Singapore Biennale 2006: So, who’s afraid of contemporary art?

Contemporary art can transport a person into a place that is strange and familiar at the same time. It offers us new ways of looking at an old world. That’s how weirdly great art is supposed to be, anyway.

Hmmm, allow me to first explain contemporary art in terms of music. For music geeks saturated with by-the-numbers rock n’ roll and retroactive garage punk, eccentricity can be found in composers malcontented with traditional musical forms, musicians in love with revolutions.

Edgard Varese was responsible for Deserts, which includes tapes of factory and sawmill noises meant to be played back during the performance. Lou Reed released "Metal Machine Music" in 1975, as a "sonic companion to Anime Beta Ring, a chemical structure commonly found in LSD." It was a double album filled with feedback, drones and white noise – music that (with the right set of speakers) could cause the Antarctica to melt or for the Whore of Babylon to start weeping. Steve Reich used brainwaves and plug-in toys to generate music, and wired up skin to produce sound, while Terry Riley invented the time-lag accumulator tape-delay system used to create loops. (Riley was immortalized by Pete Townshend in The Who classic Baba O’Riley with that repetitive synthesizer riff.) John Cage wrote a controversial piece titled 4’33 , which is four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. (Cage philosophized about the piece: "I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry...")

In the same vein, Robert Rauschenberg created his ultra-minimalist "White Paintings" in 1951, during the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Just recently, there was an exhibit curated by Roberto Chabet at the West Gallery in Quezon City called "The Blank Show," featuring artworks that contemplated the concept of blankness, of absolute presence and absolute absence.

Ah, to view contemporary art. It can be compared to staring into the abyss and finding it both compelling and mystifying. Like putting Nietzsche and Slayer into the same conceptual blender and then quaffing the damn concoction.

Recently, the Singapore National Arts Council, in partnership with the National Heritage Board of Singapore, launched the Singapore Biennale 2006, the Lion City’s first-ever international biennale of contemporary visual art. (A more comprehensive article on the biennale will appear in The STAR’s Monday Arts & Culture section.)

The Singapore Biennale, which runs until Nov. 12, features 198 artworks by 95 artists and art collectives from 38 countries and regions. The curatorial team is headed by artistic director Fumio Nanjo, who was the commissioner for the Taipei Biennale in 1998 and the Japan Pavilion in the Venice Biennale in 1997. The members of his team are Roger McDonald, the deputy director of the Tokyo non-profit arts collective Arts Initiative Tokyo (AIT); independent curator Sharmini Pereira; and Eugene Tan, director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore.

Singapore Biennale 2006 general manager Low Kee Hong said in the press conference, "Contemporary art connects us with deeper layers of human existence. They allow us to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. To artists, let me say this: we may always not understand you, we may not always love you, but boy do we need you."

The thrust of the Singapore Biennale is to make contemporary art accessible and affordable to the common man. Recently, The Straits Times published an article giving readers a mini-primer on the Singapore Biennale. Here is my own darkly twisted take on that much-maligned, strangely-beautiful, often-misunderstood beast called contemporary art.

Installation Art

Installation art uses sculptural materials and other media to alter the way the audience experiences a particular space.

For the Singapore Biennale, Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama, a contemporary of Andy Warhol during the golden age of Pop, created the visually-arresting "Ascension of Polkadots on the Trees" along Orchard Road.

One moment, you are on your way to Borders or Takashimaya, and the next you are faced-to-faced with a hallucinogenic installation artwork that intrudes on the day-to-day commerce along Orchard Road.

Another Kusama piece is "Ladder to Heaven" at the Sri Krishnan Temple. This is so ingenious. The ladder is made of fiber-optic cables that run from the ceiling to the floor with mirrors attached above and below, reflecting illusory voids.

By the way, Kusama was obsessed with polka dots long before Damien Hirst started messing with his Spot Paintings. "Ascension of Polkadots" presents art as intervention on and revaluation of a specific space. No, no, those pink MMDA urinals along EDSA are not considered installation artworks. Even if they evoke Marcel Duchamp.

Ephemeral Art

To paraphrase Axl Rose, "Nothing last forever, and we all know art can change." This is the philosophy behind ephemeral art, which is made of material that decomposes or changes over time.

In a performance at Tanglin Camp in Singapore, Taiwanese artist Charwei Tsai inscribed a Buddhist sutra onto a block of fresh tofu in a piece titled "Tofu Mantra." No, no, the cake with the green icing left out in the rain in MacArthur Park doesn’t count as ephemeral art.

Text Art

Text art utilizes the written word solely to convey its point. Such is the power of the written word. British artist Tracey Emin came up with a piece called "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963-1995," a blue tent appliquéd with the names of all the people the artist slept with – sexual partners, relatives, even two aborted babies.

For the Singapore Biennale, American artist Jenny Holzer projected text onto the façade of the old Singapore city hall with cryptic messages such as "Moderation kills the spirit," "Men are not monogamous by nature," and "Using force to stop force is absurd," her commentary on "the makings of truth and power."

Something tells me we Filipinos could do remarkably well in this text art thing.

Video Art

Video art relies on moving pictures. This includes artworks shot on digital video cameras.

The most riveting video artwork I saw at the Singapore Biennale was Bigert & Bergström’s "The Last Supper," which is currently being shown at the Singapore National Museum. The main subject of the film is Brian Price, a former death row chef in the US who reconstructs one of the 200 "last suppers" he prepared during his stint at Huntsville State Prison in Texas. The documentary was shot in the States, Thailand, Japan, Kenya, South Africa, Sweden, and even the Philippines. A Muntinlupa chaplain has some interesting things to say about conversion and execution.

This is essential viewing. Especially the bits on the soiled undergarments with the names of executed men, as well as the "obituary onion rings."

Music videos could be considered artworks in their own right. Especially Nine Inch Nail’s Closer and Radiohead’s Just videos. As for Don Johnson or Bruce Willis music clips…

Site-Specific Art

Site-specific art, also known as environmental art, is created for a particular space.

We journalists visited Takashi Kuribayashi’s installations at the Hermés gallery along Orchard Road. The artist created a false pillar, duplicating the existing pillars on the third floor of the boutique, with a small secret chamber inside. Alert viewers reportedly spotted Kuribayashi’s signature seals (cavorting in Hermés suits, most probably).

Performance Art

Performance art involves a live performance in a designated space. It has four basic elements: "time, space, the performer’s body, and a relationship between performer and audience."

An artist who has elevated performance to the realm of legend is German conceptual art icon Joseph Beuys. His most famous performance piece is titled "How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare (1965)," in which Beuys walked around in a gallery with his face smeared with honey and gold, carrying a dead hare, explaining paintings to the deceased animal. A piece of absurdist theater, perhaps? Beuys explained his enterprise as an examination of "issues such as human and animal consciousness." Riveting, man.

For the Singapore Biennale, Hiroyuki Matsukage recreated his nihilistic "Echo" piece at the Tanglin Camp. On opening night, the artist threw glass bottles onto the gallery wall and created piles of shattered glass, which afterwards comprised an installation piece. In the process, the artist gets wounded by the bouncing glass shards, a bloody yet beautiful exercise.

Biotechnological Art

Biotechnological art is propelled by scientific principles, and is made of organic materials manipulated by the artist.

Eduardo Kac’s "Specimen of Secrecy about Marvelous Discoveries" at Tanglin Camp, which features microorganisms exposed to different amounts of light, is an example. No, no, the swampy things that used to be cheese mutating inside my refrigerator doesn’t qualify as biotechnological art.

Contemporary Art Matters

The Singapore Biennale has proven that contemporary art can be, in the words of National Arts Council CEO Lee Suan Hiang, "inspiring, thought-provoking and even fun." Yes, even if some of the artworks have that aura of impenetrability about it, and thus being prone to much misunderstanding.

No matter. Bob Dylan once asked, ""What’s wrong with being misunderstood, anyway?"

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For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja_ys@yahoo.com.