A Guide to Walking: Convening the Singapore Psychogeographical Society (27 October, 2011)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s quite a trend within local art practices to address the rapid transformations of our cityscape and culture which causes the historical amnesia that creates the…perhaps…most contingent Singaporean identity, that of an urban city dweller cut from his or her roots, in which any instance of self-reflexivity heightens the sense of disorientation. We have seen and heard enough of the  countless diatribes on the effects of modernity, the stammering loop that spews out vile discontentment with progress and the loss of our cultural bearings. While we witness this in different shades, all these voices seem to conjoin together into this eternally reoccurring, momentum gaining resentment that calls for a slower pace of life. Even more repulsive are the weaker strands that readily dive into any avenue that allows them to fill this gap, falling into the trap of nostalgia, when the past is utterly exotified and exalted as a pastoral memory.

Debbie Ding’s Psychogeoforensics lecture, the last instalment of the Lecher of Art series at the Substation, is conceived from this same terrain of uprootedness. She imagines Singapore in the shape of a black hole, the ultimate non-space, what Marc Auge defines as “a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity.” Staring at a projected image of a blackened Singapore map is indeed an uncanny sight. On the surface, it disavows any form of signification, the image of our nation rendered as a total abstraction. Yet the contours that define its edges begin to illuminate its function as a frame that, as Debbie puts it “invites signification and attracts questions.” In a quick turn, abstraction gives rise to curiosity, as the blackness injects a degree of strangeness to what we can obviously make out to be our country. It’s like being plunged into a dream state- we sense that we have been here before but we seem to be traversing an unusual space with possible traps and surprises lingering at each corner; or revisiting a foreign country a second time without a copy of lonely planet- you vaguely remember the routes and sites, but being confronted with a colourful reality, the whims of your desires, and a sense of time not governed by a fixed daily routine, the perception of your surroundings heightens, and you begin to transverse the space with child-like eyes, forming a fragmentary and affective map that pulsates and changes shape according to the rhythms of life, both real and imagined.

Recuperating the potential of blackness as an invitation and entrance to our own psychic and physical investment with our lived spaces, Debbie cuts through the two blackholes- unproductive resentment towards the rapid transformation of our cityscape and the seduction of nostalgia. She proposes an assemblage of techniques which are laid out systematically in the toolkit publication of her lecture, ranging from derives, narrative reconstruction, pictorial reconstruction, map-making, analysing street symbols, walking along road networks, questioning designated zones, tracing desire lines… you get the ‘drift’.

It is a light and playful practice in philosophy it its most effective sense-  the generation of concepts, without strict adherence to the specific tradition of thought that it stems from, that function as tools which allow us to connect and experience life both critically and joyfully. The idea of psychogeoforensics stems from the idea of psychogeography initiated by the Situationists which calls for a greater awareness of the way the built space of the city influences and affects the emotions and actions of its people. Extending this concept with the idea of forensics, Debbie fortifies this practice with the looming absence of an official historical and cultural narrative and identity in Singapore as a mystery to be solved. The word forensic conjures up scientific methodologies utilised towards the recovery of a certain explanation or cause to a mystery. Debbie mentions that the word is to be taken more broadly, as a means to discourse, of which, in her words we go “through all the possible clues of Singapore’s whereabouts, so that one day we may find out where Singapore truly is.” This seems a bit puzzling- no doubt that the search will reconnect us with our surroundings, yet with the impetus being the revelation of what and where Singapore is, it seems to resemble some exercise in affirming national identity. It could be positioned as an abstract endpoint that we all reflexively acknowledge as that which can never be fulfilled. Yet it is indeed troubling that such a desire for complete understanding fuels and governs our actions. In this sense, the idea of forensics seems to obscure the play of mind, imaginative impulsion and exploratory adventure that Debbie conjures in her presentation.

Forensics induces a certain element of exoticism. It almost seduces people with the element of mystery to engage with a practice of psychogeography. This should not be taken as a charge that dilutes a more authentic psychogeographical engagement with the city, but as a reflexive move that recognises that in order to look at reality with childlike-eyes, we would inevitably have to gaze at our surroundings with a certain degree of exoticism. We need mystery and strangeness to sustain our desire to engage with something other than ourselves. This links us back to our history of British colonisation and the exotifying gaze towards us as an Asian other, ultimately conjuring up the ethical problems of such a power relation. Debbie mentions how British architects have utilised Indo-Saracenic designs that not only invested in their own western sensibilities, but also reproduced Asian designs as a symbolic justification for the violence that they have inflicted onto pre-existing localised cultures. While this is true, such investments should not merely be seen as a strategy for the appropriation of Asian culture for the expansion of the Empire. A libidinal desire for the other and the need for transformation also fuels their contact with the East. And to a certain degree, in the practice of psychogeoforensics, we have to engage and reactivate this desire which ultimately results in the exotifying of our surroundings. To enter the ideal headspace and to attain the level of awareness for such an engagement with our surroundings, it is almost necessary for us to make what is familiar strange and exciting again. This should not be posed as a problem. Rather it should be seen as an inescapable logic in life. The exotifying gaze aids in the framing of an otherwise immense space with a myriad of objects and subjects, transforming a familiar space into an otherly space. We should not be consumed by it, but it should be taken as it is, a tool and frame that provides an entrance in which we enter and pass through…trailing on.

Must this frame necessary take the form of a cultural referent that we already deem as exotic…such as Geylang and Balestier which we view as a more spontaneous, sprawling district in Singapore? We must also learn to produce strangeness, to train our eyes to gaze out strangely, and to really wonder, become curious, let even our unconscious and dream narratives influence our actions.  It is very apt for this lecture to take place within the substation, whose founder Kuo Pao Kun believed strongly in ‘play’ as a means to sensing an other and the creation of a reflective space that facitiliates the formation of a rich network of multiple connections and linkages. Debbie’s restrained call to action rests within this emancipative drive as applied to our psychological and geographical landscape. We are all automatically members of the Singapore Psychogeographical Society… walkers/writers with a wealth of material around us, our city made unfamiliar, littered with curiosities, a map constantly rewritten through the weaving of our own narratives.

Bestiality as ‘Healthy’ Action in Oshima’s Max Mon Amour & Apichatpong’s Tropical Malady

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bestiality is a taboo subject that speaks of the ‘unholy’ union between civilisation and primal nature through the lenses of sexuality. Apart from forms of hardcore porn, it has not been addressed explicitly within cinema. Krzywinska states that such a transgressive theme is “presented allegorically, metonymically or by way of suggestion” within mainstream cinema (2006, p. 140). In this paper, I shall base my analysis on the more minoriatian circuit of art house cinema to discuss how particular representations of bestiality take on the form of cultural critique. Firstly, I shall discuss Nietzsche’s ‘healthy’ perspectivism through his ambiguous affiliation with civilization as the framework of such representations. Secondly, with reference to Max Mon Amour (Oshima, 1986), I shall explain how bestiality is utilised as a catalyst towards the creative reshaping of the family. Thirdly, I shall discuss how Tropical Malady (Apichatpong, 2004) illustrates what Deleuze and Guattari refers to as ‘Becoming Animal’, which destabilises the human and animal distinction as well as any fixed subjectivities. It is my aim, to demonstrate that the theme of bestiality has been utilised symbolically, within both films discussed, in cathartic manners that resists any form of conservatism or bestial regression.

Nietzschean Complexity: Neither Human Nor Animal

Human beings in their highest and noblest capacities are wholly nature and bear within themselves its uncanny dual character. Those abilities that are thought to be terrifying and inhuman are perhaps even the fruitful soil from which alone all humanity can grow in emotions, deeds, and works. (Nietzsche, 1976, p. 32)

Within this statement is the assumption that a form of primal nature that has been rendered taboo by civilisation is in fact the productive force of desire that propels humanity into greater possibilities. Therefore, nature is inherently intertwined with progress. Various films that portray a greater vitality and increased sexual appetite within characters that tap into a certain primal instinct have aligned itself to this principle. Krzywinska notes that in films such as The Fly (Cronenberg, 1986) and Wolf (Nichols, 1994), transforming into an animal enables a rejuvenation of “the powers of youth” and the revelation of “newfound vitality” (2006, p. 151). In relation to King Kong (Cooper & Schoedsack, 1933), Ferry celebrates its poetical and convulsive potential induced via “its monstrous eroticism” (1978. p. 107). Thus, in Surrealist fashion, he locates a rupture of reality’s constrains and a transcendence into the fantastic through the cinematic representation of bestiality.

However, Nietzsche contradicts this direct hypothesis that praises a return to nature:

Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration… imagine indifference itself as a power—how could you live according to this indifference? Living—is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? (1966, p. 9)

The chaotic dynamics of nature is condemned as the antithesis of humanity. The purpose of living is to differentiate itself from the wastefulness and excesses of nature. Thus, this results in the civilization/human nature/animal binary. A conservative framework would exploit this binary and position bestiality as a threatening form of desire that has to be subdued to maintain the symbolic order. As Krzywinska states, while animal transformation does appear pleasurable, “all too soon autonomy is lost and the experience becomes a terrifying ordeal which eventually wipes out the human” (2006, p. 152).

In considering Nietzsche’s contradictory statements in relation to each other, one has to reject a simple reassertion of nature as the solution to cultural stagnancy and position nature as an inherent aspect of a ‘healthy’ framework for living. In other words, one plunges into an uncertain and dialectical relationship between man/civilisation and animal/nature. Bestiality becomes a fertile theme because it is a means in which this binary is transgressed. In approaching this transgression not simply through the sexual act, but by amplifying the dialectics between both poles of the binary, it becomes possible to analyse how bestiality acts as a catalyst towards a Nietzschean outlook. This framework shall be utilised in the two films discussed.

Max Mon Amour: The Acceptance of Bestial Desire within the Family

Max Mon Amour is set in a bourgeois household that seems artificially held together by civil codes of conduct. Peter and Margret are both having affairs outside their marriage. However, the taboo of adultery that is still located within the concept of humanity seems to be not much of a problem to the maintenance of their family. It is absorbed into the symbolic order, reterritorialised through the couple’s refined mannerisms. However, Peter’s comfort zone is transgressed by the realisation that Margret’s lover is a chimpanzee named Max. This bestial affair corresponds to what Wartenberg conceptualises as “the unlikely film couple” that is problematic due to “its violation of a hierarchic social norm regulating the composition of romantic couples” (1999, p. 7). Peter is thrown into anxiety as his structural notions of human and animal are mended into disorder. As Creed states, Peter is confronted by the ambiguity of woman’s jouissance, which is made even more apparent through its relation with animalistic eroticism that exceeds “the male world of phallic signifiers” (2006, p. 50). In wanting to resolve this mystery, Peter threatens Margret into letting Max live with the family. Thus, bestiality that existed but floated around the margins of their family is brought within its structure.

In his integrating into the family, Max comes of as a threat with the exception of Margret and Nelson. It is within this tactic that bestial nature is associated with female desire and childhood, fields that are subjugated by phallic authority. Maria the family’s maid screams and eventually faints when Max was transported into his caged room. Subsequently she breaks out into a rash that is diagnosed as an allergy to Max. Krzywinska notes that animal transformations signify towards “the strange materiality and uncontrollable rhythms of the flesh” (2006, p. 150).  In this case, the mere contact with an animal results in a rupture in the flesh that disrupts the clear image of the body. More implicit is the little scratch that Peter notices on Margret’s neck. This also increases Peter’s anxiety through its signification of the sexuality between Margret and Max. In the dinner party sequence, constant dog barking can be heard outside the compound. The guests attempt to compartmentalise these bestial signifiers into the symbolic order by categorising the dogs into their respective breeds.  This is interrupted by Max’s scream, a perverse and foreign sound that catches everyone off guard. Margret then brings him out to join them for dinner. What follows is probably the most visually suggestive scene of Margret and Max’s sexual relationship. Max openly embraces and kisses Margret with an expression of sensual absorption as the guests stare in disbelief. However, their bourgeois manners prevail as they sit quietly without making any verbal assumptions. They repress the occurrence of bestiality despite its apparent presence. The contrast of bestial desire and what Rambling describes as “the inacceptability of bourgeois society (and family) to introduce any difference into its structure” result in a comical surrealist image (Volkert, 1987, par. 9). In relation to Dali’s painting ‘The Lugbrious Game’, Bataille states, “My only desire here—even if by pushing this bestial hilarity to its furthest point I must nauseate Dali—is to squeal like a pig before his canvases” (1985, p. 28). While the dinner sequence does present the potential of such a convulsion in response to a heterogeneous presence, all that follows is awkwardness, an incompatibility.

Bestiality appears to Peter as an intangible element that can only be seen in an incomplete form through the symbolism of the keyhole. Thus, it is suggested that Peter’s attempts at resolving the threat of bestiality through voyeurism. Mulvey theorised that fetishistic scopophilia, in which the object is  “transform[ed] into something satisfying in itself,” is a means in which the male figure escapes from the anxiety evoked by the castrated female figure (1989, p. 21). It is uncertain whether Peter develops a fetish towards bestiality. However, it is possible to plot a casual relationship between the threat of castration and the lack of understanding of Margret’s elusive sexuality. The need to know is different from the voyeurism theorised by Mulvey because it does not reduce anxiety through a masked gaze. Rather, it goes in line with the instrumentality of the gaze within modernity. According to Foucault, the gaze:

implies an open field, and its essential activity is of the successive order of reading; it records and totalizes; it gradually reconstitutes immanent organizations; it spreads out over a world that is already the world of language, and that is why it is spontaneously related to hearing and speech. (1975, p.121)

Peter’s gaze is motivated by the possibility of reconstituting the subversive nature of bestiality into the symbolic order by the instrumental power of the gaze. The mechanics of the gaze is most apparent in clinical form through the zoologist who suggests to Peter that Margret and Max’s sexuality should be observed in the name of science.

Margret gains agency by denying easy access to the male gaze. The communicative dynamics between Max and her that is represented as instinctual and subliminal “put into question the primacy of human language and consciousness as optimal modes of communication” (Lippit, 2000, p. 2). Peter becomes the opposite of Mulvey’s conception of the male movie star’s “more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego” (1989, p. 20). In one scene, he hires a prostitute for Max. However Max refuses to have sex with her.  Thus, Max is somewhat humanised to the effect of having a complex sexual preference that denies a universally undiscerning bestial sexuality. Margret’s relationship with Max is subjectified even further away from Peter’s understanding. As Peter realises the futility of his scopophilia, he attempts to repress the presence of bestiality by instructing Margret to get rid of Max. However, she defies him by locking Nelson and herself in Max’s room. Peter’s desperation peaks as he takes out his gun, a signifier of phallic authority as well as instrumental rationality, to shoot Max. It goes haywire as Max snatches the gun from Peter; in which his unpredictable handling puts the whole family in danger. This stresses the incompatibility of phallic authority with nature, the destruction that will result when nature becomes a priori to civilisation.

After this incident, the family is reconstituted as Peter changes his attitude towards Max. He moves away from an excessive need to instrumentally place him within the symbolic order and learns to care and relate to him in an emotional level. He does this mostly without verbal expression but through actions that express his shift in paradigm. For example, with much urgency, he sends Max to the hospital where Margret is at as Max’s health deteriorates in her absence. His relationship with Margret is revitalised through this process. The family’s drive back from the hospital, in which Max parades himself at the top of the car, is represented in a celebratory mode as random onlookers cheer as they pass by. The spectator is becomes fascinated, not so much by the presence of a monkey on an automobile, but the acceptance of bestial nature into the family structure. In earlier dining sequences, Max is always seated close to Margret However, in final scene, Max is seated proportionately in-between Peter and Margret. This suggests that the family is restabilised through the neutralisation of the prior threat posed by Max. This is not achieved by its entrance into the symbolic order through the assertion of the gaze that will classify Margret’s sexuality as a psychological deviation from normality. Rather, it is enabled through the creation of a newly constituted symbolic order that is enabled by a destructive reshuffling. Bestiality is represented as a catalyst that rescues the family from structural stagnancy by facilitating a creative reshaping. As Nietzsche states, in order to create structure, one “must first be an annihilator and break values” (1968, p. 114). Nevertheless, the family is envisioned as a micro-structure in contrast to the major-structure of society that can easily override such creative changes. In Margret’s dream, she is unable to withstand the pressure asserted by the police to repress Max and chooses to kill Max with her own hands.

Tropical Malady: Becoming Animal

In Tropical Malady, things take a more chaotic turn as the dialectics of man and animal are spilled into an open field devoid of structure. There is no explicit reference to bestiality. But it suggests that the nature of sexuality is bestial through its two-part structure. The first segment follows the narrative of a soldier courting a village boy. It ends with a sequence in which the village boy licks the soldier’s hand in an animalistic manner before disappearing into the shadows. The soldier’s blank expression and the eerie tone of the mise-en-scene situate this sexual gesture as a hint towards the underpinning intensity of a primordial form of sexuality. Narrative is ruptured by an illumination of eroticism that presupposes a partial dissolution of the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity” (Bataille, 1962, p. 17). The second segment, which is based on the myth of a shape-shifting shaman, takes place in the forest where the soldier hunts a tiger that appears in the image of the village boy. Thus, this segment parallels and deconstructs the mechanics of the soldier’s desire, revealing its bestial nature within the animal realm. The soldier takes on the role of the hunter in an attempt to dominate and contain the threatening status of sexuality, which takes on the form of a mythical creature much like a Jungian archetype that is more elementary than man as it is situated within a collective subconscious. A talking monkey tells the soldier, ‘Kill the tiger and release him into the ghost world. Or let him devour you and enter his world’. This either/or choice is reflective of the man and animal binary: it is either a repression of sexuality or an embrace that marks the dissolution of the wholesome body into the realm of unconscious desires.

However, the soldier does something quite different in the concluding sequence in which he encounters the tiger face to face. Closeups of the tiger are intercut with closeups of the soldier’s fearful yet self-reflexive expression as he narrates:

And now, I see myself there. My mother, my father, fear, sadness.

It was all so real, they brought me to life.

Once I devoured your soul, we are neither human nor animal.

Then it cuts to an ancient painting that illustrates an energy stream floating in-between the tiger and a human in a respectful kneeling position. The soldier’s narration continues, “Monster, I give u my spirit my flesh and my memories.” Thus, it becomes unclear whether it is the monster or soldier that performs the ‘devouring’. Rather it seems to be a reciprocal effect in which the soldier’s submission allows him access to the monster’s soul, resulting in an entity that transcends the conceptual boundaries of what constitutes as human and animal

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “Becoming Animal”, in which the human interacts with an animal other towards the formation of ever-shifting entities, is a helpful way to understand this ambiguous phenomenon. In this process, “there is no longer man or animal, since each deterritorializes the other, in a conjunction of flow, in a continuum of reversible intensities” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, p. 22). Thus, both parties engage in a transformational process that breaks up the conceptual boundaries of the single entity. There is no animal becoming man, as it is the subjectivity of man that is in need of decentring. As such, the human’s kneeling position in the painting represents the soldier’s acquiescence to the becoming. The energy stream that is released signifies towards the immanent processes at work. The becoming is not an arrest of humanity into bestial nature, as the tiger does not absorb the energy stream. Rather, it is in constant flux in-between both parties.

Creed suggests that becoming animal is a way of understanding the metamorphosis of man to wolf in cinematic representations (2005, p. 137). In Tropical Malady, the process of becoming animal is represented in a less apparent and crude manner. An intensive mood of heightened sensitivity is constructed through the meditative pace of the sequence and soldier’s concentrated expression. The processes of becoming animal are occurring in molecular levels, much like the immanent energy stream. This is also suggested when the soldier’s narration concludes, “Every drop of my blood sings our song, a song of happiness. There, do you hear it?” The camera pans slowly through the forest trees to the ambient sounds of bustling wind before cutting to black. The molecular exchange of particles within the becoming occurs within the micro makeup of a drop of blood. Deleuze and Guattari state, “What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes” (2008, p. 262). It is impossible to show the product of becoming, as there is no finality to it. Thus, the film moves away from both subjects and pans into the openness of the forest.

In Max Mon Amour, bestiality appears as a threatening element within the bourgeois family. Its excessive nature disrupts Peter’s phallic authority. He attempts to assimilate bestiality into the symbolic order through the instrumentality of the classifying gaze. However, as he learns to relate to Max in an emotional level, the family unit restructures itself into a new order. Seen in this light, Bestiality becomes a catalyst towards the creative destruction of the stagnancy of the bourgeois family that enables a more communicative order to emerge. In Tropical Malady, the human subject engages in the process of becoming through an interaction with an animal other. The binary of human and animal collapses into the productive process of becoming that frees desire towards creative potentials. Both films represent bestiality as a means to communicate a Nietzschean dialectic between human and animal. These are ‘healthy’ actions in the sense that it shakes of the fantasy and economy of a fixed, stable form of humanity.

References

Bataille, George. (1962). Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo. New York: Walker and Company.

Bataille, George. (1985). “The ‘Lugubrious Game’”. in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 24-30.

Creed, Barbara. (2005). Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Creed, Barbara. (2006). A Darwinian Love Story: Max Mon Amour and the Zoocentric Perspective in Film. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 20(1), 45-60.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari. F. (2008). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum.

Ferry, Jean. (1978). “Concerning King Kong”. in Hammond, P. (ed.). The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema. London: British Film Institute. 105-108.

Foucault, M. (1975). Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage Books.

Krzywinksa, Tanya. (2006). “The Beast Within: Animal Transformation and Bestiality & Bondage”. in Sex and the Cinema. London & New York: Wallflower. 139-159.

Lippit, A. M. (2000). Electric Animal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mulvey, Laura. (1989). “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. in Visual and Other Pleasures. London: MacMillan. 14-26.

Nietzsche, F. (1966). Beyond Good and Evil. New York: Vintage Books.

Nietzsche, F. (1968). Thus Spoke Zarathustra. London: Penguin Books.

Nietzsche, F. (1976). The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Penguin.

Volkert, Andreas. (1987). The innocence of Desire: Charlotte Rampling in Koln/Germany. Retrieved 3 Nov, 2008. From http://users.belgacom.net/bn579857/5-interviews_0001.html

Wartenberg, T. E. (1999). “The Subversive Potential of the Unlikely Film Couple”. in Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism. Boulder: Westview Press. 1-18.

Aesthetic Revolution within the Police State: Tracing the Link between Art and Politics in Singapore

The vibrancy and visibility of art production in Singapore is heavily dependent on the development and implementation of state policy and support for culture and the arts. Singapore’s cultural policies in the 60s to 80s were more concerned with articulating the utility of art and the role of artists in relation to nation and identity building. This period has often been referred to as a ‘cultural desert’ due to the lack of support for the development of the arts. From the late 80s onwards, policy was informed by the economic potential of the arts. [1] This resulted in an expansion of arts infrastructure and support for arts groups, amounting to a spectacle of liberalisation and accumulation of cultural capital. While dependent on governmental support to a certain extent, it could be said that art practices in Singapore came into existence through their own agency and conditions. Art practices might share certain commonalities with the directions set by policy. However, in the moments of departure from policy, there emerges a history of art practices that function in excess to the prescribed directions and boundaries enacted by the government. The repressive function of arts and cultural management rears its ugly head through the government’s strategic containment of such instances. This relation between art production that stands apart from the dominant order and governance inevitably conjures up political potential in the former, rejects a sovereign conception of state power, and lays claim to Foucault’s assertion that whenever there is power, there will also be resistance that exists through strategic exercises within the field of power relations (Foucault, 1990, 95-96). Nevertheless, due to the sheer force and violence of repressive state mechanisms, these accounts of contestations have often been framed up as a series of failures in enacting political discourse. Such mechanisms don’t only repress these instances of political art, but work towards maintaining a zone of silence. An alternative history of Singapore’s nation building could just as well be written through the markings of such instances of cultural exclusions and the strategic folding of such events within the public sphere. Yet with every clash and failure between a dissensual art practice and governance, there is a reshuffling of the tactical coordinates of artists who are still committed to a certain politics. In this paper, it is my intention to investigate certain key moments in Singaporean art history in which art practices can be framed as political. I shall extract and understand the political trajectories of art, not for its uses in the framing of a cohesive cultural identity and value in global symbolic capital within the management of the state, but in enacting sites of contestation in which politics can be practiced on a stage and as ways of living. In avoiding a study that simply situates the politics of art in its contestation with a dominant governmental structure, I shall aim to sketch a history of politicised art in Singapore in which the force of politics in art functions outside the realm of power relations.

I shall beginning by giving a brief outline of the link between arts and politics. The main theoretical framework that I will be utilising is Ranciere’s idea of a politics of aesthetics, and the difference he makes between politics/dissensus and the police/consensus. The body of this paper is framed within five sections. Firstly, I shall paint a portrait of leftist woodblock print artists and the Chinese student movement’s utilisation of theatre within the early days of Singapore’s independence in the 50s and 60s. This gives a picture of what is often omitted in our history in governance: the brief flirtation between the People’s Action Party and Communism. This period also framed up the historically situated rise of politicised art under sway by the influence of the global leftist movement. Of particular interest to the theoretical understanding of the relationship between art and politics is the ideological difference between the Equator Art Society, which championed a social-realist form of art, and the Modern Art Society with its practices in abstraction and formalistic experimentation. Their discourse presents itself as an entanglement between artistic autonomy and the social relevancy of artistic practice. Secondly, I shall give an account of the large scale rooting out of Communist influence through the use of the Internal Security Act, which gives the government the right to arrest and detain individuals without trial during exceptional circumstances. Faced with such repression and the gradual dissolution of Communism, the generation of politically orientated artists had to move on to other occupations or change their mode of practice to avoid further governmental repression. Kuo Pao Kun, an influential playwright who was active in the Chinese student movement, was jailed for four years under such circumstances. In the third section, I shall look into his reflections within detention and his newly found sense of artistic rigour, as a crucial turning point for artistic practice in Singapore. I shall explain how he re-evaluated the relation between art and politics and resurfaced with a less blinkered understanding of the politics of art which is more informed by nomadism and active sensory experience. In the period that followed, the governmental aversion towards Communism continued to disrupt youthful idealism towards social relevancy and change that have been loosely determined as Marxist threats. In particular, I shall discuss on theatrical practices and the government’s manoeuvres in repression that resulted in the withdrawal of support and unofficial ban of Forum Theatre. The 1980s saw an emergence of contemporary art practices. Instrumental to this process is the artist-run collective, The Artist Village. I shall discuss how their attempts to use performance as a base for rethinking the sensible was met with state censorship thorough an interface with media sensationalisation. Lastly, I will discuss how the art community has been maturing into a collective political subjectivity in a bid to interact with the governing structure within the level of policy. While the relationship between arts and politics is never stable, it is my aim for this paper to give an account of artistic practice in Singapore in which a democratic aesthetic drive that runs through its history constantly confronts and reshapes the consensual limits of political debate enacted by the government.

Art, Politics and Aesthetics

Within the history of artistic practice and theory, there has been an unstable relation between the fields of art and politics. Within the modernist tradition is the idea that art should be understood and appreciated as an autonomous sphere with its own formalistic traditions. Theophile Gautier’s slogan ‘l’art pour l’art’ or ‘art for art’s sake, is still casually used whenever there is a need to defend art’s own intrinsic values from utilitarian, moral or social evaluations. This school of thought champions an art that is “devoid of ideas, where sentiment is purely instinctive, and where the artist observes total impartiality towards his subject” (Stocks, n.d., p. 43-44). It stands in defiance against the idea of a politicised art, such as the Communist tradition of Socialist Realism, which positions the purpose of art within social and political grounds. In avoiding a view that sees art as inherently political, as well as art being a rigid transcendental discipline that stands alone in its affects, it becomes necessary to adopt a wider aesthetic framework that is able to witness shifting perspectives and the production of a wide range of constituted subjectivities. As Papastergiadis states, “Aesthetics defines the relationship between art and politics as neither the representation of political messages, nor even the political inspiration drawn from art, but rather that it is the transformation that occurs through inter-subjective relations” (2010, p. 34).

Kant produced one of the most influential accounts that separated aesthetics as a field of study in its own right in contrast to other human practices. As such, he is often the starting point for what became a radical critique of aesthetics within the twentieth century. Rejecting or complicating the idea of aesthetic autonomy, theorists such as Adorno, Derrida and Ranciere attempted to resurrect a certain radical democratic element to aesthetics that will tie its significance to politics. Firstly, aesthetics is borne out of our faculty of sensation with its own principles. Since judgements of taste are informed by ‘free play’ between the faculties of intellect and perception for Kant, the spectator would not have a “primary interest in identifying the object by finding a concept for it or giving it a description,” but is oriented towards “experienc[ing] the object as something uniquely particular which, through its particular sensory qualities, presents something general” (Harrington, 2004, p. 85). In contrast to the Faculty of Judgement that evaluates the particular under general concepts, the free play of aesthetic judgement allows us to escape the regimes of dominant discourses and languages as the sensing of the particular interrupts its logical hold, forcing us to reconfigure our idea of the general. Kant also states that, there is no “universally valid aesthetic concepts or principles” as “every object of an aesthetic judgement is experienced as achieving beauty by its own unique means” (ibid, p. 86). Such principles has its consequences on subjectivity, more so given that culture and the arts have always been crucial in the way we make sense of the world.

Adorno’s aesthetic theory serves as a reference point in the extraction of political potential from Kantian aesthetics. Emphasising on the reflective judgement of aesthetics in contrast to determinant judgement, Adorno postulates that art is able to express a future outside instrumental rationality. He states:

Art, however, is social not only because of its mode of production…nor simply because of the social derivation of its thematic material. Much more importantly, art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystallizing in itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as ‘socially useful,’ it criticizes society by merely existing, for which puritans of all striples condemn it. (2004, p. 296)

For Adorno, art and society are inherently linked due to the underlying socio-historical circumstances which gave rise to particular art forms. However, he is sceptical about these very circumstances that are coupled with certain presuppositions. He rejects the definition of aesthetics as the theory of the beautiful, just as he rejects the repressive mechanisms of the culture industry. In consideration of the homogenising forces of the culture industry and the possibility of art becoming complicit within its workings, Adorno affirms the autonomy of art via its negative value which sustains the unresolved tensions that an art work has with its historical and disciplinary conditions. This might seem like a retreat from social praxis to modernist artistic autonomy. However, Adorno contradically asserts that it is through art’s ‘unique[ness] to itself’, in which art becomes social through its very aversion towards societal standards. This can be positioned as a power struggle between ‘puritans of all striples’ and the subversiveness of art. However the significance of Adorno’s aesthetic theory is that the conceptualisation of art’s non-identity and lack of continuity foster “critical attitudes resilient to reification,” providing an entrance to a form of politics that functions outside power relations (Harding, 1992, Summer, p. 184). Ziarek argues that with Adorno, the “social and political forces” that contribute and determine art production “become inverted or transformed in the artwork,” thus “opening up a reality in a manner that remains inaccessible outside art” (2004, p. 41). As such artistic autonomy “does not signify its independence or separation from socioeconomic or technological forces but indicates its capacity to inflect or rework the very relationality of forces that underlies and stratifies social manifestations of power” (ibid, p. 36).

It is through this angle that I turn to Ranciere’s account of the relation between art and politics. Informed by the practice of democracy, Ranciere provides a compelling framework that positions the potentiality of art as a matter of sensory experience and democratic politics. Underpinning our understanding of art and politics is what Ranciere defines as the distribution of the sensible:

An order of bodies that define the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and of the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise. (1999, p. 29)

Within a distribution of the sensible, what is speakable, thinkable, visible and audible, and that which is not, is distributed and arranged in a particular system of cognition and representation within a milieu or subjectivity. When such a system is fixed in its coordinates, it is seen as a police order:

The essence of the police lies in a partition of the sensible that is characterized by the absence of void and of supplement: society here is made up of groups tied to specific modes of doing, to places in which these occupations are exercised, and to modes of being corresponding to these occupations and these places (Ranciere, 2010, p. 36).

The police constitutes of any molar organisation that inserts our senses and our ability to sense into a highly representative categorisation based on a consensus in which roles and functions are stratified and stabilised within a particular order. In maintaining an existing system of inclusions and exclusions, the police restricts the democratic drive towards an ‘equality of intelligences’.[2]

Politics is an attempt to verify the axiom of equality through an active redistribution of the sensible police order, and as such, exists as a form of dissensus to the police order (Ranciere, 2006, p. 52). Rather than a question of social organisation, which corresponds to his idea of the police, Ranciere’s politics is situated as a process of disruption or division in which the excluded or ‘part of no part’ is made visible as an equal speaking being through “a meeting of police logic and egalitarian logic that is never set up in advance” (Ranciere, 1999, p. 32). This leads Ranciere to the assertion that “politics is aesthetic in that it makes visible what had been excluded from a perceptual field, and in that it makes audible what used to be inaudible” (2004, p. 226). What he terms the aesthetics of politics is the idea that politics is ultimately bound up with the idea of aesthetics because what can or cannot be said or done is defined by the image of society. It is a reconfiguration of the sensible through an aesthetic framing of subjectivities whose voice disrupts any given police order.

Existing beside the aesthetics of politics is the politics of aesthetics. Ranciere unfolds this idea  by conceptualising art within three specific regimes with three distinct distributions of the sensible. It is the aesthetic regime, which had the most influence within the 19^th and 20^th century to the present, in which the political significance of aesthetics enables art to become political.[3] Within the aesthetic regime, the hierarchy of representation is disrupted and there is an equality in subject matter.[4] This aesthetic rupture “arranges a paradoxical form of efficacy, one that relates to a disconnection between the production of artistic savoir-faire and social destination, between sensory forms, the significations that can be read on them and their possible effects (Ranciere, 2010, p. 139). The dissensual quality of aesthetics is a restless drive that refuses any final destination and any fixity in meaning. The politics of aesthetics is rooted in the idea that the dissensus posed by aesthetics enables “practices and modes of visibility of art that re-configure the fabric of sensory experience” (ibid, p. 140). This is not achieved through the “channelling of power by or for the people,” but through a more affirmative stance in which artists and spectators tap into “the sensory apprehension of possibility” and partake in their own subjective forms of storytelling that is against the grain of dominant narrative forms (Papastergiadis, 2010, p. 35). The difference between the aesthetics of politics and politics of aesthetics is that in the first, reconfigurations result in the formation of particular political subjectivities; in the second, while art “re-configure[s] the fabric of sensory experience,” there is no clear direct passage from artistic intention to political subjectivation (Ranciere, 2010, p. 141).

The paradox between autonomous art and art becoming life runs at the heart of the aesthetic regime. Ranciere states that the aesthetic regime “simultaneously establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to shape itself” (2006, p. 23). Art establishes itself as an autonomous and singular sensibility. However, this singularity and autonomy is defined by an indifference to any criteria in which its singularity can be territorialised and draws its affective space and subject matter from everyday life and non-art. This contradiction results in the confusion between the politics of art becoming life and its resistant form of autonomy. However Ranciere states that “both of them, without analysing it, rely on the contradiction constitutive of the aesthetic regime of the arts, which makes art into an autonomous form of life and thereby sets down, at one and the same time, the autonomy of art and its identification with a moment in life’s process of self-formation (2009, p. 26).  For Ranciere, the possibility of political art means sustaining this contradiction of the aesthetic regime.

Ranciere’s emphasis on this crucial contradiction within the aesthetic regime helps make sense of the ideological differences between the social-realist leanings of the Equator Art Society and the Modern Art Society’s emphasis on artistic autonomy. Rather than an essential difference in ideology, Ranciere allows us to view the contradiction as necessarily complementary within the rubric of the aesthetic regime. I shall also frame up Kuo Pao Kun’s reflections in detention as an event in which he comes to terms with the contradictory nature of the aesthetic regime. Through self-criticism and a new found heightened sensitivity of his surroundings, Kuo opens up a future for artistic community whose politics refuses capture from consensual determinations. By utilising Ranciere’s politics of aesthetics as a framework to position the politics of specific artistic practices in Singapore, I aim to sketch a picture of a dissensual community of artists that draw its politics through a revolution of the senses. In this sense, political art does not assert itself in a dialectical resistance with the dominant order. Rather, it reworks the power of social stratification by presenting and enabling new forms of ‘common’ sense through an active drive that constantly redistributes the sensible.

Ranciere’s notion of consensus and police is contingent for analysing the Singapore government’s management of the arts which constantly aims to silence and delegitimise the affects of political art. In its most extreme, consensus is attained through violent acts repression, such as the ISA’s detention of left-leaning artists. On a more everyday level, consensus is achieved through the workings of cultural policy. From its early days in the 60s to 80s to the current framework that adopts the creative industries rationale, cultural policy has functioned towards a depoliticisation of the arts. In mapping various contestations between political art and the government’s consensual management of arts and culture, we will be able to illuminate the ways in which politics and the police continuously impinges on each other.

The Role of the Artist during Singapore’s Early Independence

We were riding a tiger and we knew it- Lee Kuan Yew

The visibility of art production in Singapore during its early independence is closely tied to its political value in relation to anti-colonial and nation-building activities. The revolutionary potential of art converged with the wave of societal radicalisation in the 50s and 60s when the People’s Action Party (PAP) came to power through the “support of students and procommunist groups” (Peterson, 2001, p. 34).[5] It is in this sense that Lee Kuan Yew refers to their riding of a tiger. Yet, the consequences and effects of this brief flirtation with Communism are often historicised in a negative manner. In his study of the use of cat imagery within the socio-political landscape of Singapore, Ho Tzu Nyen finds that the force of Communism is often articulated within the figure of the tiger, the pre-existing creature in our ecology prior to eradication and domestication, in contrast to the fabricated image of a lion as our national image (2007). Ho argues that the state created a ‘zone of indistinction’ between Communists and tigers to frame up the threat of Communism as a microbiological ‘viral ideology’ that must be repressed (ibid, p. 159). Thus, the lion is conjured as a macro figure of national stability and consensus while parasitical elements are invested in the image of the tiger, a consolidation of microscopic threats in which the status of Communism is conflated with animalistic tendencies. Yet, it was also these micro-animalistic tendencies that amounted to a wave of vibrant political energies that marked a period of political agency within the public sphere during Singapore’s brief flirtation with Communism. Within this period, the Social Realist traditions of woodblock prints and Chinese theatre functioned as a ballast towards the formation of a unified Communist subjectivity.

The history of woodblock prints in Singapore tells a story in which an alliance was formed between artists with leftist sentiments and the PAP who still represented itself with leftist ideology at that time. These Social-realist prints depicted events such as workers struggles and worked to empower the labouring masses, to tell the story of the people. Many of these prints were exhibited and utilised in national events and went hand in hand with the artists and government’s efforts in creating a Malayan art form. Instrumental to this movement was the Equator Art Society, a group formed in 1956, who envisioned the construction of a Malayan art form as synonymous to the imagination of a rising national anti-colonial consciousness within the younger generation through depicting the living conditions of the working classes. In an exhibition catalogue, the Society states:

Only those indefatigable artists who, having known the value of the genuine school of art, can push their way out in this society which is fraught with the temptation to personal aggrandisement in all its devilish forms. The value of the genuine school of art lies in the fact that it does not lose its integrity amidst the ugly commercial dealings belonging to the decadent bourgeois. Instead, it always works to faithfully reflect or expose the very root of the reality of life, to spread the Truth, the Virtue, and the Beauty of this world. (Cited in Kwok, n.d., par. 9)

This emphasis on socially committed art, which calls for artists to become sensitive to their locality in a bid to resist colonialism, makes a period in which the active artists in Singapore merged with Governmental strategies temporarily. The Equator Art Society organised a local art exhibition in conjunction with Singapore’s National Day in 1960. Lee Khoon Choy, then Parliamentary Secretary of the Ministry of Culture, opened the catalogue for the event with these words:

In a society which is in the process of being moulded into a homogeneous whole. Artists have a special social responsibility to help the people have a better understanding of their surroundings and their lives. To that extent art should be for the people…The search for a Malayan art form will be quite futile if art is not creative. But we can only produce high quality works of art if our painters look for their themes from the things and people they see around them daily. (Cited in Lim, 2004, p. 37)

Nevertheless, there is a difference between the Equator Art Society’s idea of nation-building and Lee’s articulation of a ‘homogeneous whole’. The Equator Art Society not only emphasised on the implications of existing society, but also attempted to articulate a way out. A sense of utopianism, which is “rooted in the aesthetic anticipation of the future” and “the invention of sensible forms and material structures for a life to come,” is evident in their art works (Ranciere, 2006, p. 29) For example, in Chua Mia Tee’s Epic Poem of Malaya (1955), a group of students gather around a figure, no less different from themselves, who passionately reads from a red book. This painting is the embodiment of the hope and anticipation of a unified Malayan identity in which the stratifications of class will give way to a community of equals.

Chua Mia Tee’s Epic Poem of Malaya (1955)

 

However, with the gradual clamping down of leftist tendencies in favour of social cohesion in the mid 60s, it became evident that the Equator Arts Society and woodblock print community was simply a cog within a periodic form of governance. As soon as 1961, the government laid down its change in direction:

The cultural policy of the government is based on the belief that for successful nation-building in a multi-racial society it is necessary to evolve a common way of life, a common acceptance of similar ideas and values and norms of social conduct, a common system of emotional response and above all a common idiom of artistic expression reflecting and idealizing these systems (State of Singapore, 1963).

This marks a shift from the visibility politically motivated agitprop art to a search for a common cultural denominator through art production. This brings to mind Ranciere’s framing of art within an ethical regime. In reference to Plato’s republic, Ranciere, asserts that with the ethical regime, “it is a matter of knowing in what way images’ mode of being affects the ethos, the mode of being of individuals and communities” (2006, p. 21). ‘True’ arts as “forms of knowledge based on the imitation of a model with precise ends” is distinguished from “simulacra that imitate simple appearance” (ibid). In the government’s cultural policy, artistic expression is genuine if it expresses a common social system of modes of conduct and emotional responses. By insisting that art must resonate in line with a singular heartbeat of the nation, the government cancels out the possibility for political art by delegitimising the precarity and difference of political art. In this instance, the dissensual quality of the Equator Arts Society and woodblock print community, which helped mobilise a sense of class-consciousness and social inequalities, departs from the consensual framework outlined by cultural policy.

The rise of the Modern Art Society, formed in 1963, gave prominence to abstraction and other modern visual art forms. They did not directly serve the purposes of expressing commonality outlined by cultural policy, but due to their ‘apolitical’ nature, as defined by the government’s markers for political dissent, they were safely inserted into a passive consensus with the government. Ho Ho Ying, the president of the Modern Art Society criticised the Equator Art Society for a lack of creativity and direction because of their narrowly defined aesthetics in which they make a strong link between art and politics (1999, p. 26-28).[6] Thus, the Modern Art Society positioned themselves within a juncture, in which realism and representation within Social Realist works are partitioned within the past, while the future holds new possibilities in “presenting an unmediated reality between the artist as the creator and the canvas” (Kwok, n.d., par. 6).

Ho Ho Ying’s Rhythm of Dance (1958-1959)

 

Both art societies were informed by the search for a Malayan culture. However, they depart in the way their politics is understood and articulated. These two directions resemble Rockhill’s identification of two forms of politicised art: a “content-based commitment” that is based on “the representation of politicized subject matter”, and a “formal commitment” that “locates the political dimension of works of art in their mode of representation or expression” rather than represented subject matter (2009, p.195). On one hand, the Equator Art Society pursued a form of politics that is aligned with the social-realist model of leftist revolution, while the Modern Art Society emphasised on the political potential of artistic autonomy. Ranciere’s positioning of the aesthetics of politics via the paradox between artistic autonomy and art becoming life illustrates how the ideological and methodological difference between both art societies is complementary to the aesthetic regime. Rather than concerning ourselves with the question of which model is more legitimate for political art, it is more useful to view this episode as an attempt at articulating the difference strategies in which art performs its politics. While wresting itself away from the historical knot posed by the social realist movement and moving away from political involvement, the Modern Art Society articulated a different form of politics in art that is understood through its unfinished task invested within the future . However, due to the depoliticisation of content reflecting actual social conditions, such formalistic experimentation separated itself from everyday life, and contributed to the spectacularisation of Singapore’s cultural sphere. The social realist tradition that was more closely linked to the political influence of the radicalised Chinese student community became seen as a threat when PAP moved away from leftist ideology. Thus, while in practice, both art societies articulated their own expression of politics, through the policing of culture by the government, it is clear which artistic practice is more disruptive towards the consensual regime it proposed.

Also in strong connection with student activism and Communism was the Chinese theatre community, a prominent node within Singapore’s art history that is politically informed by the May 4^th Revolution in China. This artistic practice raised the bars of political consciousness necessary for the revolution into self-governance. In contrast to ongoing concerns of art production catering to a middle and upper class segment with higher cultural capital, this period of Chinese Theatre had a large working-class audience and active participatory dynamics that aligned artistic practice with the dimension of political resistance against colonisation.

Kuo Pao Kun is prominent playwright who is regarded as a pioneer of the arts community in Singapore for his contributions in theatre, and the role he played in facilitating the development of the arts community over three generations. In his description of the politicised theatre scene in the 60s, it seems less of a question of alignment with party politics, but that of creating a space in which the changing living conditions were reflected and brought into discourse:

The involvement of the theatre with politics, not necessarily party politics, but politics, ideological debate, was quite inevitable, arising from the volatile situation in the sixties when Singapore first became independent. It was a time of strife—there was the pressure to succeed, particularly economically, on the part of the government which was expressed in radical economic and social changes like the evacuation of people, of farmers from their land for new development. (Cited in Peterson, 2001, p. 35)

Nevertheless, Kuo also acknowledges that political art was active in this time due to the discourse that emerge through the contestation of two political parties: “We had 2 very energetic parties going at each other and a lot of things came out from these energies and they were reflected in the theatre” (1997, p. 68).[7]

Kuo ran a company with an initiative called ‘Go Into Life’, which brought artists into the working class conditions of factories, farms, construction etc, in an effort in plugging the nervous systems of its artists into more down to earth environments and to the heartbeat of its people.  Many of its artists ended up working for years in such conditions. In a rejection of romantic ideals of authorship, this programme pursued Kuo’s humble idea: “Art came from life. Without knowing life firsthand and deeply, especially the life of the labouring masses, it would be difficult to write good artistic work” (Cited in Lo, 1993, p. 139). Life was displaced by the speedy capitalistic logic of the nation’s rampant industrialisation. As such, Kuo calls for a reinvestment back into a heightened perceptivity of life in which artists are encouraged and mentored to redistribute the sensible by actually witnessing and existing with the people and within the environments that are excluded within the dominant progressive logic of the nation.

While the wave of revolutionary activities posed itself as a dissensus within Singapore, it was nonetheless tied to a consensus with a specific framing of art’s servitude to politics as heralded by the revolution in China. Soon the straddling between Communism and capitalistic development moved towards the latter, and thus begun the brutal mechanisms enacted to contain the influence of Communism. The socially committed Chinese theatre milieu was targeted as a potential threat, probably in reference to theatre being adopted as the official medium for the Chinese Communist Party’s artistic illustration of the proletariats’ struggle in China. This is an extreme case of interpellation that pushes an artistic milieu of social discourse into the logic of Marxist state subversion by analogy to the function of art within Communist regimes.

The representation of mass proletariatisation of the Chinese community through woodblock print and theatre brings to mind Benjamin’s thesis that the aestheticisation of politics within totalitarian regimes in which the masses are mobilised and energies consolidated into a spectacle (2008, p. 41). In this case, masses were not oriented towards war. They were mobilised towards creating the image of national solidarity in the struggle towards colonialism and the construction of the nation. However, it must be stated that the early leftist PAP government conjoined themselves to rather than organised the movement. As Ranciere states, “The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and invisible” (2006, p. 19). The government’s management of the cultural image of the nation, as well as the expressions of community arranged by artistic movements, are both distributions of the sensible in which the link between aesthetics and politics is positioned. PAP’s switch from an earlier period of political activism to a conservative framework is the moment in which its commonality with the Chinese theatre and Social-realist movement was shattered. This resulted in a contradictory relationship between the liberation of energies within the Chinese community and the consensual logic of post-revolutionary governance. And as such, it is not surprising when the political subjectivisation of the Chinese community was reposed as a threat to PAP’s pragmatic and authoritarian regime that followed. The commonality between the Modern Art Society and PAP is not so much framed as an agreement on the direction of artistic development and politics. Rather the Modern Art Society’s formal-commitment is less of a threat to PAP’s paranioa that art can lead to processes of political subjectivisation when it reflects and draws its subject matter from the richnessness and contradictions of everyday life.

The Internal Security Act and the Failure of Communism

From the 1960s onwards, PAP utilised hard measures to clamp down the influence of Communism. In otherwords, they have rode the tiger for all its revolutionary worth in the anti-colonialist struggle and early stage of national development. The next stage of nation-building, which calls for tight consensus in stability, amounts to the containment of the revolutionary energy that it once endorsed. Avoiding a democratic contestation with the Barisan Socialis within the political sphere, PAP enacted a covert security operation labelled ‘Operation Coldstore’ in 1963 which arrested and detained up to 111 leftists including many key figures from Barisan Socialis (Rodan, 2004, p. 20). This was the first operation enacted through the formation of the Internal Security Act, which gave the government the right to arrest and detain any individuals without trial during times of emergency.

This repressive mechanism marks the threshold in which a state of exception was established in Singapore. Agamben describes this practice of the government’s executive powers as “[T]he extension of the military authority’s wartime powers into the civil sphere, and a suspension of the constitution (or of those constitutional norms that protect individual liberties), in time the two models end up merging into a single juridical phenomenon that we call the State of Exception” (2005, p. 10). The utilisation of authoritative hard power reaches its limits by asserting itself through a space that is “precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside” of the juridical order “do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other” (ibid, p. 23). The parasitical threat of a Communist tiger becomes a matter of extraordinary concern for the security of the state, such that an extraordinary measure in reducing the political agency of the threat is enacted.

A negative image of weeds was used by George Yeo, the Minister of Communication and the Arts in 1995, to encapsulate the government and society’s role in policing of the arts. [8] He states:

For the arts to bloom in Singapore, we must produce our own blooms and not depend on cut flowers. Our objective is to cultivate our garden in Singapore and not merely be adept at flower arrangement… In tending this garden which is Singapore, we must not see all plants as healthy. In any garden, there are weeds whose growth we have to curb.  (Cited in Kwok, 2004, p. 2-3)

Other than making visible the distribution of content, there is the task excluding what is unhealthy to the community and image of the nation. Alfian Sa’at goes as far as to declare that “our garden city was created not so much by planting seeds but by weeding” (2001, p. 221). By not subscribing to the government’s framing of what ought to be art, weeds must be eradicated from the nation. In preference for art that is ornamental, spectacular and de-politicised in its affects, the government had to delegitimise the socially-conscious and political motivations of Chinese theatre from the public understanding of art.

In 1976, it became clear that it is not just leftist agents operating in the political sphere that are being targeted. The threat was framed to encompass even the circulation of ‘problematic’ images and narratives in the cultural sphere. As Quah states, “The Whole of the 1970s was crucial in the de-politicisation of Chinese Theatre.” (Cited in Chong, 2003 May, p. 5). It was within this year when another ISA leftist purge was enacted and Kuo Pao Kun was arrested, despite any concrete evidence of his involvement with state politics, stripped off his citizenship, and detained without trial till 1980. Thus, the cultivation of the garden of the arts must be understood through all the violence dealt through the process of weeding. More importantly, through this repressive mechanism, the government initiates a defensive split between art and politics. Within the constitution, it is illegal to produce any form of art that is tied to a particular political party. Thus, it is illegal for art to be used towards the accumulation of power within the political sphere. However, as evident in the paranoid use of the ISA, any art practice that communicates what is excluded and disrupts the ideological consensus sanctioned by the government risks running into such repression.

The force of ISA was also felt within the English theatre community. Within the 1980s, English was adopted as the major language medium that will serve as a neutral language that bridges the gap between ethnic divides and also align Singapore towards the pragmatism of the market economy. As Chinese Theatre lost its prominence within the public sphere within this period, Post-colonial English theatre practices soon emerged as a critical reinforcement. Armed with questions on what constitutes Singaporean identity, these practitioners aimed to subvert the Eurocentric displays of English and illuminated particular localities and their situations. This is a period in which artists brought in the discourse of Asianness in its multiple aspects as a means to make the official language and narrative stammer. Asian values would soon be co-opted by the state apparatus as an ideology that reterritorialises on the transgressions brought about by its insertion into global capitalism. For post-colonial English theatre, there is a more honest rethinking of Asianness that resists the government’s assertion of ethnic morality. Rather it is a matter of a radical Asianness that is wielded to destabalise the official state narrative and language.

Instrumental to this process is Third Stage, a company that was founded in 1983. Its 10 members had been active within the student union movement during the 1970s, and theatre was seen as an extension to their political practices. In combating the irrelevancy of foreign productions as well as the orientalisation of Asian theatre, Third Stage attempted to root itself to the rapidly modernising society in Singapore and dealt with social themes that resulted from governmental policy and the changing landscape.[9] Its use of Singlish, a local vernacular that is a mishmash of different ethnic languages, was also a milestone in the representation of Singapore’s hybrid identity. As Wong says, “In the theatre scene of the early 1980s, it represented a milestone of sorts in its recognition of and relevance given to the local vernacular. Singlish also added an important dimension to Third Stage’s exploration and representation of the Singaporean identity: its concerns, creative spirit and quirkiness” (19 March 2010, par. 4). Singlish is a loose assemblege of second languages that were losing its importance and dialects that were gradually phased out. For Ranciere, political subjectivisation necessitate an “impossible identification” that function within “the difference between voice and body” and “cannot be embodied by he or she who utters it” (Cited in Parker, 2009, p. 256). As an illegitimate offspring of a multiplicity of minoritarian languages within the history of Singapore, Singlish affirms a radical Asian identity in which a sense of shared culture and nationalism is experienced through a dissonance of cultures. Similarly, Third Stage’s aesthetics is informed by the utilising elements from the everyday, in all its particularities and antagonisations, as a means to draw out the ramifications of the government’s project in national development.

In 1987, ISD arrested 22 people who are accused of being involved in a Marxist conspiracy. Out of these 22 people were 4 members of Third Stage (Wong Souk Yee, Chng Suan Tze, William Yap, and Tay Hong Seng), under the charge that the company was a front for political subversion (Chong, 2003 May, p. 5). After their detention, which lasted from 7 to 15 months, Third Stage produced another two plays and soon became dormant. This was the last instance within the history of art production in Singapore, in which the ISA as been enacted upon art practitioners. Together with Kuo’s arrest, this case became moments of trauma that haunts the potential of politicised art even till this day.

Revaluating the Relation between Art and Politics

After the wave of political repression through the ISA and the dissolution of Communist influence, the milieu of socially-committed art shifted its coordinates. In fear of being implicated as social deviants by the government, many artists either left their practices or sacrificed criticality for a de-politicised art practice that is more sustainable in light of the regulated ‘garden’ of the arts. However, through the case of Kuo’s confinement and release, it is possible to witness an active sensibility that enabled him to be transformed by the event, despite limitations to his rights. It is through Kuo’s transformation, in which the relation between art and politics is reconstituted, thus marking a turning point in Singapore’s art history that ushered in new forms of political art practices.

Wee states that after Kuo’s release, he “moved away from a singular approach to theatre based on the need to reform society to a more plural comprehension of art’s relation to society, one not tied in to specific ideological goals” (2004, p. 123). One could detect in Kuo’s transition after his release, a trait of escapism, as his works became more subtle and plural in content and expression, a move away from the hardheaded revolutionary directions of his earlier works. However, this charge is diffused when we consider Kuo’s 5 years of silence as a reflective period in which he untangles himself from the consensual knot the Chinese revolutionary movement posed to art. Kuo’s reflections within a jail cell mirrors the unrooted community of Chinese intellectuals and artists in Singapore that are disillusioned by the dissolution of China’s Communist ideology, its gradual entrance into global capitalistic flows, as well as the failure of Marxist practice in Singapore in light of violent repression. While this marks the end of a period in which art served political purposes, it also signalled a new dawn of art production of Singapore. Kuo’s change in direction in his understanding of art upon his period of reflection marks and important node, a distribution of a sensible in which the potential of art was evaluated in consideration of its failures. And it is in this sense, that we must not see his change simply as escapism, but a productive betrayal, an escape in a Deleuzian sense, in which one finds a weapon.

Kuo laments on the dominance of politics over other social and cultural production within this past revolutionary period in which “everything was made subservient to the narrowest interpretation of politics” (1997, p. 70). Of particular influence to him was Lu Xun’s essay ‘The Divergent Ways of Art and Politics’:

I have always felt that art and politics are often in mutual conflict. At first, art and revolution were not opposed to each other; they shared the same discontent with the status quo. Yet politics attempts to maintain the status quo, so it naturally stands in the opposite direction of art. (Cited in Liu, 2000, p. 58)

Lu Xun’s idea of politics is closely related to consensus or the police, a form of party politics that aims to ‘maintain the status quo’. Thus, Lu Xun outlines that the problem of conflating art with party ‘politics’ is that once the revolution has been accomplished, there is no more use for art. Art then poses itself as an excess to the post-revolutionary order. In locating a semblance between art and revolution through their ‘discontent with the status quo’, Lu Xun frames up both instances as dissensual acts. In this sense, revolution is framed up as a movement that surpasses the logic of consensual politics. Similarly, Lu Xun emphasises on the politics of aesthetics within art that conjoins with the relentless and constant revolutionary drive towards emancipation.

Kuo rejects the servitude of art to politics but affirms that “politics is still very much understood as an undeniable, inalienable part of any art form, any art, especially theatre, which has a literal aspect to it” (1997, p. 70). This realisation was achieved through his reflections within his jail cell. He accomplished this, not simply through recounting the failure of Communist-led art practice, but through an active perceptivity towards his surroundings: “So long as I maintain my objectivity, a calmness of mind and an eagerness to learn, then everything around will educate me ceaselessly, regardless of the size of my surroundings” (22 Dec 1977, par. 1).  When Ranciere researched on the workers archives, he encountered a performance of equality in the way the workers articulated something other than their working conditions:

In the construction and writing of his sensory experience, the joiner implements a different as if that overturns the whole logic which allotted him his place. But this overturning is far from the canonical idea of the freeing power of awareness. The jobber frees himself by becoming less aware of exploitation and pushing aside, thereby, its sensory grasp. (2009, p. 276-277)

Similarly, Kuo’s sensorium breaks from the logic of confinement through an active imagination. On his detention, he writes:

Not surrendering to what they impose on me, but seeing a more naked, bare modest self. Essentially it was a moment of humbleness, realising that I was as ordinary as numerous other people who had been susceptible to pressure and fear. But in that moment, when a lot of false pride had been stripped away, I also began to appreciate the pride and strength of being ordinary, and realised that it is actually on the level of being ordinary that one sees the power of ordinary people (Cited in Chew, 2004, p. 359)

In sensing the power of the ordinary, Kuo evokes the axiom of equality and imagines a community of equals. It is through the constitution of a sensorium that is in itself ‘ordinary’, in the sense that it rejects a presupposition of authority, that one can locate the emancipatory potential of the particular. Through this realisation, Kuo shed the idea that art should serve a specific form of politics or image of community, shifted his perspective away from any clear cut subjectivities, and steered towards a marginal and paradoxical position (Yun, 2000, p. 31). Kuo positioned himself within the contradictory nature of the politics of aesthetics. Artistic autonomy prevents the transformation and crystallisation of art into other forms of activities. At the same time, through a new mode of being informed by the aesthetics of sensory experience, artistic autonomy discovers an equality within the ordinary and everyday.

After his release, Kuo diligently continued his artistic practice and became the mentor for the emerging art community in Singapore. Of great importance within his work, is the idea of ‘Cultural Orphans’: “The orphan can only grope for a way forward, to make his or her own spiritual home in the midst of loss and alienation. It seems that in this increasingly plural world, we cannot help but accept a few more lines of parentage so as to counter the cultural impurities already infused in our blood” (1995, p. 1). Thus, a politicised art practice that poses itself as a dialectical resistance to state power, a position that plagues art activism in Singapore up to today, gives way to the use of nomadism as characteristic of a Singaporean identity suffering from cultural amnesia. It is also a basis towards the creation of a new ‘spiritual home’, an active recoordination of what is sensible by passing through and incorporating a multiplicity of parentage.

The late Kuo Pao Kun founded The Substation in 1990

In his conversations with Kuo, Devan noticed he often spoke of ‘play’ as a postulate towards sensing something ‘other’, “something not his own, something that cannot be enclosed within any system whatsoever, something that could only be found, glimpsed, by putting himself in play, at risk, open to the wind and rain” (2004, p. 354). On another note, Yun writes about the difference between Kuo’s modernist project, who’s rebellion strives to “preserve the most secret feelings and concepts held in the depths of one’s heart,” in comparison to the generation of post-modern artists, whom he calls the “play generation’ that “proceeded from rebellion to play to apathy to nihility” (2000, p. 57). Ranciere has pointed out how an ethical thread runs through postmodernity. It has as its theoretical foundation Lyodard’s analysis of the Kantian sublime, whose irretrievable distance gives rise to a focus on the “unrepresentable/intractable/irredeemable, denouncing the modern madness of the idea of a self-emancipation of mankind’s humanity and its inevitable and interminable culmination in the death camps” (Ranciere, 2006, p. 28-29). What Yun is concerned with the ‘play generation’ is this general lack of conviction, of a cancelling out of politics through resentment, and the way art becomes an uncountable and eternal debt to the ‘other’.

Kuo’s version of play remains within the drive for emancipation, of which I argue, strives not towards essentialising the self, as Devan’s statement might suggest, but an honest expression of hope and conviction that people have the basic agency to transcend and rethink systems of domination. Kuo’s new found use of parables and allegories in his work is not a return to some mythological structure, but harnesses its ambiguity that “offered a reflective space where meaning began to extrapolate into multiple connections and linkages, a means of realising the richness of multiple associations” (Cited in Chew, 2004, p. 360). Its liminality does not serve to repay a primal debt to the other, but passes through and senses a multiplicity of ‘others’, and rejuvenates the imagination for “the anticipation of the future” and “the invention of sensible forms and material structures for a life to come (Ranciere, 2006, p. 29). As Devan affirms in memorium of Kuo, “Kuo Pao Kun was a possibility, a challenge within us—a possibility of breaking beyond the shells of our certainties, a challenge to our armoured identities” (2004,  p. 355).

The Politics and Policing of Forum Theatre and Performance Art

Kuo Pao Kun’s reconstitution of the relation between art and politics is an event that rejuvenated the potential for a more plural understanding of the dissensual significance of art. It is a key moment in Singaporean art history that shuffled in new forms of contemporary art practice. In this section, I shall analyse this shift by look at the aesthetic strategies of Forum Theatre and Performance Art practices in Singapore. These two case studies are particularly useful in analysing the clash between the politics of aesthetics and the police, as both art forms came under intense scrutiny from the media and government, resulting in a withdrawal of state support and a de facto ban on both art forms. By looking at how the government managed the public understanding of these two art forms, we will be able to map the transition of its police function from the hard power of the ISA to the soft power of aesthetic arrangements in the media, which worked towards delegitimising the political affects and status of these two art practices.

Following on from the tradition of socially-conscious theatre, The Necessary Stage (TNS), an English language theatre company formed in 1987, strove to develop new strategies and platforms for a more politicised theatre practice. In 1993, they utilised Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre as a post pedagogic convention to empower spectators into actors. According to Boal:

“Forum Theatre consists, in essence, of proposing to a group of spectators, after a first improvisation of a scene, that they replace the protagonist and try to improvise variations on his actions. The real protagonist should, ultimately, improvise the variation that has motivated him the most.” (1995, p. 184)

Forum Theatre is envisioned as a weapon that is not solely in the hands of the author, but invested into the audience themselves, who are handed the means of production and free to wield it in order to intervene in an oppressive anti-structure by acting out their own desires and motivations in relation to the issue at hand.[10]

TNS brought Forum Theatre into schools as an alternative pedagogy for education. At its core, Forum Theatre proposes a process of negotiation in which every participant in the theatrical space has a voice that can be put to action. As Krishnan states, Forum Theatre has a “readiness to give up control and mastery: by making itself open and vulnerable, and by creating an atmosphere of trust that was free of authority and coercion” (2004, p. 101). By tying Forum Theatre to education, it could be said that TNS is attempting to legitimise a methodology that could be used outside the curriculum as a potential means to emancipate spectators.

TNS is at the forefronts in continuing the practice of socially conscious theatre, which has a turbulent history within state regulation, through inclusive collaborations with other organisations within civil society. Alvin Tan, TNS’ artistic director, states that its focus of collaboration based on a constant negotiation between “democratic tenets” in which heterogeneous voices are respected and considered, and “active intervention” through confrontation (Tan, 2001, p. 136). TNS maintains an idealistic position on the democratic structure of civil society as a theatre of tensions in which each player and organisation is self-organising and held in permanent tension with one another (Keane, 1998). Furthermore, collaboration is a means to share the stakes, in the risky case of practicing critical art, with a larger network of stakeholders (Tan, 2001, p. 137). There is also the notion that state institutions do not constitute a consensual and synonymous bureaucracy, but are a network of institutions with varying, and at times conflicting, interests and objectives (Chong, 2004, p. 276). Thus, collaborative alliances are available in a temporary manner. For example, TNS’ education programme was not accepted by the Ministry of Education much due to its conventional pedagogical approach in transmitting knowledge. However, TNS has a long lasting collaborative relationship with the National Arts Council (NAC) in implementing an arts education programme. NAC’s mission in developing the arts enables them greater capacity to accept unfamiliar artistic methodologies that might be too risky for MOE. A more in-depth study of relational dynamics will reveal temporal instances of success of TNS’s engagement with civil society. However it is evident that the government favours a de-politicised ‘civic society’ that rejects democratic processes for a brand of social activism that consist mainly through volunteer work that supports a familial and communal ethos (ibid, p. 270). As such, collaborations run the risk of suffering from an inequality when dissensus is offset and one party is absorbed into the consensual logic of the other.

For the case of Forum Theatre, media sensationalisation served as a catalyst towards the reinscription of a consensus that negates the ability of the public to recognise its political affects. In 1994, an editor from the Straits Times published a report, titled ‘Two pioneers of Forum Theatre trained at Marxist workshops’, that charged Alvin Tan and Haresh Sharma with having political agendas on the basis of practicing Forum Theatre and their training at a Bretchian workshop, in which Boal himself was present as an instructor (Peterson, 2001, p. 44). Such sensationalisation in the media rejected the present conditions in which Forum Theatre was utilised and rode on the history of state aversion towards Marxism. Tommy Koh, the chairman of NAC, was quick in posting a response in the paper that highlighted how the news article was slanted to frame TNS in a bad light, and that they will continue their support of TNS with the exception that no support will be given for Forum Theatre productions (Lee, n.d., par. 9). Furthermore, TNS’ business manager had to make a public announcement that Tan and Sharma’s “intentions were to improve their skills as theatre practitioners and to learn new theatre techniques, thereby supporting the Government’s vision of promoting arts activities in Singapore”, that there is “no interest whatsoever in using theatre for political purpose” and that “the intention of the Necessary Stage is not to effect social change” (Cited in Peterson, 2001, p. 48). The collaborative partnership between TNS and NAC helped in the sustainability of the company as NAC utilised their state legitimacy to clear TNS reputation. However, such a negotiation was severely limited with the coupling of pressure towards the staging of what amounts to a public spectacle of TNS de-politicisation, an absurd declaration that their practice is a stagnant artistic display. Through the media, the government reterritorialised the emancipatory effects of Forum Theatre for a state-sanctioned definition of an art product with its affects sealed into an ornamental surface. The controversy of Marxism gives way to a concern with spontaneity and the fact that art can indeed engage the public to become critical. Langenbach states that this event “established the boundaries of speakable discourse for the following decade of Singapore theatre” (2004, p. 210). Indeed, in symbolically banning Forum Theatre as a means of developing the political capacities of audiences, the government reconfirms their held and imposed consensus on an undemocratic civil society.

In close proximity to this event is the de facto ban and condemnation of performance art. The entrance of this art form into the local scene can be located with the burgeoning field of contemporary art in the 80s. Instrumental to this process is Tang Da Wu who returned to Singapore in 1979 after practicing in Britain for over 10 years. In 1987, in a bid to facilitate a sharing of ideas and carving an autonomous artistic space of experimentation, Tang converted a rural chicken farm into a studio and workshop that is named The Artists Village (TAV) (Kwok, n.d., par. 8-9). In its operative years before the government reclaimed the space for other developments, TAV was a hot bed of artistic experimentation that housed up to 35 artists.  According to Lee, it was an open space of free association, “marked multi-disciplinary interests,” and “was by no means an exclusive enclave or one that drew formal lines on membership” (2005, p. 48). TAV also aimed to “extend art activities into the consciousness of everyday life” through social relevancy, provocation, and the staging of site-specific happenings in a variety of public spaces (Cited in Lee, 2005, p. 50).

Together with 5^th Passage Artists, a company with a gallery space in a shopping centre, The Artists Village organised the infamous week-long Artists’ General Assembly that took place from 26 December 1993 to 1 January 1994. This event featured an eclectic mix of music, poetry, video art, performance art and forums on contemporary art in Singapore. Later in the week, Josef Ng performed a piece which commented on the arrest and canning of 12 men for homosexual soliciting, in which at a point he pulled down his swimming trunks to cut his pubic hair. Shannon Tham’s piece commented on the sensationalised coverage of the event by The New Paper, in which he burns a page of the newspaper and vomits on stage. Here we see how the state repression of minorities, in this case the regulation of heterosexual bodily functions, is rehashed through Ng’s controversial performance gestures. Ng’s performance makes the homosexual community visible as a speaking being that is silenced by the government’s anti-gay law. At the same time, it disrupts the consensual framework of decency within artistic practice. Within the same event and space, Tham continues this dissensus against the media by in turn reworking the media’s consensual coverage of Ng’s performance. The experimental and spontaneous nature of the Artists’ General Assembly illustrates the restlessness of the politics of aesthetics, which constantly draws new connections and injects new sensibilities that rework the logic of consensus.

Ng’s scandalous gestures which attacked the government and media, became a pretext for the condemnation of performance art.  The National Arts Council released the following statement:

The National Arts Council (NAC) noted with consternation the report in The New Paper, Shin Min and Lianhe Wanbao yesterday (3.1.94) of two artists putting on so-called performance art: One snipped off his pubic hair while the other vomited, both publicly in protest against allegedly unfair reports by the press. NAC finds the acts vulgar and completely distasteful, which deserve public condemnation. By no stretch of the imagination can such acts be construed and condoned as art. Such acts, in fact, debase art and lower the public’s esteem for art and artists in general. If an artist has any grievances there are many other proper ways to give vent to their feelings. Artists with talent do not have to resort to antics in order to draw attention to themselves or to communicate their feelings or ideas. By staging such tasteless performances, 5th Passage or any other arts organisation for that matter cannot expect any form of support or assistance from NAC. (Cited in Lee, n.d., par. 9)

Similar to the case of Forum Theatre, NAC took the stance of refusing funding for performance art, and Ng was charged with committing an obscene act in public.[11] In a report in The Straits Times, it was stated that the government’s unease with Forum Theatre and Performance Art is due to both art forms’ scriptless nature that, “encourage[s] spontaneous audience participation, pose dangers to public order, security and decency, and much greater difficulty to the licensing authority” (Cited in Davis, 2004, p. 300). Furthermore, academics such as Dr K. K. Seet from the National University’s Theatre Studies programme gave sceptical opinions in the papers that de-legitimised the status of both art forms as art (Lee, n.d., par. 8). Forum Theatre and Performance Art pose different political aesthetic strategies within their own milieu. One attempts to create a democratic theatre space through education, in which the limitations on specialised knowledge and artistic conceptualisation of the artist enables spectators to become active participatory agents. The other concerns the freeing of bodies and objects from the fix coordinates of space, time frames and subject matter. What is at stake for the police order is not just acts of indecency and defiance which must be removed from public visibility and understanding, but these very strategies and methodologies that bring forth the challenge of aesthetic free play. The government’s regulative management of this controversy aims to cultivate a well defined and formalistic artistic practice, just as the media’s sensationalisation alerted the government on what needed rooted, and shaped public consensus towards viewing such practices as unlawful transgressions.

The Political Subjectification of the Arts Community

During Singapore Art ’95, an exhibition of local artworks, Tang Da Wu staged a performance intervention that was addressed to a sole-audience member, then President Ong Teng Cheong. He wore a black jacket which featured the slogan ‘Don’t give money to the arts’ plastered on the back, and gave a note to the president that reads ‘I am an artist. I am important’. Tang wished to, but was prevented from speaking to the president about those issues. Was Tang’s intervention a display of Performance Art for the president? We could perhaps come to a conclusion that Tang’s actions are performative towards the inclusion of the artistic community within Singapore’s wider community. However, with the controversies of Forum Theatre and Performance Art still fresh in people’s memories, as hinted on Tang’s jacket, there remains a certain excess, in defining the liberties of an artist. He envisions a community of artists which stands apart from the social order through its dissensual capacities, yet relentlessly verifying its purpose by calling for its inclusiveness within society.

Tang Da Wu’s Don’t Give Money to the Arts (1995)

During the controversies of ‘93-94, the arts community came together for an informal meeting to address such matters. Stella Kon, a playwright, suggested that the community should actively participate in fighting for their rights as artists, and of art’s relation to society, by mobilising themselves as a visible community by publishing a full page advertisement in the Straits Times to protest the consensual attitudes held against art (Wee, March 19, 2010, par. 3). However, this task was not accomplished in consideration that such a statement might make things harder for Josef Ng’s impending trial. Nevertheless, in such events, it is evident that the heterogeneous field that facilitates potential formations of political subjectivities underpins the formations of new sensible aesthetic configurations of a ‘part of no part’ that affirms its equality within the social order. By attempting to address a wrong and becoming visible in the public sphere, a certain political subjectivity is forged through their own imaginative capacity.

The Singapore ‘Artscommunity e-group’ is another initiative that facilitated a longer lasting sensible community of heterogeneous speech acts. It was set up in 1999 as a means for the community to dissemination ideas and conduct dialogue within a more democratic and self-regulated space enabled by the internet. Tan states that it is “a space where socially engaged artists, concerned citizens and activists could interact to share resources, collaborate on projects and thereby ‘build capacity’ of ‘the people sector’ in Singapore (Cited in Tan, O’Neil, & Davis, 2007, p. 281). Sure enough, the e-group became a hot bed of differing views and productive debate, a collectivisation of the arts community that resulted in countless projects and initiatives. It also functioned as ballast towards the enunciation of political subjectivities. For example, in 2009, discussions about having greater representation for the arts community in parliament led to an experiment in self-organised parliamentary elections in which three candidates contested against each other for the potential place of Nominated Members of the Parliament (NMP). One of the organisers, T. Sasitharan, asserted that the role of an Arts NMP would be to “increase the profile of artists […], the level of discourse of the arts,” and “pushing for accountability from the authorities particularly on censorship issues” (Cited in Zaini, May 4, 2009, par. 14). As a result of her successful application after winning the support from the arts community, Audrey Wong moved on from her role as Substation’s Artistic Co-Director to ‘Arts’ NMP.

Skeptical about the role of NMPs in initiating civic discourse, Chua observes that it attempts to delegitimise and substitute aggressive opposition with a more moderate capacity for disagreement within a prescribed political framework (1995, p. 209). An inclusive strategy that inserts an arts practitioner into the established coordinates of parliamentary politics might not be in line with Ranciere’s notion of politics in which the break or division is a defining characteristic. His idea is that the constitution of political subjects is based on the formation of collectives that “produces a multiple that was not given in the police constitution of the community, and “whose count poses itself as contradictory in terms of police logic” (1999, p. 36). As Hallward states, “Ranciere’s emphasis on division and interruption makes it difficult to account for qualities that are just as fundamental to any sustainable political sequence: organization, simplification, mobilization, decision, polarization, taking sides, and so forth” (2009, p. 155). However, what is important in this case is the self-organisation of the arts community in a bid to select their own representative who has close links and understanding of art production in Singapore. Through this process, it bypasses the proper channels in which NMPs are recommended for election, and the authority of NAC as a legitimate voice for the arts community.

Pandian states that Singapore “is one of the few countries in the world where the arts are (arguably) the only regular forum for political and social comment and analysis” (1997, p. 233). This is also the reason why the arts community are at the forefronts in experiencing the force of the censorship regime. There are many openings within artistic practice that confront and test the limits of censorship. Furthermore, there are forms of dissensus staged through events that strategically hides itself from police surveillance. However, issues of censorship, which are becoming more dispersed in its management in contrast to the visible controversies of ‘93-94, still limits aesthetic potential. Thus, it makes sense that the practice of dissensus must also be implemented with the field of cultural policy that determines the coordinates of the censorship regime. Within this node is the newly formed Arts Engage, which emerged from the Artscommunity e-group. Arts Engage are a network of individuals from the arts community that got together to engage in cultural policy debate. In light of the Censorship Review Committee midterm review in 2010, Arts Engage attempted to become involved in the decision making process through a series of discussions, focus groups, press interviews, limited discussions with CRC members, and most importantly a position paper that was submitted to CRC and made available to the public. Arts Engage’s position is ‘Censorship isn’t working: regulate instead’. In the paper, various faults of censorship and benefits of regulation are discussed. However, the strength of their contestation lies in the significance of their one recommendation, “Replace the current system by one where there is a clear separation of regulation and censorship” (Arts Engage, 2010, p. 8). The Media Development Authority’s stance is that they have moved on from censorship to classification and co-regulation (Huang, 2010, Aug 7, par. 3). However, co-regulation is a code word which functions as a veil over more dispersed forms of censorship, as evident by the list of censorship cases in the paper, that are implement through a bureaucratic network of governmental agencies including statutory boards that manage arts infrastructure such as The Esplanade, Art House etc. In untangling this ideological term, Arts Engage aims to destabilise the habitual executions of censorship by rendering sensible and visible such acts of repression.

As the voice of ‘anti-censorship’ advocacy, the arts community is positioned within the frontlines, thus enabling them to experience the regime’s effects in all its force. It is a dissensual community insofar as it disidentifies itself from the factual community in which censorship issues are legitimately reviewed through a specialised body. However, they also move on from a political subjectivity that represents the arts community and its specific rights in expression. They reject the idea that they “represent a ‘vocal minority’ at the ‘liberitarian’ end of the spectrum” and position themselves as “a diverse group of individuals” representative of citizenry (Arts Engage, 2010, p. 3). The excess that declassifies its policed role in society is reconstituted as the concern of all citizens that suffer from the unequal distribution of information and a lack of capacity to think for themselves. Its position and facilitation of a platform for any concerned person to participate in discourse is rooted within the ideal of generating capacity for the practice of democracy through the imagining of a community of equals.

There is the question of whether such a strategy that engages with police logic is able to facilitate any substantial changes in the censorship. Ranciere does not see a a police order as an eternally rigid form of consensus. Rather, the police “can produce all sorts of good, and one kind of police may be infinitely preferable to another” (1999, p. 31).  A better police order is one “that all the breaking and entering perpetrated by egalitarian logic has most jolted out its ‘natural’ logic”. (ibid). This it is a matter of receptivity in which an institution sheds the coordinates of its imposed order and transforms itself through its interaction with dissensual voices. There is a certain fatalistic limitation in Arts Engage’s communicative framework with CDC, and it remains to be seen what is the result of this engagement. Yet, it remains as a crucial strategy that is to be tested, and it is heartening that Arts Engage plunges into the process without any form of ressentiment. Holloway states that resistance and insurrection are tied to each other because every act of resistance is also a “movement of power-to’ that ‘create[s] the sort of social relationships which are desired” (2005, p. 153). Thus, the platform that Art Engage enabled to generate capacities to combat censorship can be envisioned as an example of meaningful engagement. The contestation for a more autonomous artistic practice is reframed as a maturation of the citizenry, in which a community claims their agency and right to navigate and evaluate ‘problematic’ cultural material without the government’s paternal regulation.

In this paper, I sketched various configurations of art and its politics in Singapore. Starting with the early social-realist tradition of woodblock prints and Chinese theatre, I explained how their content-based commitment to art’s social and political function is rooted in a content-based commitment, and informed by the leftist cultural politics of Communism. In analysing the ideological differences between the Equator Art Society and Modern Art Society, I explained how it illustrates the contradiction between artistic autonomy and art becoming life, and sustains the politics of the aesthetic regime. In Kuo Pao Kun’s reflections in confinement, and his emphasis on allegory and paradox in his post-detention period, I located a crucial movement in which Kuo detaches art from becoming subsumed within specific forms of politics. Cutting right through to the fundamental contradiction of the aesthetic regime, he arises with a new sense of artistic autonomy that gains its potential from the democratic nature of the ordinary and everyday. His emphasis on  the nomadic logic of ‘cultural orphans’ illustrates how the precarious rhizomic passage in-between specific points enables an aesthetically determined free play, in which the ability to sense the ‘other’ or particular ultimately determines the transformation and redistribution of our pre-existing ideas of our surroundings. It is in this sense that Kuo affirms that art “has always been a provocation, a rethinking of a reality you have accepted without question” (Cited in Necessary Stage, 2001, p. 98). I have also mapped the interactions between the dissensus posed by artistic practice and the government’s management of consensus through the hard and soft powers of the ISA and cultural policy respectively. I explained how the government’s paranoia of an indeterminate artistic practice resulted in the subsequent delegitimisation of the democratic participatory dynamics of Forum Theatre and the unpredictable freeing of bodily expressions in Performance Art. Lastly, I discussed how the arts community subjectified itself into a political collective to stage a dissensus against the regime of censorship.

Each configuration of art poses its own form of politics, and differences seem to stem from the contradictory nature of the aesthetic regime. Nevertheless, it is evident within all this instances, that art does not hold any assumption of intelligence or superior knowledge, but arises from a critical attitude, an exilic drive that rejects particular form of consensus and stirs towards new arrangements of sensible experience. Ranciere’s emphasis that politics function within the realm of sensory experience ultimately opens up the aesthetics of art to a wider conception of  a politics of sensation and perception that encompasses diverse practices on a spectacular as well as everyday level. And it is through this perceptive membrane in which what official discourse has designated as noise can be reconstituted as a political disruption in its assertion of equality.

In the current adoption of the creative industries model within Singaporean arts and cultural policy, the ethical commonality of nationality is reworked into a new Asian identity in which shared communitarian values prevents the creative worker from developing political subjectivities.[12] There is greater capacity for creative artistic practice as the arts community is given greater support under the creative industries rationale. However, the government’s micro-management of this transition proves to be a strategically thought-over plan than retains the cohesion of a state-sanctioned brand of nationalism while integrating into the global economic and cultural field. Boundary markers and more ephemeral forms of censorship still exist despite the government’s push for greater creativity. Art forms that explicitly enable audiences to think critically about the dominant order in Singapore are discriminated upon if it contradicts the ruling party. In general, in order for art to be critical within the creative industries, it still has to be relatively discreet, indirect, albeit like a simulation of political agency. In order to sustain its operation, political art will always be operating, directly or indirectly, in relation to the police. On the other hand, the police will always instil boundaries to safeguard the transition from the affects of political art to the formation of political subjectivities. Nevertheless, the uncertain passage from artistic political intentions and political subjectification is a heterogeneous space in itself. The precarity of such transitions makes it hard for the police to map its movements. The politics of art alerts us to the radical fluidity of sensation, resists the paralysing shroud of apathy, and ultimately, ushers in the possibility of political subjectivisations and the practice of democracy.

While the nation celebrated its 45^th year of independence at the national day parade in 2010, a group of artists got together in an exhibition called Singapore Survey 2010: Beyond LKY’ to imagine what the future would be like after the death of Lee Kuan Yew, our Minister Mentor who is the most potent and consistent figuration of Singapore’s governmental history. In highlighting his mortality, Beyond LKY postulates that the existing police order, as all assemblages, are constructed historically and ultimately rests upon an underlying fragility. The exhibited artworks posed and enabled a variety of sensible entrances towards the imagination of a future community. Tang Da Wu’s ‘Same Same And No Difference Between Unity and Self-Destruction’, is an assemblage of hammers nailed together into an complex structure. It is possible to view the structure as a representation of the realities of the existing police order, in which each individual component is forced haphazardly into place. Yet the resulting structure does not fit into an organic whole, but is more of an asymmetrical compound with multiple fissures. When apprehended by the fragility of this structure, which seems too brittle for tactile involvement, one begins to imagine what would happen when it eventually decomposes. What then happens to each individual component? Possibilities multiply in this instance. Perhaps, with recollection of the various forms of politics posed within the history of Singapore art, and an active and imaginative recollection of its series of failures within the specificity of the present, an imagination of the future will be more fertile.

Tang Da Wu’s Same Same And No Difference Between Unity and Self-Destruction (2010)

[1] The 1989 Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts is often taken as the blueprint for cultural and arts policy in Singapore (Kong, 2000, p. 414). The report resulted the formation of the National Arts Council and other arts infrastructure which increased the visibility and practice of arts in Singapore. This was followed by the 2000 Renaissance City Report which aims to “establish Singapore as a global arts city” that is “conducive to creative and knowledge-based industries and talent” (MITA, 2000, p. 4).

[2] It is useful to look at Ranciere’s analysis of Joseph Jacotot’s anti-pedagogical methodology in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991). Ranciere observes that Jacotot rejected the top-down transmission of knowledge from teacher to student. Rejecting any claim to mastery, Jacotot insisted that knowledge is gained through the student’s inherent capacity to form their own narratives through the art of observation. Thus, emancipation through knowledge is recast as a practice of equality among individuals.

[3] The previous two regimes are defined by ethics and representation. The ethical regime has its roots with Plato’s republic. It is firstly a distribution of a sensible, not within the specificity of an art work, but in relation to its ethos of the community, which defines true art apart from simulacra. It is within this desire to “constitute his Republic as the organic life of the community” that Plato excluded artists from the act of assembly because they “have time for nothing but their work” (Ranciere, 2004, p. 24-26). Thus, the consensual hold of the Republic prohibits the artist’s voice to be heard and understood as speech. Secondly, we have the representative regime that rose from Aristotle’s critique of Plato. Within this regime, art is understood as an imitation that is not subjected to the utilitarianism and morality of the ethical regime. Art begin to develop its own form of language that constitutes itself as a hierarchy of genre and subject matter, the principle of appropriateness in which modes of expression are adapted into the represented subject and genre, and the power of the speech-act over the visual. These two regimes are not limited to its historical constitution but still overlap into the present.

[4] Ranciere derives his idea of the aesthetic regime from Shiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, in which the ‘free appearance’ of a Greek status, results in a ‘free play’ that “suspends the ordinary connections not only between appearance and reality, but also between form and matter, activity and passivity, understanding and sensibility” (Ranciere, 2009, p. 30)

[5] The People’s Action Party is the leading political party that was formed in 1954. They have been Singapore’s ruling political party since 1959.

[6] Lim notes that with the influence of the Modern Art Society and gradual demise of the woodblock print movement, the simple design elements of woodblock prints that is suitable for printing in popular mediums such as newspapers, thus making them more communicative with the masses, gave way to the institutionalisation of art, in relation to the wider palette and formalities of modern abstraction, within the confines of museums and galleries. (2004, p. 39).

[7] The other party was the Barisan Sosialis, which was formed in 1961 by leftist members of the PAP who were dismissed by Lee Kuan Yew. There is no clear link between Kuo Pao Kun’s practice with Barisan Sosialis. However, there are also theatre practitioners that aligned themselves the the party and and the Barisan Socialis. This resulted in the staging of large scale political motivated theatre.

[8] The Deleuzian idea of a rhizome is a useful way to reposition the emancipatory affects of art that does not have a place in Yeo’s garden of the arts. Deleuze states that, in contrast to embryos and trees that “develop according to their genetic preformation or their structural reorganizations,” there is the rhizome that is figurised through the weed that grows between cultivated spaces” (2006, p. 23). Based on “principles of connection and heterogeneity”, a rhizome “ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relevant to the arts, sciences, and social struggles” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 7). the rhizome/weed can be understood as a figuration of Ranciere’s politics of aesthetics in relation to its potential for cutting through and establishing relations between and outside pre-existing regimes of identifications.

[9] Prominent productions by Third Stage include Corabella, which critiqued PAP’s genetics oriented childbirth policy which benefits graduates, and Esperanza, which attempted to give a voice and reflect the working and living conditions of Filipino maids.

[10] Boal created Forum Theatre as a response to an earlier situation in which an agit-prop play he staged in Sao Paulo resulted in the audiences inviting Boal and his company to join them in an attack on land owners (Cohen-Cruz & Shutzman, 2006, p. 3). Feeling ashamed that he imposed a particular action that he himself had no intention of fulfilling, Boal created Forum Theatre as a means to position the multiple subjectivities inherent in the audience as a means for a more spontaneous emergence of action that is fuelled by the audience’s desires.

[11] The Censorship Review Committee Report in 2003 urged the government to bring back funding support for both art forms, and insisted that they were not banned or censored to begin with (Cited in Davis, 2004, p. 300). Davis remains sceptical about this public display of relegitimisation, asserting that censorship continues to operate implicitly out of public view through NAC and the  Media Development Authority; while subjugated to censorship requirements and requests, art groups are reluctant to discuss such issues out of the fear of losing government funding (ibid, p, 301).

[12] In light of globalised informational flows, technological advancement, and economical competition, the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts (MICA) initiated the Creative Industries Development Strategy (CIDS). It is envisioned that the propagation of creativity will engender a healthy transformation and rejuvenation of Singapore’s capitalistic economy, a switch from one-dimensionality to multi-dimensionality that is essential for continuous growth. Through the products of Singapore’s creative clusters, Singapore “mobilize[s] New Asia as a strategy of branding and a form of cultural capital” that is significant from other creative industries “because it incorporates the ideology of Asian values” and positions accumulated cultural capital “as an economic strategy of regional dominance” (Yue, 2006, p. 21).  Difference is contained and absorbed within the New Asian creative economy through “the active citizenship of communitarianism” and “through communitarianism embodied as New Asian capitalist materialism” (ibid, p. 24). Creative workers are allowed to harbour particular belief systems as long as it remains private and that they remain within their designated roles as creative workers. The homogenising effect of the New Asia rhetoric prevents these workers from forming political subjectivities and claiming their equal rights within the community. PAP’s use of a heartlander/cosmopolitian dichotomy is a means of maintaining this new communitarian identity. Webb sums up this ideological strategy: “While the authorities realise that plenty of Singaporeans, dubbed ‘cosmopolitans’, are well travelled, well-educated and open-minded when it comes to new experiences, a large portion of the population- the ‘heartlanders’- remain conservative and resistant to avant-garde art house films or sensational art” (Webb, 10 Oct, 2002, p. 59). The silencing of art forms that challenge the dominant paradigm of a clean and orderly New Asian Singapore is often justified by a consideration for the heartland. Alfian states that “on issues such as censorship, the idea of the heartlander, this silent majority of conservatives, is summoned, and their reservations will be appropriated to extinguish any tentative sparks towards liberalization” (2001, p. 259). Thus, the government utilises the cosmopolitan/heartlander dichotomy, which is unstable in reality, as a basis of control, as and when the creative economy’s trajectory transgresses its set boundaries. As such it is a strategic distribution of the sensible that attempts to reterritorialise the emancipatory and democratic affects of the cosmopolitian drive into servitude of the economy. This is accomplished through a nostalgic resurrection of a mythical state of a pastoral Asian community.

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