It’s been a week and I am only just recovered from unhealth. Still, I was around the Central Market Annexe over the weekend, ostensibly to help give away free copies of the Kakiscript Playwriting Competition-birthed “10 x 10: 100 Minutes to Change the World” — but I suppose I couldn’t really keep away, what with the books and art and Farish Noor’s pec-hugging, neon-orange T-shirt. There were also forums on media freedom and indierock, but bodies in breathlessly close promixity were anathema to my sniffling self.
Juliana and Juliet, hawking Kakiscript’s “10 x 10″ to young gentlemen; I blame the blurry photo on the flu
Due to interactions with diseased persons and generally unhealthy living, I was ill this weekend. So, a lazy post:
A few days back I had the privilege to peruse a friend’s bathroom reading materials; as I sat on her commode, I sifted through the magazines and books. Among them were a couple of photocopied pages, from “Letters to a Young Artist”, which appears to be a slim volume that nevertheless offers excellent advice. The following extracts are from a letter by African-American abstract artist Howardena Pindell:
One thing I would warn you about: Be careful of whom you let into your studio. i remember two artists who lived near each other and often visited each other’s studio. One had an earlier and better chance to show than the other and took her friend’s idea and showed it first. So you need to be very self-protective and shrewd.
One of the things that I find very helpful is this: If you open your studio or have a show and you get verbal or published criticism that is not positive, write it down oir talk it into a tap. I find that that gets it off my mind, as I do not need to bother remembering it because it is captured along with my reactions to it. Once you have distance from it, you can decide what is useful.
Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means “stereotyped and trite.” In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to play with tropes, not to make fun of them.
The wiki is called “TV Tropes” because that is where we started. Over the course of a few years, our scope has crept out to include other media. Tropes transcend television. They exist in life. Art in any form does its best to reflect life, so tropes show up everywhere. We want ‘em all.
Essentially, it’s a repository of general narrative trends in popular fiction (and sometimes beyond). It’s quite smart, under its rough, pop-wit exterior: “Theme Music Power Up” is another way of looking at how music punctuates and adds dramatic weight to a scene; “Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Realism” describes the tug of war between two types of polemics, wisely advising viewers to “look out for anyone saying that Silly Rabbit Idealism Is For Kids — you can tell a lot about where the show is on the scale depending on if the character who says is shown to be right or wrong.” Meanwhile, “TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life” is simultaneously a disclaimer and an affirmation that critical knowledge means newer, equally interesting ways of looking at stuff.
If you can get over the cheesily orchestral opening music, an intriguing (and one-and-a-half-hour-long) lecture by the “Marco Polo of neuroscience”, V S Ramachandran. He begins with: “The science of art — there’s already an oxymoron there. Most people think of art and science as completely antithetical, and it seems like a travesty to even ask, “Can there be scientific principles underlying art?”
The talk was delivered to the University of California’s San Diego campus in November 2000, so it’s old — but it’s good. It’s a meaty watch about synesthes, the biological principles behind aesthetics, and of how art (in this case, necessarily a narrow definition) manipulates the perception of visual information.
As for his initial proclamation, Rama is right: there’s still a whole lot of prejudice towards explaining artistic endeavour / response — or, as it may be, any sort of sentient activity — in mechanical terms. But why is knowing where our behaviour comes from a paltry thing? Surely there’d be better foundations for creation when we understand, at the basest levels, why we do what we do?
What makes this complaint particularly significant is that it comes not from the public, whom the museum might privately dismiss as benighted philistines, but from insiders … artist and critic Carol Diehl blogged about the “impenetrable prose from the Whitney Biennial.” As examples, she offered “random quotes” about individual artists and their work taken from the exhibition’s wall texts and catalog. Among the gems:
• “. . . invents puzzles out of nonsequiturs to seek congruence in seemingly incongruous situations, whether visual or spatial . . . inhabits those interstitial spaces between understanding and confusion.”
• “Bove’s ’settings’ draw on the style, and substance, of certain time-specific materials to resuscitate their referential possibilities, to pull them out of historical stasis and return them to active symbolic duty, where new adjacencies might reactivate latent meanings.”
Wha and wha?
Okay. Those two sentences are not completely incomprehensible, if you frown real hard; and taking any one line out of context is quite unfair (here is Carol Bove’s profile for the show). But it is a point well taken. Why do we have to frown in the first place?
(Criticism of the show is less turgid. The Wall Street Journal’s own review is a simple read because it is simplistic — but Peter Schjeldahl’s meditation rewards for little effort.)
After the Friday-night setup for the “Songs For A Shadow” launch, the Central Market Annexe’s Pang Khee Teik turned on the lights of the galleries next door — the ones that housed “The Painting Show”, a group exhibition with works by Hamir Soib, Phuan Thai Meng, and Gan Siong King. Hamir’s was predictably epic, and while Thai Meng’s works — photorealistic evidence of water theft, surreal (yet stylistically photorealist) landscapes of urban construction and decay — were the strongest, Gan’s were the most mischievous.
“Short” and “Long”
The works reproduced on the show catalogue’s cover are exemplary: “Long” is a painting of a piece of grained wood (called a kok chai, a carpentry implement typically wedged between two planks to stabilise and support them), 61 cm by 4.5 cm small, life-size dimensions for the tool; “Short” is 2.5 cm longer. Even with close inspection, Gan’s meticulous — and surely OCD-flavoured — attention to deatil mean that it’s a toss-up whether you realise they are actually paintings, instead of real kok chais.
You can predict which artist I, being a simple philistine easily amused by gimmicks, ended up talking about. More precisely, conversation questioned just how to categorise Gan’s seemingly photorealist paintings — “But it’s not really Photorealism,” Pang said. It isn’t: that attribute is defined as a “genre of painting based on making a painting of a photograph”, a post-Pop Art movement that employed photography as a catalyst to return meaning to images of the “real”, as opposed to abstract splatters and geometry.
Delivered without much comment. “Scoffsyrup”, by Ronnie Khoo — of Furniture (emo-pretty post-rock) and Ciplak (fire-breathing Puteri Umno-in-heels) — was used in James Lee’s grayscale “Before We Fall In Love Again”, the first and most solidly told feature in the director’s Love Trilogy (mysteriously vanished persons tend to give some narrative direction).
The question — “Will you still love me if I stop loving you?” — is straight from James’ film; the crafted, ponderous, frustrations-building-to-the-point-where-I-dream-of- shooting-my-wife melodrama is also a trademark. The music’s menacing and cynical. Ronnie’s slouch, however, is his own.
“Scoffsyrup” is a brilliant invention. I want to see it enter our vocabulary of emotional tags: “You’re too happy. You need a cure. How about some scoffsyrup?”
You probably know Aardman Animations for its Wallace and Gromit stop-motion clay animation films (did you know that the word “claymation” was registered as a trademark by pioneer Will Vinton? I didn’t). A lesser known (not by much, it did win the studio its first Oscar) but arguably funnier work is the “Creature Comforts” series, where real-life interviewees are brought to life (and commented on) by spliced their voices to clay animals: two sheep argue chicken-or-egg, a dog talking about how life for everyone is like a hamster’s on its wheel, and an amoeba expounds on “what’s it all about.”
The second episode of “Creature Comfort” ’s 2007 American version is about Art:
My favourite is the painting gorilla: “I love it, the fact that there’s an elephant at the zoo that paints. You know, is that art? No — you know why? The taught the elephant to put the brush in paint. Now the monkey that throws poo — he’s making art, cause he’s living his experience. ‘I don’t want to look at your ugly face, I’m going to throw poo at you.’ Now that’s art.”
Having arrived in Singapore on Friday morning, and left early the day after, I saw spell#7’s “National Language Class” with a moderate case of disorientation. The Esplanade itself was daunting: on previous visits I had not known it to be so full of people — not only show-goers, but shoppers and diners; it seemed as if the fancy establishments and gift-shops were the point, and that juxtaposition (a shopping mall-theatre?) unnerved me. A fool, I did not reserve a ticket for the night’s performance, thinking I could take my chances just by presenting myself at the box-office — thankfully, director Paul Rae alerted me to a seat that someone had canceled on at the last moment.
Entering the Theatre Studio, I sat next to a Caucasian fellow — who, five minutes into the show, asked me whether it had begun. The first half of “National Language Class” involved audience interaction; it was, for all intents and purposes, an evening class wherein we were taught Malay. Yeo Yann Yann was a Chinese schoolgirl: she spoke in Mandarin with us, and communicated her eagerness to learn. Noor Effendy Ibrahim, kindly and imperious, conversed in Malay; he was the girl’s — and our — teacher. Under his watchful eye, the audience introduced themselves to each other.
“Assalaammualaikum,” I said. “Nama saya Zedeck. Saya tinggal di Kuala Lumpur, dan saya orang Malaysia.” Haltingly, my bench-mate told me that he was Australian.
The rest of the audience was less perplexed. They related to the nattering Yann Yann — much of what she said passed me by, since I comprehend only the most rudimentary Mandarin — but this assurance did not last for long, hobbled as it was by disturbing revelations. There was some hesitation as the room formed a consensus as to what its national language was. (It wasn’t English, except for the lone Englishman in the theatre.) Having established that our guo yu was, indeed, Malay, the actress proclaimed: “Saya orang Malaya!”
What?
The more vocal contributors in room attempted to correct Yann Yann’s error. “Melayu la,” a young ethnic-Malay woman said — and she repeated the same thing, somewhat reproachfully, when Noor Effendy’s teacher introduced himself in the same way.
Jerome Kugan’s debut album, “Songs For A Shadow”, launches itself on April 12th. I’m helping out this Saturday, so I really shouldn’t say too much about the merits of Jerome’s music — apart from telling you that I care enough to be involved in some fashion.
Anyway, a video!
There are two more, of “This Excellent Love” (featuring goldfish) and “City of Mud” (featuring the contents of a suburban closet; the song is a new one not in the album). Don’t be too hard on us; these were thought up on the fly and under five hours.
