Sustaining Alterity in the Times of R(v)apid Changes.
'art is the only twin life has - its only valid metaphysics.
Art does not seek to describe but to enact.'
- Charles Olson (1)
In a major collection of essays, ‘The Open Work' (2), entitled after a text written in 1962, Umberto Eco theorized that the reader was free to interpret and read the book or created work of art as they choose, regardless of authorial “intentions”. In another essay, discussing the demise of ‘Gruppo 63’, a radical avant-garde group in Milan in the 1960s, he helped to form, he asserted that it was expected such radical movements are short-lived, lasting at most about five years as they gained acceptance, or members become engrossed in individual destinies as they gained maturity. The Artists Village has now existed longer than the expected lifespan of avant-garde groups as contended in Eco’s considered opinion however it is open to interpretation whether the group played or continue to play a radical role in offering an ‘alternative’ to the status quo.
Space
At her commencement, The Artists Village provided an alternative space for artists living in a state where 80% of its populace is housed in urban high-rise apartments. A majority of us who congregated at the kampong site of Ulu Sembawang found the unused chicken coops and wooden farm houses, varied insects, birds, live animals like chickens, geese, rabbits, dogs and cats, together with the green natural surroundings most conducive to inspirational art explorations. Some artists had childhood experiences of living in kampong environments but like the last remaining farmers of Singapore in Sembawang had been evicted to be re-housed in the housing estates due to island wide urban development. Others like myself who grew up all our lives in housing estates were thankful we could at least have this short yet intense experience of a countryside lifestyle. Aside from arousing lyrical and nostalgic feelings or satisfying the curiosity of urbanites for a disappearing landscape in Singapore, the village environment served a real need for working as well as exhibiting spaces by artists. Even today many of us still face problems in looking for reasonably priced studios that may allow extensive work with pungent smell producing oil paints, spacious halls with long walls and high ceilings to accommodate more ambitious paintings and sculptures or noisy tools like electric drills, jackhammers and saws. At the same time the lackluster galleries within a conservative art market in Singapore does not have the guts, gumption nor good judgment to risk exhibiting and endorsing works that go against the grain nor edgy artists of difficult or daring dispositions.
After having lost the kampong location, The Artists Village continued working in the spirit of facilitating and extending the scarcity of spaces that allows the alternative practice of sincere, searching and inventive experiments that reflect the changes in our rapidly evolving society. In 1990 The Artists Village participated in the Singapore Art Festival under the proposed group project of C.A.R.E.: Concerned Artists for the Environment. Tang Da Wu mooted this just after the euphoric successes of The Drawing Show and TIME Show, the last events held on the Ulu Sembawang site. The C.A.R.E project originally was conceived to be held in the kampong, to provide a platform to present new works with thematic emphasis of responding and highlighting the threatening fate of ecological imbalance our world faces due to incontinent policies based on profit-motivated market capitalism that neglects concerns for our natural environment. Ironically an eviction notice was served by the authorities in the midst of our preparations, which ejected us from a green working environment and forced us to present our works in noisy polluted urban sites, overly cold air-conditioned shopping malls and hot unsheltered concrete sidewalks. It was a bittersweet experience but it gave us the impetus to work in public sites reaching out to a wider unsuspecting non-art audiences. At the same time we were forced back into our small flats or seek higher costing studios and worst of all destroy our unwelcome experimentations due to the lost of accessible space like the kampong in Ulu Sembawang. We reverted to making smaller works of manageable proportions for ease of storage and moving in anticipation of having to keep a larger part of our creative art productions in a ‘hard-to-sell’ art market unsympathetic to our cause. It also became apparent that it made more sense in such a scenario to devise temporal site-specific works of performance and installation art.
In the many projects that followed over the years was a consistent search and exploration of space in the urban island city-state. The Space in 1992 occupied a disused warehouse, with four floors of wide-open studio and gallery spaces. Tour de Art Lah! in 1996 transformed a double-decker bus into a roving gallery, A.I.M-Aritists Investigating Monuments (2001, made local monuments the focal points of site-specific presentations by the artists, the Pulau Ubin project brought back memories of the familiar yet missed fresh rustic open working environments of old Ulu Sembawang. Offshoot separate establishments were setup to initiate autonomous exhibition spaces and collaborative networks. Jason Lim, Yvonne Lee and Vincent Leow initiated U.T.O.P.I.A. (1995-6) a small shop space gallery focused on featuring selected artists working in the contemporary vein. Plastique Kinetic Worms (1998-2008) ran as a gallery and residency venue in Little India. Others like P-10, The Other House and Your Mother Gallery also found Little India’s central location yet affordable spaces appropriate for artists’ occupation. The latest addition being Post-Museum and Food #3 initiated by Woon Tien Wei and Jennifer Teo that runs not only a gallery space but also offices, studios, residencies, and a vegetarian restaurant. All these efforts had two main things in common: they were initiated and operated with the participation of former or current members of The Artists Village with passionate aspirations and singular focus striving to create alternative autonomous platforms that will allow a higher visibility for deserving new contemporary art practices in Singapore which still would not be given the chance in the growing number of art galleries, awards and competitions in Singapore.
Body and Material
Our senses are acutely aroused when we make critical shifts in our living environment. A higher sensorial response to mundane objects and materials encourages a different sensibility and investigational perception. We forsook the traditional rules and methods, using unexpected ways such as tea, coffee, soya sauce and catsup to make stains and marks in our drawings. Sand, dried leaves, glue, epoxy, varnish, wire-mesh, photography, polymer and enamel paints, etc. were not spared experimentation in unusual, untried, unexpected combinations of decoupage, collage and photomontage. Not only the ideas of using ready-mades as art material liberated us into an infinite possibilities of creativity it also spurred us also into seeing and using our bodies as object material as well as subject narratives for art making itself. Since The Artists Village left the grounds of the kampong in Ulu Sembawang, various members have continued to pioneer or introduce previously unheard of methods and materials for art making in Singapore.
Tang Da Wu used tapioca as subject as well as materials for art workshops explaining historical contexts of the Second World War with students, Jason Lim and Vincent Leow used a variety of unconventional or unstable yet common materials for an installation ‘A Flock of Birdies’, commenting on the growth of golf courses in land-scarce Singapore, New generation artists such as Lina Adams, Kai Lam, Jeremy Hiah, Woon Tien Wei, Agnes Yit, Angie Seah, Marienne Yang moved into using video, sound, voice, industrial, new media while keeping in touch with traditional materials, methods and processes. Not only is there a conscious desire to use novel or investigational materials and methods but also to expressively responding to current concerns of environmental imbalances or other societal tensions.
Time, Concepts and Processes
Since its independence, Singapore had experienced a rapid rate of development and changes. If not for some civil bodies like the Singapore Heritage Society in advocating the preservation of various historical sites and buildings Singapore would otherwise look just like any other recently developed or built-up cities in the world devoid of unique historical characteristics and culture. Artists were also responding to the changes. There were constant demolishing and erecting of buildings and the rapidly transforming daily landscape prompt us to regard time as an increasingly important factor in the creative process, not only in terms of the quantity and chronological but also psychological and historical references and significances. The proliferation of objects, memorabilia, furniture being discarded and left behind in the moves and relocating, appealed to artists as historically loaded images, raw material to be salvaged and used as to make new art. For example, Tang Mun Kit’s various creations are assemblages and juxtapositions of found objects giving concrete forms to psychological sentiments and historical time frames in what he calls ‘Hibernated Works’.
The uses of different materials and methods beyond other more durable, traditionally acceptable also require new philosophical or conceptual thinking. Members of The Artists Village did not concur on any particular school of thought or manifesto for a particular working strategy but there were some inherent trends. There was a stronger leaning towards social issues or content-related aesthetics than abstract and detached objective investigation and experimentation. Maintaining a flexible tolerance for uncertainty, giving room to improvisation and spontaneous responses to unanticipated shifting situations instead of strictly adhering to or playing by immaculately pre-thought out plans. There was also a higher regard for ‘process’ based art, a procedure of test and inquiry involving a time-sensitive open-ended operation.
Autonomy, Network, and Continuity
The lack of art magazines, publications and media coverage discussing the emerging more challenging and conceptual art in Singapore, artists had always felt they were working in a ‘critical vacuum’. The Artists Village found plan of action was to create more opportunities to hold artists talks, discussions and forums.
In a society where capital and commercialism speaks louder than any other commitments, the pursuit for the autonomy of art continues to be a necessary struggle. The Artists Village’s resilient ability to continue its role as a relevant alternative art practice in Singapore for the last twenty years could be seen as a failure or a success. Contrary to the likes of ‘Gruppo 63’, The Artists Village’s members have not grown in stature to be strong enough to establish solo individual endeavors or interests or could it be the failure of society to embrace them. On the more optimistic note, The Artists Village continued presence shows there is a slowly but surely growing, sympathetic appreciation for such worthy alternative art pre-occupations. It is not so much important to list out all the reasons why The Artists Village outlasted the well-considered opinion of Eco but to realize, as to paraphrase Sun Yat Sen, “the revolution has failed, we must work harder!”
Footnotes:
1. Charles Olson, 'Human Universe' in Robert Creely, ed., Selected Writings of Charles Olson (New York: New Directions, 1966), p. 61.
2. Umberto Eco, The Open Work. Trans. Anna Cangogni. Cambridge (MA): Harvard UP, 1989. The Poetics of the Open Work, p.1 -23, The Open Work in the Visual Art, p.167-179, The Death of the Gruppo 63, p. 263 – 250.
————————————--
Published in
Title: The Artists Village: 20 Years On
Editor/s: Kianwoon KWOK, LEE Wen(李文)
Country of Publication: Singapore
Published by: Singapore Art Museum (Singapore), The Artists Village (Singapore)
Year of Publication: 2009
No. of Pages: 87
ISBN / ISSN: 9789810813840
Art does not seek to describe but to enact.'
- Charles Olson (1)
In a major collection of essays, ‘The Open Work' (2), entitled after a text written in 1962, Umberto Eco theorized that the reader was free to interpret and read the book or created work of art as they choose, regardless of authorial “intentions”. In another essay, discussing the demise of ‘Gruppo 63’, a radical avant-garde group in Milan in the 1960s, he helped to form, he asserted that it was expected such radical movements are short-lived, lasting at most about five years as they gained acceptance, or members become engrossed in individual destinies as they gained maturity. The Artists Village has now existed longer than the expected lifespan of avant-garde groups as contended in Eco’s considered opinion however it is open to interpretation whether the group played or continue to play a radical role in offering an ‘alternative’ to the status quo.
Space
At her commencement, The Artists Village provided an alternative space for artists living in a state where 80% of its populace is housed in urban high-rise apartments. A majority of us who congregated at the kampong site of Ulu Sembawang found the unused chicken coops and wooden farm houses, varied insects, birds, live animals like chickens, geese, rabbits, dogs and cats, together with the green natural surroundings most conducive to inspirational art explorations. Some artists had childhood experiences of living in kampong environments but like the last remaining farmers of Singapore in Sembawang had been evicted to be re-housed in the housing estates due to island wide urban development. Others like myself who grew up all our lives in housing estates were thankful we could at least have this short yet intense experience of a countryside lifestyle. Aside from arousing lyrical and nostalgic feelings or satisfying the curiosity of urbanites for a disappearing landscape in Singapore, the village environment served a real need for working as well as exhibiting spaces by artists. Even today many of us still face problems in looking for reasonably priced studios that may allow extensive work with pungent smell producing oil paints, spacious halls with long walls and high ceilings to accommodate more ambitious paintings and sculptures or noisy tools like electric drills, jackhammers and saws. At the same time the lackluster galleries within a conservative art market in Singapore does not have the guts, gumption nor good judgment to risk exhibiting and endorsing works that go against the grain nor edgy artists of difficult or daring dispositions.
After having lost the kampong location, The Artists Village continued working in the spirit of facilitating and extending the scarcity of spaces that allows the alternative practice of sincere, searching and inventive experiments that reflect the changes in our rapidly evolving society. In 1990 The Artists Village participated in the Singapore Art Festival under the proposed group project of C.A.R.E.: Concerned Artists for the Environment. Tang Da Wu mooted this just after the euphoric successes of The Drawing Show and TIME Show, the last events held on the Ulu Sembawang site. The C.A.R.E project originally was conceived to be held in the kampong, to provide a platform to present new works with thematic emphasis of responding and highlighting the threatening fate of ecological imbalance our world faces due to incontinent policies based on profit-motivated market capitalism that neglects concerns for our natural environment. Ironically an eviction notice was served by the authorities in the midst of our preparations, which ejected us from a green working environment and forced us to present our works in noisy polluted urban sites, overly cold air-conditioned shopping malls and hot unsheltered concrete sidewalks. It was a bittersweet experience but it gave us the impetus to work in public sites reaching out to a wider unsuspecting non-art audiences. At the same time we were forced back into our small flats or seek higher costing studios and worst of all destroy our unwelcome experimentations due to the lost of accessible space like the kampong in Ulu Sembawang. We reverted to making smaller works of manageable proportions for ease of storage and moving in anticipation of having to keep a larger part of our creative art productions in a ‘hard-to-sell’ art market unsympathetic to our cause. It also became apparent that it made more sense in such a scenario to devise temporal site-specific works of performance and installation art.
In the many projects that followed over the years was a consistent search and exploration of space in the urban island city-state. The Space in 1992 occupied a disused warehouse, with four floors of wide-open studio and gallery spaces. Tour de Art Lah! in 1996 transformed a double-decker bus into a roving gallery, A.I.M-Aritists Investigating Monuments (2001, made local monuments the focal points of site-specific presentations by the artists, the Pulau Ubin project brought back memories of the familiar yet missed fresh rustic open working environments of old Ulu Sembawang. Offshoot separate establishments were setup to initiate autonomous exhibition spaces and collaborative networks. Jason Lim, Yvonne Lee and Vincent Leow initiated U.T.O.P.I.A. (1995-6) a small shop space gallery focused on featuring selected artists working in the contemporary vein. Plastique Kinetic Worms (1998-2008) ran as a gallery and residency venue in Little India. Others like P-10, The Other House and Your Mother Gallery also found Little India’s central location yet affordable spaces appropriate for artists’ occupation. The latest addition being Post-Museum and Food #3 initiated by Woon Tien Wei and Jennifer Teo that runs not only a gallery space but also offices, studios, residencies, and a vegetarian restaurant. All these efforts had two main things in common: they were initiated and operated with the participation of former or current members of The Artists Village with passionate aspirations and singular focus striving to create alternative autonomous platforms that will allow a higher visibility for deserving new contemporary art practices in Singapore which still would not be given the chance in the growing number of art galleries, awards and competitions in Singapore.
Body and Material
Our senses are acutely aroused when we make critical shifts in our living environment. A higher sensorial response to mundane objects and materials encourages a different sensibility and investigational perception. We forsook the traditional rules and methods, using unexpected ways such as tea, coffee, soya sauce and catsup to make stains and marks in our drawings. Sand, dried leaves, glue, epoxy, varnish, wire-mesh, photography, polymer and enamel paints, etc. were not spared experimentation in unusual, untried, unexpected combinations of decoupage, collage and photomontage. Not only the ideas of using ready-mades as art material liberated us into an infinite possibilities of creativity it also spurred us also into seeing and using our bodies as object material as well as subject narratives for art making itself. Since The Artists Village left the grounds of the kampong in Ulu Sembawang, various members have continued to pioneer or introduce previously unheard of methods and materials for art making in Singapore.
Tang Da Wu used tapioca as subject as well as materials for art workshops explaining historical contexts of the Second World War with students, Jason Lim and Vincent Leow used a variety of unconventional or unstable yet common materials for an installation ‘A Flock of Birdies’, commenting on the growth of golf courses in land-scarce Singapore, New generation artists such as Lina Adams, Kai Lam, Jeremy Hiah, Woon Tien Wei, Agnes Yit, Angie Seah, Marienne Yang moved into using video, sound, voice, industrial, new media while keeping in touch with traditional materials, methods and processes. Not only is there a conscious desire to use novel or investigational materials and methods but also to expressively responding to current concerns of environmental imbalances or other societal tensions.
Time, Concepts and Processes
Since its independence, Singapore had experienced a rapid rate of development and changes. If not for some civil bodies like the Singapore Heritage Society in advocating the preservation of various historical sites and buildings Singapore would otherwise look just like any other recently developed or built-up cities in the world devoid of unique historical characteristics and culture. Artists were also responding to the changes. There were constant demolishing and erecting of buildings and the rapidly transforming daily landscape prompt us to regard time as an increasingly important factor in the creative process, not only in terms of the quantity and chronological but also psychological and historical references and significances. The proliferation of objects, memorabilia, furniture being discarded and left behind in the moves and relocating, appealed to artists as historically loaded images, raw material to be salvaged and used as to make new art. For example, Tang Mun Kit’s various creations are assemblages and juxtapositions of found objects giving concrete forms to psychological sentiments and historical time frames in what he calls ‘Hibernated Works’.
The uses of different materials and methods beyond other more durable, traditionally acceptable also require new philosophical or conceptual thinking. Members of The Artists Village did not concur on any particular school of thought or manifesto for a particular working strategy but there were some inherent trends. There was a stronger leaning towards social issues or content-related aesthetics than abstract and detached objective investigation and experimentation. Maintaining a flexible tolerance for uncertainty, giving room to improvisation and spontaneous responses to unanticipated shifting situations instead of strictly adhering to or playing by immaculately pre-thought out plans. There was also a higher regard for ‘process’ based art, a procedure of test and inquiry involving a time-sensitive open-ended operation.
Autonomy, Network, and Continuity
The lack of art magazines, publications and media coverage discussing the emerging more challenging and conceptual art in Singapore, artists had always felt they were working in a ‘critical vacuum’. The Artists Village found plan of action was to create more opportunities to hold artists talks, discussions and forums.
In a society where capital and commercialism speaks louder than any other commitments, the pursuit for the autonomy of art continues to be a necessary struggle. The Artists Village’s resilient ability to continue its role as a relevant alternative art practice in Singapore for the last twenty years could be seen as a failure or a success. Contrary to the likes of ‘Gruppo 63’, The Artists Village’s members have not grown in stature to be strong enough to establish solo individual endeavors or interests or could it be the failure of society to embrace them. On the more optimistic note, The Artists Village continued presence shows there is a slowly but surely growing, sympathetic appreciation for such worthy alternative art pre-occupations. It is not so much important to list out all the reasons why The Artists Village outlasted the well-considered opinion of Eco but to realize, as to paraphrase Sun Yat Sen, “the revolution has failed, we must work harder!”
Footnotes:
1. Charles Olson, 'Human Universe' in Robert Creely, ed., Selected Writings of Charles Olson (New York: New Directions, 1966), p. 61.
2. Umberto Eco, The Open Work. Trans. Anna Cangogni. Cambridge (MA): Harvard UP, 1989. The Poetics of the Open Work, p.1 -23, The Open Work in the Visual Art, p.167-179, The Death of the Gruppo 63, p. 263 – 250.
————————————--
Published in
Title: The Artists Village: 20 Years On
Editor/s: Kianwoon KWOK, LEE Wen(李文)
Country of Publication: Singapore
Published by: Singapore Art Museum (Singapore), The Artists Village (Singapore)
Year of Publication: 2009
No. of Pages: 87
ISBN / ISSN: 9789810813840