WANTED: Someone to restore Arteri and give it 2nd life. Interested? Email: mail.sharonchin.com
I would like to take the opportunity to use my inaugural article on this site to put together an editorial of sorts, since I have very kindly been accepted as contributing editor for Arteri. This entry therefore is about a question. A question I have been trying to understand so I can posit it in a more sophisticated way.
I constantly think about the following: what is urgent and important to the Malaysian art scene, to Malaysian artists, to Malaysian art? And finally where is Malaysian contemporary art going? So although that is more than one question, it is nevertheless, what I have been asking myself as I try to insert my own voice and positioning here after returning to live and work in Malaysia as an independent curator. As a distant observer but one that is still invested in being Malaysian I hope to be able to find at least a few directions to lead me to….well….. at the moment, probably more questions but… that is a good thing I think.
In my research I have looked to both the past and present for some encouragement. Historical voices from Malaysia’s fathers of art history echo in the background in my thinking (of course they are always men), do they for others I wonder? Is there an engagement with this history or is it so under documented and one sided that it has little relevance to currently practicing (younger) artists? Perhaps for painters there is more to be inspired and guided by as this medium is still so popular and well supported? Conceptual artists have a much more difficult task when conducting research on their lineage which is scantily acknowledged in texts and local discourses (what are the local discourses by the way? I know what I am thinking but want to know more about what others are focusing on). Indeed are younger artists even interested in this type of academic research? It seems from my limited understanding there is little sustained engagement with Malaysia’s art historical past.
Following on another line of inquiry I thought about the following: gender politics, social/cultural identity both the post colonial and the contemporary post globalisation, economic meltdown we suffer from now, trends in aesthetics, diverse medium, socially engaged practice, art in the public realm, I mean the list is limitless. But this is where I began. And then I realised I was being way to macro about all of this and needed to go to the source and talk frankly, honestly with artists themselves. As a curator I can layer meaning on top of work, create my own personal discourse between artists and how they interweave in between socio-political events, the landscape of museums, galleries, artist run spaces etc (in fact I am doing research on this for an article please contact me if you want to talk). And I am very committed to my own curatorial practice. But it seems that we as contemporary art professionals, function very much in isolation, with little cross pollination, discussion, professional support and critical distance in terms of reviews, opinions, and programmes. So creating meaning is something that should be taken very seriously because there are so few doing it apart from artists themselves.
I firmly believe that as a curator I am NOT an artist, but someone that wants to support, challenge, produce and intelligently frame the practice of artists to create new dialogue and interpretation for different audiences. But in order to do that I want to know more….. What do artists need to feel more supported, what trends, issues, contradictions (both practical and theoretical) is the artworld grappling with? And how do we get all the pieces of puzzle to fit together to truly engage with audiences and each other? What do audiences want to see, what do they engage with?
As I thought, yet more questions emerge……
EM
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Artists in Malaysia are a lazy bunch. Most of them just want to hide in a cocoon and perpetuate the romantic idea of a hermetic artist working away in his studio. Now, if they were to have produced good works that’s another story.
Yo Rodeo,
Are you sure you meant to use the word lazy? If you did, then the following lines contradicts the meaning.
:/
Dear Eva,
Why is it necessary to speak of art in a national framework?
DC
Hi Daniel,
Do you think this is problematic? And can you clarify what you mean by national? I think frameworks and questioning frameworks, are important, however, flawed and simplistic they may seem, for critical over views.
E
Dear Eva,
Not a problem, just a question about your questions to know why is it necessary that you start your inqueries from within a national, meaning Malaysian, framework. By moving in this direction, I would presume that what is urgent and important to art in Malaysia, would most likely be traced to the needs of the country and its citizens, and less to what is desired by art itself or artists individually.
DC
This is indeed some food for thought. The reason why Arteri is taglined Contemporary Art in Malaysia and Southeast Asia, instead of Malaysian and Southeast Asian Contemporary is influenced by my understanding of the direction in which contemporary artists are heading – as well as the nature of contemporary art itself.
Increasingly connected through an immensely labyrinthine network of of residencies, biennales, online portals/network channels – it’s not so much a question whether national identity and its artistic culture is important, but whether we should also start looking at new frameworks to discuss about art practice in this region that is less context-heavy and more attuned to the languages of contemporary art that is a shared medium for translating local experiences to a global audience?
Should one be privileged over the other?
While I believe the model of reading art along nation-state boundary could be applied effectively to contemporary art of the previous decade and art history in the region before the 90s, I also feel it is a little dated (though not completely irrelevant) as a framework to think about what’s happening today, especially in conceptual practices.
When boundaries are dissolving, ‘fluidity’ and ‘contact’ are becoming the ‘it’ things to chatter endlessly about in biennale discussions… what I am interested in seeing in this new generation of artists are ways in which they can successfully contribute to a global discourse.
Of course the irony of all this globalisation is that artists are increasingly identified with their nationality, at times becoming token representatives in the tangled vast field of biennale circuits and what nots, especially those practicing outside of the well known centres of art.
Have nationality become merely a convenient marker? How useful or meaningful is it, other than being merely convenient???
:/
So Simon,
“what is urgent and important to the Malaysian art scene, to Malaysian artists, to Malaysian art? And finally where is Malaysian contemporary art going?”
You would rephrase the following questions by Eva as:
– what is urgent and important to the art scene IN Malaysia
– to artists living IN Malaysia
– to art IN Malaysia
– where is contemporary art IN Malaysia going?
In/for are just two letters but it sure makes a difference in world view huh :P ? Reminds me of the time Clinton asked the definition of “IS”…
At the UMNO assembly, I overheard the tail end of a speech by Najib on the radio where he shouts ‘demi Tuhan(God), bangsa(race), dan negara (country)’. Even in the Rukun Tetangga (National Pledge?), number one on the list is God. Thus I suspect that for a lot of the religious folks here, national issues will always have less of a priority than matters connected with god or race. In my view, this is probably because such connections bring them to a level of reality that are so much more powerful (the ALMIGHTY) and obvious (skin colour, costume). I believe that countries and constitutions are just too abstract and ‘new’ for most people from newly independent countries. Before we even have the chance to settle down onto this idea of the ‘Malaysian Malaysian’, technology is already allowing us to shift into globalistic tribes based on personality, lifestyle, passions etc.
At the VWFA Resource Library, it was necessary for me to physically sort the books according to country to suite the gallery’s tagline, but out here in life and the internet, looking from a nationalistic structure will be convenient system but not entirely necessary.
Simon, another question: what do you mean by ‘contemporary’? Will any artist who is alive today do? Or is it necessary that it brings something of new(?) or relavent(?) onto the scene?
@_<
“Is there an engagement with this history or is it so under documented and one sided that it has little relevance to currently practicing (younger) artists?”
I guess that one of the difficulties I have and have had with Malaysian ‘Art’, is its influences from the West. This applies directly to those ‘fathers’ of Malaysian art who did their art school training abroad, many in England.
It has taken the entire length of Malaysian art history, which in itself is about 60 years give or take, for an actual Malaysian art to start to emerge, rather than being a regurgitation of that art the founding fathers brought back from abroad.
This is rather harsh I know, but intentionally so.
Finally, amidst all the replication and stylistic posturing, Malaysia is grappling with its own identity, separate from, yet akin to, western art discourse.
In reply to Yusuf Martin’s statement, i believe that your reaction to ‘influences from the west’, while i understand and in some areas even sympathise, is not the the problem, but the way art and artists have dealt with it, that has contributed to the state of the arts. I suspect the ‘answer’ lies in the underlying sentiment betrayed in your statement ‘grappling with it’s own identity, separate from, yet akin to, western art discourse’ as if there is a point of departure, implying a place of arrival, betraying a mindset if not a reality, still with us, of an intellectual trajectory, started by “those ‘fathers’ of Malaysian ‘Art’ (that you are so dismissive ), ” that really is still a (mal)lingering post-coloniality and the need for ‘identity’ predicated on ‘national’ awareness, on all cultural fronts – Between an ontological yearning of a non-existent mythological past upon which to fashion an identity and a future, and a ‘lack’ created by post-coloniality, what we / you overlook, I believe, is that this very ‘grappling’ is our condition, this ‘replication and stylistic posturing’ at the root of our problematic, as symptom of the post-colonial hangover, is at once our weakness and (should be cultivated as ) our strength, because it is a condition that is inherent in the trauma of colonial fact, and one in which we cannot escape. So it is not to look beyond or outside of this fact, but to dive in further and celebrate the chimera slumbering there.
Our identity does not lie (in both sense of the word) in any projection, to some past or future ideal, but in the reflection of a cracked mirror, in the ‘imbriccated’ time and space of the post-colonial subject – forever diffracted, refracted, moving between ourselves and our broken image.
There is no identity, as there is no narrative destination for/of a particular identity, (unless you count that which is prescribed and subscribed by the instrument of political forces and institutions of government) Instead of posturing for an identity, as if we could pin it down, why not celebrate in what has elsewhere been termed as a/our ‘hybrid’ moment, and work with our fragments, splinters and all.
Any reaching out for a future ideal as subject and identity, is elusive, and we will forever be in a cultural eddy; our ‘bastard’ status, which is surfacing in some of the contemporary, generation of young artists, show promise for the future, not least aided by our borderless world of information technology and the attendant ideas and spaces it has created.
Where traditionally place was key to notions of identity, now it is time and space, and the de-centred subject, which is always where we have been; if only we had recognized this earlier, we could have been everywhere and arrived at nowhere, and that can be very liberating!
Oh..and of course, if I might add, so long as we don’t arrive at where Daniel is standing – in the breathing spaces of liberation, there is a difference between between air and ‘airy’ , and no, the ‘h’ is not dropped!
but that’s the problem isn’t it? the terms between air-ness and air-iness are up for debate. who doesn’t want a liberating space?
but on whose terms? no one wants to talk about that.
I agree with you Simon; and you yourself have therefore identified the ‘problem’, though I commend you in that, the questions you raise are calculated to promote discussions. Part of the reasons I believe, as to your point, of the ‘model of reading art along nation-state boundary’ as I am sure you know is the intractable ideas or lack of them, between policies in government art institutions, and education in generating and effectively promoting culture in this country, on par with the rest of the world. In fact I sincerely believe that if anything it/they have effectively served to reign in, if not repress cultural expressions. Without a critical/analytical culture in approaching art (education), and within I might add, an environment of revisionist history, how does one deal with notions of identity, that could be usefully and meaningfully utilized for any sort of trajectory for the global stage, assuming that it is an important, and particular stage of our history. All this within the problematic of a multi dimensional, multi-voiced and multi-racial community, where divisiveness has been the cultural mainstay.
I would go so far as to say that, these morally and spiritually violent institutionalisation of divisive cultural practices has contributed to a kind of ‘retreat’ even if only at the most hidden psychological levels, promoting the carving out of specific individual terrains, abstractedly connected to the polity, but divorced from the community; hence the fragmented voices and spaces within which we operate. That this obsessive concern for national identity is a response to the political entrenchment of nationalist government policies, is one which we are all aware off, but it is one that is difficult to leave behind, partly because I don’t think we have ever, if we ever will, ‘resolve’ it, on our own terms as artists / practitioners, and my suspicion is this failure to fulfill this void, creates a lingering effect, whose cure can only be found within the body itself, but more importantly, we should be using less the cure and more the disease, or we should walk and take in the air, from the narrow streets and alley ways of the city and urban sprawl to the dirt tracks that lead to jungle or the water’s edge, and finally, as some of us are doing now, take to the airwaves.
But as you have pointed out, the irony is, as we become more globalised and our old masters return under a new cosmopolitanism, we in turn return to a new ‘retreat’ ,( local, emperor’s new clothes?), but this time with the ‘unresolved’ problem still waiting to ambush us; we were late, although we were there first, earlier than most, at our post-colonial moment – we did not have the wherewithal, the vision nor the language to utilize it and move beyond our own entrenchment, imagining a history we never had, a community we never knew, a place we never re-covered, mythologizing the self with a broken compass, when we should have been pouring out our, bile, spleen and imbibe and feed on our own ‘sickness’ and our own ‘disease’.
But I do think and believe there is hope, however late we are, because sadly and triumphantly, we have to leave, as young Malaysian artists are looking out to the world, because ‘identity’ was a sickness their fathers could not overcome, and I hope they can see this time round that the father is dead, and his clothes are out there, and anyone can wear it, because the world is nearer.