Open house in a not so open society, The third Singapore Biennale

64 | TEMPO MAY 24, 2011

ARTS

Roy Voragen*

THE theme of the Singapore Bien-nale (SB2011) was ‘Open House’ (as celebrated by many during Chinese New Year or at the end of the Ramadan fasting month).

This theme comes with an ironic twist: Singapore is not exactly an open society. Can art open up and lay bare the contra-dictions of Singapore?

Open House sought to interpret art in terms of everyday urban life, and it questioned how we move across bor-ders—of the private and public sphere—and form connections with others and their views. But why should there be a biennale in Singapore in the fi rst place? Biennales are mushrooming around the globe (those in Jakarta are marred by fi -nancial, organizational and religious problems—in 2005, the FPI took a sinis-ter interest in the joint work of Agus Su-wage and Davy Linggar).

In a press release, the organizers stat-ed that the goal was to enhance “Singa-pore’s international profi le as a vibrant city in which to live, work and play.” This means that the biennale is part of

Third Singapore Biennale:Open House in a Not-So-Open Society

the branding of a city: art as a tool to soften Singapore’s image to compete with other global cities. However, Sin-gaporeans and tourists I spoke with had no clue about the biennale. The Formu-la 1 racing event seemed more enticing (and louder) than art.

For the duration of the Singapore Bi-ennale, Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi con-structed a hotel around the Merlion stat-ue at Marina Bay. During the day it is open to visitors, and for the night, a room can be booked for S$150. As Marina Bay is a very touristic area, many who visit-ed the Merlion Hotel just happened to be in the vicinity and had no clue about the biennale. They loved the hotel: patient-ly waiting for their turn to enter. Before entering, they hastily kicked off their shoes and as good tourists took pictures of each other, especially next to the Mer-lion’s head hovering above the king-size bed. Mayo Martin, the art critic of Sin-gapore’s daily Today, spent a night in this makeshift luxury hotel, where he felt watched, even though he did not de-tect any CCTV. He concluded this was a good metaphor of Singapore.

American artist Jill Magid took a dif-

ferent, less paranoid stand on surveil-lance technology. She sought to seduce the system, wanting to enter the sys-tem by fi nding its loophole. Magid pen-etrates seemingly closed systems to get intimate with these systems and in the process, technology is subverted by sensuality. A system of surveillance is turned into self-surveillance so the sys-tem works as a mirror to create herself. For Magid, art is exactly this process of seduction. She said: “I seduce systems of power to make them work with me,” and in the process there is mutual change.

At the biennale, several of Magid’s works were displayed, some of these were commissioned for the 2004 Liv-erpool Biennale. In Liverpool, at the time, there were 242 CCTV cameras. Normally, footage is destroyed after 31 days; however, the Data Protection Act which the UK enacted in 1998, al-lows one to submit a so-called Subject Access Request Form and, if approved, footage will be saved for seven years in an evidence locker. Magid stayed for a month in Liverpool, where she submit-ted 31 request forms, which read like in-timate love letters. Along the way a mu-

Michael

Lee’s Offi ce

Orchitect.

Evidence

Locker by Jill

Magid (right).

The more

subtle The

Meaning of

Style by Phil

Collins (far

right).

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MAY 24, 2011 TEMPO | 65

tual bond of trust was created, most po-etically visualized in Final Tour. On the last day of her stay, she toured around Liverpool on the back of a motorbike driven by one of the observers.

Magid’s work was intriguing, but it also raises questions. The most obvi-ous question is, of course, whether this kind of work could have been made in Singapore—where surveillance cam-eras are ubiquitous—which seems ex-tremely unlikely. Another matter is our position—she calls us the ‘third par-ty witness’—and we are put in a pas-sive, voyeuristic relationship. She in-vites us, though, to seduce the system ourselves. However, wouldn’t the Data Protection Act be jeopardized if we, en masse, started to submit request forms? Moreover, wouldn’t the public sphere as a democratic space become impossible if we en masse bring our most intimate selves into this space? American soci-ologist Richard Sennett warned in his book The Fall of Public Man of the tyr-anny of authentic intimacy.

South African Candice Breitz took up the question of what drives individua-tion. In Toronto she fi lmed interviews with seven sets of twins and one triplet. The title of her captivating work, Fac-tum, is taken after two near-identical paintings by Robert Rauchenberg: Fac-tum I and II. The interviews show how in-dividuals struggle to be different and to be considered an individual while some-one with identical genetic codes is proxi-mate. Breitz explains this with a Thai ex-pression: “Same, same, but different.”

The indigenous Australian artist Trac-ey Moffatt connects this question of identity with power. Her video Other was a collage of all the colonialist clichés in Hollywood movies: the indigenous Other is assumed to hold the secret to erotic pleasure and unlocking this secret will lead to greater power (already criti-cized by Edward Said in his book Orien-talism). And fi tting a Hollywood produc-

tion, Moffatt’s video ends with a cosmic ejaculation. More subtle were the video works by Phil Collins and Tan Pin Pin.

Briton Collins follows a group of Ma-laysian skinheads in the video The Mean-ing of Style. I watched it three times in awe. The slow-paced, lyrical video plays on and then sublimates our prejudices of skinheads. The Impossibility of Know-ing, a video by Singaporean Tan Pin Pin, was also a very subtle work. It touches upon the impossibility of giving mean-ing to death. While a narrator gave us the dry facts of some deadly accidents around Singapore, the camera panned solemnly through the landscape—look-ing for clues, and not fi nding any.

Like Magid, Singaporean Michael Lee’s work Office Orchitect investi-gates the relationship between space and desire. For this work, Lee invent-ed the fi ctional architect KS Wong. Lee presents models of several of Wong’s de-signs, one more outlandish than the oth-er. Lee says: “When objects and spac-es lose their utilitarian functions, their aesthetic ones come to the foreground.” And in so doing, Lee tries to imagine a different Singapore. However, Lee calls Wong “anally rigorous”; how can a per-son who is excessively orderly and fussy imagine an alternative for the exces-sively ordered Singapore?

The great thing about visiting an art exhibition that is not in a museum or gallery specifi cally designed for art but in an abandoned building, is that our senses are opened up to the poet-ry of the unexpected. One of the ven-ues of SB2011 is the old Kallang air-port. In a hangar stood the installation the Deutsche Scheune/German Barn by Scandinavian artists Elmgreen and Dragset. I walked around their instal-lation (the bit-too-neat barn is lifesize) when something in the far end of the hangar caught my eye. Most likely this was not an artwork in any traditional sense, but it reminded me of what Mi-

chel Foucault wrote: “Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?” This aesthetic question is, of course, also a political matter.

An abandoned building also offers freedom to artists. Polish artist Gos-ia Wlodarczak made eerie drawings on windows (frost drawings), another art-ist scribbled on the walls of the staircase of the old airport, for example: “the act of seeing with one’s own eye.” This text is a reference to a movie by avant-garde fi lmmaker Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) and it is a literal translation of ‘autop-sy.’ The scribble is part of a work by Bul-garian artist Nedko Solakov. However, he himself never came to Singapore, be-ing mortally afraid of fl ying. He invited Singaporean fi lmmaker and artist Liao Jiekai to Sofi a and on his return he cre-ated the work for Solakov.

The only Indonesian contribution to the biennale was by the Jakarta-based artist collective ruang rupa: Singapore Fiction. But at the Singapore Art Muse-um, one of the venues, two parallel ex-hibitions can be visited: It’s Now or nev-er II, New Contemporary Art Acqui-sitions from Southeast Asia and Ne-gotiating Home, History and Nation, Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia 1991-2011. Many of the big names of the Indonesian contempo-rary art scene were present at these two parallel events, and hopefully, one day, these artworks will be shown again in Indonesia.

From the fi rst Singapore Biennale, in 2006, I only recall vividly one artwork: the sublime painting The heart is a lone-ly painter by Thai artist Chatchai Puip-ia. There is only so much art we can ab-sorb. Artists raise questions. We art lov-ers add even more questions.

*The writer is a Bandung-based academic and writer.

He can be contacted at fatumbrutum.blogspot.com