[Non-review] Goddess of Mercy

Local artist Alecia Neo’s Goddess of Mercy is being presented at the Substation Gallery as part of the M1 Fringe Fest. this year.

The artist has recreated two living spaces from real-life referents, belonging to a pair of mother-son couples: the Neos (any relation?), a devoutly Buddhist, cancer-stricken woman living with her hairstylist son, who professes faith in a personal mash-up of various Buddhist and Taoist cults, as well popular Asian folk religion. In the other section, culled from the lives of the Tans, the younger Tan considers himself agnostic, while his mother, a pious Catholic, now suffers from a debilitating case of Alzheimer’s.

Re-imagined domesticity as narrative is nothing new. (Simon Fujiwara’s censored contribution to the local Biennale last year, Welcome to the Hotel Munber, is a case in point.) What was striking about Neo’s piece is her embrace of the olfactory dimension: a small coil of incense was kept burning in one section of the work (the Neos’), and some essence of rosemary in the other. Engaging the sensorium is a big deal in contemporary art these days, but the tactile and the aural senses are the next most common modes of appeal after the visual – and only rarely the olfactory and/or gustatory after that.

Props to Neo, and the Substation as well for being open-minded about their space. It may seem like a trifling touch, but not for nothing is smell considered the most powerfully evocative of the senses – the incense, in particular, activated the display for me in very immediate, visceral ways, evoking the numberless shrines and temples I’ve encountered over the course of my life, the thick, woody scent of joss sticks coating the air almost always an inescapable element …

Goddess of Mercy runs till Feb 26.

THE NEOS

THE TANS

[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.

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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.

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[Review] The Hall of Mirrors

This review was born of numerous conversations about the work in question: shoutouts to SY, MY and AO.

Local artist Bruce Quek was this year’s winner of The Substation’s Open Call competition, in the Visual Art category, and his installation, The Hall of Mirrors, is on view in the Sub’s gallery till 30th Sept.

The piece is comprised of some 20+ clocks (? – not sure if I got that number right), each pre-set to the rate of occurrence of a particular statistic, e.g. assault, rape, desertification, death by malaria, just to name a few. The connection between each individual timepiece and its statistic is literally inscribed into the face of the object (below), which explains the tempo of the clock’s hand – a rapid pace suggests higher incidence, a slower momentum a lower rate. Or at least that’d the impression I got. The various clocks also seemed to be chiming at regular intervals, though, as someone pointed out, exactly when and why they did so isn’t made clear. (I’ve since been given to understand that each clock chimes upon one full rotation of its single hand.) Finally, when the visitor leaves the gallery, s/he is given a short printout tabulating all the stats represented in the work – a mechanically-generated tally of just how many deaths from cancer, female genital mutilations etc. occurred in the time that was spent in the gallery.

Destruction, Seabed (HA), The Hall of Mirrors, Bruce Quek (2011).

I was there for the opening last week with SY. When we exited, our little slip (below) informed us that we had entered at 7.13 p.m., and left at 7.22. In the nine minutes that we’d spent in the gallery, apparently the following happened:

ASSAULT: 361.333333333

DEATH, CANCER: 129.047619048

DEATH, CHOLERA: 2

DEATH, EXECUTION: 0

DEATH, HIV: 30.9714285714

DEATH, HUNGER (CHILD): 90

DEATH, INTENTIONAL HOMICIDE: 7

DEATH, MALARIA (CHILD): 18

DEATH, MATERNAL: 6

DEATH, NEONATAL: 68.6075949367

DEATH, OCCUPATIONAL: 40.447761194

DEATH, SHIGELLOSIS (Bacterium found mostly in animal feces): 18.8650174216

DEATH, SUICIDE: 13

DEATH, TUBERCULOSIS: 29.1397849462

DEATH, VEHICULAR: 20

DEATH, WAR: 0

DEFORESTATION (HA): 216.8

DESERTIFICATION (HA): 208.461538463

DESTRUCTION, GLACIER (MT): 6.90445859873

DESTRUCTION, ICE SHEET (MT): 6.18265060241

DESTRUCTION, SEABED (HA): 903.333333333

EMISSION, CO2 (KT): 492.727272727

EMISSION, METHANE (KT): 7.39427012278

EMISSION, NO2 (T): 216.8

EXTINCTION, SPECIES: 1

INFECTION, HIV: 45

MUTILATION, FEMALE GENITAL: 36

RAPE: 7

TRAFFICKING, HUMAN: 17.2065492063

WASTE, GENERAL (KT): 17.3162930297

First things first – I liked the piece. The varied yet pre-determined regularity of the aural textures created by the differentiated tickings and chimings agreed with me: a staccato, stentorian salvo of reverberations amplified to inescapable auditory hegemony within the gallery, the methodical dings and peals, sounding at recurrent, rhythmic instants, interwoven into an almost tactile wall of patterned sound (below). The embodied experientiality of the tick-tocking clocks instantiated a clear counterpoint to the disembodied abstraction of statistical numbers; the rupture between deracinated information and compulsory white noise structures the central tension here, a pair of dialectical drives imbricated.

The write-up on the Substation’s website puts it this way:

The Hall of Mirrors is an installation that resembles an echo-chamber. Exploring the relationship between infrastructure and information flow, The Hall of Mirrors explores how conveyed information is often devoid of meaning and personal relevance. Situated in the gap between information and meaning, The Hall of Mirrors constantly changes and highlights the inexorable nature of time and the unpredictability of the environment.

The installation uses publicly available and socially relevant statistics. The occurrence and reoccurrence of these statistics, measured in seconds and in minutes, are synchronised to clocks that constantly alert the viewers of their frequency and reality. The installation aggregates this information and ‘humanises’ these statistics by letting viewers experience them on a personal and individual level. Offering ample opportunity for reflection and self-examination, the work also asks the audience to consider the implications of the ways in which information is packaged and presented.

N.B. I don’t agree with that last bit, by the way, for reasons discussed immediately below. Nothing struck me as being humanising here; if anything, the information presented to viewer seems completely notional, the only appeal to the experiential register functioning within the sensorium.

The Hall of Mirrors, Bruce Quek (2011). [Turn the volume up to watch.]

Now, the issue of those numbers: just how are they being generated, and why those particular stats ?

Questions and problems abound: are these figures theoretical, or real ? As in, did these occurrences actually take place during the timeframe specified (common sense would dictate the unlikelihood of this scenario), or were they calculated according to pre-existing data ? If the latter, just who mined this information, and where and according to what methodology ? Models of information gathering are hardly without their inherent biases, and executional flaws. Also, are these numbers applicable globally ? Or within a circumscribed locale ? I find it hard to believe that in the nine minutes I spent in the gallery only seven instances of rape occurred, or were likely to occur. (See list provided above.) Under what conditions did these purported sexual assaults take place ? Are we talking date rape, domestic rape, institutional rape, rape as a weapon of war, or a random attack by a stranger ? Who was raped: a woman, a man, a child ? What about those HIV transmission rates ? Apparently 45 happened; again, where (in which part of the  world, because social conditions under which those occur are vastly different, and due to various factors largely dependent on the victim’s socio-economic status, not just sexual orientation nor gender), and to whom ? Or perhaps, more pertinently, to whom plausibly ? An economically depressed African-American woman who caught it from her partner, or a gay man residing in a so-called high-risk area, practicing unsafe sex ? Or perhaps the two stats here – rape and HIV infection – may be related ?

The logic of including certain, specific stats is also open to interrogation. Death seems to predominate: death by cholera, death by execution, death by war, death by shigellosis. Unsurprisingly, I had to look that last one up. If indeed mortality rates are of abiding concern to the artist – or perhaps he believes these numbers should be of public interest – then why these in particular ? Is shigellosis really up there with HIV and cancer these days, when it comes to public health issues ? By which I mean, does it claim more lives in a certain part of the world ? Where ? And those figures which raise the spectre of environmental degradation: why so many ? Not that the erosion of our natural habitat is unimportant, but does their inclusion here, in such plenitude, reflect a particular socio-political agenda ?

And then there’s the matter of the artist’s own stated views on his work. This is what was given in the little accompanying booklet (which one has to shell out two bucks for), and on the wall of the gallery:

ABOUT THE HALL OF MIRRORS. By Bruce Quek.

I never could resist a ticking clock; or chimes, in this case. It’s been suggested that the measured rhythm of a clock can have a soothing quality, as a psychological prosthesis of our own heartbeats. The rhythm consoles us, preserving the fiction that the long march of entropy can be measured, regulated, and controlled.

This fiction of of time has since changed – horology is now a collector’s sport, while time itself has dispersed, infusing every aspect of our lives. We tell time with our cell phones and other devices; a digital, contextual time, one function embedded amongst a myriad of others. Time is everywhere, yet nowhere, superseded by the instantaneous lockstep of real-time. Our present relationship with time, then, is not one of circadian reassurance, but of an infinite simultaneity merged with an endless sense of mounting tension – a Shepard-Risset glissando of sorts, a continuum of events onto which we attempt to impose patterns and identify connections.

Events which once unfolded as history might be better thought of in terms of trends and tendencies, emergence and virality. We yearn nonetheless for a scale of happenings to which we might relate, in which we are significant, and in which we can recognize ourselves.

Welcome to The Hall of Mirrors.

Quek certainly has a way with words: this is a pretty sumptuous-sounding string of lexical pearls.

Beyond the verbal pyrotechnics, what is particularly appealing here – at least to me – are the critical gestures regarding the idea of time: its historical embodiments (horology), its social imaginaries (cyclicality or “circadian reassurance” vs. “simultaneity”), its theoretical implications (here historiography, or the “continuum of events onto which we attempt to impose patterns and identify connections.”)

Unfortunately, I don’t see the relevance of any of that.

At least not for The Hall of Mirrors.

Like I said, the chief dialectic or tension at work here seems clear enough (but of course the artist, or anyone else, might beg to differ). The slippage between the experience of Quek’s piece in the flesh (the manifestation of the inexorability of mortality and decay as a myriad of ticking clocks in an otherwise silent space, engendering a soundscape of power) and its conceptual engine (the bloodless, faceless anonymity of statistical numbers and abstract categories, of relevance to few but academics, public officials and government functionaries) gives The Hall of Mirrors much of its visceral force. Indeed, it is from the oscillation, the centrifugal pull, between these two conflicting impulses that the work derives its particular cogency – and not, as Quek seems to be implying in rather rambling fashion, the various ideational and historical ramifications of Time, with that capital T …

A personal friend also happened to contribute an essay to the publication. (Really good, by the way, even if I do say so myself. Won’t say which; there are three of ‘em, go read.) S/he shared with me some of the artist’s personal views on the shape that the planned installation would take – this was of course prior to the show itself – and it seemed as if he, Quek, was perfectly cognizant of many of the issues raised above.

Which of course begs the question: why the prolix, almost disingenuous periphrasis, as opposed to a more direct, descriptive approach ? Or, to move away from re-inscribing the artist’s preferred modus operandi into the present enunciation – a self-reflexive rehearsal of circumlocution by the explication thereof – why all the mumbo-jumbo ?

With love, Audrey Wong.

Apropos of the Sub’s big milestone – which, as JW remarks, means that the institution has now reached official adulthood – this piece by former NMP and ex-artistic co-director of the Sub, Audrey Wong, has been popping up with clockwork-like regularity on my Facebook feed.

It’s worth the read. Some of it is perhaps a little too personal for me – or I just happen to disagree – but there’s a bit in there about how Singaporeans tend to “unconsciously shackle our own imaginations.’

Truer words were never spoken.

The personal angle does provide a nice counterpoint to Pete Schoppert’s ST piece though.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY SUBSTATION !

By Audrey Wong.

So I’ve finally read the article in The Straits Times about The Substation’s 21st anniversary (8 Sept 2011), and the headlines made me sigh  – once more, yet another press article about whether The Substation is “relevant” today. The media keeps harping on that. I’m sure Adeline Chia (the reporter)  did as much as she could, but I think that our national newspaper could do so much better and come up with more insightful editorial angles. Two other things struck me personally: one, Weng Choy was barely mentioned (not quoted even – perhaps he wasn’t available for an interview, but perhaps the national paper should really go for an in-depth perspective even if it took a little longer to get the story?); and two, my quote (taken from a 20-minute chat with Adeline) was about Timbre. Ha.

But back to the ‘relevance thing’. I’m not so interested in this – I’m really more interested in thinking about ‘what is the art that happens at The Substation and how and why this has connected with people all these years’. And thinking about that took me down the road of thinking about what’s now going on in Singapore’s arts development – not at the level of arts policy, but at the level of the everyday reality of the arts-goer and artists. One clear development that’s taken place since the 2000 Renaissance City Report and the opening of the Esplanade in 2002 was the increasing ‘mainstreaming’ of the arts in Singapore. Once the government said, ‘it’s a go!’ we steamed ahead, and in the top-down fashion of Singapore, it became a game of numbers and hype, in order to win approval – from policy-makers, influencers, the media, and ultimately the masses. The NAC, for instance, always issued a press release after the Singapore Arts Festival which focused on audience numbers and ticket sales, with hardly any discussion of the ‘artistic’ aspect of the festival. Such habits of thought and practice (of looking at numbers, and using numbers as a measure of how much an audience ‘took to’ the artistic work) have become second nature to many Singaporeans and affected how we accept, receive, and perceive the arts. The highly materialistic and results-focused society that’s Singapore has bred a consumerist mentality towards the arts. We’re susceptible to the next big spectacle, the next ‘new’ thing, hype. A lot of present-day culture, especially popular culture, is built on the ‘new’ and the newsworthy: just think of the emphasis in the movie industry and across all the media, of a movie’s opening weekend box office take. When one thinks about it rationally, what’s the actual purpose of this emphasis? It’s not really about whether a movie is good or not, or even whether it’s worth watching; it’s about driving even more ticket sales and grabbing media attention. It’s about pushing the sale of a commodity and driving consumption, and everyone’s bought into this game. But, as Weng Choy reminded us years ago, the ‘new’ had become normal business in contemporary arts in the 1990s. (“The Substation’s Place in Singapore Arts”, http://www.substation.org/about-us/artistic-mission). And sometimes, certain genres of art, artists, places, events, become media darlings because of the spectacle, the money it earns or other reasons, garner the lion’s share of media space and thus, the public mindshare.

What is it that drives people to seek out alternatives to mainstream entertainment? I think it’s something intangible that unfortunately, we don’t discuss a lot in the public sphere. Not in Singapore. But, artists and arts groups might see it through audience responses and feedback forms. What’s this intangible thing? At the risk of sounding overly romantic, it’s about any of these: it takes us out of our narrow banal everyday concerns and our selfish concerns; it provokes us to think about the world; and it just gets us beneath the surface of life and its glittering temptations. I was very moved when one of my students told me about what was recently, his first experience of ‘serious’ theatre in Singapore. He was someone who had always  focused on bread-and-butter issues, but he attended the “Remembering William Teo” event at The Substation and subsequently went to see TheatreStrays’ performance, “What the Dog Knows”. He responded to the performance directly, emotionally and intellectually, and developed an interest in and admiration for William Teo and other practitioners who passionately dedicated themselves to the craft of theatre without consideration of material rewards. In short, it was a deeper experience of life.

Sasitharan said,

“Unless artists are capable of grappling with the full and unmitigated force of the complications of history, the dilemmas of modernity, the complexities of life as it is lived collectively by men, women and children, they will never be capable of making great art … There can be no great art, no living culture, without great lives, at least lives lived not just expansively but also more deeply.”

Living deeply, perhaps, is what attracts us to the arts. And maybe we Singaporeans could do with a reminder about this, every so often.  Earlier this week, during consultations for first-year BA Arts Management students at LASALLE, one student told me that she enjoyed reading an article about how the media’s depiction of women affects social norms and influences the self-image of young women and girls. She had not seriously thought about these issues before, she said, and she was glad to have gone beyond the surface, and glad that it showed her truly what it meant “not to judge a book by its cover”.

Another aspect of living meaningfully has to be about making connections with our deeper selves, humanity, and others. I think of the artists who continue to gravitate towards The Substation even after 20 years. Although Keng Sen said in the Straits Times article that The Substation hadn’t maintained its relationships with artists who were there at the start in the 1990s, there are actually artists from the old days who continue to do work with The Substation … Effendy being one of them, some others being Lee Wen (who was an Associate Artist in the first decade of the 2000s) and Amanda Heng (who presented “I Remember” in 2005 for SeptFest and presented another in her “Let’s Walk” series with The Substation in 2009). As for why some artists stopped being / working at The Substation, well, I can offer three reasons: not enough space to accommodate all; some artists getting bigger and better stages, or their very own space; and – something else which we might call an artistic director’s prerogative, or an artistic direction. More recent artists who are “still there” include Raka Maitra, Sherman Ong, Daniel Kok, Elizabeth de Roza …and hopefully the newest ‘additions’ like Bani Haykal continue the relationship.

I’d venture to say that one aspect of this ‘relationship thing’ is that it’s not merely transactional. Many artists do not go to The Substation just to get something back; if anything, the “getting back” has to do with the artists’ work … the work of constantly making, trying, failing, reflecting, persisting … There was a conversation among the programming team a couple of years ago about the selection criteria for Open Call, which concluded with the thought that the artist(s) selected should not look upon the programme as simply a chance to get exhibition space or get funding. It was about a deeper engagement, with the work, with The Substation as a space, with the ideas, with the public.

Another aspect of the relationship, and perhaps this has to do with the value of an alternative space, I can only explain this way: some years ago, a theatre artist I met talked about the image of stray dogs and why they matter and where there can be space for them. That struck me. You never know how a stray dog might turn out. It’s a life after all, and life should matter. There will always be those who, by choice or circumstance, are left out of mainstream culture and arts, and society has to make spaces where they can be heard, where they can gather. They’re not lesser because they are strays; they might be more interesting.

Maybe what bugs me most about our consumerist mentality, is that we Singaporeans often unconsciously shackle our own imaginations. I’ve begun to understand this a little better, as I’ve met young people who have been trained to conform to the certainty of fixed structures, and habituated to repeating what the teacher wants. Unfortunately, as we train young people not to stray from a prescribed frame, we also train them in self-limitation. This isn’t about censorship; it’s really the shackles we ourselves put on our imaginations out of habit, we don’t permit ourselves to reflect deeply or to play.

“Expectations, memories, nostalgia, frustrations, a potential in real limitations. Our resources are very limited. And to a large degree, our imagination – the Substation’s , everybody’s — has been kind of battered, with the loss of the garden, funding, cultural policies… In a way our imagination becomes restricted, reduced. The challenge now is to recognize the physical limitations and really see how small the space is, and at the same time find the potential of that space that has not been tapped yet.” – Noor Effendy Ibrahim.

Ultimately, the arts can’t be a hegemonic thing, prescribed to us by the powers-that-be or those who just happen to have money and social influence. It’s about the “more” in all of us, perhaps it’s the “more” that keeps me awake at 2am typing this out after a 12-hour workday and a late night trip to the supermarket – because this matters to me, and I want to share it with others. Out of these little “more” moments that we carve out of our lives, perhaps, we find “the potential” of the untapped, the chink in the shutters of our minds.

Remarkably, I see that I’ve managed to write about The Substation without quoting Kuo Pao Kun! Perhaps that’s what he’d have wanted – if The Substation can go on without him, that’s probably proof enough that it’s needed?

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Armenian Street, polarized?

Owner of the Singapore Public Art site – and my sometime correspondent – Peter Schoppert had a piece in last Saturday’s ST (Sept 10), which considers the dichotomous impulses seemingly at play on Armenian St. today, with venerable indie arts space, The Substation, on one side, and the moneyed, sleeker-than-silk Art Plural Gallery, the new kid on the block, on the other.

Actually, Pete’s point is that neither represents a mutually exclusive position in the spectrum that is the arts industry, here or elsewhere. He notes – astutely – that independent collectives and resource-rich institutions are simply two points along the way for most artists, with sites like the Substation playing the role of nurturing materfamilias, and high-end galleries representing the best of highly visible, trans-global cultural capital. In the interest of full disclosure, the article does mention that he’s on the board of directors over at the Sub, and it does seem as if Pete is, in the final analysis, rather more oriented towards the communal spirit that that institution consciously cultivates, but he does give Art Plural its due for doing what it does. After all, the arts scene is – or should be – a diverse playing field, and any expansion of the limits that come with a circumscribed market/audience like Singapore’s can only be a good thing.

One quibble though: this may be a personal opinion, but I hardly see the fight on Armenian St. - so to speak – as a two-way affair. What about the Peranakan Museum? Art Plural is a privately-financed outfit; the Sub, as the article points out, is partly funded by government moolah (rather than being completely independent, a fact sometimes lost to popular view), so why not take into consideration a fully public establishment as well, if one is discussing the variety of institutions that constitute the arts scene? If anything, governmental organizations probably represent the biggest and most influential players on the field, so it does seem as if developments occurring within our museums are a pretty good gauge of the prevailing state of affairs – rather than just a single private gallery. Also, the connections here are more subtle than just a series of oppositional stances represented by two antithetical attitudes: the mini “lifestyle” renaissance fostered by the museum along Armenian St. – with its pricey gift store and the opening of the upscale Nonya restaurant, True Blue – seems perfectly aligned with the takeover of the Sub’s much-loved garden space by bar and restaurant (and contributor to general noise pollution) Timbre, not to mention the blue-chip art market catered to by Art Plural. In other words, all three institutions may have as much in common as they do differentially …

Nevertheless, Pete Schoppert’s article is a valuable contribution to the flurry of opinions being bandied about in light of the Sub’s upcoming 21st birthday. Reproduced below.

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A TALE OF TWO ART SPACES

Substation, which turns 21 next week, is Singapore’s angel investor in the arts. By Peter Schoppert for The Straits Times.

There’s a stretch of Armenian Street that perfectly captures recent changes in Singapore’s art scene. On one side, opened in 1990, the Substation, Singapore’s first independent arts centre; on the other, opened in 2011, Art Plural, 12,000 sq ft of high-end art gallery, featuring artists such as Picasso, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Longo, and Thakral [sic] and Tagra.

When you walk into Art Plural, you are greeted by polite, well-dressed and well-informed young art students working as gallery attendants.

You never know who might (or might not) greet you in the Substation: a grouchy poet, our artistic director wearing a pair of angel’s wings, a post-punk rocker, an artist inviting you to join her in making an installation out of feminine hygiene products, or Mrs Chua, our iconic, laconic caretaker.

On a recent evening, great gouts of white noise, fuzz and howling came pouring out of the Substation, in a performance by musician and circuit bender Mel Araneta, from the Philippines, collaborating with a group of Singaporean sound artists. Roaming performance artists perplexed passers-by, wrapped in plastic, shaving cream covering their heads.

Art Plural is a much more discreet neighbour, with its “ring doorbell to enter” sign.

The contrasts are obvious: foreign versus local, polished versus rough, art market stars versus uncelebrated art workers, private bankers versus skinheads, discreet versus attention-seeking, art that was once shocking but is now a commodity versus art that sometimes strives – and sometimes succeeds – to actually make people uncomfortable.

The Substation celebrates its 21^st birthday on Sept 16, but its theatre has not had an upgrade in many years; Art Plural is up-to-the-minute.

So is the Substation the past, and Art Plural the future of arts in Singapore?

Actually both aspects of the art world are important and interdependent. The art world stars presented by Art Plural once depended on independent art spaces like the Substation to provide them support, feedback and that crucial first show. Robert Longo started his career in an artist-run space in an old ice factory, the Essex Arts Centre in Buffalo, New York, with his fellow student Cindy Sherman.

In a recently fashionable view, a city’s arts scene is part of its cultural capital, a key asset in the global competition for talent and investment. If Art Plural represents the world’s top artistic brands, their success validated and revalidated, in New York, Paris or London, you might say that the Substation is early stage angel investment in Asia. In this view, Substation develops and nurtures artists at crucial phases of their career, when spectacular failure is as likely as success (and more valuable in some ways).

Indeed, prominent Singapore artists, people like Ho Tzu Nyen, Matthew Ngui, Zhao Renhui, as well as film-makers like Royston Tan and Tan Pin Pin all had early or important showings at the Substation. The list of local artists who’ve worked at Substation is a long one, and covers performing arts and music as well [as] visual arts and film.

Still, this economic lens on art is only part of the story. Kuo Pao Kun’s founding vision of the Substation sees the arts as a vital source of energy and understanding for Singapore society. By providing a home for the arts, for mid-career artists as well as younger ones, the Substation attempts to create a space for artists to operate as a community, on their own terms. Under artistic director Noor Effendy Ibrahim, the Substation is renewing its mission of “nurturing and challenging Singapore artists”.

We believe that an artistic community works to open spaces for dialogue and new understanding within society, inside and between other communities however defined. Under Effendy’s Associate Artist Research Programme, our artists are asked to engage directly with a real community unfamiliar to them, whether that be scientists in Biopolis or an underprivileged group.

Keeping the mission fresh and relevant is not necessarily a simple matter. We have lost some key assets – our garden, now rented out, the kopitiam across the street, now Art Plural’s ground floor, which was the venue of so many meetings of artists, film-makers, dancers, musicians and people just hanging out.

And the Substation can be a bit of a headache at times. We believe our mission requires us to offer a safe space for the artistic expression of marginalised groups, and – sometimes – for a testing of the relevance of art in the social and political realms. Government grants provide us with about 20 per cent of our annual income, but the Government sometimes seems only 20 per cent comfortable with our total vision. Arts grants are now linked to notions of “acceptability” of content of the art, but this criterion is rarely the highest on our list.

Art Plural shows works by artist Jean Dubuffet, part of a movement known as Art Brut. In the 1950s and 60s, he wrote of the cultural asphyxiation created by Europe’s arts institutions. He demanded “a teeming diversity” of art, which would require “a crusade against taste and decorum”. Art Plural now sells his works in their very tasteful gallery, but if he were a Singaporean artist starting out today, I bet he would have had an Open Call show at Substation. At the very least, he would appreciate Substation’s contribution to the diversity of the arts in Singapore.

The writer is on the board of directors of the Substation. Formerly with McKinsey & Company, he is an entrepreneur and publisher.

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