Lam Yishan

I.
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Spring is a second beginning, a new year in the new year. In the language of symbols, it stands for rebirth, the revival of something dead or sleeping. In the world lived and seen, the sign of new buds emerging from winter tells of something stubborn in natural life: its will to survive. Perhaps that was what I was trying to capture when I took that picture of flowers while on a particularly magical walk through my university in the United States two springs ago. Flowers heralded the end of subzero temperatures, and the promise of the new.

However, T.S. Eliot’s epic poem, The Waste Land, upsets the whole thing — April, cruel? Winter, warm? Picking yourself up after a period of devastation can truly be a difficult thing. Spring, as Ella Fitzgerald famously sang, can really hang you up the most. It is in this context of a lovely and difficult season that I turn to the task at hand: guest editing the newly revamped Substation Magazine.

The year began on some sombre notes. First of all, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report spelt environmental disaster with the words: “we’re 90% sure it was us”. As if anyone had any doubts about humankind’s capacity to self-destruct. On another note, health workers and scientists race to develop a vaccine for bird flu, hoping to beat the moment if, or when, the virus mutates towards human-to-human transmission, the only factor which stands in the way of an all-out epidemic. Imbalances in the natural world (which we have known well before Shakespeare and feng shui, spell something dramatically wrong with everything) would mean rain in some places and droughts in others; an apocalypse of ill-fitted plenitudes and unknown schedules now growing ever closer.

Short of trying to sleep without air-conditioning, what else could I do in this scheme of things? Once again, nature really adds some perspective, doesn’t it?

On the more practicable front, Belief¹ had ended (there’s only so much of it in the world), and I was looking for another platform with which do something meaningful with this thing called art, while making this thing called a living. Trying to rise out of the embers of that finished paroxysm of 19 sites and 95 artists and countless late nights, I started toying with questions of art and audiences: how art content gets translated to the uninitiated, through practices such as curating, criticism, marketing, publicity, and most mystifying of buzzwords, education and outreach. Tough questions such as, how do people come to art? And, in the light of important stuff like (a) global environmental meltdown, and (b) personal financial crisis, why and what for?

As I like to think the example of Eliot writing the ur-text of modernist literature in the aftermath of WWII demonstrates, there is something compellingly recuperative about turning to writing, performance, song, visual art, etc., even when things elsewhere aren’t going too well.

II.
When you type in “substation” alphanumerically on your phone keypad in an SMS, the dictionary spells “starvation”.

Not that the folks who run the arts centre need reminding of the difficulties of raising money; a non-profit organization’s priorities don’t always align with that of funding bodies, whether state or private. Or that its artists should take pride starving for the sake of art — everyone needs to eat, you know.

I would like to think that the two words (substation, starvation) are diametrically opposed: The Substation has historically been an important public space in Singapore, its artistic mission being to serve as “an incubator for experimentation” and “to nurture local arts.” Its electronic avatar, The Substation Magazine, comes out of the commitment to engender a semblance of public life today, providing a space for debate and discussion (while it cannot be mistaken for its fact). Lots of things die in Singapore and pass away; drowned out by the instrumental rationality that eliminates certain activities and spaces on the basis of their non-production on economic terms. And so maybe The Substation should be the opposite of starvation, for some of those things. Think instead of the words survival, sustaining, supporting…

Technically, a substation is a subsidiary of a power station where voltage is transferred from high to low, or vice versa. In other words, where things power down, and power up again. As its physical transformation from power station to a “Home for the Arts” implies, in Singapore, sometimes you just want to be a little less Super and a little more Sub.² At the same time, it is a place for other kinds of circulation: of words, being traded in conferences, symposia and writing; of people, in the form of performers, audiences and passersby meeting and chatting in the lobby; of cultural objects, visual art in the gallery, film screenings, etc.

The Guest Editors were introduced this year together with some changes in direction, so as to “bring new voices to the magazine and diversify and widen our outreach”.³ I’m honored to have been invited to help usher in this spirit of operations, as well as to support the education and outreach imperatives The Substation is getting in the swing of. While outreach is the least profit-generating arm of an arts institution, it often is, at the same time, a major bedrock of its funding rhetoric, focusing on the young, school-going crowd, the general public and community surrounding the organization. Those, I guess, are the demographics of the promising.

So, this issue we feature the voices of Mark Wong, Darryl Wee and Simon Petre. Mark reviews and interviews the artists involved in Unwound, a performance by Ang Song Ming and Yeoh Yin Pin, two sound artists responding to the fruitful possibilities of limitation in art. The piece, a tribute to the guitar in its very absence, was part of this year’s M1 Singapore Fringe Festival, themed around Art & Disability. Perhaps, the laudatory aspect of the performance likens to a mode of celebration and creativity in a post-dystopian world where the guitar god is dead. Musical existentialism, if it could be called such. Nevertheless, Mark’s entry continues the space for sound criticism in The Substation Magazine, while his interview helps to demystify some of the obscurities around the concept of “sound art”. Besides stimulating more critical discourse on music in Singapore and Malaysia, Mark writes for music, film, books and the Internet, and is involved in electronic music and free jazz / Indian classical-inspired trio called Meteor Feather.

Darryl Wee takes a pedestrian tour of art and public spaces in Tokyo, during which he arrives at certain points of comparison between Singapore and his adoptive city for the past year. What ensues is a referentially sprawling narrative of observations that question the outcomes of urban renewal and development projects, the complicity between art and advertising, the elusiveness of a “Singaporean” authentic, and so forth. In short, Darryl means, in his own words, to “trash well-organized representations of space and get people to look closer at their spaces of representation”. Darryl graduated in French from Harvard last year and is currently teaching English in Japan, while maintaining a practice of writing about culture, architecture, consumption, urbanism and other stuff.

Urban development in Singapore, incidentally, has also moved out a sizeable community from its gathering space. I’m referring to the Filipino maids and foreign workers who have been bereft of their public sphere (and everyone of a green lung in shopping central, gasp) due to the constructions at Orchard Turn. Simon Petre turns his attention to some of our under-represented neighbours, with a review of the Migrant Voices’ Walk Into Their Lives project and exhibition. Intrigued by the web of relations around the production and reception of this example of “outsider art”, he goes on to discuss certain ethics of representation of others, and some of the unexpected slippages that can ensue. Simon is currently working towards a PhD in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, London, and spent the past year observing the art community and circuit in Singapore.

III.
For anything to endure, it has to cost something. Some of the best performers and artists are such because there is something perceptibly at risk for them in the midst of their creative acts; they simply put themselves out there, and in extremis.⁴

Mark 14 in the Bible tells a story of a sinful woman who came with an alabaster jar made of expensive perfume — worth more than a year’s wages — who broke the jar and poured the perfume on Jesus’s head. Those present balked at the gesture, rebuking her harshly for her extravagant and uncomely, if you will, perfumance. The jar and its contents could have been sold and the money given to the poor. In response, Jesus countered their protests with a comment that she had done “a beautiful thing”. And that wherever the Christian gospel — the word means “good news” — would be preached, this story would be told in memory of her.⁵

Many centuries ago, this live art-esque moment precipitated a performative statement guaranteeing its own circulation: the story would be told, and it does waft into current consciousness, making its way here via my retelling. Whatever you think about the story, I’ve always found it significant that the reason for its perpetuation was associated with beauty. Which seems hyperbolic, on one level, when compared to poverty. On the other, being a mere wage-earner, I’ve always been impressed by this expenditure of a year’s allowance, which, then again, is a pittance when compared to death. It’s easy to misunderstand why artists, administrators, etc., do what they do. Sometimes efforts spent may be considered a waste, or working non-profit oftentimes feels done in vain. But, referring back to the lasting power of a beautiful thing, how many have encountered this account of the woman’s gesture since?

April is springtime, and a similar sounding word, aperire, in Latin means to open: which is to initiate a kind of new space, or announce a new season. On that note, I hope you enjoy this issue of The Substation Magazine.

1. The theme of the Singapore Biennale 2006 exhibition, organized by the Singapore Biennale Secretariat at the National Arts Council. I was a part of the team. [↩]
2. “Learning to Live with the Tunnel”, by Lee Weng Choy, posted 22 February 2007. As Weng argues, in Singapore, efficiency needs to be viewed with some critical perspective. [↩]
3. from Lee, “Learning to Live with the Tunnel”. [↩]
4. I am thinking here of the likes of Tatsumi Hijikata, Kazuo Ohno, Chris Burden, Marina Abramovich, Tehching Hsieh, and so on. [↩]
5. The relevant sections of the passage read: “‘Leave her alone’, said Jesus. ‘Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me. She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial. I tell you the truth, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.’” [↩]