6th December 2022
Dear friends and colleagues
I may be 71 now but I am still trying to educate myself. The last two years I have been working hard to better understand music and those who make it. I bought a brilliant biography of Beethoven by Jan Swafford and as I read that, I listened to all the music that Beethoven wrote.[1] Then I did the same with Berlioz, Brahms, Charles Ives, Sibelius. Now I am reading Swafford’s new biography of Mozart. No, I am not going to listen to all his music! There is just so much. But everything Swafford refers to – which is quite a lot – I will listen to! I have got up to the opera Idomeneo and the sacking of Mozart by the cantankerous archbishop of Salzburg. It has been fascinating see the five-year old prodigy develop into an artistic maturity, and…
“But,” you interrupt, “aren’t these letters meant to be about art and visual culture in South-east Asia? Why are talking about Mozart? You promised to write about the Singapore Biennial.”
Indeed.
“Shocking, lazy curating. Shockingly lazy!” That was what one friend said. I was in Singapore for four days helping Geraldine install her exhibition at Mizuma Gallery so I could not get to see the biennale until my fifth day, but I met friends most evenings and asked them what they thought. Generally, they were dismissive or said they had not yet got to it or they had not realized it was on. Why so dismissive, or so uninterested?
To make this exhibition, the seventh biennale, more accessible the curators of this had called it “Natasha.” Nice idea but “Hallo!” How tone deaf can you be choosing a Russian name? The curators had talked of their desire to reach the heartlands and the average Singaporean. But hardly anything seems to have been sent out to the heartlands, and 39 of the 51 artists or artists groups in this show were shown in the warehouse at Tanjong Pagar Distripark beside the port.[2] It is not an easily accessible site and one dominated by containers not a community. (While the old Singapore Art Museum building is repaired and extended this is its temporary home – though some would like it to be a permanent home)
However, the first thing that happens when you enter the exhibition is a welcome surprise: you are given a copy of the exhibition catalogue 112 pages, one compact enough to fit in a large pocket, informative albeit strangely whimsical. Too often at biennales we get a doorstop – and expensive – catalogue with little function beyond curatorial vanity publishing. In it the curators tell us the exhibition is all about naming, or a journey, or dialogue, or… But later under the heading “Interiority” and above a photograph of all four curators posed with their eyes closed, they write of “turning away from the conventional preoccupation with the visual to dwell instead on interiority. Through Natasha, our focus shifts from common and objective experiences to something more personal happening within. Can the depth and complexity of these interior worlds and lives be fully expressed in art, text and other external forms?”
We went first to the very large spaces of the fifth floor and found that the answer was “Apparently not.” It is a big, unforgiving space and there was nothing either big enough or good enough to hold its own. Nothing energised the space. The most dominant elements were the very noisy AC units.
AC unit
Singapore Biennale 2022
Walid Raad detail
One large work, a projected film of a waterfall, by Walid Raad, is striking but flatters to deceive. Underneath are tiny figures of 80s world leaders – Reagan, Gorbachev, Thatcher. Different factions with the Lebanese civil war renamed scenic waterfalls after their patrons. But the five figures are not well made or quite upright – a recurrent problem in this exhibition. Some posters are peeling off walls. One artist (Kym Jonhong presented by Brightworkroom) complains about how things won’t stuck where he wants them. Amateurishness is presumably being evoked as a sign of authenticity.
Much as at Dokumenta, there were tables and chairs and “discussion areas” bodged together by collaborative groups. It all looked wearily familiar and given there was no-one else visiting when we were there – rather pointless.
Nina bell F. House Museum
We wandered down to the second floor to see an installation by Berny Tan of artist books made by Singapore artists. On the same floor was the commercial gallery 39+ Art Space with an exhibition of the Indonesian artists Jumaadi. Jumaadi is married to an Australian woman and his work refers to that transnational love. My instinct was to see them as faux naïf but I liked them. They made me smile. They had, something singularly lacking on the fifth floor – charm.
Jumaadi
Now, that is not a word we often hear in art critical discourse! Maybe we should. Mozart above all epitomizes charm in art. The pleasure of being with good company. We would all, I am sure, prefer to have supper or dance with Mozart than Wagner or Brahms. Good company and friendship are no little things but core elements of the good life. In visual art Watteau is perhaps the epitome of charm. “How charming!” we may say, or “How enchanting!” Enchantment is a stronger, more suggestive word than charm, it does not just appeal but wins us over. The most charming artist of the twentieth century? Bonnard? Chagall? Duchamp? Kusama?
We needed a Coffee break! Looking out from the window of the Museum’s coffee shop what do you see? Cranes, gantries and ginormous stacks of containers. From all around the world. This is the busiest port in the world after Shanghai. Perhaps the most international place in the world.
View from café of Singapore Art Museum
The Singapore Biennale has never worked out what it is: international or restricted to South-east Asia? The first three were global the next three regional. This seventh is Asian only, but why? Culturally Singapore is far closer to London, New York or Perth than to Beirut, Phnom Penh or Ramallah. For myself, I have always held that as Singapore is the only place in South-east Asia with the resources and infrastructure to mount a genuinely global biennale, that is what it should do.[3]
Finally, on the ground floor we find a really good work. Predictably, if disappointingly, it is by one of the few big names in the exhibition, the Thai artist, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. A video projection of her dogs searching, she believes, for the bones of their ancestors or howling at their ghosts. There are papier mâché models of dog’s heads and reflective texts by her too. It may not be her best work but it was visually beguiling, it was about something serious, but it also had wit, humour, feeling and, yes, charm.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook detail
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook detail
There were other things I liked downstairs: the Iraqi Afifa Aleiby. But why only two paintings and both over thirty years old? Trained in the USSR and long resident in Holland her work has that mix of the folkloric with neoclassical that permeated much Soviet painting. Nowadays she concentrates on painting women holding birds or standing by lakes or re-enacting the pieta. Did the curators not include such recent paintings because they lacked interiority or because people might have liked them?
Afifa Aleiby
I also liked the minimalist metal sculptures of Khmer Kanitha Tith but their effect was diminished by interspersing them with her drawings.
Kanitha Tith
I also liked the Tuymanesque paintings by Shan/Canadian Sawangwongse Yawnghwe about the heroin trade in the Shan State.
(As with much else I the exhibition I would have welcomed some more contextual information in the catalogue or wall texts on these artists.)
I have seen Haegue Yang make show stopping installations at biennales in Liverpool and Taipei. This pair of sculptures was far less exciting. That it won a prize was indicative of how uninspiring this biennale was.
Hague Yang and Afifa Aleiby
However well-intentioned a curatorial team is you cannot – as Dokumenta this year showed – make a good biennale without good works. Of course, biennales should include unknown, young or neglected artists but they should include some of the best art around which believe it or not (!) is often by better known artists! As I wrote three years ago there are many exceptional established artists in South-east Asia who have yet to be included in a Singapore Biennale.[4]
Nor is the search for “interiority” an excuse for the lack of visual interest. The trope of artists, poets or muses being shown with their eyes closed was common in both Symbolism (Fernand Khnopf etc) and Surrealism (Magritte’s Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt in La Révolution Surréaliste), In both cases it was a spur to visual imagination and production. Another provocation could have been Derrida’s beautiful book of 1993, Memoirs of the Blind. Maybe if they had considered such precedents they could have made a more focussed exhibition.
Oh well back to Mozart
Speak again soon
Tony
PS. I will be back in Singapore in January to see the new art fair Art SG. I will endeavour at the same time to see some of the other sites of the biennale and report on them.
PPS. This is not the occasion to talk of Geraldine’s exhibition at Mizuma Gallery (on till 18th December.) but I must note the gallery has published an e-catalogue with a very good essay by Michelangelo Samson – and one by myself. They have also published on their web site the transcript of a gallery talk she did. Close by in Ota Gallery is another exhibition also worth seeing, one by the Singaporean artist Zai Kuning (on till 18th December.) Two exhibitions that demonstrate that it is possible to make art about interiority and social/political concerns but which is also visually appealing – even charming and enchanting.
Geraldine Javier at Mizuma Gallery
Zai Kuning at Ota Gallery
- Technically not quite all – I never listened to all his many folk song adaptions. ↑
- I was unable to visit other sites on this visit. ↑
- One can’t imagine, for example, any other country in this region mounting the ambitious and excellent exhibition of Patricia Piccinini as Singapore’s Art Science Museum has. (On till 29th January) ↑
- Tuesday in the Tropics 158, 10th December 2019 ↑