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.