mumuen

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Ceramic baseballs #2, 2013

unique ceramic frame, 4 ceramic baseballs, pigment print,

edition of 1

8”x10”

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History of Playgirl Magazine for Esquire, 2017

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Thoughts on Singapore Art Week

By Megan Lim

I was unable to attend all of the Singapore Art Week (SAW) events this year. In fact, I think it was physically impossible for anyone to attend all of the Singapore Art Week events this year.

Singapore Art Week is an “annual celebration of the visual arts” that is meant to represent “Singapore’s diverse and distinctive contemporary visual arts scene”. This year, it felt as though the Singapore Art Week had pervaded all our senses and flooded all our Facebook feeds - a total of 78 exhibitions are listed in the program, 4 night events and etc etc.

The three tenets advocated by the SAW publications were “Discover”, “Experience” and “Engage”, under which they categorise the different events that are organised across Singapore.

In “Discover” we seem to have “up-and-coming home grown artists” such as Kray Chen and Sam Lo, artists who have recently/not so recently exploded into the visual arts stage. Together with these artists we also have a collaboration with SuperheroMe, taking the definition of “Discover” a little further than the bubble of visual artists.

In “Experience”, the recurring, notorious Art Stage is labelled as an experience. Apart from Art Stage, there were events like Gillman’s Art After Dark and Aliwal Urban Art Festival. These are large-scale events that often occur in the night - filled with art fairs, overpriced alcohol and the promise of live music with local artists. Perhaps the weakest category of the three, “Experience” tended to devolve into an over-glorified night out with a side of art. A lot of its attempts to engage an audience felt flat, unenthused and half-hearted, with little but a few main attractions that drew the crowds but didn’t really bring much of an experience. Unless you count sweaty people and long queues as an experience.

Even in the Aliwal Urban Arts Festival, which was a little less capitalistic and meretricious - the events aimed at introducing or engaging in elements of street culture (skateboarding) became weirdly voyeuristic experience for those un-initiated (me), where we stood at the sidelines observing a culture that we had no reason to intrude upon.

  In Gillman Barracks during Art After Dark, there were queues to go into galleries that would otherwise, and usually be empty. Strange too because the galleries that people were queuing to get into were usually collections or commercial galleries, filled with works and price tags. Overwhelmed gallery sitters had to double up as ushers, frazzled and counting people. Perhaps it was a good sales day for the galleries, I had seen a decidedly well-dressed man approach a gallery sitter who offered him an iPad for his promise of transaction.

Finally in the “Engage” section, there are the usual, talks and tours such as State of Motion 2018: Sejarah-ku organised by Asian Film Archive and The Current Convening #3 on The Oceanic in NTU CCA. Of the three categories, this is the one that I have the least firsthand experience for, perhaps out of my own personal disdain for the pseudo-intellectualism that can sometimes occur during these sort of things. Weirdly enough, the ARTWALK Little India tour is also lumped under here, in a blurring of definitions between “Discover” and “Engage”. I would argue that ARTWALK Little India might be the most accessible event of the three mentioned, ironic, seeing as the category “Engage” would imply some form of capturing of attention, making the inaccessible more known.

In total, there were “More than 100 events for Singapore Art Week 2018” (Straits Times, Nov 14 2017). An honestly impressive organisational feat. I only realised how many exhibitions and shows I had missed when flipping through the program booklet while planning this. It feels a bit wasted, a bit silly that we only had a week to “Discover”, “Experience” and “Engage” with so many things. In the frenzied mess of the week, smaller artists, exhibitions and talks seemed to have been unfortunately, inadvertently sidelined in favour of larger, louder, more garish events. It is unfortunate not only for the visitors, the viewers, the patrons and audiences but more so for the artists themselves. Commissioned, included in this gargantuan event might have seemed like a promising premise for exposure, varied audiences, larger pool of opinions. However, many of the smaller, fringe events had been reduced to single line descriptions of name, venue, duration that lack even a simple description of the exhibition or artist.

I have no issue with the idea of Singapore Art Week as a means to make art accessible to the general public. Rather than a sideline approach to the cultivation of a ‘vibrant arts landscape’, it is perhaps about time that these efforts are pushed to the forefront of public consciousness. SAW congregates many of these events and exhibitions in the span of a week or more, allowing for them to remain in the forefront of the media’s attention, and Facebook events. However, when overcrowded with so many events - some poorly executed, poorly conceptualised, some intriguing, exciting, some barely mentioned - I think there is a sense of complacency and safety in numbers. The spread of ideas and public consciousness over an oversaturated galore of events and exhibitions prevented anyone from ruminating on anything long enough to realise that it was unimpressive, or personally interesting.

Furthermore, if you add three mediocre exhibitions together you could kind of make up one interesting exhibition, giving even the organisers the freedom to focus on a few main events and chuck the fringe ones aside - they are not pushed to fulfil any of the three thrusts of the Art Week, not really tying together nor saying anything really new. It gets boring after a while. There is no greater conceptual push unifying the (even if they are disparate) practices of the artists involved in the Art Week, no greater challenge attempted by the organisers, or proposed by the organisers for the artists. If we see the organisers of the Art Week as essentially curators of a large-scale visual arts exhibition that stretches across Singapore, the Art Week feels a little like a cramped exhibition space where all the works concentrate in the centre and faceless paintings adorn the walls, far away from the center, lacking spotlights. And some of the works are classical paintings, some of them are pinch pots, some of them just Charlie Lim singing in the corner. The Art Week could be more cohesive, focused, less distracted with bits and bobs in its pursuit of creating an engaging visual arts showcase: to bring together differing practices and artists to create an (actually) engaging and cohesive program that introduces the public to different elements of the visual arts, but pushes the boundaries of their perception. Or tries to at the very least.

I am using Art After Dark as an example again; in the block of residency galleries, we went from exhibit to exhibit that were barely distinguishable from one another. Some form of anthropological, historical, geographical study. Printed texts from academia. Pinned photographs. An odd artefact or two.

In mass social media proliferation and marketing, I think that it also began to devalue the artistic value of the events in the Art Week. It makes the Art Week some form of social media frenzy, where pictures and images and videos and boomerangs are posted every day. The Instagrammability of art is widely debated and while I don’t really have an answer to the propriety of it - I do believe that it can have a detrimental or devaluing impact on the art that it showcases. This point is confusing, because on one hand, social media has made a huge difference in the exposure that a simple exhibition can receive, elevating an artist’s work way beyond their expectations. However, on the other hand, like in the case of the Art Week, a lot of exhibitions or works became Instagram backgrounds. While the Art week might have succeeded in getting the crowds to turn up, it has a little way to go in trying to cultivate a culture of appreciation. I don’t expect or desire for everyone to understand or appreciate all forms of art, but I think that there is a culture of appreciation that can be cultivated - even at a very superficial level. In that sense the Art Week failed in truly reaching out to its audience. It made the arts easy to access, but not accessible.

All in all, I still think that the Singapore Art Week is still a worthwhile cause and some of the criticism levied at it somewhat unfair. I’d rather there be a platform, albeit flawed or incomplete that brings the previously inaccessible, exclusive world of the visual arts (especially the visual arts in its somewhat varied nature from the performing arts) to the general public and invites them to participate and engage without feeling intimidated. However, with this foundation set and audiences already drawn to the program and what it might offer - the Singapore Art Week must dare to challenge their audiences, seek to expand the depth of their engagement and perhaps shock, tickle, confuse and challenge the average Singaporean to consider the arts as a little more than just a cultural signifier or additive.

Additional reads;

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/commentary-arts-festivals-in-singapore-a-fad-9898600

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You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance.

Christopher Isherwood's 1954 novel The World in the Evening

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Carvel Ice Cream Commercials from the 80s

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FUDGIE THE WHALE - EARLY 80s CARVEL COMMERCIAL

Reading about Camp aesthetics and find out that Carvel Ice Cream advertisements are an actual example of Camp

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VITALINA for sickymag.com

Photography Paulina Wesołowska and Łukasz Żyłka Fashion Anna Akińcza Model Vitalina Burton at Neva Models Hair & Make-Up Katarzyna Biały

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intro sounds like some 80s tv screensaver 

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watched this animated short at the cartoons underground animation festival in sg. it was cute and more risque than i’d have expected but i think that its presentation of sexuality/sensuality in that form was quite cool

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Mallrat- Sunglasses 

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she’s also really cool and i like that her pro-women message isn’t super forced 

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another interesting up and coming female artist! and she’s younger than me wtf. i really like her lo-budget music videos

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inspiring female writer! not afraid to be crass, but fucking good at comedic timing and character development in a non-cheesy, realistic way. committed to her characters, not cheap with the way that she writes about them - makes sure that everyone is on board in the writing team etc etc 

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Fuck man i didn’t put in proper effort into keeping this journal better 

I’m torn between using this and using pinterest but this is definitely better for non-visual inspiration

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There’s no such things as truth. Everyone has their own truth. 

I, Tonya (2017) dir. Craig Gillespie 

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The Founder (2016)