BOMB SCARE AT A LOCAL ART SHOW OPENING

The Straits Times, Prime News, November 7 2009
Reported by Tak San Chang

BOMB SCARE AT A LOCAL ART SHOW OPENING
A bag with bomb-like object found in the art gallery.

A bag containing a metal cylindrical object with timer was found in an undisclosed commercial art gallery located in the MICA Building. The black sling bag was found by the female staff of the gallery on 5 November 2009, at 6.05pm, just before the exhibition opening of a renowned local painter. The female gallery staff recounts her harrowing experience: “I was then really busy with the preparation of the opening as the Guest of Honour will be arriving soon. When I first noticed the bag, I thought it was left at the corner by the event photographer. Then I hear a loud ticking from the bag. When the photographer told me the bag wasn’t his I grew suspicious. I was reminded of the public message about ‘suspicious article’ I hear on the MRT everyday. But I could not believe I am the one to be caught in such a situation… some more not on MRT but in an art gallery. When I opened the bag and saw the bomb I screamed.”

According to the Investigating Officer, Staff Sergeant Tony Lim, the Arms and Explosives Unit has confirmed the object as a homemade analogue device that would not cause serious injuries or fatalities. Lim also highlighted “During the test, we found that huge quantity of black and gold enamel paints were contained in the shell with the other chemicals that would undergo explosive decomposition. It seems this amateurish device was made to splatter and splash paint in an explosive manner than to harm anyone.”

From an expired student ID card found in the bag, the police have identified Samuel Chen, Chinese Singaporean, aged 21, as the owner of the black sling bag. Graduated from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 2008, Chen is believed to be closely involved with the Arterr Orist, a cell group of the clandestine organization known as Black Baroque Interventionists. An ex-member of the organization, Clement Liang Jielun, aged 21, is currently helping the authorities to track down Chen who has been missing since.

The other items inside the bag include a sketch pad and a note book; books such as The Possessed by Dostoevsky and The Anthology of Black Baroque Poetry and Prose; some coins and miscellaneous receipts; stationary such as pencil pen and penknife and a can of Breda beer. The small sketchpad of figurative drawings and notebook of hardly legibly writings, contain comments on local contemporary art with repeated vehement criticism of the convenience of video art and Abstract Expressionism, the major American art movement from the mid 20th century. “Whenever I go to an opening of seemingly avant-garde art, or see the Abstract Expressionist drippings on canvas that has been repeated again and again for the last 50 years, and the kind of crowd at the opening, I feel nauseous and need to throw up. I think the loan shark runners execute time based paint dripping on my neighbour’s door better, with more intensity.”

In the notebook, besides detail notes, gathered from the internet, on how to make an explosive device, and list of exhibitions to sabotage during the exhibition opening, and local artists he hates – a few names were struck off the list. Strangely, the exhibition where the bomb was found is a figurative painting exhibition of an ex-social realist painter from the Equator Art Society, and was not on his exhibition or hate list.

Watching Time Pass (May, 2008)

...Time Indeed Passes, and We Pass with It. - Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

About three months ago, he began to realise his self-indulgence in procrastination. Upon realisation, he began to trace, as far back as his childhood, the many other time wasting habits he was susceptible to. After mentally drafting out a more or less complete inventory list of these tarrying activities, he somehow managed to identify the 'progenitor'. It must be the many idle afternoons and lazy mornings he spent staring at the mechanical clock on the wall in his bedroom.

Sometimes he spaced out with a blank stare, and became only aware after; sometimes his thoughts drift untamed, analogously from pointless recollection to restless anticipation and ridiculous imagination. But often, it is just the mere counting of the seconds and minutes gone by following the clock’s ticking.

It was during one of these sessions, as a kid, that he realised the irreversibility of time, experienced an overwhelming sense of devastating ruinousness, and thus, full of pessimism, viewed every moment of his growth, since birth, as decay. Despite the circular movement of the clock hands, made especially obvious by the seemingly disciplined and inexhaustible rotation of the second hand, the clockwise movement indicates temporal linearity, of Time as a one-way street. This experience is, in a way, an antipode to the devastation Nietzsche felt when he realised the notion of eternal recurrence. Perhaps it has to do with his mediocrity, or misunderstanding of the idea, but he could not grasp the apprehension of this German philosopher who eventually gone insane. He does not understand why one would forsake the return of the best moments just because it entails the return of the worst.

Time watching is indeed time wasting, even in other more practical circumstances. Two days ago, when he was early for an important appointment (and being early is a rather unusual experience for him) he checked his watch repeatedly... for the time to come. But yet, how meaningless it is to ease one's anxiety by looking forward to the clock striking the appointment time, when it does not affect the actual situation of the impending arrival. The arrival of the appointment time does not equal the arrival of the person... he thought to himself.

This unproductive pursuit does create a sense of guilt if not stupidity, and one perverse way to lessen this guilt or to console an idiot would be to find others with similar fault or indulgence (although he hardly felt any guilt now). Perhaps this is why he was quite consoled to discover this physically inert activity in the protagonist of a story by Raymond Queneau. A form of consolation similar to the assurance of finding other puzzled faces in class when a rather complex equation were being explained by the math teacher in an arid manner: an assurance of either his average mental capacity or mass stupidity.

…All he had left now was the very vacuity of time. Then he tried to see how time passed, an undertaking just as difficult as that of catching yourself falling asleep. Sitting at his cash desk he would watch the big clock above Meussieu Poucier’s shop, and follow the progress of the big hand. He would manage to see it jump once, twice, three times, and then he suddenly found it was a quarter of an hour later and the big hand had taken advantage of this to move without noticing it. Where had he been all that time? Sometimes he had been back in Madagascar, sometimes he had relived an episode from Flash Guy or Mandrake, his favourite heroes, sometimes he had merely re-eaten a meal or re-seen a film, more or less fragmentarily.

At the end of two months of application, he managed to register three jumps of the big hand, but he never got up to four, not remembering this occupation until much later, being then lost in a fun-jungle, or repeating to himself like a scratched record some conversation he had had with Housette, Virole, or one of his other neighbours. He couldn’t manage to make his mind a blank.

Raymond Queneau, The Sunday of Life (Le Dimanche de la vie), P. 113.

pomegranate

Of palate pleasure and death

not one pomegranate

but six crates of grenade

with greed and power

from the United Fruit Company.

Genres of Reality (2008) for Real Space Conceptual Space (ifa)

It would be simplistic to describe this exhibition as one that merely features photographs or photography. Our understanding of the term ‘photography’ creates an expectation to see photographs as either art, with technical application and formal aesthetic as prime concerns, or as a document of historical value, recognised for its high degree of neutrality and exactness. In the early history of photography, these two diacritical positions were demonstrated by the black and white prints of Alfred Stieglitz and Lewis Hine. Although both were New York-based photographers from the same era, Stieglitz once described his use of photography ‘as a distinctive medium of individual expression’, whereas for Hine, a pioneer of photojournalism, photography was an instrument for research, reportage and reflection of social reality.

Undeniably, the chief medium of these works, from the 1990s, by Susanne Brügger, Thomas Demand and Heidi Specker is photography. Nevertheless, without compromising their aesthetic concerns, the images exemplified the development of contemporary German photography towards application beyond its given framework. Within this expanded field questions and issues regarding reality, space, representation, and the roles of photography arise. In short, real space conceptual space is very much an exhibition of meta-photographs which, in place of theoretical discourse, examines the nature of photography through the practice itself.

The original title of this exhibition, in German, is realer raum bild raum. The word ‘bild’ could be literally translated as view, image, figure, or painting. Therefore, the title can also mean ‘pictorial space’. However, in the context of this exhibition, the usage of realer (which could be translated as real, physical or actual) and bild is neither a juxtaposition of pure binary opposites, untainted by one another, nor a regression to the old debates concerning the authenticity of photographs and high art. The curatorial theme has gone further to destabilise the fixed meanings of the two terms in order to allow an awareness of how reality, which could be written like fiction, is often like composed like a picture.

Of the many virtual and imaginary elements, one crucial point lies in our idea of reality itself. The curator for the exhibition, Ute Eskildsen states, ‘The starting point for the practice of photography is no longer necessarily the existing reality. We should not lament this development, for a glance at the history of photography shows clearly that reality, long assumed to be an essential basis, has always been merely a starting point for the expression of an idea.’ Yet, this claim of negating ‘existing reality’ to allow a shift of emphasis to the ‘expression of an idea’ should not be understood as an absolute negligence of ‘reality’ as a subject matter or artistic concern. This is because any idea which emerged from reality cannot be divorced from reality and this is obvious from the common subject of ‘public’ space (raum) in the works featured. Conversely, it should also be added how these pictures of the external world where the viewers and artists are situated, represent three distinctive stances that suggest how our worldviews (weltanschauung) are deeply ideological. In other words, it is of how our perception of reality, which emerges from reality itself, is an idea of reality but not reality itself.

Thomas Demand
In Thomas Demand’s Detail series, the window-sized C-prints are images of seemingly banal interior spaces that range from a sink with unwashed dishes to an office cubicle with an untidy table to a massage parlour. Upon closer observation, the little details in each image reveal to viewers that these spaces were in fact fabricated from cardboard. Firstly, the realisation of how this is not a representation of reality, but of a pseudoreality, relates one to Rene Magritte’s paintings that are often about such conceptual overlaps. In Demand’s case, this pictorial mis en abyme is manifold with implicit narrative structure. Each image is composed with reference to published photographs from the newspaper or archives. Constructed into three-dimensional objects and spaces from paper, but once again ‘flattened’ when presented as photograph, every picture is a polysemantic, indexical sign, open to multiple readings. For instance, the bathroom in Detail VII recalls a familiar day-to-day scene or a frame from an Alfred Hitcock film. And for viewers in Germany, it would easily be recognised as Demand’s reference to the controversial crime scene of a corpse in the tub photographed by a man who broke into a hotel room. Ironically, the photographer of the original picture, persecuted for his voyeurism, lack of respect for the deceased, and trespassing, was also the person who, few years later, helped provide an important clue to the police investigation with the photograph.


Susanne Brügger
By combining text and symbol with monochromatic archival photographs, Susanne Brügger’s Map Work embodies the discursive structure of scientific disciplines like criminology and anthropology. In these fields, photography plays an integral part in their systems of classification and analysis which discover or, from a more cynical perspective, ‘invent’ facts or truths. Despite adopting their form, her pseudo-scientific project parodies and critiques such discourses that Michel Foucault categorised as the secular ‘regimes of truth’. In this long-running series, her coupling of graphs, charts, maps, diagrams, or old, unidentified portrait photographs with scientific jargons, clichés from the media, or speech conventions in our social interaction, parallels the nostalgic musings of a pataphysician. The dissected aerial views of urban architectural spaces in Map Work XIV – On appropriation: the name of the view, or Gustav for short, highlights the inherent contradictions in how we experience spaces through inhabitation by contrast to their graphic representation. Reflecting the idea of how existence precedes essence, the work expounded how scale systems, when applied in studies such as cartography, geography and architecture aid the conception of distance or length, requires one’s prior experience of the space or site. Moreover, by appropriating such methods of measurement, she undermines the validity and reliability of the system, and reveals its subjective aspects.


Heidi Specker
As a contrast to the bird’s-eye view in Brügger’s pictures, the ink-jet prints of buildings from 1960s to 1970s by Heidi Specker are all bottom-up views of one in the midst of a concrete jungle. In spite of their formal differences in many other aspects, they share a common aim. Throughout her works, Specker demonstrates how the advents of digital photography and image manipulation software have rendered obsolete the notion of photography as a neutral medium. Not that manipulation of the photographic image before the digital revolution was impossible, but now, the extent and ease of executing it have resulted in a quantitative change that offers a qualitative impact. Some might argue these works are not a further development of photography. Instead, with its painterly traits, smudging the boundary between photography and painting, each picture evokes questions concerning painting as a genre defined by its medium, or hints at a return to the practice of painting in pictorial aesthetic. With their subtle colour gradations, simultaneously reminding one of old postcard pictures and watercolour paintings, Marshall McLuhan’s dictum on how ‘the medium is the message’ is therefore
revived.

* * * * *

In the essay On the Invention of the Photographic Meaning, the photographer-writer Allan Sekula mentioned how a Bushwoman, due to her ‘photographic illiteracy’, could not recognise her son in a photograph. This incident demonstrated how a photograph, operating within a symbolic framework, is not universal but to be read within particular logic and cultural context like a language. With the unprecedented popularity of photography as an artistic medium, and in an age of mobile phone cameras, this anecdote could, perhaps, point to those ‘illiterate’ or those unfamiliar to such concepts and applications of photography – with visual languages of stronger ontological implications – how it requires from one the effort and patience of learning a new language to comprehend and appreciate these alternate existences of what Fox Talbot called ‘the pencil of nature’.

“Courageous, untroubled, mocking, and violent — that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.”

Philosophy of Right ( (1821), translated by T. M. Knox, (1952)) p. 13

"When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." Philosophy of Right ( (1821), translated by T. M. Knox, (1952)) p. 13

en connaissance de cause: with full knowledge of the facts

Fortiter in re, suaviter in modo (Latin) "Resolute in execution, gentle in manner".

The Garden of Forking Paths (Original version)

The Garden of Forking Paths

In the midst of this perplexity, I received from Oxford the manuscript you have examined. I lingered, naturally, on the sentence: I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. Almost instantly, I understood: 'the garden of forking paths' was the chaotic novel; the phrase 'the various futures (not to all)' suggested to me the forking in time, not in space. A broad rereading of the work confirmed the theory. In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pên, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork. Here, then, is the explanation of the novel's contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger calls at his door; Fang resolves to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they can switch roles, they both can escape, they both can die, and so forth. In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings and repetitions. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend. The scenario could also double itself as in a mirror. If you will resign yourself to my incurable pronunciation, we shall read a few pages."
His face, within the vivid circle of the lamplight, was unquestionably that of an old man, but with something unalterable about it, even immortal. He read with slow precision three versions of the same epic chapter. In the first, an army marches to a battle across a lonely mountain; the horror of the rocks and shadows makes the men undervalue their lives and they gain an easy victory. In the second, the same army traverses a palace where a great festival is taking place; the resplendent battle seems to them a continuation of the celebration and they win the victory. In the third, the same army strategically raided and completely razed a village the enemy troops laid ambush; the heroic victory necessitates the cruelty of undervaluing the lives of the peasant folks. I listened with proper veneration to these ancient narratives, perhaps less admirable in themselves than the fact that they had been created by my blood and were being restored to me by a man of a remote empire, in the course of a desperate adventure, on a Western isle. I remember the last words, repeated in each version like a secret commandment: Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die.

The Garden of Forking Paths – Jorge Luis Borges (pp.26-27)

The Garden of Forking Paths – Jorge Luis Borges (pp.26-27) vertsub

[…]Naturally, there are several possible outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they can switch roles, they both can escape, they both can die, and so forth. In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings and repetitions. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend. The scenario could also double itself as in a mirror. If you will resign yourself to my incurable pronunciation, we shall read a few pages."

His face, within the vivid circle of the lamplight, was unquestionably that of an old man, but with something unalterable about it, even immortal. He read with slow precision three versions of the same epic chapter. In the first, an army marches to a battle across a lonely mountain; the horror of the rocks and shadows makes the men undervalue their lives and they gain an easy victory. In the second, the same army traverses a palace where a great festival is taking place; the resplendent battle seems to them a continuation of the celebration and they win the victory. In the third, the same army strategically raided and completely razed a village the enemy troops laid ambush; the heroic victory necessitates the cruelty of undervaluing the lives of the peasant folks. I listened with proper veneration to these ancient narratives, perhaps less admirable in themselves than the fact that they had been created by my blood and were being restored to me by a man of a remote empire, in the course of a desperate adventure, on a Western isle. I remember the last words, repeated in each version like a secret commandment: Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die.

The Garden of Forking Paths – Jorge Luis Borges (pp.26-27)

The working copy of the doctored excerpt, The Garden of Forking Paths, 2010, vertical submarine

Plagiarism is necessary...

‘Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps an author’s sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.’ (Lautréamont: 1978 [1868], p. 274)


Lautréamont, Comte de (1978 [1868/1870]) Maldoror and Poems, trans Paul Knight, London, UK: Penguin

Reading Slowly

‘It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading: – in the end I also write slowly. Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also to my taste – a malicious taste perhaps? – no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every son of man who is 'in a hurry'. [...] My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well! (Nietzsche: 1997 [1887], p.5)’

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1997 [1887]) Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Silence

‘One has to be responsible, as I have always said. One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one’s silences. I am responsible in every way. My silences are immaculate.’ (Bolaño: 2003, p.1)

Bolaño, Roberto (2003 [2000]) By Night In Chile, trans Chris Andrews, New York: New Directions

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1944) ‘La République du silence’

‘We were never more free [sic] than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. […] Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment. The circumstances, atrocious as they often were, finally made it possible for us to live, without pretense or false shame, the hectic and impossible existence that is known as the lot of man.[…] (Sartre, ed. Liebling; 1947, p. 498)’

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1944) ‘La République du silence’, published in The Republic of Silence, ed. A.J. Liebling (2003) Simon Publications and Situations, III:Lendermains de guerre (1949) Paris: Gallimard, pp. 11-12

Badiou, Alain (2009 [1982]) ‘The Indissoluble Salt of Truth (November 21, 1977)’, in Theory of Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels, Continuum: London, p.19

Under the name materialism we understand two perfectly contradictory theses. One states that there is the One, the other that the One precedes the Other, and thus that there is the Two.

‘There is the One’ is the monist thesis about being, for which ‘matter’ in reality is only the signifier. Every materialism posits the primitive unicity of being, with the implication that its intimate constitution requires only one name. Matter is this name.

It is only the non derivable nature of the One-of-being that is designated by this signifier of matter. One can illustrate this nominating power with a variety of scientific considerations to make it seem attractive and convincing: mass, electrons, atoms, waves, various particles, and so on.
Thus, if you want to name the name of the One, you instantly obtain the multiple


Badiou, Alain (2009 [1982]) ‘The Indissoluble Salt of Truth (November 21, 1977)’, in Theory of Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels, Continuum: London, p.190

in a middle of a room - E. E. Cummings

in a middle of a room
stands a suicide
sniffing a Paper rose
smiling to a self
"somewhere it is Spring and sometimes
people are in real:imagine
somewhere real flowers,
butI can't imagine real flowers for if Icould,
they would somehow
not Be real"(so he smiles
smiling)"but I will noteverywhere be real to
you in a moment"The is blond
with small hands"& everything is easier
than I had guessed everything would
be;even remembering the way who
looked at whom first,
anyhow dancing(a moon swims out of a cloud
a clock strikes midnight
a finger pulls a trigger
a bird flies into a mirror)

handicaps are the pet of my sympathy