Finally I'm beginning maybe to understand. You see daily I worry about directionlessness: umpteen artists, each established in hir field, gabbling, chattering, sharing tea and pop and biscuits and Singapore Slings, no workshop no panel no ticketed performance no VIP. Something Paul said tonight on another ride on the bus: “renewing and comparing” our practices, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, which is simply the act of talking: learning to think in another person’s language. I don’t know but communication must often take me out of my comfort zone, how about you?
Presentations: Friday night on the Pulau Ubin Chinese opera stage; Saturday morning to small hours of Sunday at 72-13. Some hawk branded techniques: Caden Koosil-Ja explicates her “life processing” approach to dance, Caden Manson his “real time film” which is neither film nor real nor in realtime. Some exhibit: the multichoreomedia of Nibroll, the music videos of Brian Gothong Tan. Some simply bear witness: Tiffany Chung exhibits V-pop/scooter culture, Raqs Media Collective revisits the Mahabharata in contemporary consciousness, Naeem documents rendez-vouses with ancient Shah-Jehara revolutionaries.
And there are slippages: Melati describes how she uses the body as a container, a form for all memories with a capacity to resist, but she does not capture the impact of her Butter Dance, in figuretight evening dress and red high-heeled shoes, twisting her arms Indonesian-dance style while her shoes slide from beneath her, falling splatonherback hard and ugly on the floor, caked with butter. Chee Wai plays a silent Internet chat with a blind woman; he plays a blackout strain of noise art; he speaks of Hadaka, his pan-Asian experimental sound collective. Half the artists attack him for lack of distinction from Euronoise; half the artists attack the other half for presuming to presume distinctive Asianness. Kim presents her music theatre: neotraditional Viet opera to improv and fingers on cymbals in the Museen Glyptothek until her DVD encounters technical difficulties of fast forward back shut down.
Guests are officially (un)invited to elude the government screening process: hence performance, of Luigi’s imitatio Heliogabalus, buck-naked donning papal mitre chasuble lipstick vagina on his navel, attempting to Alpine-ski towards an AM radio God. Hence performance, of Julie as third-wave feminist burlesque dancer, cavorting in a colossal latex balloon, singing Eidelweiss with her pussy, raping herself with a hoodoo-voodoo dismembered hand. Hence performance, of Takamime’s Kimura-san in which he jacks off a panplegic victim of the 1955 Morinaga Arsenic Milk Poisoning Incident who guffaws into his head microphone as he cums onto his own face.
There’s a back-and-forth at work: uh-huh now I get it I say when Francis walks us through his photo/sculptural/video series: the confluence of commercialism - fashion’n’tourism – and critique thereof: mad babydoll models in a Chinatown heritage site. Paul aka DJ Spooky and Kaffe come up with rival models of sound philosophy: music as information says Paul, x-referencing Amiri Baraka/William Gibson/Romare Bearden/Luigi Russolo/Alexander Graham Bell/Garrett A. Morgan/muzak/the Luanda Triennale/Rebirth of the Nation at the Acropolis/NYC subway graffiti artists bombing the system. Music as sensation, says Kaffe, enclosing us in absolute darkness and sampling/resampling ourselves/oursounds until even the clitter-clatter of my fingers on the keyboard is also one with the medium.
Presentation: both a word that says “this is a mask” and “this happened”. This is why Arts Fest/Esplanade/ Museum programming officers come to witness the work: this is a happening is not happening; will not happen officially unless it’s festivaled or Sisticdotcommed: watch them watch Rachid do Death and the Young Man, crossing his feet on two bags of transfused blood, watch them watch Meg paroxysm into the violent spasms of her dance troupe Damaged Goods; maybe poach them for curatorship like you did Pichet Klunchun and Jerome Bel, you know where the good stuff is, huh? They say:
Come play me. Come play with me. For there is foray – Mich and David describe 25 works of their performance group M+S aka Mitsune and Subal in 25 minutes, cellphone alarm beeps now and move on every 60 seconds. Katarina admits no strategy or ideal but that of collaboration: video that allows a linguist to elevate her voice into epic Swedish gobbledegook, that allows a violinist to negotiate herself through double stars. And already this is what is happening: I am numb to aesthetics, munching hot dogs and Pocky and banana cake but the true artists are talking together, are critiquing gushing brushing the elbows of the other with their bangs and saying, we must work together. I would not have thought without contracts that chemistry arose but yes it rises.
What am I doing here, tapping out what has become a mere summary, a purposeful omission of the clearest strategies, playing the sex for cheap and the concept for mere vocabulary. Why am I outside, why am I falling asleep at 4 ayem, SUPERINTENSE they call it, but zone out and you are hyperdiffuse with the passage of dulcet moments and ennui; I am unable to endure and I pass out on the beanbag but Kaffe keeps playing, playing, and the lights come on and the champagne is not yet drained to the lees.
Because the directionlessness actually happens to the outside, where I squat with my laptop. Once you accept the word of Art you are drawn bulkily toward the Platonic ideal, the hot white light of wow oh wow? It is a Flying Circus, the clowns and bearded women aloft in a big-top-dirigible, everyone on the inside tumbling, rumbling like camisoles in a dry cleaner, making breaking contact and coitus of static cling, while farmers and hoeboys stare from below and wonder why. And yes we ascend but the Kansas we collapse exhausted into is not the same Kansas we left.
Brian Caden Chee Wai David Francis Jeebesh Julie Kaffe Katarine Keisuke Keng Sen Kim Koosil-Ja Luigi Mark Meg Melati Mikuni Monica Naeem Paul Rachid Shuddha Tadamime Tiffany; I love you where are you and will the human race itself grow hipster angel wings, and fly into the tent to become you?
Sunday, November 4, 2007
I SURVIVED SUPERINTENSE!
.... and all I got were these lousy eyebags. We just finished: the tech guys are clearing up and Keng Sen is treating everyone to da baoed chicken rice. And he shifted the meeting time for tomorrow, when we're going sailing with Charles Lim. He roxxorz.
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Superintense
My god. We're running two hours late on our presentation schedule. At this rate, we'll end at 3am.
Talk by Dr Alan Colman
Meet Dr Colman, former Executive Director of the A*Star's Singapore Stem Cell Consortium, now academic and researcher who worked with the Roslin Institute in 1997 to clone Dolly the sheep. What with Singapore's positioning as a biotech hub, hardly anyone knows what they're doing with our moolah. KS invited him to do a presentation yesterday at Kamariah's house.
Post-human tech in a kampung hut, rain beating down about us. Nature, art, science. Below is an albino South African claw-toed frog: extremely useful for genetics research because it spawns whenever it's tickled.
In fact, in the midst of the lecture on the raw basics of cloning and stem cell tech, the stuff that sticks out most is the systematic idiosyncrasy of the science world: animals named dolly millie christa alexis carrel dotcom snuppy prometea xena and the politics behind naming a goat after a French eugenicist, Fidel Castro's appeal to clone a cow that yielded three times more milk but who'd been dead for ten years, the bad science of journalists with Photoshop. Art meets life science: Ira Levin publishes "The Boys From Brazil" about 64 clones of Hitler, adapted into a bad movie starring Gregory Peck; Colman himself is soundly trounced in a debate with university philosophers about whether we'll ever be able to know everything about what how our bodies work. And the idiosyncrasy of the man himself: madly Mancunian, clumsy at ice skating but joyous in his newfound grace through tropical scuba-diving, married to a monozygotic twin.
A few words from that afternoon:
“Dying people are desperate. Most of the royal family of Saudi Arabia have heart valves that come from pigs.”
"I actually gave up cloning some time ago. I came here because I wanted a change and I was spending huge amounts of money. Government money, other people's pensions. Venture capital money, I can be comfortable spending that... but to continue spending at that level I had to move to Singapore."
"Armadillos always have quadruplets who are genetically the same."
On fears that science will one day clone Hitler:
"I don’t think Hitler needed that kind of technique to make mentally cloned people... What Mancunians really fear is cloned Liverpool fans."
On the early death of Dolly from a viral disease:
"I worked in Scotland for four years and I can tell you Scotland is not a healthy place to live. Most people over 40 don’t have their own teeth. They have deep fried pizza there. They have deep fried Snickers bars.”
"Kidney transplantation caused a huge uproar when it was first invented. Putting an organ from a dead person into someone else... when the first test tube tube, baby Louise Brown, was born in 1979, the scientist and doctor were ostracised. Now over 1,000,000 people have been born because of this. It's a strange philosophical question of whether it’s better to be alive or not alive."
On his research into cures for heart disease and diabetes:
“Don’t believe anyone who says this treatments are around the corner. It’ll be around 10, 15 years before they’re effective.”
"I am wary when scientists say, 'This will never happen."
"In Italy, the cloning of animals is illegal. And a friend of mine cloned a cow, whom he named Galileo. And so there was a possibility Galileo would go to prison again."
"I think Italy is the greatest country in the world, I want to retire there. "
"No I don’t read science fiction, but I used to before man landed on the moon. That spoilt it. For me, nothing surpasses the human imagination."
Post-human tech in a kampung hut, rain beating down about us. Nature, art, science. Below is an albino South African claw-toed frog: extremely useful for genetics research because it spawns whenever it's tickled.
In fact, in the midst of the lecture on the raw basics of cloning and stem cell tech, the stuff that sticks out most is the systematic idiosyncrasy of the science world: animals named dolly millie christa alexis carrel dotcom snuppy prometea xena and the politics behind naming a goat after a French eugenicist, Fidel Castro's appeal to clone a cow that yielded three times more milk but who'd been dead for ten years, the bad science of journalists with Photoshop. Art meets life science: Ira Levin publishes "The Boys From Brazil" about 64 clones of Hitler, adapted into a bad movie starring Gregory Peck; Colman himself is soundly trounced in a debate with university philosophers about whether we'll ever be able to know everything about what how our bodies work. And the idiosyncrasy of the man himself: madly Mancunian, clumsy at ice skating but joyous in his newfound grace through tropical scuba-diving, married to a monozygotic twin.A few words from that afternoon:
“Dying people are desperate. Most of the royal family of Saudi Arabia have heart valves that come from pigs.”
"I actually gave up cloning some time ago. I came here because I wanted a change and I was spending huge amounts of money. Government money, other people's pensions. Venture capital money, I can be comfortable spending that... but to continue spending at that level I had to move to Singapore."
"Armadillos always have quadruplets who are genetically the same."
On fears that science will one day clone Hitler:
"I don’t think Hitler needed that kind of technique to make mentally cloned people... What Mancunians really fear is cloned Liverpool fans."
On the early death of Dolly from a viral disease:
"I worked in Scotland for four years and I can tell you Scotland is not a healthy place to live. Most people over 40 don’t have their own teeth. They have deep fried pizza there. They have deep fried Snickers bars.”
"Kidney transplantation caused a huge uproar when it was first invented. Putting an organ from a dead person into someone else... when the first test tube tube, baby Louise Brown, was born in 1979, the scientist and doctor were ostracised. Now over 1,000,000 people have been born because of this. It's a strange philosophical question of whether it’s better to be alive or not alive."
On his research into cures for heart disease and diabetes:
“Don’t believe anyone who says this treatments are around the corner. It’ll be around 10, 15 years before they’re effective.”
"I am wary when scientists say, 'This will never happen."
"In Italy, the cloning of animals is illegal. And a friend of mine cloned a cow, whom he named Galileo. And so there was a possibility Galileo would go to prison again."
"I think Italy is the greatest country in the world, I want to retire there. "
"No I don’t read science fiction, but I used to before man landed on the moon. That spoilt it. For me, nothing surpasses the human imagination."
Pulau Ubin Experience
Good excursion today/yesterday: big chill touristy vibe for everyone to kickback and gabble. Met at 7:30 am at the Robertson Hotel lobby where the boys were breakfasting before the bus bay.
Departure at 8ish, with some delay because Naeem had zonked himself out on Nyquil and was systematically slamming down the phone during wake-up call. Arrival at Changi jetty at 8:45ish, rendez-vous with KS, Tay Tong, Brian and Ka Fai.
Bumboating. Whee!
Pulau Ubin is 10 min from Singapore’s central island: depopulated by government decree wit aims to build it into a Sentosaesque megaresort, it was suddenly okayed for preservation on the discovery of invaluable ecodiversity in its Chek Jawa district. One up for the conservationists.
Biking for $6, all-day. Whee whee whee! Van for the squeamish.
Breakfast at 10ish at Kampung Sungei Durian, one of the older Malay-dominated villages that occupied the centre of the island. Left standing is a 200 year-old stilt house with its attap roof replaced with zinc (yes, 200, the owner Kamaria traced her family history back to a Riau fisherman who migrated here in 1803). Kamariah Samsiah & family serve us lontong, vegetable curry, agar-agar, curry puffs, hot hibiscus tea with ice cubes. We sit on the floor and munch, while they describe the history of the house: this is modified floor, this is the hole in the floor where we shat as children and this is the hidden trapdoor to the roof where we played hide-and-seek when the Japanese invaded.
Kamariah takes us on a walk to investigate herbs: citronella, cashew leaf, passionfruit. On the way to her old swimming hole, we pass the disco ball under the tree which her father installed: as the town barber, he would instruct people to gaze into its glittering mirrors while he shaved them bare.
We’ve been joined by Norah, a niece who works as a stewardess for Cathay Pacific and Mali, a cousin who works as a technician for QANTAS in Melbourne. Mali tells me how they used to hunt monitor lizards and sell them at the Chinese village at the jetty; there used to be a whole community here, huts everywhere, children running and laughing. Now even the eponymous durian trees are getting older and older; no-one plants new ones anymore.
We stop at the pavilion near the Cookie Monster statue. In the grass, the artists see a wild boar, but the documenters are too startled to capture the moment.
Back at the house, Kamariah’s sister Ruqxana hosts her Kampung Cooking Class: DIY butter prawns, sambal belacan and nasi kerabu, chopped and pestled from the gatherings of the jungle itself. Herbs galore: lemongrass shallots turmeric galangal coconut lime leaf coriander basil mint noni semangkok ulam raja Asian pennyworth red chilli garlic grated coconut gula melaka tamarind torch ginger blossom salt and pepper to taste. Minced and medleyed into white rice. The best thing, she says, is that every bite you take is slightly different. Four or five to a wok; our cooking is amazingly effective (the recipes are idiotproof anyway), our sambal paste ends up chunky and oversugared but we like it better as if it’s chilli jam.
Over ice kacang we begin to talk shop: copyright and culturehacking, heritage and fetish. I am personally often terrified of opening my mouth lest I interrupt the exchange of intelligent ideas among men and women so gifted that they switch from issues of intellectual crisis to so how is your new girlfriend is she alright? Or is that what we always do – never quite dividing the personal and the political, the heart and the mind, the manifesto and the valentine?
Mali decides to lead a group of enthused artists for a swim before our featured guest arrives. Five minutes after they set off on their bikes, the dark sky cracks and pisses on us all: sweet thunder where there should have been maddening one o’clock sun. I nap in the hut. The swimmers come back, clothes marinated with rainwater, with reports of a beach paved with litter: Kamariah’s household gifts them with sarongs to wear while their trousers dry.
At 2:30ish, our guest comes: Dr Alan Collman, big A*Star biotechnologist, stem cell boffin and genius genesmith of such creations as Dolly the doppelganger sheep. More about that later.
Cyclic progression up to the Temple of the German Girl, Nadu Guniang, a keramat shrine for the spirit of a young madchen who lived on Ubin with her parents on a coffee plantation till the break of World War I, when she took refuge to hide from the Brit soldiers and kena fall off a cliff and become superlotterynumbergoddess: cute trick. Very Theatreworks artefact, her shrine: syncretic fusion of a Barbiedoll idol before an urn of decaying hair and deutschmarks surrounded by tuapehkong icons in songkoks and Kuanyin and Sun Wukong and sacrifices of angpows and lipsticks. Evidently I didn’t make a sufficient donation of libatory oil: got hopelessly lost and mud-spattered on the way back to the jetty; only saved when I spied Mich and Tadasu spinning in steady sync on their tandem bicycle in the distance.
Returned the bikes. Bums sore, sipped beer and baby coconut water. Talked more culture and politics and domesticity. Dinner at 6:30pm at the Live Seafood Restaurant. The artists ooooh and aaaah over decent but unspectacular zi char favourites: or luah omelette cut into quadrants, stewed cauliflower with glass noodles, crisp baby octopus, lemon chicken, small perch. I hope this will happen in Ho Chi Minh City: that everything unfamiliar will be zingfully delightful for its novelty; yowzah; right now I feel guilty that they’ve been eating such mediocre food in their last few days that this bunch on paper plates seems ambrosia.
Sumei and KC and guests arrive by bumboat. Presentations. Moreaboutthatlater.
Brian and I are hectored by a precociously self-possessed Mandarin-speaking 6-year-old named... wait for it... ROYSTON. He's the son of one of the stall-holders. He's actually named after Royston Tan, I think.
We’re done at 11pm. Woozy, exhausted; trudge back in the darkness to the jetty for a final boat ride home. Keng Sen and the others step out onto the poop to take in the breeze.
Bus back to the hotel. Me, I have a three-leg series of buses back home. Also discover that I lost my handphone in Kampung Sungei Durian. Scheisse. The jungle takes its due.
Departure at 8ish, with some delay because Naeem had zonked himself out on Nyquil and was systematically slamming down the phone during wake-up call. Arrival at Changi jetty at 8:45ish, rendez-vous with KS, Tay Tong, Brian and Ka Fai.
Bumboating. Whee!
Pulau Ubin is 10 min from Singapore’s central island: depopulated by government decree wit aims to build it into a Sentosaesque megaresort, it was suddenly okayed for preservation on the discovery of invaluable ecodiversity in its Chek Jawa district. One up for the conservationists.
Biking for $6, all-day. Whee whee whee! Van for the squeamish.
Breakfast at 10ish at Kampung Sungei Durian, one of the older Malay-dominated villages that occupied the centre of the island. Left standing is a 200 year-old stilt house with its attap roof replaced with zinc (yes, 200, the owner Kamaria traced her family history back to a Riau fisherman who migrated here in 1803). Kamariah Samsiah & family serve us lontong, vegetable curry, agar-agar, curry puffs, hot hibiscus tea with ice cubes. We sit on the floor and munch, while they describe the history of the house: this is modified floor, this is the hole in the floor where we shat as children and this is the hidden trapdoor to the roof where we played hide-and-seek when the Japanese invaded.
Kamariah takes us on a walk to investigate herbs: citronella, cashew leaf, passionfruit. On the way to her old swimming hole, we pass the disco ball under the tree which her father installed: as the town barber, he would instruct people to gaze into its glittering mirrors while he shaved them bare.
We’ve been joined by Norah, a niece who works as a stewardess for Cathay Pacific and Mali, a cousin who works as a technician for QANTAS in Melbourne. Mali tells me how they used to hunt monitor lizards and sell them at the Chinese village at the jetty; there used to be a whole community here, huts everywhere, children running and laughing. Now even the eponymous durian trees are getting older and older; no-one plants new ones anymore.
We stop at the pavilion near the Cookie Monster statue. In the grass, the artists see a wild boar, but the documenters are too startled to capture the moment.
Back at the house, Kamariah’s sister Ruqxana hosts her Kampung Cooking Class: DIY butter prawns, sambal belacan and nasi kerabu, chopped and pestled from the gatherings of the jungle itself. Herbs galore: lemongrass shallots turmeric galangal coconut lime leaf coriander basil mint noni semangkok ulam raja Asian pennyworth red chilli garlic grated coconut gula melaka tamarind torch ginger blossom salt and pepper to taste. Minced and medleyed into white rice. The best thing, she says, is that every bite you take is slightly different. Four or five to a wok; our cooking is amazingly effective (the recipes are idiotproof anyway), our sambal paste ends up chunky and oversugared but we like it better as if it’s chilli jam.
Over ice kacang we begin to talk shop: copyright and culturehacking, heritage and fetish. I am personally often terrified of opening my mouth lest I interrupt the exchange of intelligent ideas among men and women so gifted that they switch from issues of intellectual crisis to so how is your new girlfriend is she alright? Or is that what we always do – never quite dividing the personal and the political, the heart and the mind, the manifesto and the valentine?Mali decides to lead a group of enthused artists for a swim before our featured guest arrives. Five minutes after they set off on their bikes, the dark sky cracks and pisses on us all: sweet thunder where there should have been maddening one o’clock sun. I nap in the hut. The swimmers come back, clothes marinated with rainwater, with reports of a beach paved with litter: Kamariah’s household gifts them with sarongs to wear while their trousers dry.
At 2:30ish, our guest comes: Dr Alan Collman, big A*Star biotechnologist, stem cell boffin and genius genesmith of such creations as Dolly the doppelganger sheep. More about that later.
Cyclic progression up to the Temple of the German Girl, Nadu Guniang, a keramat shrine for the spirit of a young madchen who lived on Ubin with her parents on a coffee plantation till the break of World War I, when she took refuge to hide from the Brit soldiers and kena fall off a cliff and become superlotterynumbergoddess: cute trick. Very Theatreworks artefact, her shrine: syncretic fusion of a Barbiedoll idol before an urn of decaying hair and deutschmarks surrounded by tuapehkong icons in songkoks and Kuanyin and Sun Wukong and sacrifices of angpows and lipsticks. Evidently I didn’t make a sufficient donation of libatory oil: got hopelessly lost and mud-spattered on the way back to the jetty; only saved when I spied Mich and Tadasu spinning in steady sync on their tandem bicycle in the distance.
Returned the bikes. Bums sore, sipped beer and baby coconut water. Talked more culture and politics and domesticity. Dinner at 6:30pm at the Live Seafood Restaurant. The artists ooooh and aaaah over decent but unspectacular zi char favourites: or luah omelette cut into quadrants, stewed cauliflower with glass noodles, crisp baby octopus, lemon chicken, small perch. I hope this will happen in Ho Chi Minh City: that everything unfamiliar will be zingfully delightful for its novelty; yowzah; right now I feel guilty that they’ve been eating such mediocre food in their last few days that this bunch on paper plates seems ambrosia.
Sumei and KC and guests arrive by bumboat. Presentations. Moreaboutthatlater.
Brian and I are hectored by a precociously self-possessed Mandarin-speaking 6-year-old named... wait for it... ROYSTON. He's the son of one of the stall-holders. He's actually named after Royston Tan, I think.
We’re done at 11pm. Woozy, exhausted; trudge back in the darkness to the jetty for a final boat ride home. Keng Sen and the others step out onto the poop to take in the breeze.
Bus back to the hotel. Me, I have a three-leg series of buses back home. Also discover that I lost my handphone in Kampung Sungei Durian. Scheisse. The jungle takes its due.
Circus Animals 3
DJ SPOOKYPaul B. Miller, New York
Deejaying, video art."
"We’re sitting here in Singapore and we’re still talking about Deleuze and Guattari and about colonialism. I’m tired. Isn’t there somewhere else we can go?
Deejaying, video art."
"We’re sitting here in Singapore and we’re still talking about Deleuze and Guattari and about colonialism. I’m tired. Isn’t there somewhere else we can go?
"We criticise each other, we fight each other."
" I try and find a way I can take part, or I ask people to enter my own work, a place where people can articulate their own voices: "
“When do we start to drink coffee? Mother said, please don’t drink coffee."
Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta , New Delhi
Multidisciplinary cultural investigation.
"The word “end” is just a placeholder for a forever deferred conclusion."
Multidisciplinary cultural investigation.
"The word “end” is just a placeholder for a forever deferred conclusion."
Friday, November 2, 2007
Talk by Sylvia Lim
At 7:30pm we had our first of three talks by Singapore informants: one each to represents the fields of politics, science and art. Our guest speaker was Workers' Party Chairman Sylvia Lim.
How did we get hold of her? Turns out that she and KS were in NUS Law together; they published the Law Review and worried about legal aid and poverty and capital punishment and the authenticity of the curls in Keng Sen's hair.
Sorry, ISD, she didn't say anything defamatory. Most of the evening was her giving simple background data to the foreign artists: our GRC system, our shortage of effective checks and balances to the executive branch, the fact that the constitution has been amended 27 times since 1975 (which means nearly one amendment per year), racial rhetoric and 377A.
Interesting dialogues:
* Mark noted that back in Italy prisoners can sometimes wait up to 13 to 15 years for trial - so it's not detention without trial, but it's still pretty fucked up for human rights. Sylvia said this'd never happen in Singapore 'cos we're so efficient.
* Kaffe mentioned how after 9/11, powers of arrest and surveillance in the UK have increased dramatically. Sylvia noted that in Singapore, the police have always had those rights - and now all those Western nations that used to criticise our human records are suddenly quiet, 'cos they've realised powers of detention without trial are pretty useful when you're trying to root out terrorists.
"The scary thing is, most Singaporeans buy into this crisis discourse, the need to be safe, the fear of mass deaths. Even I buy into it."
* Naeem said,
“In Bangladesh the intelligentsia is obsessed with Singapore. You know we just had a civil war, with the army coming in. The Chief of Army, the Head of Education, the global head of the Kosovo mission - people say he could be the Lee Kuan Yew of Bangladesh. How did Singapore get where it is today? The explanation is that they don’t bother with this messy, ugly democracy."
* Caden (on the relentless search for humane capital punishment in the USA):
“If we could only find a nice way to kill someone. I’m sure we will.”
* Caden (on 377A, the law against male homosexual sex in Singapore):
“They said that in America as well. We won’t prosecute, it’s just symbolic of how much we hate you.”
Going to Pulau Ubin tomorrow. Madness, utter madness.
How did we get hold of her? Turns out that she and KS were in NUS Law together; they published the Law Review and worried about legal aid and poverty and capital punishment and the authenticity of the curls in Keng Sen's hair.Sorry, ISD, she didn't say anything defamatory. Most of the evening was her giving simple background data to the foreign artists: our GRC system, our shortage of effective checks and balances to the executive branch, the fact that the constitution has been amended 27 times since 1975 (which means nearly one amendment per year), racial rhetoric and 377A.
Interesting dialogues:
* Mark noted that back in Italy prisoners can sometimes wait up to 13 to 15 years for trial - so it's not detention without trial, but it's still pretty fucked up for human rights. Sylvia said this'd never happen in Singapore 'cos we're so efficient.
* Kaffe mentioned how after 9/11, powers of arrest and surveillance in the UK have increased dramatically. Sylvia noted that in Singapore, the police have always had those rights - and now all those Western nations that used to criticise our human records are suddenly quiet, 'cos they've realised powers of detention without trial are pretty useful when you're trying to root out terrorists.
"The scary thing is, most Singaporeans buy into this crisis discourse, the need to be safe, the fear of mass deaths. Even I buy into it."
* Naeem said,
“In Bangladesh the intelligentsia is obsessed with Singapore. You know we just had a civil war, with the army coming in. The Chief of Army, the Head of Education, the global head of the Kosovo mission - people say he could be the Lee Kuan Yew of Bangladesh. How did Singapore get where it is today? The explanation is that they don’t bother with this messy, ugly democracy."
* Caden (on the relentless search for humane capital punishment in the USA):
“If we could only find a nice way to kill someone. I’m sure we will.”
* Caden (on 377A, the law against male homosexual sex in Singapore):
“They said that in America as well. We won’t prosecute, it’s just symbolic of how much we hate you.”
Going to Pulau Ubin tomorrow. Madness, utter madness.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Desire Paths
Today's itinerary: everyone got a slot to do tech for their presentations. Big headaches. In between, we got to go to Little India to do Spell #7's Desire Paths.
Desire Paths is a discman audiotour around the streets of Little India, created by Kaylene Tan, Ben Slater and Evan Tan, following phantom voices who instruct you on the history and cultural landscape of the neighbourhood. The bells of the temple ring in the strings of your ears and you follow invisible footsteps and dodge traffic which isn't there. Very beautiful and very Unheimlich.
Went on the three o'clock tour with Kaffe and Rudi (he's an observer from Norway, with a specialty in Circus Studies).
Kaffe's favourite bit was where Ben's voice tells you how Race Course Road was once a real race course, where the first plane landed in Singapore.
There was a video art student, Brian, who was assigned to document our journey.
I kept getting us lost. I documented his documentation.
Then we broke for bhattura, pooris, rice cakes and mango lassi on the go at Komala Villa.
Poor Kaffe's been overpaying for all her meals so far. She kept getting directed to $50 restaurants of mediocre Indonesian fish.
I like fragmentary signs.
Go take the tour yourself. To make an appointment, contact spell#7 at info@spell7.net or +65 6392-1772.
Desire Paths is a discman audiotour around the streets of Little India, created by Kaylene Tan, Ben Slater and Evan Tan, following phantom voices who instruct you on the history and cultural landscape of the neighbourhood. The bells of the temple ring in the strings of your ears and you follow invisible footsteps and dodge traffic which isn't there. Very beautiful and very Unheimlich.
Went on the three o'clock tour with Kaffe and Rudi (he's an observer from Norway, with a specialty in Circus Studies).
Kaffe's favourite bit was where Ben's voice tells you how Race Course Road was once a real race course, where the first plane landed in Singapore.
There was a video art student, Brian, who was assigned to document our journey.
I kept getting us lost. I documented his documentation.
Then we broke for bhattura, pooris, rice cakes and mango lassi on the go at Komala Villa.
Poor Kaffe's been overpaying for all her meals so far. She kept getting directed to $50 restaurants of mediocre Indonesian fish.
I like fragmentary signs.
Go take the tour yourself. To make an appointment, contact spell#7 at info@spell7.net or +65 6392-1772.
Circus Animals 2
"I can't live in a place like that. You go outside and there's no grass under your feet."
RACHIDRachid Ouramdane, Paris
Conceptual dance.
"I heard a French accent over there, so if I am struggling you will help me out..."
ARTIST SCHEDULE (tentative)
| Want to make it down to see a specific artist do a presentation? Check the (extremely changeable) schedule here: Artist Presentations @ Chinese Opera Stage Under the moonlight at Pulau Ubin Schedule (subject to change) | ||||||||||||
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“Superintense” | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Detailed biographies at: ** For events on Pulau Ubin, the public is advised to be at the Pulau Ubin Jetty from 30 minutes before the start of the event. Audiences will be ferried to the respective venue on the island. Ferries to Pulau Ubin will stop at 8:30 pm. *** Guests are welcomed to join us quietly anytime during the presentations. Take a cigarette break, a pause, a meal, whenever but time flows on! |
Fete Officielle de l'Ouverture
Party's over for tonight... strange affair, really. We began by communing over satay and prata with vegetable curry at $5 a pop, then got ushered indoors for a speech by KS, introducing the artists (selected because they are artists
1) whom Singapore should definitely get round to witnessing,
2) whom he just plain likes.)
Then DJ Spooky started spinnning, and what should have happened was that everyone should have got down on the floor and started boogieing till the cows came home. But
1) it was three hours before midnight (which was three hours too early),
2) no-one was tipsy enough to be over his inhibitions yet
3) everyone over the age of 40 was unnerved by the sudden loud music,
4) everyone below the age of 40 was dying for a fag,
and we all thought we could all just talk and eat for a bit before going inside later at night. Unfortunate idea - in the end only three faithful musicos stayed in the room, so Paul decided to put on some prerecorded music and skip out to chow down with the crowd.
Very cocktail party atmosphere in the end - I'd been hoping for a more presentation-heavy opening, but opening parties seem by necessity to be about schmoozing rather than art appreciation itself.
Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba got a pretty good reception for his Memorial Project Nha Trang, though - the famous video from the Yokohama Triennale with underwater fisherman slowly pushing pedicabs along the ocean floor.
Keng Sen and the rest of us got into a little wine-sodden discussion at 1am on the beanbags over the idea that beauty might remain the most important entryway into even contemporary art. Me, I took issue with the neo-exoticist-activist way the disenfranchised fishermen/pedicab drivers were being depicted in the film, till I thought about the universal humanity of the rise and fall of the fisher boys as they gasped for breath - it's not "they are underwater", it's "we are underwater", I said.
The point of the evening in the end - the point of the day, the point of the Project itself - was about talking, sharing ideas, getting somewhere beyond small talk. D J Spooky/Paul ended up telling me how he got his name: he was studying French literature and philosophy and in college and he started arguing with his prof about Freud's notion of the Unheimlich; what is uncanny anymore he said now that people are watching ethereal moving images all the time on their TV screens? Life has become - wait for it - spooky.
The art world is without music. It's very boring, he said at the opening of the night. What happens when the 20th century looks back and realises you can play with the archive? He's interested in records/recording, this man; of music as information; dematerialisation of social context. Which is why he makes works like Rebirth of a Nation, mashing up D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation will Bill T. Jones and his own live music. He speaks in quotable quotes because he used to write for advertising; good money, he tells me. He was going to be a diplomat but somehow DJing and art got in the way.
Somehow we all ended up gabbing about love and war: family and history: Katarina told me about how Sweden's economy took off after World War II because they'd stayed neutral while every other Scandinavian state got invaded by the Nazis and had its factories destroyed; Michiru persuaded me to tell stories of the Japanese Occupation and how his countrymen Sook Chinged and bananamoneyed and comfortwomaned the denizens of 1940s Singapore and cut off their heads and stuck them on pikes from the top storey of Capitol Cinema. And of course in the background of everything there's the Vietnam War: a transformative event for Vietnam America Singapore Southeast Asia The World, which is why we're going to Ho Chi Minh City directly to query the past.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Circus Animals 1
Opening Party in 15 minutes! Let's make some proper introductions first, though:
MICH
Michikazu Matsune, Vienna.
Live performance, video and photography.
More to come after the party!
"It's so strange. There's so many different people."
"You’re talking about cross-cultural stuff, how you're born here, but you stay there. I stayed in Japan and I feel the same. That’s why my English never developed. "
MICHMichikazu Matsune, Vienna.
Live performance, video and photography.
"It's interesting, what you tell me about the Japanese Occupation. Because five years ago in Japan, everyone was crazy about tapioca drinks."
“By accident I’m here I think, because I was supposed to go for lunch.”
"Oh, stop."
More to come after the party!
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