Dear friends and colleagues
I really like Christmas. Whenever I think of Christmas, I think of my Christmases back home in the West Country with my parents and brothers: midnight communion, walking home feeling the frosty air, a warming drink round the log fire, my children leaving messages for Father Christmas, waking up hoping for snow, roast turkey, crackers, stupid paper hats, opening presents, etc. etc. And, of course, we had a Christmas tree, a real one – of course! – decorated with a miscellany of baubles. Some years once all the decorations were taken down, we would plant it outside in the garden and hoped it took root. Occasionally it did. The last time I drove past our old house two were still there, though after fifty odd years they have become, of course, much taller than the house.
Sadly, Father Christmas doesn’t live in Singapore – neither does it snow here – nor do Christmas trees grow here. But the Singaporeans do like Christmas and they do like shopping for Christmas, so we find some very curious substitutes for Christmas trees in the malls, shops and streets.
By way of a Christmas card to you all, here is a selection:
The Christmas trees of Singapore.
A short semiotic analysis is called for. Images 1-3 show a basic adherence to the notion that a Christmas tree is green with sparkly things added. However, please notice how rigidly geometric the triangular shape of the tree is in each case.
In image 4 we see the green lost entirely as if it was an unnecessary accident and sparkle + triangle equals the essence of a Christmas tree. Images 5 and 6, both highly simplified versions, were shot in the café of the National Gallery and outside Esplanade, Theatres on the Bay, so may be considered culturally considered – all the rest bar 10 are in malls or shops.
Images 7, though equally geometric, sees a blend of food and Christmas tree – it is made of macaroons – hence the barrier around it. By way of an interesting contrast, images 8 and 9 show a different, more gothic tendency. Image 10 is my favourite because it assumes that each and any viewer recognizes a triangle with a star on top as a Christmas tree and that allows the designer (or artist?) total freedom.
Do we want to see this as somehow connected to the way the triangle in Indonesian art, as Astri Wright shows in her 1994 book Soul Spirit and Mountain: Pre-occupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters, represents the sacred mountain? Or is it just an empty sign? Does it act as a subliminal marker to get you to go and buy someone a present? Or does it still have some vestigial power, some hint of spire or pyramid? Certainly, it has gone a long way from pre-Christian Germanic tree worship!
I am taking a break next week but I will be back on the 5th January.
Wishing all my readers a very happy Christmas and New Year full of good art and non-art experiences.
Tony
PS. I do miss that pre-Christmas excitement thought: the possibility that it may snow and we might make a snowman on Boxing Day. Therefore, here’s hoping that all my Northern hemisphere readers have snow on Christmas day and get to build a snowman on Boxing Day.