Blog - Tuesday in the Tropics 19 - Art Talk South East Asia

Dear friends and colleagues,

It’s the last picture show.

Gary Ross Pastrana

This will the last exhibition at Equator Art Projects, Singapore where I am curator. The gallery will close at end of May. However, we will carry on in Jogja making shows.

How do I feel after 44 shows and projects, mostly initiated and curated by myself, most with a catalogue written by myself? A little weary, perhaps? Certainly, but looking forward to other different projects!

My main feeling at this moment is that just as it was good to have started with a provocative show Marcel Duchamp in South-East Asia it was good to finish with something similarly provocative: You Must Change Your Life. Both of them had some good works in and set up a lot of questions.

And as I think about both shows I can see a lot of unfinished business for me to pursue.

Firstly, the understanding of conceptual art and its history is very uneven here – to put it politely. Moreover, as elsewhere, it is also a site of conflict. The little ASEANers if we can call them that, those writers and curators here who want to focus on (or invent) a specifically South-East Asian art or art world, tend to stigmatise Euro-American conceptualism like Euro-American abstraction as an other. An evil other. A silly writer here called “influence” a sad word. Every half decent artist or writer has had many influences that they are affected by but also negotiated or fought with. Any artist in the last fifty years who hasn’t been influenced by Picasso or Duchamp is not just uninformed but stupid. One definition of provincialism is to refuse possible influences.

Yes, I know: a lot of the best writing is very local, about a specific place, a specific culture, a specific language. But that doesn’t necessitate turning your back on world literature.

And, yes, I know that conceptual art has always manifested itself in different modes in different modes in different situations, but it was also, like Fluxus before it, something like a genuinely international movement. There was a real belief in the possibility and need for cross border communication. That is still important.

Secondly, the lack of connection today between art and poetry, or rather between artists and poets, is an issue I want to investigate further, but, more importantly, I want to be pro-active and find some way of initiating interchanges between them.

That’s for the future though. Why, you may have been asking, while I have been ranting above, did the gallery close?

Because we did not sell enough art, of course. There weren’t enough collectors here interested in the sort of work we were showing to sustain us. Our lease had come up as it had for most of the galleries at Gillman Barracks and like a few others we did our sums and decided to move on.

I read somewhere that the average art gallery lasts five years. This is not so obvious because the key players (Waddington, Pace, Gagosian, White Cube) look so blue chip and secure, but in reality they are exceptional: it is a volatile and unpredictable world.

I will miss Gillman Barracks: it’s a beautiful site and a very interesting project. When it gets the right balance between private and public art (commercial and state supported), between art and other stuff (restaurants, fashion shops, bookshops, design shops, studios) it will become a very important meeting point for this region – or to use a Singaporean term a “hub”. I’ll talk a bit more about another day, but I have a show to open now. Here are some images of it.

Wishing you all a good Tuesday and hoping you attain all your KPIs.

Tony

PS. “KPI” is the most important acronym in Singapore: Key Performance Indicators.