Lee Weng Choy

Communicating what The Substation’s artistic direction is hasn’t been easy. We are different things to different people. To some, we’re a place for yoga or batik classes, and for others, it’s gigs by local bands. One weekend, we may be home for the burgeoning community of Singapore’s first-time filmmakers, the next, we’re a site for an international art conference, then later that same month, a couple of our associate artists might be collaborating on a performance. This diversity is one of our main strengths, but it has a downside. It makes it harder for the “general public” to comprehend who we are.

And unlike some of our friends, The Necessary Stage, TheatreWorks and spell#7, The Substation is less defined by the personalities of its artistic directors and top management. It’s impossible to think of TNS, et al. without also thinking of Alvin, Haresh, Keng Sen, Tay Tong, Paul and Kaylene. But The Substation without Pao Kun, Sasi, Audrey or yours truly? (I’ve lost track how many times people have come up to me to say they heard a rumour that I was leaving. Am I? Yes. Eventually. I won’t be at The Substation forever, even though I’m not planning on going away anytime soon.) The point is, The Substation isn’t something that I’ve ever felt in possession of. Audrey and I may feel, especially on our better days, in clear control of this thing, but we also feel it’s much bigger than the both of us. More than any other arts organisation in this town, The Substation is subject to the claims of so many constituencies.

If any personality should be most associated with this place, it’s obviously our founder, the late Kuo Pao Kun. As Audrey and I have noted a number of times — in press interviews and exhibition captions, even letters to some of our stakeholders — when Pao Kun left in 1995, he was adamant that his successors be completely free to run the place as they want to. He did not wish to cast his shadow on this space. So what was his artistic direction while at The Substation? What were his curatorial preferences? If you look at the stuff that was happening during his time, the early 1990s — wonderful stuff, some ground breaking interventions in local arts — what you’ll find is less a specific direction than a general open-ness to exploration. This isn’t to say that Pao Kun wasn’t deliberate and decisive, but in running The Substation, what he wanted was to create the space for artists to find out what they wanted to do, rather than pushing them into particular outcomes.

Pao Kun’s personality may no longer preside over the building, but The Substation wouldn’t be The Substation if it were unfaithful to his vision of an arts centre as first and foremost an open space for experimentation and exploration. There is another way of talking about this open-ness, and it’s to emphasise The Substation’s function as a public space. The “public” can be a very pedestrian notion, often made in reference to so-called average people; it’s certainly a less lofty idea than “free artistic expression”. But I want to stress how important publics are, and my own vision for The Substation is largely pinned on certain ideals of what a public is and can be. We use the term, “the general public”, rather casually. But let’s be precise here. How exactly does this thing called the “public” express itself? Very often in terms of individual voices, speaking in spaces claimed as public. I don’t believe the truth of “public opinion” can be obtained through surveys and other instruments of market research. The public should not be, as it is all too often conjured in Singapore and elsewhere, the manufactured consent of the masses. Ideally, the public thing, the res publica, is THE space for independent individual voices.

The title of this editorial, “public space for …”, is an incomplete phrase, a question that begs a reply — public space for what? I wonder what Audrey would say (with our busy schedules, she and I haven’t had the chance to discuss this text). And I wonder what my colleagues Malissa, Hatta and Cyril would offer as their answers (they’re the ones making the magazine happen). This editorial is not just a statement of our artistic direction. It’s a statement from an individual who makes claims on The Substation (strong claims, no doubt), an individual who wants to initiate a public dialogue with his colleagues (both those on The Substation payroll as well as those who are not) about what he believes this magazine, this particular public space is for.

In a word, I think it’s space for “intellectuals”. Maybe it’s odd that I should hesitate, ever so slightly, to say that. Those who know me would say I’m very comfortable in that role. But if ever there was a justifiably maligned group of people, it would be intellectuals. Noam Chomsky, an intellectual I admire, is well-known for his strident criticisms of the intellectuals of his own country, the US. Like him, I consider the term in its larger sense to encompass the administrative elite of society. In the US and in Singapore that would include numerous highly-paid journalists who are conspicuously anti-intellectual. Modern society is marked by this betrayal: the responsibility for the dumbing-down of the major media lies with the intellectual classes.

Then there are those persons who reek with self-appointed superiority, who may or may not assume the designation of intellectual. In a number of cases, that part of me that wishes he were a boxer in a past life wants to respond to them not with words, but otherwise. All this to say that I have no categorical allegiance to intellectuals, anymore than I have a universal liking for everything that is called art. (If it were up to me, there would be only one use for nuclear weapons, and that would be to destroy hideous public artworks.) Of course, some of my best friends are intellectuals. Some of them may not be the most articulate of people, they may also be awful at spelling and grammar, but there isn’t an artist whom I respect that I wouldn’t consider an intellectual. Just as there are innumerable kinds of artists, there are intellectuals of all stripes. What makes someone an intellectual is not formal education, but commitments and practices.

It should go without saying that life is complex, but there are whole industries whose purpose is to render the world reductively and simplistically. I’m referring not only to the cliché factories of Hollywood and MediaCorp, but also the schools that churn out student proposals laced with well-worn buzzwords — “my art is concerned with globalisation and identity, blah, blah, blah”. Some of the most dumbed-down depictions of the world derive from bad oppositions: simple versus complex; intellect versus emotion (there are valid oppositions, to be sure: like the honesty and intelligence that opposes the arrogance of power). A great abstract painting, such as Pollock’s Lavender Mist, is no less complex for being abstract than something like Velásquez’s Las Meninas. What could be more simple than drips and splashes, but Pollock’s canvases, no matter how many times I look at them, never fail to remind me of how expansive our sensory world is. What I want from art is for art to demand a lot from me. The best art provokes us to live more thoughtfully, to commit to complexity, nuance and clarity.

This online magazine is an “intellectual” space for reflecting about art, culture and society. The word should exclude no one willing to engage thoughtfully. But spaces are never neutral — no matter how open their custodians may want them to be — they always have a structure. I haven’t defined what an intellectual is, and won’t, just as I won’t define what an artist is; but an important part of what intellectuals do is shape our public spaces. The media and the university are two of the most obvious and important intellectual spaces. I’ve already insinuated how the owners and controllers of the world’s media are invested in making that space increasingly less and less intelligent. Chomsky, writing about the university in the late 1960s, lamented how intellectual life in America is becoming rarer outside the campus. The sad fact of the matter is that these days, intellectual life is becoming rare within the university as well. Moreover, universities have failed to be widely accessible public spaces — not just in terms of who gets to go there, but in terms of the role they play in society at large; they have become the training grounds for technocrats rather than thinkers.

Spaces always also have a location. Not too long ago, an international art magazine, to which I was a regular contributor, published a special issue where curators and artwriters chose three artists to write about. A number of those short texts started by claiming that “so-and-so is one of the most interesting artists from wherever”. The problem isn’t just that this is one of the worst ways to persuade a reader that the artist in question is actually interesting; what’s worse is the inadvertent implication that these artists are notable primarily because they represent their respective non-Western countries. The artists whom I’ve followed most closely over the years, regardless of where they’re from, are never interested in speaking FOR their countries or for any category of identity. Invariably, these artists’ or cultural workers’ relationships to location are complicated. Nonetheless, I don’t recall any of them ever apologising for the fact that they speak from specific situations. A critic once wrote about the “indignity of speaking for others”; it’s a good reminder to those of us who make a vocation of writing about art — to speak FROM, and OF, but not for the people who make art, or for the places where they live and work.

But speaking from and of specific places is not enough. There is also a universal imperative, which is to speak TO each other. A default that prevails, not only in Singapore, but throughout the artworld at large, is a well-meaning but flawed relativism. Relativism maintains that there are no non-subjective perspectives, and opposes the ideal of an objective history. This is another “bad” opposition. The real practical and ethical challenge of writing from a given place isn’t in trying to present the one true version of history, but in trying to speak truthfully from within a specific situation. Subjectivity is never an alibi for disengaging with this struggle for “truthfulness”. The problem with relativism is that it does not provide the grounds from which to debate difference. In contrast, an ethics, what I’ve suggested by the word “truthful”, is predicated on such an effort — these grounds may always only be provisional and situational, but for a specific moment in history, they are exemplary expressions of the commitment to speak to all others, not merely from where one speaks but across any difference. These grounds we endeavour to provide are our publics. Welcome to The Substation Magazine.

(originally posted 16 May 2005)