The 'J' confusion

Signs you may be stressed:

You get a txt saying that your friend's engagement is 15 JULY. On 16 JUNE, you panic because you think you have missed her engagement. So you call up a mutual friend and have hysterics about how you have ruined a friendship, are generally an evil uncaring forgetful ass,etc. He calmly tells you that it is in fact next month.

And then, you do it again:

It is 24 June (Sunday), somehow you have mistaken THIS week for NEXT week. So you call up your friend S. in a panic and apologize for not calling her yesterday for her birthday. She calmly tells you that it is on 30 June, to which you say YES, 30 June was yesterday, to which she assures you that IT IS NOT, it has in fact YET TO COME.

Sadly, you are not always saved at the last minute:

It is 22 June. You realize somewhere in the vague pits of your stunted mind that you MAY OR MAY NOT have been asked to give a presentation of your work. Yeessss, it's becoming clearer now that someone has indeed made such a request, and that the date was 23. But! June or July? You decide quite unequivocally it is July. The next day you get a furious txt demanding the slides for the presentation later in the night. PANIC. DIEEEEE LAAAAArrrr.

Theories?

1. Stress
2. My semi-evolved little oblongata cannot in fact deal with the subtle variations that differentiate 'June' and 'July'.



Go ahead. Make my day.

Old incisions

I'm not one for holding on to my past works - after the intense outpouring of passion and effort is over, I want to throw everything away and never look at it again. I feel no remorse in the cutting down of an installation that took days and 20 people to put up; months to prepare. This is not wise, I strongly advise against it - it leads to an unfortunate blase attitude about documentation, which in turn leads to agony once grant application and presentation time comes along. I'm ashamed to say the shocking state of my slides once reduced me to tears - twas' only a few hours left before the competition application closed, and I realized I would be judged on a couple of sorry, miserably dark little pieces of film. All the work I'd ever done before, that people had seen and touched - gone. You could say that LEARNED ME GOODE. I still love throwing things away, but at least now I spend a few painful hours making sure I've got passable photos.

But, you know, I wonder...

I looked again at the blog for Fourth World, which I havent' done in ages. It'd been the target of some odious spammer! (I knew those 38 comments were too good a number to be true) I felt I had let things decay somewhat, and as I deleted the spam it seemed I was clearing away a particularly obscene and putrid crust (bestiality fetiesh anyone? brother-sister incest orgy?) - and underneath there was my work, still strangely close and important, more important than all the others before or since. Not to say better, I think I've made better work since then (or so I hope!), just personally important somehow. It did my heart good to see it again, and to read L.'s essay - which remains the most generous, concise and accurate appraisal of anything I've done. Listen to a few passages:

'...the “Shores” series maps a longing for the world outside, a romance with the unknown. Recorded then on each strip of perspex and paper is the ebb and flow of desire.'

The generousity:

'The sails in The Fourth World are perpetually in the harbour because Chin is not searching for a utopia elsewhere; she embarks on a passage to the here and now.'

And the excruciating accuracy:

'Hoisted high, the sails seem as hopeful as prayer flags, but are more like flagging prayers.

...Desires may be trapped, but they breathe through perforations in the walls.'

Excruciating only to me of course, because it's as if one has been laid bare. But this is work from a different time, and I'm different now.

Still somewhat self-indulgent, however ^_^

A few lines of that Silverchair song are playing in my head almost constantly these days:

'Old incisions, refusing to stay... like the sun through the trees on a cloudy day...'

Here I beg your indulgence for this self-important post and leave you with images of Paper Shores (my Jolly Koh moment, heheh):

Mutual pluggage

UPDATE: I also made a mention on Pelukis Melukis! I feel the love, y'all. Betta's Fanbase/PR team: 2! Will we ever reach double digits? It doesn't matter.


I made a mention on Attack of the Pansies!!

Go theeerre noooooow. Be immersed in the glowing petri-dish ecology of young KL corporate life. This person is my pimp/Ah Long, operating under misguided belief that some day my art will become 'valuable'. Interest rate 0% over 10 years. Whose yore daddy?

00:15 Superstar review take 2

Here is the newly finished review for those of you whose interest lie in such things. I did indeed have to rewrite big chunks of it, due to a debilitating bout of self-censorship in my first attempt. I've been working hard on my habitual loquaciousness, keeping in mind the succint and precise writings of J.L. Borges and Paul Auster.

I left out a good deal, IMO. Warhol is one of my pet subjects - his ideas continue to be important today. But I wanted to add that he and the other pop artists never addressed how perceived ownership of images would come to represent a clash of civilizations - the sort of clash encapsulated in the controversy about caricatures of Prophet Mohammed published in a danish newspaper last year. To me, this is the next carriage in Warhol's train of thought - I'd like to see critics and artists leap on.

But art reviews are not about me. Well, sure they are, but at the end of the day I hold that my first responsibility is to the exhibition and the second is to the readers. I come in quite close to last on the list. I'm adverse to reviews that become a soapbox for some critic's unwritten Phd thesis. Almost adverse as I am to reviews that write about each artwork separately - with alot of description and visual analysis thrown in - that's first-year art history student stuff.

Right. *Claws retract*review begin:


Each year, in addition to the Rimbun Dahan Artist Residency, Hijjas Kasturi Associates sponsors Art for Nature, a charity exhibition in support of WWF. It features local (and occasionally one or two international) contemporary artists, each contributing work towards a specific theme.

Art for Nature has long been a highlight on the Malaysian art calendar. One of the reasons undoubtedly is that curator Laura Fan selects a theme each year that engages with contemporary issues. This lends topical focus to a show that, often with over 30 artists participating, also represents a comprehensive view of local contemporary art practice. Add in the feel-good factor of making, buying, selling and caring about art in the name of a good cause, and Art for Nature seems to be one of those events in which art both talks and walks the talk.

This year’s curatorial theme 00:15 Superstar takes its title and direction from pop artist Andy Warhol’s (1928 - 1987) infamous soundbite: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”. It also provides a fortuitous lens through which to reexamine the context surrounding Art for Nature as an exhibition with two separate agendas. On the one hand, it is a high-profile charity event attracting publicity for and due to the sale of artworks. On the other, as a curated exhibition of contemporary art, it is also meant to engage and challenge viewers’ perceptions.

The question is, how do these two agendas fit together, and what does this mean for the art-going public?

Let’s return to Warhol. Incidentally, the same week 00:15 Superstar opened, his 1963 work Green Car Crash from the Death and Disasters series sold at Christie’s for $71mill (RM 250mill), doubling its high estimate and smashing the previous record for a Warhol – a ‘mere’ $17mill (RM 58mill) for Mao, a portrait of China’s iconic leader. To say that his ideas about the influence of mass-produced imagery on all aspects of culture are more relevant than ever would be an understatement.

The fascinating thing about Warhol is that his works were never didactic, instead they are (and continue to be) self-prophetic. The Campbell’s Soup and Marilyn portraits are now so well-recognized that their image as artworks has become as trivial as the very images they’re made out of. The fact that they are also worth a mother-load of cash further supports his idea that all signs and images have become nothing but commodities – there to be manipulated and reproduced in countless ways.

00:15 Superstar is a hefty exhibition of 36 artworks from 33 artists. Some explore Warhol’s train of thought in the local context, such as the collages of Roslisham Ismail and Choy Chun Wei. Both artists use surface treatment of subject matter to reveal how the simple act of looking has lost its essential authenticity, hence value. Choy in particular reinvests this ‘bankruptcy of images’ into a dense new picture surface that reacquires (monetary and as well as other) value as an artwork.

Ahmad Fuad Osman takes these ideas further to question the relationship between celebrity, media and audience. His video Dreaming of Being a Somebody, Afraid of Being a Nobody consists of edited footage from the ‘contestants search’ segment of Akademi Fantasia, Malaysia’s version of American Idol. His cut reveals the staged nature of AF as a spectacle orchestrated by industry executives – a spectacle that poignantly (and rather hysterically) means so much to the contestants when they are finally informed of their success. Fuad’s use of ready-made footage with (apparently) minimal handling seems tediously deadpan, but this uncompromising lack of an ‘artistic signature’ takes away the comfort of viewing the 16min video as an artwork. Fuad’s work denies its audience a socially-inclined moral punch-line, and the viewer remains a shallow, passive consumer of media products, just as he or she does in real life.

In contrast, many artworks in 00:15 Superstar occupy a space in which images continue to be invested with cultural meaning and significance. For example, Bayu Utomo Rajjikin’s profile of a melancholic Malay warrior overlaid with Arabic text, Anurendra Jegadeva’s portrait of an Indian couple with a Hindu god between them, and Jalaini Abu Hassan’s prowling tiger in Harimau Malaya are meant to be read as far more than empty signifiers. These works sit incongruously beside those that question the value and meaning that we place in visual symbols.

It seems fait accompli to say that each artist has taken a different approach in 00:15 Superstar. Technically, all the artworks ‘fit in’ (not difficult as most works of visual art tend to consist of visual signifiers), but it is the uneven level of engagement with the curatorial theme that is the exhibition’s greatest weakness. For example, any but the most dogged viewer would be hard-pressed to draw connections between Wong Perng Fey’s abstract landscape Yellow and Umibaizurah Mahir’s lovely ceramics to questions about celebrity and mass media. This is not to suggest that works are in any way inferior because of this. But their inclusion inevitably diminishes both the intrinsic strengths of these individual artworks, as well as the conceptual strength of the exhibition.

Most of the works in 00:15 Superstar relate to the theme, but strangely, not to each other. In terms of being a coherent, challenging exhibition, the curatorial process needs to be more stringent. But one is also aware that Art for Nature is straddled between the need to be rigorously engaging on the one hand, and imminently marketable/saleable on the other. It is possible that one agenda can only be pushed at the sacrifice of the other. In a group show of this size, can a symbiotic relationship be formed between conceptual rigor and salability?

One speculates that the lack of the presence of public art institutions has led to exhibitions like Art for Nature (and other private institutions) taking on more of a role in providing engaging art experiences to the public, rather than focusing on the commercial business of art. Art for Nature could well have been an auction of established names in which the non-collecting art audience had little or no stake. Perhaps one of the few unforeseen positive spin-offs to having Balai (National Art Gallery) missing in action is the growing presence of ‘symbiont’ shows and spaces that are both commercial as well as audience-centric. This in turn might lead to the slow (oh ever so slow!) change in perception of what sort of art is considered saleable. Video art next to that painting in your house, anyone?


This review will be published in next month's (July 07) issue of Off The Edge.

Be your own pet***

Betta: Can we have a new cat? I'm going to call it Gandalf.

Parent (in word-of-god voice): No.

Betta: Oh, why not?

Parent: You're leaving soon and I'll be the one looking after it.

Betta (peevishly): You would come to love it in the end.

Debated wisdom/viability of hiding aforementioned cat in room. Decided that such actions (as well as above conversation) do not reflect mature adulthood, although this household sorely needs the cool aloofness of a haughty independent feline to balance the slavish dependecy of two geriatric dogs.

***Disclaimer - this post title is actually the cute-as-pie name of a real life band!

Did you take your dysentery tablets with you?

UPDATE: It's not everyday you find two posts with the word 'isthmus' in it! Spot the serendipity at Newty's lastest post!

Over the weekend, edified by our bourgeois and deeply satisfying continental breakfasts at La Bodega, me and a gentleman friend (GF) decided to make the most of a sunny day and drive out of town.

Port Dickson was decided on as the destination, being not too ambitious (only 1.5 hours drive), and next to the sea (good for land-locked KL-ites). It did my heart good to smell the sea air, but I'm sad to report there was a stench around the edges that wasn't there when I was a wee brat on family vacation.

How places denegerate and fall into disrepair! Worse than this was the overall sensation of pollution. If anywhere would benefit from one of those magic Captain Planet makeovers (where he sucks up all the trash and slime stuff with his superpowers) it's PD. I felt like one of those lost children who enjoys playing at a rubbish dump or exploring a sewer, only to contract the bloody flux the day after.

Walking along the shore, GF spotted a sort of island whose isthmus (this is the part which connects the island to the shore, like a little bridge of land. Cool word, do you say? It's courtesy of GF) was next to a drain that was spewing some grey liquid into the sea. GF expresses strong desire to explore island. Wanting to appear game, I follow, despite grave misgivings about stepping into muddy stream of god-knows-what that is coming out of the drain.

Island is magnificently ugly. After much coaxing from GF, I walk through mangrove roots and feel like Frodo in the Forbidden Forest.


But we come out the other side to some rocky outcrop and then we see a hawk! An honest-to-goodness wild hawk making slow, graceful circles in the free sky.


On the rocky outcrop is also this fascinating pile of... rubbish!


Such an artfully arranged pile it is that one wonders if some strange trash-worshipping pixies come here at night and make a party and special commemorative sculpture! Seriously, I have seen installations in artschool that could not compare to it. Notice that coconuts only line the periphery of the arrangement.

GF once again uses his smarts and guesses that each time the tide comes in, the island is submerged. And when the tide goes out, this pile of rubbish gets left behind always at the same spot on the island.

Fascinating! But all this talk about the island being submerged makes me nervous. We go back through the mangrove forest to discover that the water has indeed risen and the isthmus is now underwater! Shore now seems quite far away. Panic, but hike up shorts like a good un' and wade across slimy seawater, trying to not imagine germs that are inching their way through one's skin and into one's body. We make it okay, but this is how far it was! (Those are GF's sensible island-exploring shoes)


Afterwards my Frodo-mojo is worn out and GF takes me for drinks at a nice resort. More walking on beach and frivolous banter, a dubious dinner at some roadside gerai that makes GF sick in the stomach the next day.

Then we go home. I also fall sick (I think they will leave out Port Dickson on the Visit Malaysia 2007 list). But it was worth it! Even big girls need playtime. Thank you, GF. I leave you with this portrait of Betta as a Vietnamese boat refugee:

The self-censor's dilemma

Everytime I write a review I think I have overcome my old demon, but in actual fact it manifests in different forms, and I don't catch it until I'm about 800 words in and am wondering why the closing paragraph is so excruciatingly hard to come by. It occurs then that the 'review' is a sham and I must write it all again, which although will be a massively satisfying undertaking and will probably come out 'right', is also very time consuming and mentally exhausting. I don't know why I ignore my instincts until the very end, as if I can write one thing in my blog about a show and then another in a magazine. *Extreme self-vexation* As if in the attempt to rephrase and un-catty-fy 'empty exercise' and 'vaccous enterprise', some guilt complex kicks in and I go the other extreme to neuter any opinion I might have. Stupid stupid fear and stupid stupid need to be liked universally. Sometimes I see my 'invisible' teachers like Borges standing over me with a whipping stick and a look of complete disdain on their faces...

The grasshopper is still learning... >_<

"Like a god waking up inside me"

Bottom: from The Lake & Stars Spring/Summer 07

I was asked by someone intimate (who shall remain super secret) whether I'd blog about something women here don't really talk about openly, even within their close circle of friends. I shall do my best. And I shan't be coy, and shall come straight out and say what it is, that is, 'the clouds and the rain', I mean 'the lake and stars', but what I really mean to say is 'la petit mort' or 'the little death', rather it is about how I should say... orgasm, or coming (or 'cumming' according to some porn-lit) or female ejaculation.

There, that wasn't awkward at all, was it? Those other terms are not just my fanciful imagination, by the way. They really do exist.

Now I have stuck my silly neck so far out, I shall go back and try to retract it just an inch. I really must suppose that when I say 'women here don't talk about it', I'm making a gross generalization, and maybe there are groups of friends in KL (such is my millieu) who are able to discuss it openly - that is, having one, not having ever had one, not being able to have one, having one by oneself or with others, not knowing if one has had one, how to have one, and/or faking one.

Oh, all of us talk about sex and men all the time. Sometimes we even talk to men about sex. But that's more about sexual attraction, the dating game, how to hook up with someone, etc. In terms of sexual health? I don't know. In a group you'll always have one friend (if you're lucky) that you'll always feel comfortable going to regarding these questions, who won't judge you or become embarassingly awkward about things. Otherwise you pick it up from magazines or Sex and the City re-runs.

I find that in general there is a great deal of assumption that women out there are having orgasms left right and center, just because they have sex. It's not uncommon to think that if you really love someone the sex will be great and you'll have an orgasm. I think that this is a myth. I do think that if a man sets out give a woman an orgasm, instead of just assuming that she will get there in the course of the night (or not caring if she does or not) - it's pretty likely she'll have one. Of course it's always nice when mutual love is involved, but not essential.

Even the most experienced men, who know what to do in bed, aren't necessarily interested in giving pleasure to their partner in bed. And alot who are, just don't know where to start. I think all women (and men) are just waiting to be asked what they like. The best sex happens when there's some sort of back and forth dialogue (Don't worry, this is not Oprah. The dialogue is only minimally verbal, but hopefully extensively oral) - instead of silence and mutually repressed desires. But for this to work a woman has to know what actually DOES please her. I think it's alot to ask for a man to awaken this knowledge in oneself - is it even possible? So I'm all for self-exploration...that is, self-pleasure, that is what I mean to say is masturbation. Which is another thing we women don't talk about.

I do know that as a guy, if you're not sure if you've made her come, it's pretty likely she hasn't. The worse thing you could do is 'just keep on hoping for the best'. The next thing you know it's been five years and she's never had an orgasm with you. Not many relationships can withstand that sort of revelation. And if you do ever ask, and the answer is a 'no', don't feel crushed. It's not your fault, not really. But you could be the one to turn it into a 'yes'! (yes yes yes). The next worse thing you can do is blame her for not having an orgasm. It's not her fault either, most definitely. A woman's clitoris has twice the number of nerve fibres compared to a man's penis. If we go by the assumption that men with functioning penises can achieve orgasm, then so can women (perhaps twice as likely). It also makes sense that this should be the main area of your loving attention. If you care to make a little effort, she'll get you both where you want to be.

It's a proven fact that the majority of women can't come by normal penetrative sex alone. If you're a guy, the most gentle, self-empowering and ultimately fulfilling thing you can do while having sex with a woman is to quietly take her hand and put it on her own clitoris. Don't make demands or turn it into a test. You'll probably be surprized by what happens.

Here I will leave you with your dirty thoughts stirring. I remember an episode of Nip/Tuck where an african woman who went through genital mutilation asked the doctors to build her a clitoris. She'd never had an orgasm before, and when she finally did (self-delivered!) she said: "It was like a god waking up inside me".

Meowrrr II

So far I have only seen two worthwhile shows in KL this year:

1. Streetworks by Craig Walsh and Shawn Gladwell at VWFA
2. Tokitsumugi: kinetic sculptures by Masato Tanaka at Galeri Petronas

I also liked Ise's visual diary from his Gunnery residency. Does that count as a show? Oh well, go ahead, make it three then.

It's already JUNE. Eye and brain must. have. more. food.

Meowrrr

Caught in hell-fire writer's block with two reviews that were due... yes, my dears, yesterday. Sometimes I wonder at the trust editors and curators place in me: I hope none of them read this blog - they would discover that I am ever only one step away from complete nervous, creative and financial breakdown.

One of these shows is the annual WWF Art for Nature show at Rimbun Dahan, 00:15 Superstar. The other is Filtered at Wei-Ling Gallery. Both have interesting themes, I suppose - 00:15 Superstar is about celebrity, fame, all that jazz; Filtered has stuck its neck out and calls itself 'socio-political artworks from Malaysia's contemporary artists' - a move that is tantamount to shooting yourself in the foot anyway withOUT the help of a snarky reviewer, IMO. I sound jaded do I? Yes, alright. Frankly am sick in both head and heart with looking at exhibitions that group artworks together under some common theme without developing or addressing the issues of the theme itself. The extent of curating in this case seems to be picking this square shaped peg (artwork) to fit that square shaped hole (theme).

I guess 00:15 Superstar has a better excuse for being such an empty exercise - it's actually a charity exhibition where 50 percent of proceeds go in support of WWF. It's always a highlight on the Malaysian art calendar, but I've begun to feel that having a curatorial theme (which changes every year) might not be the best strategy both in terms of artistic interest or fund-raising. A show that aims to sell as many works as possible needs to have a sizeable portion of saleable, marketable work. Yet being a 'curated' exhibition raises expections that it will be a challenging one for the audience. This implies of course that challenging work is not saleable in Malaysia. That may or may not be so (an issue that I won't address here), but my point is more that one should stop looking at the annual WWF show as a source of new or challenging ideas. It is simply an event that groups related works by Malaysian artists together under some theme du jour in order to raise money for charity. What I'd like to see is something ostensibly facile like oh, say, Works in the Color Red as the curatorial premise. I'd venture that that would actually be more interesting than something apparently socially engaged.

Filtered however has no such excuse but engages in the same vaccuos enterprise. Actually both shows operate on nearly the exact same lines, except that point of Filtered is not make money for charity but for the gallery business.

On a positive note, I saw an artwork that I would actually give alot to own. This doesn't happen to me very often in KL. It was at Rimbun Dahan and is a painting by Yusof Majid called Larger Than Life. It's a huge work of a prima ballerina in the most appealingly fresh whites and pinks, with two tiny figures looking up at her. Description only does it disservice, as will photographs. The colors in this painting really hit my pleasure spot - just that perfect note of innocence, candy pink, and glamour. I noticed that it wasn't sold, which means that it's not inconceivable I should have it in my house one day in the remotest future. I didn't take a picture, but here's one of his others, just to give you an idea:

Yusof Majid, The Great Balloon Race