborating on an art project of this scale.

He is an architect by profession, and she is an associate artist of The Substation’s research programme and the founder of kwodrent, an inter-disciplinary practice specialising in design and fabric works.

 —————

[Review] Master Plan

Gallery view, Master Plan. Image from Chan Hampe Galleries.

Jason Wee’s solo show, Master Plan, currently on view at the Raffles Hotel outpost of Chan Hampe Galleries, is his first in a couple of years.

And it’s good too.

A labyrinth of baleful, pitch-black edifices crowds out the narrow space: mountainous pyramids, crowned by Saturnian rings, loom up next to self-contained cylinders, topped by planar shapes. The play of pure geometric forms here retreats from a contemplation of linear abstraction into immediate, visceral evocations; indeed, first impressions imply a topography of spiked steeples and closed towers, inscrutably shut to human habitation, inimically hostile to human advance, a dystopic terrain of silently minatory entities straight out of a Brothers Grimm narrative. And, save for slender slivers of standing room tenuously maintained at the entrance to the gallery and out back, the only concession to the human body is a narrow path of open space eked out through the mass of structures, its negative ontology – the absence of presence – fraught at every turn by the encroaching host, in the manner of a landscape overrun.

One has to swivel, and pivot, and turn, and tread with wary step down the open concrete road, an interloper dwarfed by the intransigence of monumentality.

Master Plan represents a confluence of several interests on Wee’s part: in urban landscapes, in architectural drawing, in set design. Those concerns, while shaping the formal configurations of the piece, seem less urgent in the face of the experiential – the sheer perceptual immediacy, the impression of looming menace, which the work imposes, and the bodily manipulations to which the viewer is obliged to acquiesce. One is overwhelmed by the profusion of dark, alarming presences, that seem to bear down like the beloved of the Song of Songs, “terrible as an army with banners”; and one is physically coerced into observing, with trepidatious footfall, the attenuated margin of space grudgingly allocated to the viewing body, a person’s movements through the forest of objects reduced to a series of gestural negotiations and corporeal accommodation.

If indeed the installation re-imagines the shape and the life of a city, then it isn’t too difficult to imagine which city that is.

As Michel de Certeau remarks:

The panorama-city is a ‘theoretical’ (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.

The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this experience: they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write ……

Thirdly and finally, the creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself: it gradually becomes possible to attribute to it, as to its political model, Hobbes’s State, all the functions and predicates that were previously scattered and assigned to many different real subjects …

(See the section, “Walking in the City”, in de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life.)

On the one hand, the walker – hardly Baudelaire’s flaneur – as subjugated denizen, inhabiting the embodied down below, rather than occupying a panoptic up there. On the other, the city itself as subject, the calculating, hegemonic materiality of a built-up space compelling submission, or adaptation, to its concrete determinations.

In other words, if it can be claimed that, in its spatial format, Wee’s piece imagines a displacement of human agentiality by an architectural order of power, then the city – here distilled into a materiality of manipulation – instantiates what Gayatri Spivak famously identified as the “subject-effect”:

 … that which seems to operate as a subject may be part of an immense discontinuous network … of strands that may be termed politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language, and so on. … Different knottings and configurations of these strands, determined by heterogeneous determinations which are themselves dependent upon myriad circumstances, produce the effect of an operating subject. Yet the continuist and homogenist deliberative consciousness symptomatically requires a continuous and homogeneous cause for this effect and thus posits a sovereign and determining subject.

(See Spivak’s In Other Worlds.)

The city as “sovereign and determining subject”, then, a placeholder for the “immense and discontinuous network” that operates behind contemporary urban experience, becomes clearly legible in Wee’s Master Plan: the regulation of bodies, movements and flows inscribed into the rationalized cityscape of Singapore (let’s just come out and say it), transposed into a hegemonic topography that imposes its spatial organization onto the abjected agentiality of the viewer – the city-subject as subject-effect, and the viewer as city-walker as, irrevocably, the subaltern. (Which is a whole other discussion …)

Clever.

The exhibition runs till 18 February.

[Review] Milk and Honey

A recent piece I contributed to The Muse: In The Realm of Plenty, a review of Brian Gothong Tan’s Milk and Honey show, which runs at the Goodman Arts Centre till Sunday (Jan 22).

An Art History Mystery: The Butler Did It ! .. or, The Denouement

The Pek San temple 碧山廟 in the Kwong Wai Siew Pek San Theng 广惠肇碧山亭 complex on Bishan Lane.

Finally.

THE RESOLUTION.

And, yes — after three posts, two articles, a couple of trips to a train station, the library and a temple, and the adrenalin-charged joy of stumbling onto the decisive piece of evidence through sheer serendipity — there is one.

The mystery of who was actually responsible for the four statues on the facade of the Old Tanjong Pagar Station has been solved.

Ba-da-ba-dum !

<lol> Ok, maybe all that’s just melodrama and puffery. After all, we pretty much already knew who created the Tanjong Pagar statuary: the four larger-than-life figures of Agriculture, Commerce, Industry and Transport that were inscribed with the names of their creators, one Angelo Vannetti, and one R. Bigazzi. (The back story here, here and here, in that order.) It was more a matter of corroborating that information. Oh, and of course (a) finding out just who those two guys were, and (b) tracking down how the Nolli myth came about in the first place.

But first things first. A confession: the er, proof about to be presented really should have come to light much earlier — at the outset, in fact. A quick hunt through the National Library’s digital archives of The Straits Times had turned up a short notice about Vannetti and Bigazzi gracing our our sunny shores in 1929 (quoted in my first post on the topic). I’d used Vannetti’s name as a search term, simply because the inscriptions on the statuary named him as the sculptor; like the fool that I am, I’d neglected to dig around with Bigazzi’s name as well. Which is exactly what I did not too long ago, and, well — ding ding ding !

The smoking gun … and then some.

So anyways, my little search turned up the following: a long article from the May 2, 1932, edition of The Straits Times (below) on the then newly-opened Tanjong Pagar Terminal Station. “Opening of Singapore’s New Terminal Station”, the headlines announced, “Magnificent Modern Railway Terminus.” The piece delves into almost every aspect of the structure in some detail, and, in a two-paragraph section titled “Allegorical Figures”, the writer — god bless her, his or its soul — clears up our lil’ art history mystery for us:

Entering the station from the first “In” gate on Keppel Road, one is immediately struck by the four huge figures occupying prominent positions on the main facade, depicting agriculture, commerce, transport and industry respectively. These are carved in marble, and surmount in turn the letters F.M.S.R. picked out in white on blue shields.

A nine-foot-high statue of a bare-footed man carrying a sheaf of corn over his shoulders and grasping a scythe in his left hand represents agriculture. Commerce is a Greek-like figure of a man holding and open scroll in the right hand and a bag of money in the other. A half-naked man with a huge block of stone on his left should represents transport, while industry is depicted by a well-built, muscular man wielding a mallet. These figures were executed by a distinguished Italian sculptor, Angelino Vanette, from the studios of Raoul Bigazzi, Florence. (Bold emphasis mine.)

There we go.

The pertinent section from the ST article, “Opening of Singapore’s New Terminal Station” ( May 2, 1932).

The first page of the article.

And that’s that, I think. Inscription + contemporaneous eyewitness account = a pretty air-tight case.

One other thing: I Google-d “Angelino Vanette”, since Vannetti seemed to go by quite a few variations on his name. Oddly enough, only results in Malay showed up. It turns out that the Malaysian press at least were never fooled by the Nolli story one bit — presumably because they didn’t have the benefit of Lim’s and Sabapathy’s work. A recent Utusan Malaysia Online piece on the closing of Tanjong Pagar Station ran:

Empat figura manusia setinggi 22 meter melekap pada bahagian hadapan bangunan. Ia adalah kerja tangan tukang arca terkemuka di Itali, Angelino Vanette dari Studios of Raoul, Floerence. Keempat-empat figura itu mewakil kegiatan ekonomi Singapura ketika itu iaitu perdagangan, pertanian, pengangkutan dan industri.

“Perjalanan terakhir”,  Noraini Abd. Razak, Utusan Malaysia Online, June 5, 2011.

Four human figures, as tall as 22 meters, are attached to the front of the building. It is the work of the renowned sculptor in Italy, Angelino Vanette of Raoul Studios, Florence. Those 4 figures represent the economic activities of Singapore at that time, i.e. trade, agriculture, transportation and industry.

“Last Trip”,  Noraini Abd. Razak, Utusan Malaysia Online, June 5, 2011. (English translation courtesy of Ms. Bernette Meyer. Thanks, babe !)

Definitely interesting …

But moving on. Some other nuggets involving Bigazzi also popped up in the archives, most of which were newspaper ads for his marble and his sculpting services. One article from the Singapore Free Press (god how mocking that sounds now) from January 19, 1955 (below), details his association with the Crosby House project, and also provides a brief history of his activities in this part of the world:

The supply and installation of all marble in Crosby House was entrusted to the well-known firm of artistic works, Raoul Bigazzi, whose Far East headquarters are in Hong Kong ……

The firm of Raoul Bigazzi has specialised in marbles, bronze, mosaics, and other branches of architectural decoration for the past 34 years.

It has contributed to some 74 banking premises and many Marajahs [sic] and residences of royalty, some of which are scattered all over the world, but mostly in the Far East, from Peking to Bombay.

In Singapore its pre-war work included Eu Villa, the Municipal Building, Supreme Court, Hong Kong Bank, Meyer Chambers, and Union Insurance Building.

The latest post war works have been the Bank of China, Finlayson House, Odeon Cinema and the Lim Bo Seng Memorial.

The marble finishing of Crosby House, both in the materials chosen by the architects and the way they have been employed, is outstanding and well suited to this latest addition to the Singapore skyline.

A. CLOUET & CO. (Malaya) LTD. are the agents for Raoul Bigazzi.

Reading the article definitely rang a couple of bells in my head — specifically its name-checking of the Supreme Court and Bank of China buildings. It’s known that Rudolfo Nolli also contributed to those projects (the former in a very big way), so Peter Schoppert’s suggestion that Nolli and Bigazzi were at the very least acquainted is made more credible by this piece. (See his comments on the Singapore Public Art site here.)

“It’s rich with Italian marble”, Singapore Free Press, January 19, 1955.

The real find of the day, though, was this: a fairly recent Straits Times article, from 2006, on the publishing of a book on local Chinese temples — in Chinese, by the Shin Min Daily News 新明日报 (below).

Doesn’t sound too relevant, does it ?

And indeed it started off exactly as the title suggested, “Pray tell, where is this?: A new book on Chinese temples here uncovers fascinating facts”:

Did you know that at Loyang Tua Pek Kong Temple, Chinese and Indian Singaporeans worship both the Taoist deity and Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god?

Or that the 130-year-old Po Chiak Keng Temple is devoted to a general of Empress Wu Zetian’s time?

And Lorong Koo Chye Sheng Hong Temple stages more than 100 Hokkien opera shows a year – ahead of even the active gezaixi theatres in Taiwan? (Gezaixi is Mandarin for Hokkien opera.)

The stories of these and 35 other Chinese temples in Singapore can now be found in a new Chinese-language book titled Temple Culture.

The 224-page volume by the evening newspaper Shin Min Daily News includes articles on Chinese cultural beliefs like bai tai sui (the Chinese New Year practice of praying to one of the 60 deities who take turns to preside over each year, for peace in the months ahead).

About 21,000 of the 30,000 copies of the book have been sold since its publication two months ago.

Book in hand, LifeStyle takes you on a tour of some of Singapore’s colourful Chinese temples.

But then there was this fantastic little gem in a section dubbed “From Italy with Love”:

Two languid marble lions guard the entrance of the Peck San temple.

These were sculpted in the 19^th century by an Italian named Raoul Bigazzi, and seem less stern than their Chinese counterparts.

Mr Wong Ah Fook, the late leader of Singapore’s Cantonese community, bought them for the tomb of his family.

His descendants donated them to the temple after it moved to its new address at the temple complex at Singapore Kwong Wai Siew Peck San Theng.

Portions of text and images from “Pray tell, where is this?”, Foong Woei Wan, The Straits Times, 19 February, 2006.

That definitely got me excited.

An extant piece of sculptural work by Bigazzi in Singapore ? (His known projects so far seemed to be all architectural.)

Woah.

I had a gander at the book in question, which brought more good news. The relevant portion of the book is reproduced below (Chinese text quoted verbatim; English translation mine):

碧山庙守护狮

意大利雕塑家雕塑

福德祠旁边是碧山庙, 这也是一座超过百年的古庙. 中国的古庙门口, 都有两只石狮守护着, 而碧山庙的石狮, 不是传统的中国石狮, 而是一对西洋造型的石狮, 走近一看, 石狮旁刻着雕塑师的名字。 他是十九世纪意大利雕塑家劳勿.毕卡西。说起这对石狮, 它体现了先辈们的族群互爱的精神。

这对石狮, 原是本地名人黄亚福家族购买来守护家族墓园的镇山之宝, 政府征用碧山亭的土地后, 黄家后人将这对珍贵的艺术品赠给碧山亭, 于是原本守护一家的石狮, 现在守护整个碧山庙。

庙宇文化, 第一本 (Singapore: Focus Publishing Ltd., 2005), p. 47.

Pek San Temple Guardian Lions

Sculpted by an Italian Sculptor

Next to the Fuk Tak Temple* is Pek San Temple, another historic temple dating back a century or more. The old temples of China always had a pair of stone lions guarding the doorway, but the Pek San lions aren’t your traditional Chinese lions; rather, they’re a pair of Western-style stone lions. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that they were inscribed with the sculptor’s name: Raoul Bigazzi, a 19^thcentury Italian artist.  [Bold emphasis mine.] It must be said that they evince the communal spirit of our forebears.

These lions were originally purchased by the family of local notable Wong Ah Fook to stand watch over the family’s burial ground. The descendants of the Wong family donated these valuable art objects to the Pek San Theng, when the temple’s lands were expropriated by the government. As a result, the lions, which once watched over a family plot, now stand guard over the Pek San Temple instead.

Temple Culture, first volume (Singapore: Focus Publishing Ltd., 2005), p. 47.

* [The Kwong Wai Siew Pek San Theng complex houses a Fuk Tak Temple; it’s not to be confused with the older Fuk Tak Chi Museum on Telok Ayer St.]

Uh huh !

Apparently these pair of cuddly marble kitties, secreted away in a Chinese temple, were inscribed.

I made a beeline for Bishan.

Alert, with Bigazzi’s inscription.

Abject, with Bigazzi’s inscription.

The Kwong Wai Siew Pek San Theng 广惠肇碧山亭 complex lies just behind the sprawling RI-RJC campus, tucked away innocuously on a quiet, leafy backlane, dwarfed by its prodigious neighbour.

Who would’ve guessed that it held a piece of the puzzle ?

But that, it did.

Bigazzi’s felines are wonderfully expressive, playful creations (above). Unlike the usual male-female pairing one finds with Chinese guardian lions, here the yin-yang polarity is conveyed through an emotional disjuncture instead: the creature on the right is a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed presence, peering at the viewer, if one faces it head-on, with a curious, roguish regard. Its partner, also a male cat – the implications are delightful – seems a lot less jolly, its head resting glumly on its paws, its eyes sunken and its mien melancholic. Otherwise, both statues are very vivid representations, the musculature of their bodies and the wavy tresses of their manes articulated with a certain stylized flair.

I decided I’d dub them Alert and Abject.

Both were inscribed with the same epigraph on their bases: “Raoul Bigazzi” on one line, and beneath it, “Sculptor and art dealer”; and beneath that, quite simply, “Florence.” Alert had his on the left-hand side of the base, near the front, while Abject’s was on the right-hand side, towards the rear. The script employed was regular and even, in keeping with the inscriptions on the Tanjong Pagar statues (see my first post).

If ever someone decided to make a close study of the four Vannetti-Bigazzi figures, here’s ready material for a compare-and-contrast exercise.

Mucho, muchos gracias to the wonderful folk of the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library ! – you guys made my research a breeze.

I ♥ USS

That’s Urban Sketchers Singapore.

For the unfamiliar, Urban Sketchers is a global collective of artists who are “dedicated to raising the artistic, storytelling and educational value of location drawing, promoting its practice and connecting people around the world who draw on location where they live and travel.” They “aim to show the world, one drawing at a time.” And, right now, several members of the local chapter have an exhibition of their work showing at the White Canvas Gallery, called Tiong Bahru Revisited. I haven’t had the chance to make it down there yet, but it’s going to happen.

The show ends on 17 July.

In the meantime, here’s a short notice from the July 2 edition of The Straits Times.

—————

SOUL SKETCHES

A sketch-exhibition of buildings in Tiong Bahru is back again after a successful run last year. By Magdalen Ng.

A Tiong Bahru-themed art exhibition did so well last year that it is returning to the retro-fabulous neighbourhood from tomorrow.

Tiong Bahru Revisited features more than 70 sketches of the Housing Board estate at the White Canvas Gallery, also located in the neighbourhood. The exhibition ends on July 17.

Inspired by the old-school architecture in the area, the works are mainly by four artists – Tia Boon Sim, Paul Wang, Don Low and Miel Prudencio.

The display follows Tiong Bahru Sketches: Outside-In, which ran at the same venue for two weeks around the same time last year.

Tia, 56, who teaches at Temasek Polytechnic’s School of Design, says: “The response last year was so good more than 90 per cent of the works were sold, and some residents even complained that the works they wanted were sold.”

The sketches on display are priced from $600 to $2,000. Works at last year’s exhibition sold for between $250 and $900. This year, four works are up for bids in a charity silent auction in aid of the Ability Centre in Tiong Bahru. The centre is run by the Society Of The Physically Disabled.

Most of the drawings were done on weekends. The four artists are part of Urban Sketchers, a global network of artists who draw the cities they live in or travel to. Started by Seattle journalist and illustrator Gabi Campanario in 2007, The Singapore Chapter, set up in 2009, has about 20 regulars now.

Miel, 47, a Straits Times senior executive artist, says the laidback vibe of the iconic area draws him back to it. But he does more than just draw there: “I would sit there, have kopi and read my book.

“It is almost provincial, yet just a bus ride away from the heart of the city,” adds Miel, who lives in Redhill, an MRT stop away from Tiong Bahru.

There are already plans for next year’s exhibition. For that, the artists hope to focus on the back alleys and rooftops of the area. The group is also considering expanding their sketch-exhibition to other heritage areas in Singapore, such as Joo Chiat.

“The more we draw the same buildings, the more we find interesting facets of them. I guess it is the interplay of light and shadows at various times of the day,” says Miel.

Freelance designer and illustrator Low, 40, says the area holds special significance for him. As a child, he lived in nearby Kim Tian Place for 12 years.

The part-time instructor at the Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Design & Media says: “The more I sketch, the more I like this place, so I haven’t ventured out of it.”

Gallery manager and curator Gerald Tan says: “We plan to have street names at the exhibition and group the paintings according to that. It will be like a mini-Tiong Bahru in the gallery.”

TIONG BAHRU REVISITED

White Canvas Gallery, 78 Guan Chuan Street, 01-41

Till July 17. Tuesdays to Saturdays, noon to 8pm, Sundays, 10am to 6pm. Closed on Mondays and public holidays.

—————

Ng Eng Teng’s contribution to the retail therapy experience

The former Plaza Singapura building, with Tan Teng Kee’s Musical Fountain out front.

Stumbled across the following pictures of local sculptor Ng Eng Teng posing with his sculptures, Wealth and Contentment, that used to be located in the old Plaza Singapura. According to the online archive I swiped these from, the photos were taken in 1974, which must have been when the shopping complex first opened:

Ng Eng Teng, 38, local sculptor whose latest sculptures in ciment fondu of Miss Wealth and Miss Contentment, are now gracing the internal court under a vast skylight in Plaza Singapura. Eng Teng who was commissioned to do the job by the Development Bank of Singapore, pictured Contentment as ‘gliding through the air with winds sifting her hair’ and Wealth as having ‘hands on the tummy.’

As a tween, I would sail blithely by Ng’s bronzed, hieratic, molluscan women — incomprehensible to the adolescent eye, yet inescapable — to get to any of the establishments that constituted fine dining back in the day: Swensen’s, Ponderosa, the al fresco Macs (?). Now, when I try my darnedest to picture the mall in my head, that’s still pretty much all that pops up: the facade of the old structure, the restaurants — and Ng’s statues.

Now that’s iconic.

Then the mall got a major facelift back in the late ’90s, and the pair were* moved to the NUS Cultural Centre, where they still reside today.

And thus another piece of my childhood marched into oblivion …

* Ok, quick grammatical aside: Like most people who grew up with English, I don’t carry around the rules of standard grammar in my brain — something either sounds right, or it doesn’t. It’s instinctual. If I had to tell you why something was right or wrong, it’d probably take me a while to articulate it. So, when I was typing out that bit about “the pair [of statues]” above, it gave me pause: now, was I to follow it up with a singular, or a plural, verb ? I mean, “pair” is a collective noun, yet in this context, to say that “the pair {of statues] were moved” didn’t sound wrong to me either.

It was too much for my brain.

I google-d it, and this little nugget popped up: “From the The American Heritage® Book of English Usage: The noun pair can be followed by a singular or plural verb. The singular is always used when pair refers to a set considered as a single entity: This pair of shoes is on sale. A plural verb is used when the members are considered as individuals: The pair are working more harmoniously now. After a number other than one, pair itself can be either singular or plural, but the plural is now more common: She bought six pairs (or pair) of stockings.”

Good to know.

THE ART

CONTENTMENT

WEALTH

THE ARTIST

The Haveli of Shrinathji

The Haveli of Shrinathji, c. 19th century.

Image of the day: The Haveli of Shrinathji, a ‘map’ of the principal temple dedicated to Shrinathji, a child-form of the god Krishna.

Located in Nathdwara, Rajasthan, a short distance from the tourist mecca of Udaipur, the temple is the focal point of the Vaishnavite Pushti Marg sect. This 19th century painting is in the collection of the ACM, and currently on display in their South Asian gallery.

It’s a multi-perspectival panorama: the temple is portrayed aerially – the museum calls it “topographical” – and frontally; using both linear and atmospheric perspective; and, probably just for the heck of it, a sideways view as well. Everything becomes amalgamated into one huge confusing patchwork of courtyards, colonnades, towers, pathways, facades.

This was Escheresque before Escher. I love it.

Here’s the write-up from the label:

The composition of this painting is elaborate and intricate. It is a topographical view of the haveli of Shrinathji (a temple where the deity Shrinathji, a form of Krishna, resides). The temple is in Nathdwara, near Udaipur in Rajasthan. The followers of Pushti Marga, a sect of Vaishnavism started by Vallabhacharya in the 15^th century, consider this shrine as a holy site. The followers come from Gujarat, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. However, many Indians living abroad follow this sect as well. Pilgrims would acquire such paintings on their special pilgrimage to Nathdwara.

The foreground of the picture shows the open square in front of the main entrance of the temple. After a series of courtyards and gateways, one enters into the main shrine at the Sun gate. There are many people standing in front of the image of Shrinathji. There are also many baithaks (seats) of Shrinathji indicated such as that of Madanmohanji, Mukundrayji and Gokulnathji. Even the kitchen, where an annakuta (elaborate feast) is being prepared, is indicated.

Details of the painting.

An Art History Mystery: Chapter Sabapathy and Nolli

Industry, on the facade of Tanjong pagar Railway Station. Inscribed with the names of A. Vannetti & R. Bigazzi.

I have two posts to crank out tonight – after a long day of museum-ing and chasing down public artwork – so this is going to be strictly no-frills.

I am dead bloody beat.

Updates on the Tanjong Pagar station whodunnit: opinions are divided on the authorship of the statuary over at Singapore Public Art, with some of us falling into the camp that believes the inscriptions naming Vannetti and Bigazzi are decisive proof, while others are calling for some caution to the proceedings – and rightly so too. In any case, the comments section over there is buzzing these days, so it’s all good !

Now, short of some dedicated soul out there ploughing through the relevant archives to fish Vannetti and Bigazzi out of the shadows of our art historical annals, right now we’re pretty much still stuck at square one: inscriptions on the four sculptures at Tanjong Pagar Railway Station credit Angelo Vannetti and R. Bigazzi as the artists, two individuals of whom precious little is known at present, while scholarly tradition has long assigned that role to Rudolfo Nolli, the man responsible for the tympanum on the Old Supreme Court building (among some other things). And unless more evidence comes to light to either cinch the case for the pair of enigmatic Italians, or to absolve ol’ Rudolf once and for all, that’s pretty much the impasse we find ourselves in.

Here’s what I’m deadly curious about though: how on earth did the Nolli story come about in the first place ? I thought I’d do some digging around, and I’ve got a couple of people to thank for tipping me off:

1. “Anonymous”, who posted the following on Singapore Public Art: “The sculptures were credited to Nolli in this publication “Sculpture in Singapore”, 1991, see page 20-21.”

2. Jeffrey Say – who’s on the faculty over at LASALLE’s School of Integrated Studies – followed this up with another reference: “The attribution to Nolli also appears in “Cavalori Rudolfo Nolli: A Sculptor and Entrepreneur.” Architecture Journal (1984): 10-17 by Dr Jon Lim, who was then a lecturer in the dept. of architecture at the NUS. It remains the only scholarly essay on Nolli’s works in Singapore.”

That got me hightailing it over to the National Library.

The cover of the Sculpture in Singapore catalogue. The piece featured on the left is Ng Eng Teng’s Torso (1986). Gotta love its phallic charm …

I got my hands on the Sculpture in Singapore catalogue first (above). It accompanied the show of the same name held at the then National Museum Art Gallery in 1991, and local art historian T. K. Sabapathy – who’s the granddaddy of ‘em all over here – provided a short essay. He devotes a section to Nolli, which I reproduce below:

Allegories and virtues are amongst the riches [sic] sources for artistic expression in Western art history. In Singapore, Rudolfo Nolli produced some of the most enduring sculpted images, representing virtues such as justice and allegories extolling labour. His most renowned sculptural composition is to be seen in the tympanum of the Supreme Court Building; Nolli explains the iconography of his presentation:

The central figure was that of Justice, holding the balancing scale. The first on the left represented the lost soul; next were the two legislators holding books in their hands and representing the law.

On either side of Justice were two further figures representing the people; on the left a figure begging for protection from Justice, the other thanking Justice for benefit [sic] received, and followed by a figure and a bull representing riches and prosperity. The two young children holding a stack of wheat represent abundance as derived from law and justice.

[Comment: Included here is Note no. 29, the reference for this quote: “Lim, J. ‘Rudolfo Nolli’ in Architecture Journal, School of Architecture, National University of Singapore, 1984, p 11. ]

On four projecting pillars of the entrance way of the Malaysian Railway Building are four standing male figures, one on each of the pillars; they symbolise Industry, Agriculture, Commerce and Transport; they are Nolli’s most engaging sculptural works. Employing a debased Neo-Classical idiom he manages to infuse the figures with vigour and expressiveness, principally by emphasising bodily torsions and musculature. Whereas the representation of Justice is integrated into the design of the Supreme Court, these four figures are not received hospitably by the building; they appear to be hanging on the flat, projecting surfaces precariously and seem to be marooned.

The uneasy relationship which prevails between architecture and sculpture-as-monument throughout the modern era and down to the present day is vividly crystallised here. In these circumstances sculptors opted to develop their art independently and in so doing, asserted their autonomy. Modern sculptors in Singapore generally conceive their art within this context and produce results which depict their self-referential, autonomous status.

(From T. K. Sabapathy, “Sculptors and Sculpture in Singapore; An Introduction” in Sculpture in Singapore [Singapore: National Museum, 1991], pp. 9 – 29. See pp. 19 – 21.)

The quoted pages from Sabapathy’s essay in Sculpture in Singapore.

I suspected as much.

Jon Lim’s piece, according to Jeffrey Say, is the only scholarly monograph on Rudolfo Nolli’s local work — and clearly Sabapathy’s point of departure for many of his remarks in his own essay. Its certainly the only reference Sabapathy cites regarding Nolli.

He was probably indebted to Lim for many of his facts — one of which at least we now know went unverified.

All this actually sounds a lot worse than it really is. Academics routinely build on each other’s work; it’s par for the course. I mean, scholarship doesn’t happen in a vacuum. When you have an article or a chapter to finish writing in double quick time, it’s probably counter-productive to get anal about every single fact that crosses your page. The ideal of course is to take nothing for granted, but in an ideal world I’d have six-pack abs that magically reappear every morning, instead of people asking which trimester I’m in …

Anyways.

Apropos of Nolli’s so-called quote about the Supreme Court tympanum, I haven’t had the chance to peruse Jon Lim’s piece — it will happen, and soon — but apparently Peter Schoppert, owner of Singapore Public Art, has, because he writes of the artist’s remarks: “The Supreme Court website includes the following text, which is a slightly amended version of the words of the artist, Nolli (at least as quoted by Jon Lim, but alas without attribution).”

Hmm. If what he says is true, then Sabapathy would have been quoting Lim quoting … no one ?

Watch this space for further updates.

In the meantime, just by way of future reference, I passed by Elgin Bridge this afternoon and stopped to eyeball Nolli’s roundels there; I also snapped a close-up of his signature (below). It’s a curious little thing, lacking the usual flourishes or even a discernible personality of any sort, the only affectation being the stylised Russian doll-ing of the last three letters, with the ‘I’ nestled in the nook of the preceding ‘L’, and that ‘L’ cupped in the first one. Otherwise it’s just a small, straightforward “R. Nolli”, incised vertically along the edge between the lower leaves of the tree and the left column/hinge. The image of the work on Singapore Public Art actually shows quite clearly where the inscription is located within the layout.

Rudolfo Nolli’s Elgin Bridge roundel and his signature (incised).

An Art History Mystery

Tanjong Pagar Railway Station, with its four statues: (from left to right) Agriculture, Commerce, Transport, Industry.

The Tanjong Pagar Railway Station ceases operations on 30th June – that’s next Thursday, and there’s a party ! – after which it officially becomes our 64th national monument. So a couple of friends and I decided over the weekend to head there for a last cup of teh tarik. The usually sleepy complex was overrun by hordes of people though, who all apparently had the same idea.

It was a madhouse of howling kids and clicking cameras.

The upshot was that I finally got the chance to eyeball the four massive statues out front: personifications of Agriculture, Commerce, Transport and Industry, each adorns one of the engaged pillars that punctuate the structure’s entrance portico. Common wisdom attributes them to the Italian sculptor Rudolfo Nolli, who was active in this part of the world during the interwar years, starting out in Bangkok and eventually ending up in Singapore.

However, here’s the rub: it seems as if they aren’t really by Nolli at all.

A HUGE shoutout to blogger Sarah of Seriously Sarah for pointing this out; the local art history community owes her a debt of gratitude.

Thank you.

Agriculture (1931), A. Vannetti & R. Bigazzi.

I’m not sure how and when Nolli’s name became associated with the Tanjong Pagar statues, but that particular rumour is rampant on the Internet; even sites like the otherwise reliable Singapore Public Art* make that mistake. The Cavaliere Nolli – he was knighted at some point in his life – is best-known hereabouts for his contribution to the former Supreme Court building, being the man responsible for the tympanum tableau:

The imposing Corinthian and Ionic columns, as well as the tympanum sculpture fronting the Supreme Court Building, were the work of Cavalieri Rudolfo Nolli, a Milanese sculptor. The central figure in the tympanum is that of Justice, with a figure immediately to its left [sic: the viewer's left, not its left] representing the lost soul begging for protection from it. Next to this figure are two legislators with books in hand, representing the law. To the right of Justice, a figure bows in gratitude, followed by a man with a bull, representing riches and prosperity. Two young children holding a sheaf of wheat represent abundance from law and justice.

(Write-up from the Supreme Court’s website.)

* Singapore Public Art has since updated its site, and now has a separate page for the Tanjong Pagar statues here.

Nolli’s tympanum on the Old Supreme Court building. Images courtesy of Asia Explorers.

That Nolli’s was the hand behind this work seems to be an established fact. His much-touted authorship of the Tanjong Pagar statues, however, has been openly refuted by the gimlet-eyed Sarah, who drew attention to the fact that the base of the Industry figure is carved with two inscriptions which name the actual artists (below): the left corner clearly identifies one Angelo Vannetti as the sculptor, even dating the piece to 1931, while on the right, R. Bigazzi of Florence is named as … the artist ? I can’t quite make out the actual words: aside from the unmistakeable “art”, the rest of it seems to be superscripted, and after that we see only the letters “A.T.”, followed by more indecipherable script. (These inscriptions are actually to be found on the base of all four sculptures; read her post here.)

This is quite the smoking gun methinks.

The left (top) and right (bottom) sides of the base of the Industry relief, with their respective inscriptions. Images from Seriously Sarah.

Industry (1931), A. Vannetti & R. Bigazzi.

Elsewhere, Jerome of The Long and Winding Road, quoting the Malayan Saturday Post from 1932, establishes “R. Bigazzi” as Raoul Bigazzi of the Raoul Bigazzi Studios, Florence. He writes:

Described by an article in the 7th May 1932 edition of the Malayan Saturday Post on the occasion of the opening of the station as having a “palatial appearance”, the station is now overshadowed by the towering blocks that have come up at its vicinity, as well as by the elevated road, buildings and containers stacked high that obscures most of it from the the docks it was meant to feed. What must be the features of the grand building that stand out most are the entrance arches flanked by the triumphal figures, the work of sculptor Angelo Vannetti from the Raoul Bigazzi Studios Florence, that seem to stand guard over all that passes under the arches into the grand vaulted hallway described as “lofty and cool” in the same article.

That this Raoul Bigazzi is the most likely candidate is corroborated by a notice in The Straits Times, dated 5 February 1929:

Mr. Raoul Bigazzi, the noted international sculptor and decorator, is again visiting Malaya in the course of his eighteenth trip around the world. He is accompanied by the artistic director of his ateliers, Professor A. Vannetti, of the Italian Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. Messrs. Frankel Bros., who have for many years been in charge of Mr. Bigazzi’s interests in Malaya, inform us that his present visit is connected with the public and private work of which he was responsible for several notable examples on previous visits.

(The issue is archived online by the National Library Board here.)

Given the proximity of the dates – 1929 (their visit) and 1931 (inscribed on the statue) – it seems probable that the “public and private work” alluded to above may well have been the Tanjong Pagar station  commission.

It’s a tempting speculation, but unfortunately, short of hard evidence one way or another, just that for now – speculation.

Commerce (1931), A. Vannetti & R. Bigazzi.

And just who were Vannetti and Bigazzi ? A couple of online searches did not yield much. According to what little in English there exists out there in cyberspace, the former also goes by the more Italianate-sounding Angiolo Vannetti, and most sites, beyond giving his dates as 1881 to 1962, don’t provide much else. Bigazzi, on the other hand, happens to be better-documented, mostly because he was active in Hong Kong as well. While he apparently restored the iconic statue of Queen Victoria that now stands in the territory’s Victoria Park (it’s mentioned here), he seems to be chiefly remembered these days for the mosaic murals that covered the ceiling of the former Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank building. The present behemoth, which dominates an already jostling HK skyline, was designed by Lord Norman Foster, and is actually the fourth incarnation of the structure on that site; it was preceded by a sizably smaller Art Deco edifice (below), which was extant from 1935 to 1984, before making way for Foster’s tower. It was the old building that was the home of the Bigazzi murals. These depicted scenes from HK’s maritime and industrial economies in an Art Deco style as well (below), and apparently was titled Progress through the Ages in Transport, Trade and Industry in the Western and Eastern Hemispheres. The site Gwulo: Old Hong Kong, a wealth of information and images regarding the murals, reproduces a document which provides some very helpful details about their design and production:

Design

The theme and basic design were suggested by the architects Messrs. Palmer & Turner. Mr. Raoul Bigazzi was the contractor, and the Russian artist Poudgoursky prepared the actual design.

Manufacture

Mr. Bigazzi went to Venice to order the materials, and Mr. Poudgoursky assisted by Professor Dal Zotto drew the full scale plan from the original sketch in Florence. As it was found impossible to do this in an ordinary building, permission was obtained from the Italian Government to rent a disused church which offered sufficient wall area on which the full scale drawings could be made. These drawings were executed on large sheets of thick paper and were coloured in accordance with the original sketch, which itself only measured 34 inches by 18 inches. In the process of enlarging the drawings many changes were made to improve the shadings, perspective effects etc., taking into consideration the exact position and lighting of the finished work.

The large drawings were then assembled and sent to the manufacturer, where under the supervision of Professor Dal Zotto the various pieces were pasted face downwards onto the drawings with special glue. Extreme care was necessary to ensure that the colour of each piece was exactly the shade indicated on the drawing. When a large area of the design had been completely covered with the corresponding pieces, the design was cut into small irregular sections similar to those of an ordinary jigsaw puzzle, each averaging from two to four square feet in size. Each section was numbered, and a key plan drawn with sections numbered in accordance with the full size design. The sections were then packed and shipped to Hong Kong.

Method of Installation

The ceiling of the Banking Hall was covered with a layer of well levelled and smoothly finished cement, and when this was dry a thin coating of white cement was spread over it. Under the direct supervision of Mr. Bigazzi and Professor Monti the various sections of paper and mosaic were then gently pressed into the cement in accordance with the key plan until they adhered.

The adjoining lines of each section were carefully placed together until each section blended into the next. When the cement was dry, the paper on the outside-that is the full size colour drawing of the original design-was removed with warm water and a hard brush, so that only the finished mosaic design was left embedded in the ceiling. Its surface was then washed with muriatic acid to remove glue and cement stains, and to bring out the full brilliance of the colour.

The actual task of applying the mosaic to the ceiling was carried out by skilled Chinese workers, mostly from Shanghai.

The ceiling is the largest of its kind in the Far East and is the second largest in the world. The entire work was completed within six months.

The former HSBC building, which stood from 1935 to 1984, later replaced by Norman Foster’s design. Image courtesy of Gwulo: Old Hong Kong.

Panels from Bigazzi’s Progress through the Ages in Transport, Trade and Industry in the Western and Eastern Hemispheres ceiling mosiacs in the former HSBC building. Images and info courtesy of Gwulo: Old Hong Kong.

So it seems that, while Bigazzi was in charge of the execution, someone else did the actual designing. Yet even a cursory comparison between the HSBC murals and the Tanjong Pagar sculptures reveal pretty salient similarities: resemblances in iconography and figuration do allow for the possibility that both sets of work may have originated – at least in part – from the same artist. Indeed, their subject matter is almost identical, with several of the same buzzwords cropping up in the titles: “transport”, “industry.” Experience tells us that two different artists will treat the same subject differently, and a couple of motific and figurative parallels here seem to signal a single creative force between the murals and the reliefs. The gesture of the raised, bent elbow, for instance, kept close to the head or shoulder, is seen in Agriculture and Industry (above), and finds an echo in the mural panel depicting ocean liners (fourth from top, above), where two dock workers hauling large packages are caught in the same pose. Elsewhere, the Transport figure (below), is in fact depicted performing a similar task – heaving a box over the shoulder – and even poised before a large spoked wheel, which makes an appearance in the mural as a ship’s wheel, part of a mash-up of various transportation-related motifs. The oversized cog at the feet of Industry can be seen in the mural which features a geisha (third from top, above) – it is located between the loom and some laboratory equipment, presumably a juxtaposition of traditional and technological means of production.

What do you think ?

Transport (1931), A. Vannetti & R. Bigazzi.

[Singapore Biennale '11] At the Old Kallang Airport, part the first

Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House

http://www.singaporebiennale.org/index.php

—————

The third Singapore Biennale kicked off a couple of weeks ago. The whole event runs for about two months, from 13th March to 15th May, 2011. That’s probably sufficient to cover the four primary venues, 161 works of art by some 63 artists, and scores of smaller tie-ins on show at other galleries and museums throughout the island.

Why the Open House theme ? (Not to be confused with another similarly titled event earlier this year.) Here’s the official account, extended version:

‘Open House’ is presented across four exhibition venues, each with their own particular character, that draw upon emblematic spaces in Singapore: Housing Development Board flats (Singapore Art Museum and 8Q), shopping centres and night markets (National Museum of Singapore), and international air and sea ports (Old Kallang Airport). Major art works at Marina Bay will amplify individual experience in the city.

In Singapore, at Hari Raya, Deepavali and Chinese New Year, people open their homes to others, inviting them to visit, eat and talk. This is not only a gesture of hospitality and good will but also an opportunity to reflect, negotiate and exchange. The threshold between the private and the public is made permeable, if only for a moment, relaxing boundaries between individuals and barriers between groups.

Contemporary art often emerges out of a need to communicate across such thresholds of difference that may be experiential, psychological, or grounded in social and political hierarchies. As such, artists’ practices are not simply about something in the world, they are real attempts to exchange information, translate experiences and even trade places. Borders may be guarded with force, yet artists find ways to embed themselves within such systems of control, turning unspoken desires toward unexpected ends. Sometimes artists displace or exchange objects, materials and information from one context to another, revealing unexpected connections between culturally divergent situations. The labour of constructing or deconstructing common objects and materials highlight the creative potential in seemingly mundane situations, suggesting fresh ways of seeing the world.

‘Open House’ examines these artistic processes and their links to the daily transactions that take place between people. From trading objects to swapping stories, from sharing food to dressing up, we are constantly making exchanges, as individuals, groups, cities and nations. In the world’s busiest port, a multicultural city built on trade, ‘Open House’ brings together artworks that offer multiple perspectives and myriad creative approaches to questions of how we move across borders, see other points of view, and form connections with others.

It remains to be seen if the event as a whole lives up to that conceptual ambition (although it certainly sounds broad enough to be all-encompassing). The old Kallang airport site was my first stop, a good third of which MY and I left unexplored on our first visit. After two straight hours of trying to concentrate on the art in stifling conditions – i.e. sans air-conditioning – we gave up. Or rather, I gave up, perspiring, sticky and highly uncomfortable, and suggested we retire to a makeshift Toast Box outlet set up on the premises to refresh and regroup. It took a couple of subsequent trips, joined by MP and SY, to finally finish seeing everything.

Biennales are hard work for all involved.

The convenient, comestible goodness that is Toast Box – the highlight of the venue, as some aver.

In any case, the theme of materiality, as the medium of exchange and encounter and generated by the dislocation of “common objects and materials”, was certainly evident in many of the displays. While this sort of border fetishism is hardly new – William Pietz identified the historical fetish as a literal fixing of, and fixation on, hybrid configurations of desire, belief and narrativizing that remain embedded in the object’s material and social specificities, a “totalized series of its particular usages” brought to light by cross-cultural and cross-border movement (see here) – it was really the era of the Readymade that marked the rise of the liminal, ontologically unstable object so prevalent in 20th century art, which took pride in transgressing traditional demarcations and provoking metaphysical speculation. Duchamp’s Fountain, of course, leaps immediately to mind, as do the work of the Surrealists or, later, Rauschenberg’s Combines. Earlier concerns with narrowing the gap between art and life seems, at the dawn of the new millennium, to have been superseded by a new paradigm of social engagement and moral awareness. The attempt to “communicate across … thresholds of difference” has resulted in  pieces which not only articulate those margins of disparity, but, in a couple of instances, actually operate at the edges of physical and national boundaries, featuring what Arjun Appadurai famously called “things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.”

Taryn Simon’s Contraband series, for one (below), a photographic project “documenting confiscated items seized from airline passengers and [the] US Postal Service at New York’s JFK Airport,” represents “an anthropological portrait illustrating the desires of those entering the United States”, and “explores how privilege and power operate in a world divided between those who have access and those who are denied.” The stuff she shot covered the usual gamut: foodstuffs, cigarettes, designer knockoffs, medical supplies. (Sadly, health insurance is not a fact of life for all in America.) While the work was .. interesting, I’m not sure if patterns of privilege and power as such were actually being exposed. If anything, the pictures seemed like a selection of completely anonymous items, begging the questions of who, where from, and why – issues which go much further towards articulating the configurations of desire and profit that inform international trafficking activities. The cartons of Marlboros, for instance, must be a pretty common sight at customs checkpoints everywhere in the world, and their appearance in this context hardly speaks to more than the usual desire to bypass tariff duties; an impoverished foreign student could have been responsible, as could a well-heeled Wall Street type or someone intending to sell the stuff on the streets. In a world where Winona Ryder is capable of shoplifting, one can’t automatically claim that theft indicates poverty or want … What really puzzled me though were the clear plexiglass boxes which encased the photographs. They seemed like a conscious artistic choice, yet what were they supposed to convey ? It was as if the articles constituting this otherwise random mass of contraband were being elevated to the level of individual, auratic works of art, which didn’t quite square with the impersonal, collective presentation of the pictures or the claims being made for them.

Contraband (2010), Taryn Simon.

In an adjoining gallery was Singaporean Charles Lim’s fascinating All Lines Flow Out. Comprised of a video piece and two er, drainage socks stuffed full of dried leaves and random garbage (below), the composite work well, worked. From the wall text:

All Lines Flow Out features a migrant worker navigating the hidden waterways of Singapore’s underground drainage system. As with many of Charles Lim’s works, water carries personal and symbolic significance. A competitive sailor, Lim sees water as representing movement and flux, and of course it is highly significant to Singapore, an island where the supply of water is a fundamental concern. The city’s drains are unfamiliar and unruly, at odds with its image of cleanliness and order, and lead in unexpected directions. His process reveals an often unseen part of Singapore.

The video in particular was engrossing, especially when the camera tracks slowly down the length of various canals and rivers at the level of the water’s surface (below). The effect is compelling and creepy all at once, providing an alien, bottom-up perspective on the island’s urban landscape, literally capturing a worm’s eye view of everyday terrain most people are otherwise unaccustomed to, while at the same time approximating the POV of the monster, a cinematic device commonly utilized in giant creature movies (think Anaconda or Lake Placid) – the silent stalker in the water oh-so-slowly moving in on its prey … It’s as if the usual tourist boat jaunts from Clarke Quay down into Marina Bay (think the Duck and Hippo) has been substituted with a riverine tour of Singapore by some subaquatic leviathan. The process of defamiliarization was echoed in the two installations nearby, which hung from the ceiling like a couple of supersized beehives, left there by mutant insects as a testament to their existence. To raise again the spectre of the Uncanny – making an appearance on the pages of this blog for the umpteenth time, sorry – it relates to “what is familiar and comfortable … [and conversely] what is concealed and kept hidden”; in other words, the uncanny connotes not just what is otherwise obscured from view, but that which was meant to remain veiled and has instead been brought to light. The primary mechanism of the phenomenon is the gesture of returning: “… this uncanny element is nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed.” The act of repression and return, then, may be located in Lim’s excavation of “often unseen part[s] of Singapore”: the uninhabited waterways, canals and storm drains of our city-state, rendered from a distinctly unsettling perspective, the slowly gliding camera seeming closer to the experience of some form of marine species, rather than the thrashing movements of a human being in the water; the stuffed drainage socks suspended in the middle of a gallery space, an item of utility that most people may be unfamiliar with, and taking on an even more eerie aspect for their mode of display.

All Lines Flow Out (2011), Charles Lim.

All Lines Flow Out (2011), Charles Lim.

A sense of uncanniness also seemed to hover around Michael Lin’s What a Difference a Day Made (below). I don’t get the namechecking of Dinah Washington’s hit, but the piece spoke to me, and in a very powerful way.

What a Difference a Day Made began when the artist purchased the entire contents of a local hardware store. The store is recreated in the exhibition space along with the crates in which the work has been shipped to Singapore. In each of the crates, samples of each type of product are displayed as a makeshift archive of different object categories contained in the store. Finally Lin also asked a performer to juggle each of the various items purchased, suggesting unexpected and playful potential in objects more commonly associated with work and domestic chores.

What’s striking about the Lin’s work are the type of objects on display: the sort of everyday household articles that are either little utilized these days, or tend to be viewed as ‘nostalgic.’ I mean, I saw carpet beaters, chamber pots and scrubbing boards. Chamber pots and scrubbing boards. I’ve never had to use the first, and haven’t seen the second around in a while. The litany of bric-a-brac otherwise consisted in the main of plasticware, crockery with ye olde designs, rusting pans, brooms, metal tools, antique rice cookers, raffia string … the whole set-up looked like something out of the ‘70s, which it probably was before the artist transplanted it hook, line and carpet beater.

The act of recontextualization is key. No longer part of a functional retail operation, the goods and merchandise of yesteryear are here ossified into inaccessible nostalgia, a consumerist spectacle reframed into auratic ‘art’ displays. The dialectical oscillation between the past and the present, reified here in the shape of the nostalgic commodity – or the cultural detritus of a bygone epoch, the now obsolete odds and ends of another age reiterated as reminiscence – calls to mind the glass-covered walkways, or arcades, of 19^th-century Paris that Walter Benjamin so suggestively evoked in The Arcades Project. The urban passages that were created when Haussmann razed the medieval city to rebuild one worthy of the Second Empire, arcades that were spaces of leisured consumption for the emergent moneyed classes, where all sorts of luxury goods beckoned from behind glass windows, fascinated Benjamin precisely because they, by the time of his writing in the 1920s, had become mere shadows of their former selves. What had once been “glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors … [housing] the most elegant shops, so that the passage is a city, a world in miniature” (W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trs. Eiland and McLaughlin [Harvard U. Press, 2002], p. 15) now existed as a world of dusty objects, where “out-of-date advertisements hang on within these interior spaces, and the displayed wares are of no significance, or of many significances” (qtd. in Max Pensky, “Tactics of Remembrance” in Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, p. 166). The many significances that Benjamin read into the text of these forgotten, occluded objects constituted for him the “dialectical fairy-scene” of capitalism and the 19^th century, but here it is his understanding of this realm of commodities as an enchanted historical eloquence that is apropos:

In the flickering light of the arcade, outmoded commodities transform themselves, as if through enchantment. Space-time comprehends both the spatial and temporal juxtapositions that occur when many different, many useless things are jammed together in a small space … things in the old passage begin to wink and mutter, become phantasmagoric in the other sense, not as sensation but as sensing, magically half-endowed with the ability to communicate. (Pensky, pp. 166-7)

The language used to characterize Benjamin’s vision of a world of articulate, communicative materiality – enchantment, phantasmagoric, magical – smacks of the otherworldly. What Benjamin’s fragmentary musings foreground is the intersection of history, memory, commodity, and the phantasmal, or – again – the Uncanny. The idea of objects that speak is of course uncanny on the most visceral level, but, in the case of Lin’s installation, the commodity-as-history exemplifies the Freudian Uncanny to the extent that it embodies a return of the once-familiar, a panoply of otherwise forgotten objects almost seeming, in the silence of an uninhabited gallery space converted from a disused airport, to become enchanted not just in a supernatural sense, like ghosts from the past, literally, but also to take on a new (after)life as aesthetic spectacle. What seemed to drive the point home even more were the video pieces showing a Chinese juggler fooling around with the stuff (see the clip below): the perceived human body, set at one experiential remove from the viewer’s own embodied presence through recording technology – itself a form of ghostliness – renders the immediate reality of Lin’s objects even more preternaturally alive, beginning to “wink and mutter”, nostalgic objects caught in the slippage between the supernatural, the material, and the historical.

What a Difference a Day Made (2008), Michael Lin.

A walkthrough of Lin’s What a Difference a Day Made.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN A LATER POST.]