What is art? Thoughts after visiting the Biennale

I paid a visit to the Biennale contemporary ‘art’ exhibition at Old Kallang Airport today.

The inverted commas ask one question: what is art?

Is it a Florentine sculpture, eyes flashing and robes flowing from white marble? Or a foot-high pile of cardboard, one stacked poetically over the other?

From the perspective of a layman like myself, all I ask is that either and any piece be intuitive, accessible and born of skill; each a leg of a stable tripod.

The former artwork, boasting all three qualities and more, still props itself up in the spiritual home of classical art. In its contemporary hangar of Old Kallang Airport, the latter artwork is triply crippled, so full of obfuscation and laziness that it degrades both itself and its viewer.


Art: instinctive, not intellectual
First and foremost – whether it’s contemporary, classical, modern or layman – art needs to be visceral. Meaning, it should be understood proceeding from instinct rather than intellect.

Art should require no explanatory placard to be understood. It needs to be able to speak for itself. That is why a roomful of messy twine and old plywood is not art, it is an indulgent and ugly waste of materials and public consideration – no matter how hard the ‘artist’ or the curator claims that it “creates a physical and spatial experience”.

One of Imminent Departures' nebulous wood and string structures.

This faux-intellectualism is evident all over Old Kallang Airport, and none more so than in one Lisi Raskin’s so-called art piece . She and her curator may take equal blame for a write-up that claims the installations “radiate exponentially into their surrounding environment, creating spaces that become increasingly more ambient and abstract” and “parody systems of control”. Wtf? What do even the first two words mean?

And if that gobbledegook were not enough, it robs the heritage of Singapore’s first air hub by claiming it “draws from the historical and architectural elements of Old Kallang Airport to re-fabricate an idea of its past.”

The write-up ends with “...encouraging her viewers to formulate a variety of different cognitive and perceptual assertions.” I left the exhibit encouraged only to formulate a variety of insults for this foreigner (the Japanese have a good word for it: Gaijin, meaning ‘alien’) who misappropriates our built heritage for her ‘art’.

Art: Accessible
If an explanatory text is required, it needs to access the layman. The customer is always king; an artist must oblige the Man On the Street. The work’s title and explanatory text must bear simplicity and humility.

39 metronomes tick-tocking to a reason few can understand or care about.

It must tell viewers why they should care about, say, 39 metronomes in a row. It should not boast, like Martin Creed’s write-up of his cluelessly-titled , that he “overturns traditional hierarchies of medium, scale and rarity”, or that he “uses simple ordering structures to make equivalent variations of specific but very ordinary materials”. ...Are you joking??

Art is like journalism. It needs to describe, inform, and educate simply. Viewers of art, like readers of newspapers, do not care for fartin Martin's big words or irrelevant statements of intent. They want to know, simply, what significance his collection of retro tempo-keepers bears on them, their cultural milieu, their geography and their time.

I am no curator, but maybe it's better if that bunch kept it layman. If I may re-imagine Creed’s write-up: “This piece challenges notions of the function of tools. One metronome keeps musical tempo; 39 disrupt it. A line connotes orderliness; a line of non-uniform beats creates disorderliness. Disorder within order and order within disorder – our world in row of swinging pendulums.” Pass?

Art: Skill over concepts
If I look at the Statue of David and see the sculptor’s ability to conjure movement, courage and history from a block of stone, that is art. If I look at a stack of used cardboard and see a pile of trash, that is trash.

No amount of conceptual justification will change that.

Perhaps it is fitting that one Danh Vo called his cardboard stack installation – his reused trash does not deserve a name. It takes no skill to deprive a poor Bangkok tea vendor of his paper shelter and fly it to Singapore to stack it up as an art piece. But that is exactly what Vo did, even venturing to aggrandize them as “points in his personal constellations”. What the fuck are you, the sun?

My father tries to figure out what the 'F' is that.

Vo describes art as “about creating value”. How does he do this? By drawing each letter of the alphabet on one cardboard piece, leaving out the letter J for some artistic reason unexplained. This sickening egosim is symptomatic of a largely disappointing Biennale where self-indulgent obfuscation preceeds real talent.

A real artist would not cart some dirty cardboard around South East Asia and pass it off as a "fresh way of seeing the world". A real artist has to be defined by his visionary thought, meticulous preparation and innate physical skill.

He needs to inspire wonder; to draw bated breath; to make people think, “how did he do that!”

Of the few works that inspired such a reaction in me, one Michael Lee's caught my eye. He dreamed a compelling fictional story -- in simple English -- of an exotic journeyman architect, and went one better by himself constructing intricate models of dream-like urbanscapes his character designed.


Dreamscapes that inspire wonderment. Like!


Each sculpture is made of dozens of layers of cardboard intricately cut and positioned.


His work, , was intuitively understandable. The write-up was imaginative yet humble, and appealed to my a-long-time-ago-in-a-galaxy-far-far-away wonderment of the mysterious. And it certainly oozed skill and craft. Like that then is art la!







PS: I also thought the German Barn in the hangar installation was quite cool, until I read the write-up: that it was sited in a disused aircraft hangar to look out of place. Erm, am I missing something, or wouldn't any German barn outside of a farm in Germany would look out of place? And the Chinese poseurs in lederhosen look idiotic.