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4 - The Address of Art and the Scale of Other Places
- Edited by Mike Douglass, Simone Shu-Yeng Chung
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- Book:
- Hard State, Soft City of Singapore
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 20 November 2020
- Print publication:
- 29 June 2020, pp 113-120
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Summary
Abstract
While the author has lived in Singapore for over 20 years, he has had a complicated relationship with the island city state. He did not receive permission from the authorities to enter Singapore and participate in the ‘Hard State, Soft City’ symposium in person and instead, presented an audio recording in absentia. These reflections consider the role of place in the practice of art criticism, as well as the contrast between contemporary art and digital culture.
Keywords: Singapore, art criticism, art writing, place, contemporary art
I have lived in Singapore for over 20 years but, as I explain in a note below, my official relationship with the country has not been straightforward, to say the least. It was especially disappointing for me that I could not attend the ‘Hard State, Soft City’ symposium at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore in March 2016. I am grateful that the organizers were still interested in receiving my contribution, and I decided to share a more personal essay than if I were to present at the symposium. What follows is an edited version of the text of the short audio recording that I sent to be played in lieu of a symposium paper. For this publication, I have included notes to provide more context for readers less familiar with Singapore and my writing.
Meanwhile, the topic of place has become especially important to me and my work as an art critic. Perhaps this was always the case, and it is only lately that I am coming to realize it. You could say that I became an art critic because of Singapore. It has been in and through this island city state that I worked out my ideas about art and writing. While I had visited Singapore many times in my youth, it was in 1992 that I moved here, at first with the intention of staying a few years. Then, somehow I kept staying, and somehow this place became what I might call home. Although, as my friends know, there have been obstacles and complications.
4 - McNationalism in Singapore
- from Part One - Local desire and global anxieties
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- By Lee Weng Choy, University of California
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- Book:
- House of Glass
- Published by:
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Published online:
- 21 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 23 July 2001, pp 95-116
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Summary
Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our “reality” itself … (Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology)
The camera loves Manhattan. Each gaze is an immediate infatuation — with the skyscrapers and their great shadows, with the way Central Park in June carves a giant green rectangle out of grey concrete, with the bricks of old brownstones, the bright big city lights. From chic uptown Madison Avenue to the dirty surrealism of the Lower East Side, from a Wall Street frenzy to a 42nd Street hustle, the camera has raced to catch every detail: to climb up to the Chrysler Building gargoyles, to recognize a famous face in the crowd, or to pity a homeless person sleeping in a sidewalk bed of newspapers and cardboard.
The first time I saw New York — not counting the time when I lived there as a toddler — I was overwhelmed like most everyone else is when he is in the presence of something so big. But my sense of awe had as much to do with having grown up in Manila on a diet of images from America. America was the “Other” for me, the central object of my imagination, fascination, and desire. That autumn day in 1981, as I wandered around Manhattan, things would seem familiar, although I had never actually seen them or could not possibly have remembered them from when my mother pushed me around in a stroller. The explanation for this déjà vu is that I must have seen the thing in question or something similar on television, in a movie or a picture. Even now when I visit the city, I have no grasp of the thing itself; everything is always mediated by a mythology of images. That, however, has not made me any less enchanted with the place.
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