Five Fragments Towards Alienation: Art Stage Singapore 2012

Prices (2011), William Powhida. Image courtesy of the artist’s personal site.

A belated look at Art Stage Singapore 2012 .. or ASS, as some are fond of referring to it.

There are no numbers here.

And there are no definitely no checklists inventorying who sold what to whom for how much. (Interest in art itself deflected by interest in their prices – just about so neat a fulfillment of Marx’s notion of the commodity fetish it’s nearly ridiculous.)

A disjointed juxtaposition seemed like the only comprehensible response to the bloated phenomenon that is the contemporary art fair.

For more extensive pictorial coverage of this year’s Art Stage Singapore, see here and here.

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Fragment One

LOVE (1966 – 2002), Robert Indiana. Presented by Gallery Hyundai.

Next to the entrance to this year’s Art Stage fair, where a posse of goons in dark suits stand like chthonic sentinels before a walkthrough metal detector soaring ceiling-wards, guests are greeted by an aureate version of Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE statue (above). This one isn’t too large. Measuring some six by six feet, it’s love on a manageable, human scale. Unlike its more monumental counterparts – say, the colossal one just a block away from the MoMA in Manhattan – this piece crouches down to look the viewer in the face … or, more pertinently, to let the viewer look it in its (type)face.

Painted a gleaming gold, this particular incarnation of Indiana’s work was proudly displayed on a L-shaped platform, like the embrace of a cupped hand, with spotlights trained on it both from above and below, the illumination serving to bring out the incandescent shimmer of the hue. The sides were coloured a bold, garish red: besides chiming with the rich vermilion and crimson shades of the wall-to-wall carpeting beneath, the immediate evocation – for me anyways – was a pair of Louboutin stilettos.

Indiana’s LOVE design first emerged from the socio-political ferment of the 1960s as, of all things, a MoMA Christmas card. (It was also probably a response to certain nascent visual trends, like Pop Art and hard-edge painting). According to this Mental Floss article:

Robert Indiana never intended for his LOVE sculpture to become an emblem of 1960s counterculture, because it had nothing to do with free love or hippies. As with his other works, LOVE was all about personal symbolism

The word “love” was connected to his childhood experiences attending a Christian Science church, where the only decoration was the wall inscription, “God is Love.”

The colors were an homage to his father, who worked at a Phillips 66 gas station during the Depression. “When I was a kid, my mother used to drive my father to work in Indianapolis, and I would see, practically every day of my young life, a huge Phillips 66 sign,” he once wrote. “So it is the red and green of that sign against the blue Hoosier sky.”

The tilted O was common in medieval typography, and Indiana has variously described the leaning letter as representing either a cat’s eye or an erect phallus.

The LOVE icon as commentary on Christian Science – and, more broadly, the promises and blandishments of organized religion …

… here morphed into a gilded monument, glittering away under the spotlights.

A neat segue.

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Fragment Two

Too Old Too Cold #2 (2011), Andi Dewantoro. At the Galerie Semarang booth.

First, Stephen Colbert on what he dubbed “moneytheism”:

And it means that our collective cultural belief that the unfettered free market will take care of us is also not delusional. No. It is actually a religion. You see, psychiatrists often use use cultural acceptance to explain why it is not crazy to hold certain religious beliefs, say, a virgin gave brith to God’s son, or it’s an abomination to eat shrimp, or we protect ourselves from evil by wearing magic underwear. So, let’s just classify belief in the free market as religion. After all, they both have invisible hands, and move in mysterious ways. That way, no one can call us crazy and we can get all the benefits the government gives to churches. We no longer have to pay taxes on the money we make as long as we face Wall Street six times a day and say our prayer. “There is no god but Alan and more profits are his prophet.” Then on Judgment Day Ronald Reagan will return on a cloud of glory and take us up to money heaven.

(From the Nov 19, 2008, episode of The Colbert Report. Watch the relevant clip here.)

Now Martha Rosler on the money-driven world of the contemporary art fair:

Accusations of purely symbolic display, of hypocrisy, are easily evaded by turning to, finally, the third method of global discipline, the art fair, for fairs make no promises other than sales and parties; there is no shortage of appeals to pleasure. There has been a notable increase in the number and locations of art fairs in a short period, reflecting the art world’s rapid monetization; art investors, patrons, and clientele have shaken off the need for internal processes of quality control in favor of speeded-up multiplication of financial and prestige value. Some important fairs have set up satellite branches elsewhere. Other important fairs are satellites that outshine their original venues and have gone from the periphery of the art world’s vetting circuit to center stage. At art fairs, artworks are scrutinized for financial-portfolio suitability, while off-site fun (parties and dinners), fabulousness (conspicuous consumption), and non-art shopping are the selling points for the best-attended fairs—those in Miami, New York, and London (and of course the original, Basel). Dealers pay quite a lot to participate, however, and the success of the fair as a business venture depends on the dealers’ ability to make decent sales and thus to want to return in subsequent years.

(See Martha Rosler, “Take the Money and Run? Can Political and Socio-critical Art “Survive”?” in e-flux Journal 12 [01/2010].)

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Fragment Three

Navinland Needs You: We Are Asia! (2012), Navin Rawanchaikul. Presented by Yavuz Fine Art.

The always-already interpellated subject, according to Althusser:

To take a highly ‘concrete’ example, we all have friends who, when they knock on our door and we ask, through the door, the question ‘Who’s there?’, answer (since ‘it’s obvious’) ‘It’s me’. And we recognize that ‘it is him’, or ‘her’. We open the door, and ‘it’s true, it really was she who was there’. To take another example, when we recognize somebody of our (previous) acquaintance ((re)-connaissance) in the street, we show him that we have recognized him (and have recognized that he has recognized us) by saying to him ‘Hello, my friend’, and shaking his hand (a material ritual practice of ideological recognition in everyday life – in France, at least; elsewhere, there are other rituals) ……

As a first formulation I shall say: all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject.

This is a proposition which entails that we distinguish for the moment between concrete individuals on the one hand and concrete subjects on the other, although at this level concrete subjects only exist insofar as they are supported by a concrete individual.

I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellationor hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’

Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else). Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed. And yet it is a strange phenomenon, and one which cannot be explained solely by ‘guilt feelings’, despite the large numbers who ‘have something on their consciences’.

Naturally for the convenience and clarity of my little theoretical theatre I have had to present things in the form of a sequence, with a before and an after, and thus in the form of a temporal succession. There are individuals walking along. Somewhere (usually behind them) the hail rings out: ‘Hey, you there!’ One individual (nine times out often it is the right one) turns round, believing/suspecting/knowing that it is for him, i.e. recognizing that ‘it really is he’ who is meant by the hailing. But in reality these things happen without any succession. The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.

I might add: what thus seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’. It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a Marxist, which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing). Which amounts to saying that ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality).

(From Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, of which the above is one of the most well-known ideas.)

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Fragment Four

Navinland Needs You: We Are Asia! (2012), Navin Rawanchaikul. Presented by Yavuz Fine Art.

Above is Indo-Thai artist Navin Rawanchikul’s massive painting, part of his Navinland installation.

This, perhaps, represents the navel-gazing of the art world at its best.

The label describes it: “Navinland Needs You: We Are Asia!  is a newly composed art created especially for Art Stage Singapore 2012. Almost 13-metres in length, the centrepiece acrylic canvas is a celebratory Who’s Who of many of the significant figures in Asian Art today.”

Indeed it is. Below is a listing – helpfully provided by Art Stage, next to the painting – of just who.

Wally-spotting was never so amusing.

In the meantime, here is a snippet from art critic Ben Davis’ 9.5 Theses on Art and Class:

2.0 Today, the ruling class, which is capitalist, dominates the sphere of the visual arts

2.1 It is part of the definition of a ruling class that it controls the material resources of society

2.2 The ruling ideologies, which serve to reproduce this material situation, also represent the interests of the ruling class

2.3 The dominant values given to art, therefore, will be ones that serve the interests of the current ruling class

2.4 Concretely, within the sphere of the contemporary visual arts, the agents whose interests determine the dominant values of art are: large corporations, including auction houses and corporate collectors; art investors, private collectors and patrons; trustees and administrators of large cultural institutions and universities

2.5 One role for art, therefore, is as a luxury good, whose superior craftsmanship or intellectual prestige indicates superior social status

2.6 Another role for art is to serve as financial instrument or tradable repository of value

2.7 Another role for art is as sign of “giving back” to the community, to whitewash ill-gotten gains

2.8 Another role for art is symbolic escape valve for radical impulses, to serve as a place to isolate and contain social energy that runs counter to the dominant ideology 

2.9 A final role for art is the self-replication of ruling-class ideology about art itself—the dominant values given to art serve not only to enact ruling-class values directly, but also to subjugate, within the sphere of the arts, other possible values of art

And here is current darling of the New York art scene, William Powhida, famed for his take-no-prisoners approach to art world critique, and his Dear Art World, the text of which is transcribed below (courtesy of brainpickings.com):

Dear Art World,

I feel you sitting there trying to process the CRAZY shit going on. I’ve been there for months, and it’s driving me INSANE. Fuck it, it seems counterproductive to EVEN talk about this shit, because EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS WHY “SHIT is REALLY FUCKED UP,” or why I’m wrong.

BUT, I’ve come to some conclusions about shit. One is that we spend A LOT of time BLAMING each other for notunderstanding WHAT the problem actually is — TRANSPARENCY, Barack Obama, mandates LOBBYISTS, immigrants, RESPONSIBILITY, FREEDOM Truth, LIZARD PEOPLE, FLUORIDE in the water… TOO MUCH OR TOO LITTLE OF ANY OF IT.

I mean, everyone ALREADY has the Answer, it’s just that every ELSE just has ‘it’ all wrong. It’s really simple, apparently, to fix everything by applying some JESUS™, REGULATION®, or CONSTITUTION™ to it. If only we’d just free the Market, convict some bankers, spiritually channel the Founding Fathers, regulate derivatives, STOP eating GM corn syrup, spend more…time with your Family OR LEGALIZE DRUGS.

EXCEPT WE don’t do shit*, because this is AMERICA, Land of the Mr. Softee® and home of the BRAVES® where we are FREE to ARGUE about the CAUSES of social and ECONOMIC inequalities until the grass-fed cows come home. We argue in comment threads, on Facebook™, and twitter™. AND, when we aren’t arguing, We agree with our favorite ‘experts’ on FOX®, CNBC™, and CNN™ as we slide into RECESSION 2.0.

One of the OBVIOUS conclusions I’ve arrived at is that a very FEW people LIKE it that way. WHILE SHIT is bad for MOST of us — 9%+ unemployment, $14 TRILLION+ debt, and a perpetual War on Terror® — *THEY* hope we’ll all just pull a lever next fall ‘PROBLEM SOLVED’ and argue some more about the INTENTIONS of the CLIMATE, BECAUSE the 1% is doing fine.

The only FACTS worth stating are that 20% of the population controls 85% of the net worth and earned 49.9% of the income last year. IN the AMERICAN SPIRIT™ of BLAME and recrimination I’m going to point the finger at…deREGULATED CAPITALISM®! IT is in the very spirit of Capitalism to ACQUIRE MORE CAPITAL. To quote @O_SattyCripnAzz, fellow citizen and member of #Team #1mmy [?], “Money is money no matter how u get it.”

Unfortunately, the same 1% also supports the rest of us by BYING shit and funding almost everything else (museums, residencies, grants…) putting some of us in an awkward position (YOU TOO NATO and Pedro), BUT that doesn’t mean we should SHUT THE FUCK UP, take their MONEY, and say ‘Thank you!’ The Art World is NOT separate from SOCIETY and THIS is how SHIT gets all FUCKED UP — PLUTARCHY, motherfuckers.

So, in my useless capacity as a tool artist, I’ve made some pictures about this SHIT that are FREE to look at**, and they’re ALL DERIVATIVES.

Sincerely,

[signed William Powhida]

*#OWS?
** Bring a chair

Dear Art World (2011), William Powhida. Image from the artist’s site.

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Fragment Five

Broken Mirror Classic (2011), Lee Yongbaek.

Korean artist Lee Yongbaek’s Broken Mirror Classic consists of a mirror in a gilt frame.

Serendipitously, the perfect moment of self-regarding complicity.

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[Review] The Collectors Show: Chimera

Here is scholar of the sartorial, Anne Hollander, on the material existence of clothes:

Dress has not only no social but also no significant aesthetic existence unless it is actually being worn. Western sartorial relics on display simply do not have the artistic status of antique vases and cabinets. Half their beauty is obviously missing. This is true not just if they are displayed unworn, but always, simply because they are not seen completing the unique and conscious selves of their owners …… Concepts of design and feats of workmanship survive, along with indications of social attitudes, economic conditions, and so on. But a vase in a museum has a completeness to offer the eye that a dress never has, though both may be breathtakingly made according to artistic standards of equal altitude.

(From Hollander’s classic study, Seeing Through Clothes.)

Unworn clothing, or dress, then, as an inert physicality, un-activated as social or aesthetic fact by the animating force of a body.

Now these – at the SAM’s latest offering, The Collectors Show: Chimera - bodies missing, effaced, obscured, abstracted:

First, Filipino artist Patricia Eustaquio’s Psychogenic Fugue (below), on loan from collector Marcel Crespo (son of former Filipino Congressman, Mark Jimenez). A piano cover, an expanse of cream-coloured lace, is set over a missing piano, its evacuated, vacant interior illuminated by several spotlights. The armature of the piece is provided by the simple means of a hardened thermoplastic resin, which moulds the fabric from beneath into a phantasmal non-presence – evoked, named, but always already displaced. As the label observes: “Delicate in detail and haunting in its hollowness, this ghostly shroud calls attention to its absent object, poignantly emphasising its loss.”

Another contribution by a Filipino artist: Yasmin Sison’s Orange Madonna (below), from the collection of one Dr. George Soo. The painting’s central figures are, literally, dis-figured. The minor iconographic tradition of the Virgin and Holy Infant in a grove of orange trees – one of the more famous examples of which remains Cima de Conegliano’s late 15^th century treatment of the subject – is here given an update by the clearly visible contemporary wear. More to the point, however, is the salient effacement of the figures, the painted surface where their faces should be reduced to a muddied soup of chaotic brushstrokes and chromatic confusion, explicitly negating the dimensions of mimesis and iconicity.

Psychogenic Fugue (2008), Patricia Eustaquio. Crochet lace and epoxy. Collection of Marcel Crespo.

Orange Madonna (2006), Yasmin Sison. Oil on canvas. Collection of Dr. George Soo.

The title of Yayoi Kusama’s installation, Statue of Venus Obliterated by Infinity Nets 2/10 (below), speaks for itself. Courtesy of Lito and Kim Camacho, a replica of the Venus de Milo is set against a flat background, both rendered in Kusama’s trademark “infinity nets” (a pattern of reiterated dots), binding object and setting in a virtually indistinguishable homogeneity. To quote theorist Roger Caillois on what he termed “legendary psychasthenia”, or the phenomenon of a subject psychologically identifying with or becoming absorbed into a physical space:

It is with represented space that the drama becomes specific, since the living creature, the organism, is no longer the origin of the coordinates, but one point among others; it is dispossessed of its privilege and literally no longer knows where to place itself …… The feeling of personality, considered as the organism’s feeling of distinction from its surroundings, of the connection between consciousness and a particular point in space, cannot fail under these circumstances to be seriously undermined; one then enters into the psychology of psychasthenia, and more specifically legendary psychasthenia, if we agree to use this name for the disturbance in the above relations between personality and space.

(Qtd. in Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny.)

The body is here, the artist flatly states, obliterated, the object visually subsumed as an image of the subject in a state of destabilizing psycho-spatial collapse.

Finally, Indonesian Entang Wiharso’s The Unspeakable Victim – The Story Behind Superhero and Black Goat Colony (#3) (below), from the collection of Hugh Young. The work is one in a series of similar metal-plate sculptures, resembling, in their broad figural contours, paper cutouts, or the cast shadows of wayang kulit puppets. The rather obscure narratives conjured by the artist aren’t the point here; what is apropos is the evocation of the wayang: “… you have to understand the wayang – the scared shadow play … Their shadows are souls, and the screen is heaven. You must watch the shadows, not the puppets.” (A quote from Peter Weir’s 1982 film, The Year of Living Dangerously, based on C. J. Koch’s novel of the same name.) Orientalist melodrama aside, the wayang in its performative dimension indeed provides a ready analogue for the abstracted corporeal complex as Wiharso envisions it. The appropriation of the silhouette as a formal strategy, rather than the puppets themselves, in all their intricate detail, suggests a double dislocation here: the shadow as a Platonic un-reality, a cave of fleeting illusions, which the art of the wayang encodes into its very praxis; and Wiharso’s spare, bare forms, the body submitted to a specific mode of erasure.

Statue of Venus Obliterated by Infinity Nets 2/10 (1998), Yayoi Kusama. Mixed media. Collection of Lito and Kim Camacho.

[bottom] The Unspeakable Victim – The Story Behind Superhero and Black Goat Colony (#3) (2008), Entang Wiharso. Aluminum plate. Collection of Hugh Young.

A return to where we started from: Hollander’s claim that the unworn dress is an incomplete prosthesis of the wearer. If that notion may be analogized to accommodate the artwork-collector complex – the effaced body, so prevalent here, as an intimation of the missing, crucial, animating force that supposedly provides the conceptual glue which brings together the various strands of contemporary art praxis on display, or, in other words, the individual collector and the determining aesthetics of particular collections and tastes – then the shortcomings of the show become glaringly obvious, “simply because”, as Hollander puts it, “they are not seen completing the unique and conscious selves of their owners.”

After all, Chimera bills itself as “a tribute to the art patrons of today, the exhibition offers an insight into the breadth and richness of private art collections, introducing visitors to the personal visions and passions that shape them.”

Where, then, are these ‘personal visions and passions”, beyond the parade of names that mean little to general art-viewing public – Crespo, Soo, Camacho, Young, among so many others that soon begin to blur one into another ? Those function here simply as a placeholder for the act of semantic truancy, the organizing principle claimed but, for all effective purpose, occluded. Or to reiterate the abovementioned – “evoked, named, but always already displaced.”

The artwork as static and inert as an article of dress removed from the absent anatomy; the gesture of the hollowed-out body as an analogue of that missing element which serves as the ersatz foundation of the exhibition, a presence alluded to but ceaselessly deferred – the Collector.

It was all so .. deracinated.

A tribute of sorts this show certainly is, but what to ? The power of individual collectors possessed of the necessary resources ? The readiness of an institution to genuflect ? The ingenuity of the curator ? The cosy network of connections which sutures the art industry and the socio-economic elite ? Or perhaps the creed of convenience, the exhibition as an easy, fail-safe showcase of the snazziest examplars of contemporary Asian art, a blatantly transparent attempt to wow both collector and peasant alike, the latter especially who should be grateful for the opportunity to view such remarkable pieces accessible otherwise only to the privilege of (superfluous) capital and private property.

Ok.

Consider me grateful.

The Thomasites Were Here (2009), Alfredo Esquillo Jr. Oil on canvas. Paulino and Hetty Que Collection.

Paper Plates (2008), Hamra Abbas. Paper collage and ink. Collection of Shirish Apte.

V (2011), Li Hui. Installation. Burger Collection.

Red Carpet IV (2007), Rashid Rana. C Print + DIASEC. Private collection (New York).

Please Do Not Step 1 (2004), Hamra Abbas. Installation, mixed media. ASAL Collection.

Seeing Shadow No. 39 (2008), Lin Tianmiao. C-print on canvas, silk and cotton thread. Collection of Dr. Andreas Teoh.

Broken Mirror (Classic) (2011), Lee Yong Baek. Multimedia. Collection of Lee Jae-Hwan.

Make Up (As You Go Along) (2010), Bharti Kher. Wood, mirror, bindis, glass bricks. Tiroche Deleon Collection & Art Vantage Ltd.

Extraneous (2010), Tromarama. Installation with video and batik panels. Collection of Arif Suherman.

The Orang Besar Series: YB#1 – 10 (2010), Yee I-Lann. Digital C-type prints. Collection of Chen Rong Chuan.

Midnight Sea (2006/08), Tabaimo. Video installation. Collection of the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art.

The Sixth Day (2008), Donna Ong. Installation. Collection of Leo Shih.

Winged Pilgrims: A Chronicle From Asia (2006), Sheba Chhachhi. Installation with silk and fibreglass sculptures and light boxes. Collection of Amrita Jhaveri and artist collection.

Sex Obssession (1992), Yayoi Kusama. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of Lito and Kim Camacho.

[Review] “Let’s Chat”, Amanda Heng

Ok, I was planning on writing a thorough review of the Amanda Heng show at 8Q – which closed yesterday – but it was going nowhere. I started off just penning a critique of her Let’s Chat piece, and, three pages later, still wasn’t done.

Oy.

This will have to be it.

Heng is a local pioneer, one of the first female artists, beginning in the late ’80s, to brave the then little-charted waters of conceptual and performance art in Singapore. (So we aren’t New York.) While they’re considered seminal figures by the local arts community, folks like her and Tang Da Wu and Cheo Chai Hiang and The Artists Village crowd remain, even today, on the peripheries of official approbation and wider recognition, a historical footnote to the supposed trailblazing artistic experiments of the Nanyang School painters – as if visual art hereabouts hasn’t progressed since then ..

So anyways, giving her the Cultural Medallion last year was a bold gesture, the upshot of which is the present exhibition, Amanda Heng: Speak to Me, Walk With Me, her biggest solo show yet.

This has to be said though: some artists just aren’t very museum-friendly.

Spotted at the 8Q show was the latest enactment of Let’s Chat (above). Set around the dim, cavernous gallery were a number of tables, and sitting on each was a small pile of beansprouts – or towgay in the local lingo – along with several chairs. On the walls were pictures of previous stagings of the work, showing visitors enjoying a light-hearted moment or two over the shared experience of towgay-plucking. Refreshments were even provided; a small pantry with cups, tea bags and hot water stood in one corner of the room.

If the set-up – or the photographs on the walls – didn’t immediately suggest how the piece should be approached, then the label made no bones about it:

The work recreates the familiar experience of preparing bean sprouts for a meal, a customary practice in Asian households. This traditional chore is one that many homemakers and children would recall, as conversations are exchanged during the course of this domestic task. By bringing this activity to the public domain in locations like galleries or shopping arcades, Heng encourages audiences to participate and recall the communal spirit of sharing and conversing, which may have been forgotten, due to the fast pace of contemporary life.

Let’s Chat is both an installation and a social space facilitated by the artist for engaging audiences in the public discussion on issues related to the art and everyday life.

Fair enough. It’s all here: the tables and chairs; a ready supply of sprouts; drinks; even photographic documentation of how the work allows its audience to “participate and recall the communal spirit of sharing and conversing.”

Well, except for the most essential ingredient really: an audience willing to participate.

I visited the exhibition twice. On neither occasion was I alone in the gallery for any significant amount of time: there were always a handful of other individuals milling about, and not once did I witness anyone sitting down at the table and going at it, or availing themselves of the refreshments.

Actually interacting with the work, in other words.

To be fair, we’re talking weekday afternoons here, and perhaps the situation is different with the weekend crowd; nonetheless, Let’s Chat, in the present instance, simply comes across as being more form than function. In my case at least, the reason for the reticence was clear: despite the wall text and the pictures, I wasn’t aware that audience participation was allowed, or in any sense encouraged. Who would, in this context ? – The darkened, silent space, almost forbiddingly reverent in its evocation of the sacred, not unlike a sanctum sanctorum where one comes to worship (the gods of Asian food preparation perhaps?); the neat little piles of produce positioned exactly in the centre of each tabletop, sans any of the necessary, makeshift apparatus one would need for the task of plucking towgay; the literally untouched cups sitting upturned on their individual saucers, looking for all the world like they were there to contribute to a sense of verisimilitude, rather than being actually utilitarian in purpose. To transgress that wall of ordered, self-contained aloofness without explicit permission seemed pretty unthinkable.

Growing up, I’ve had a fair share of beansprouts pass through my fingers, so it’s from a position of authoritative experience that I say: no one plucks towgay like this. If it doesn’t happen in a public area – say, a void deck, or at a kopitiam over a cuppa with friends, as some housewives prefer to do – then it takes place in a kitchen, surrounded by the smells and the bustle of cooking in progress, while some bossy female relative higher up on the familial hierarchy inevitably tells you to speed it up – or “Kin lah!” The tweaked-off ends generally go into a plastic bag or onto a spread-out sheet of newspaper placed within easy reach, all the better to simply transfer into the bin with a single scoop and toss after one is done; it doesn’t happen on pristine surfaces like the ones at 8Q, with the sprouts arranged to maximum aesthetic effect, the pile in the centre of the table and a token few strands, already plucked, laid down next to it, calling to mind perhaps the (sometimes contrived) Japanese sense of mono no aware. The entire process of towgay preparation – like so much of Chinese cooking – is a smorgasbord of sensory assaults and gestural reiterations, from the tender crispness of the sprouts in one’s hands, to the repeated act of pressing down with the thumb on the index finger to separate tip from sprout, to the buzz and hum of dinnertime kitchen activity in the background, to the heat and fumes and aroma of food being fried up in the wok, teasing the palate with the promise of gustatory gratification in the very, very near future … Nothing could be further from that memory of multi-sensorial engagement than the empty, spotless tables of detached-looking produce, sitting around seemingly untouched in the gloomy hush of the gallery, lacking the usual accompaniments – like plastic bags and newspaper and the stray end or two that escaped those receptacles – that signal the mess and the embodied physicality of the process.

It was all so tidy, and unfamiliar.

Cultural anthropologist Allen Feldman relates the following anecdote about his participation in a conference on violence in 1992. A Croatian academic had also been invited to speak:

… the local ethnologists and historians attending the meeting [the conference was held in Sweden] had difficulty conceptualizing political violence as a routinized element of everyday life; a concept without which it is impossible to grasp what has been happening in Northern Ireland for the last two decades, and more recently in ex-Yugoslavia. In discussion it became clear that for most of the scholars violence, like the geographies it had disordered, occupied the verges of civilizational process and European modernity ……

This tacit ghettoization was momentarily shaken as the Croatian folklorist delivered a paper punctuated, in the white space between her words, by barely concealed emotional disorder approaching public mourning. This was not her after-shock from living in a war zone, nor the catharsis of having momentarily exited. Rather her distress exposed the frustration, risk and uncertainty of communicating local terror to an audience at a historical and experiential remove. I was thrown back to the enforced spaces of silent fear I had encountered, doing fieldwork in Belfast, among those who were intimate with the regularity of random violence and who could not trust me with this intimacy of which, at that time, I had no bodily experience. How does one transport the experience of everyday terror that is almost inexpressible outside the sensory encompassment of violence ? The Croatian did not speak explicitly of the sensory alterity she had made tangible in that conference room, rather it was borne in her body and voice. Incarnate sensory difference was the gulf where explicit theoretical communication hesitated. The Croatian’s tensions was about speaking, without guarantee of perceptual connection, to an audience who inhaled different cultural givens, touched different material realities, and who did not have to sniff out imminent death from once familiar surrounds.

(“On Cultural Anaesthesia”, Allen Feldman, in C. Nadia Seremetakis, ed., The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity.)

The point of the rather lengthy anecdote is this: speaking across sensorial and material differentials is a tricky business. While war, violence and death are far more, shall we say, pressing issues than food preparation, the unexpected cognitive shock registered by Feldman as a result of his fellow speaker’s very personal, very visceral, very vivid disruption of the mediated matrices structuring the intellectualized atmosphere of the conference underscores in this instance just what is missing from the deracinated re-enactment of Heng’s work at 8Q – save in reverse. As Feldman relates it, the gut reaction from the Croatian scholar, erupting into the “white space” gridding her speech, made all too manifest the sort of “incarnate sensory difference” otherwise banished from the realm of abstract intellection and its languages, an articulation of inarticulate, instinctual reactions. Let’s Chat, as a sort of antinomian counterpoint, presupposes its own stated aims of communal participation and bodily engagement, but, as it took shape in this particular incarnation (I use that word purposively), seemed for all the world to be performing an act of self-negation, a nullification of its own artistic gestures, by pre-empting precisely those sorts of responses. The work may invite the viewer’s participation, but by decontextualizing and defamiliarizing the process it purportedly performs, it remains simply inert, inactivated by the crucial element of user interaction, a hollow gesture.

Elsewhere, art historian Douglas Crimp adduces Adorno as a jumping-off point for his dissection of the mummificatory consequences of museology: “The German word museal [museumlike] has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are the family sepulchers of works of art.” (Italics mine; see Crimp, “On The Museum’s Ruins” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture.) Indeed. And it is precisely the loss of that vital relationship that is at stake here - encapsulating the often problematic transposition of everyday praxis, with its largely untranslatable sensorial, corporeal nuances, into the realm of Art. The explicitly stated aims of participation and communality and “social space” place Heng’s piece firmly in the school of what has been termed relational aesthetics. The relational paradigm was the defining ‘-ism’ of the ‘90s, so well-worn now that it probably doesn’t bear explication at too much length, but just as a brief précis: with relational art, certain forms of interpersonal engagement have become the desired ends; Bourriaud, who coined the term, uses terms like “sociability” and “conviviality” in his book. “In our post-industrial societies, the most pressing thing is no longer the emancipation of individuals, but the freeing-up of inter-human communications, the dimensional emancipation of existence.”* Unlike the scripted nature of a Happening, the generation of a “community effect” is the point: “The aura of art no longer lies in the hinter-world represented by the work, nor in form itself, but in front of it, within the temporary collective form that it produces by being put on show.”* In other words, it is the staging of a forum wherein relations between viewers  – rather than simply a relation between the audience and the artwork – which is held out as the chief site of interest, the instituting of an arena or an open system under the auspices of art enabling the sort of communality that Bourriaud envisioned.

(In fact, there’s an entire essay on the relational aspect of Amanda Heng’s work in the exhibition catalogue, which looks like a well-conceived tome. I haven’t gotten round to most of it yet, save an essay or two – but it’ll happen. Soon.)

The museum as mausoleum – embalming, entombing, asphyxiating. The work as living, breathing entity, necessitating forms of engagement beyond the mere spectatorial to activate it as experience - contemporary, intelligible, communal.

The two did not sit well together here.