Lucy Davis
Editor, FOCAS

Speech at the launch of FOCAS 6: Regional Animalities, 15 July 2007.

Hello everybody, it’s so great to have such a full house; great that so many friends and supporters have turned up. I hope you will be patient with me now in my final speech as FOCAS editor. I have a whole load of thank-you’s to make. But first there are some important things I want to say about this volume, Regional Animalities: on humans and animals in art and life in Southeast Asia.

I have always believed that the strength of the FOCAS series has been that we are a publication that straddles disciplines. FOCAS seeks to situate discourses on art in the immediate concerns that face artists and cultural workers in South East Asia — both as professionals who care about their art, and also as regular people who care about the world. (This is an approach that informs my own art practice and teaching.) This is why FOCAS straddles art criticism, cultural theory, social commentary and activist voices.

And while this approach has it’s advantages — meaning we can take on, for example, artistic responses to the war in Iraq and Bush’s second front war on terror in Southeast Asia from a multiplicity of positions in FOCAS 5, Second Front — this has also meant that different groups of readers will always feel there is too much or too little art, too much or too little theory, too much or too little society, too much or too little activism in FOCAS.

And with this volume we risk frustrating things even further by adding another “and”— FOCAS 6 is not only talking about the contested world of humans and art, but nature and animals too!

Regional Animalities

Regional Animalities — the main theme of this sixth volume of FOCAS — concerns ways in which human / animal places, spaces, ecologies and exchanges are imagined, represented and performed in a range of historic and contemporary contexts in South East Asia.

As John Berger puts it in his seminal essay “Why Look at Animals”: “The first subject matter for painting was animal. Probably the first paint was animal blood. Prior to that it is not unreasonable to suppose that the first metaphor is animal”. Berger details a process during the nineteenth century, “completed by corporate capitalism”, by which natural and animal life became increasingly physically marginalised from modern human existences. He regards zoos as particular monuments to this marginality. But Berger goes on to argue how, just as real animals are exiled to the margins of modern human life, anthropomorphic figures of animals increasingly proliferate in our symbolic registers, co-opted into either human family psychology as pets or into mass culture as spectacle: “No other source of imagery [for children] can begin to compete with that of animals”.

In South East Asia the “discovery” and violence to animal and natural life was conterminous with colonial conquest. Animal specimens were catalogued in collections of impaled, skinned and stuffed beetles, birds, butterflies, orang utans — intercessors of, for example, Alfred Russel Wallace’s encounters with The Malay Archipelago, and shipped back to populate European museums, and botanical or zoological gardens. Carefully-exfoliated colonial administrative territories also fenced off intractable jungles around their edges — infested by creatures which threatened to disturb a fragile imperial order.

Postcolonial developments in his region have taken this physical segregation of human natural and animal life to the extreme, with catastrophic deforestation projects occurring alongside the appropriation of endangered animals for indigenous branding — for example, the Thai elephant, the “tiger” economies. Other creatures are recast as a fecundity of mediatised fantasies and specters: in some cases via Walt Disney or Animal Planet, as in Yar Habegnal’s letter to the FOCAS editorial on the subject of Happy Feet, or as inadequate vessels for displaced anxieties about immigration, disease, terrorism, environmental destruction, and, in the case of Singapore, politics. Ho Tzu Nyen, Alfian Bin Sa’at and my own essays in FOCAS 6 encircle that representational, political contagion that is the Singapore cat.

Our objective with FOCAS 6 is not merely to count the curious ways that political ideology in the region gets mirrored onto and through animals from the tiger to the mosquito. Nor is this volume an attempt to colonise or expand into the latest, most marginal territories of a late-twentieth-century-identity politics — to give animals too their place in an identitarian order of things. New writings on animalities are indeed influenced via a twentieth-century identitarian turn. But acknowledging the multitude of existences, perspectives and possibilities of other living creatures, alongside the manifold animalities within humans, complicate and metamorphosise twentieth century politics of alterity in too radical a manner for us to simply add “species” to our existing categories of human marginalia.

Animals are chosen, as Claude Lévi-Strauss would have it (on the use of natural species as totems), not because they are “good to eat” but because they are “good to think” — because we project onto and through animals, metaphors, symbolic codes and structures which allow us to structure ourselves and our societies. Lévi-Strauss was of course talking about pre-modern as much as modern societies when he made these claims.

But there is also in twenty-first century South East Asia (as elsewhere) an ecological urgency which compels cultural theory to better understand the complex asymmetries at stake in contemporary productions of nature. Another task is to attempt to transcend reflexive but centripetal critiques of animals as metaphors through which modern humans think — transcend a tendency for things to become, once more, all about us — and perhaps looking to the ways we once more become animals.

And the particular inadequacies of late capitalist productions of culture and nature in our region could not be more chokingly apparent than at present.

As I mentioned at the fundraiser for FOCAS in March of this year, with each year, inhabitants of Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia inhale more burnt remains of fauna and flora from blazing rainforests, pathetically abstracted by national media as PSI (particles per square inch) indices — or “the haze”. This at the same time as viruses such as avian flu and SARS have jumped not only geopolitical and species barriers, but also symbolic containers of purity and danger in this region and beyond.

The essays in FOCAS 6 comprise a preliminary mapping of historic and contemporary human / animal experiences in South East Asia. Without summarising each of the arguments tonight there are a series of inter-linked contestations and questions emerging from these texts from which future artistic practice and theoretical enquiry could develop.

Pornrat Damrhung’s essay concerns the Animal and the Divine. Animal and human worlds are interconnected and have come into being in relation to the Divine. (Animals and Gods being the two constitutive Others via which we construct ourselves as Human.) Animal and divine worlds specifically overlap in Hindu-Buddhist representations and classical performance forms in our region.

Damrhung invokes the iconic versions of Hanuman the Monkey-God in Thai and Cambodian classical and contemporary dance to tease out an animality within the divine — just as “entrepreneurial” congregations of real monkey troupes, mingling with tourist throngs around South East Asian temples, recast religious understandings of the divine in the animal.

A number of essays address the incursion of colonial capital into South East Asian landscapes in and through its mediating animals — for example, the liminal emergences of the man-eating tiger, appearing only in monstrous, man-eating form, just as Singapore rainforests are being cleared for mass cultivation. This spectre emerges in both Kevin Chua’s and Ho Tzu Nyen’s essays.

Sarah Whitney Womack discusses how experiments to produce domesticated dandies of orang utans and to learn the languages of “monkey wives” were conducted at mealtimes in colonial bungalows of Sir Stamford Raffles and the eminent 19th Century linguist (and translator of the Arabian Nights) Sir Richard Burton. Elsewhere, the fidelity of the European pet dog was sorely tested when taken as a companion on jungle explorations in French colonial Indochina.

There are also fantastic, chimeric possibilities emerging from South East Asian contemporary art. Gabrielle Low writes in this volume of Malaysian artist Chang Yoong Chia. Other examples might be the work of Indonesian artist Heri Dono or Singapore artist Vincent Leow. And while these artistic visions are apparently fictional, perhaps it is precisely via such fantastic representations that real problems and possibilities of human/animal ecologies can be unpacked and played out.

I just got back from a conference on Animals & Society at the University of Tasmania in Australia attended by a number of the leading names in that new interdisciplinary discipline that is “Animal Studies”. There were also numerous artist participants at this conference — which is perhaps not so unusual, it is quite normal to throw art at a trendy new postmodern disciplines (and Animal Studies is undoubtedly very trendy right now, for better or for worse).

But what was so encouraging were ways that artists and writers really are at the forefront grappling with questions of what it means to be a human animal and how to engage with other living creatures animals and with nature. These artists are not so much illustrating posthumanist theory as poetically provoking it. (There was, for example, a whole session in the conference on the South African / Australian writer JM Coetzee.)

Here are a couple of images from the 2004 “Artists & Other Animals” show co-curated by The Substation SeptFest and FOCAS, and featuring Teresa Teo Guttensohn and Andree Weschler.

Another thread in FOCAS 6 is a discussion of the ways in which human, gender, race and class hierarchies are projected back and forth between real and fictional animals, and categories of subaltern humans (Alfian Bin Sa’at, Kevin Chua, Yar Habegnal, David Teh and my own essay address these questions).

A Politics of Equivalence

This is of central significance to a politics of equivalence which FOCAS as an institution has been eager to provoke — both in our publication series and in the events we have curated and co-curated. That is to say we have tried to provoke equivalences between a whole series of marginal struggles, homosexuality, migrant worker rights, gender equalities and questions of continued marginalisation of animals and nature.

One of the main questions I get asked a lot is “why all this talk about animals, why not humans when there are so many instances of human suffering in the world”. My answer would be that although there are indeed contradictions between our and animal’s needs and it would be naïve to underplay these, it is both entirely possible and increasingly more ecologically necessary to think about both humans and animals.

There are a number of continuities between ways other animals are imagined and treated and other humans are imagined and treated, and this manifests both positively and negatively:

It is interesting how, for example, in Singapore a number of the same actors are active in feminist groups, animal groups and other civil society interests. Of course, these are not all happy rainbow coalitions. There are contestations between these groups and there are also gender race and class hierarchies within civil society organisations. There are, moreover, the divide and rule tactics of the state to contend with.

A related trajectory concerns the ways in which animals are subjected to human, familial, gendered and sexual projections and politics, and at the same time as “cat women”, for example, take on the codes — perhaps also the culture — of their companion animals. And while on subject of cats, cat women and companion animals, I want to take up another response to animals and particularly a response concerning women’s interest in companion animals: namely, the issue of sentimentality.

Women, Sentimentality & Loving Animals

Without overly channeling Elizabeth Costello here (Elizabeth Costello being the titular character of a JM Coetzee novel; she is an esteemed writer and the mother of the book’s narrator; in her old age, she refuses to talk about art anymore and has become an “irritating” animal rights advocate), I do think there is something in the way that emotions about animals and nature have been denigrated — even in trendy postmodern animal studies. Like it’s OK to theorise animals or critique animal metaphors and representations, but it’s actually seen to be a bit dodgy if you actually like them.

There are of course connections here to the ways that Jane Goodall was accused of individualizing her chimps and calling them by names rather than alpha 1, 2, etc. I do think there is an interesting dynamic going on when a fondness for companion animals is denigrated, when the person is accused of being sentimental, or when animal lovers are accused of merely projecting anthropomorphic oedipal orders onto animals.

Something came up several times at the Animals & Society conference in Tasmania; it concerned a trajectory that started with the gender discourses of 19th century, where the previously flamboyant Western males of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries were transformed into these sober, emotionless, stiff-suited, utilitarian servants of capital, and when and excess of sentiments and emotions were projected onto women, children and animals.

This nexus of sentimentality, fetishisation and derision perhaps reaches its zenith in the trope of the beauty queen, ridiculed for liking animals. Or the admittedly deeply problematic, and also highly xenophobic phenomenon of Brigitte Bardot.

Of course that wasn’t the end of sentimentality for western patriarchy. Such suppressed sentiments returned big time in Fascist Nazi aesthetics and expression, only here in an acceptable tie to militarism. And there is of course a story to be told here about Hitler’s own relationship to Blondi the Alsatian, killed at the same time as he committed suicide.

But I do think this might be a moment to rethink a knee-jerk derision or “feminisation” of those who love animals as merely sentimental. I’m not sure if it is possible to redeem sentimentality per se. Camp aesthetics have attempted to do this, with excess of sentiment ambivalently accompanied by a knowing wink or macabre hilarity. I’m not sure this is the only way to go.

Speaking personally, I’m looking for artistic means of expressing a relationship of reciprocal if uneven affection between humans and animals that anyone who has spent time in proximity of companion animals will claim exists. Which brings me to this issue of oedipal relations and the denigration of animal lovers who call their companion animals “my baby”, “my child” . I’m beginning to wonder whether to dismiss such relationships as merely “substitution” and subjecting of the animal to human familial order misses the point two counts:

Firstly, perhaps when I say my cat is my “darling boy” it’s not because I really believe he is my boy — either my son or my sexual partner — I do actually realise he is a cat! But I do not have the language for this relationship of affection with my cat and therefore have to resort to inadequate familial frameworks instead.

Perhaps the very excess of name-calling, noises and songs with which animal lovers address their companion animals also has something to do with this inadequacy of language. Might there be a connection here with the name-calling and songs we expound for and towards the ones with whom we are in love?

There is future artistic and theoretical inquiry to be done on the issue of loving animals. And of the papers in Tasmania the most memorable for me also had an element of this name-calling or passionate exchange with the animal. Or the poetics of the voice calling out to the animal and vice versa — as in one wondrous paper concerning how we hear howl of the dingo by Merryl Parker.

Another issue is the ways in which companion animals are active agents in the constitution of a culture between caregiver and animal. Anyone who has experienced the way a cat or dog will insist on communicating with a human, following them home, entering the space of a human or radically demanding alterations to the daily habits of a human will know that companion animals are not merely empty vessels forced to comply with human domestic orders. Sociologist Adrian Franklin at the Animals & Society conference spoke of how he together with cyber- and animal theorist Donna Harraway are currently starting a three-year study on families with small children and dogs to examine this issue.

Interactivity and Agency as Enactment

Ho Tzu Nyen’s essay in FOCAS 6 concerns micro–macro, ideological correlations between parasites, disease and warfare in colonial Malaya and independence Singapore. And in Chris Wilbert’s essay on avian flu, Chris argues how in such cases “agency is relationally dispersed; an enactment, not a property of a virus” — it is not the virus in and for itself that is doing the killing. Chris maps SARS, for example, as a late capitalist “enactment” between “live animal markets and within … circulations of intensive food products [via] … human consumption, in hotels, air travel, front-line health systems, laboratories and hospital design, in diverse media; and myriad other spaces.”

Such fluid ecological conceptions, in and between bodies, and provoked by the immediacy of new viral outbreaks in South East Asia, perhaps suggest ways to move beyond the mutually-constitutive dualities of human and animal so endemic to a humanist project.

This question of larger, more fluid ecologies is also at stake in Kathryn Yusoff’s and Jennifer Gabrys’ invocation of George Bataille’s animal — existing in the world “like water in water”. Which raises the question of what is left of these existences when they are removed from such ecologies — such as the experience of Sheba and Inuka, two polar bears languishing in tropical enclosures in the Singapore Zoo.

FOCAS & documenta 12

This question of the life of bears brings us to the issue of “bare life” and “what is to be done” in relation to documenta 12. FOCAS 6, Regional Animalities is a collaboration between FOCAS and the documenta 12 magazines project — a project which brings together the publications, writings and ideas of over 90 independent editorials on art and culture from around the world; documenta 12 magazines manifests as an online archival resource and via a series of face-to-face meetings of writers and editors in different cities of the globe.

Articles from FOCAS 6 will be uploaded onto the documenta archive, to be accessed by the other participating editors who may, after obtaining the writer’s permission, translate, re-edit and reprint them. FOCAS publications are part of the documenta 12 magazines exhibit and we will be holding a launch of this publication at documenta in Kassel in August 2007. Although this volume, Regional Animalities, was planned before we were invited to participate in the documenta 12, much of the material in this issue dialogues directly and indirectly with two of documenta 12’s structuring leitmotifs: “What is bare life” and “What is to be done?”.

A number of our main section articles make mention, question and/or attempt to transcend notions of “bare life” as theorised by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, for whom bare life is that liminal zone of being, or “state of exception”, whereby a subject’s life is determined from within a social / political order, but where that same subject is also outside and by exception, denied ordinary rights of civilians. It is also in this indeterminate zone of bare life that Agamben suggests an unresolveable split between the human–animal and animal–animal is produced.

The question of what bare life is, and which liminal human / animal existences “qualify” for and/or complexify such a designation, is a thread which also runs between our main Section I, “Regional Animalities”, and Section II on “Art and Activism in Singapore”. It also brings us back to equivalences between the material marginalisation and symbolic treatment of other humans, and the material marginalisation and symbolic treatment of animals.

The question of what bare life is emerges when humans are treated “as beasts”, and is also provoked by the question of extending human rights to animal subjects. For John Berger, the zoo is not to be seen as a metaphor for anything else. The zoo for Berger is the material experience of our absolute marginality of animals in modern life — what he calls “an irredeemable loss for the culture of capitalism”.

Is it at all helpful to draw equivalences between “states of exception” for, on the one hand, animals condemned to be culled during avian flu scares and SARS outbreaks, and on the other hand, the conditions of migrant workers, smuggled into wealthier South East Asian nations and held captive in squatter accommodation on construction sites and in domestic apartments?

And how does an understanding of bare life better enable an understanding of the other documenta 12 leitmotif “What is to be done?” as regards the series of dilemmas pertaining to conservation, animal welfare, transient workers’ rights and anti-death penalty initiatives in our Section II reports on “Art & Activism in Singapore” and also in our Section III, “FOCAS on Censorship”?

FOCAS on Censorship

The “FOCAS on Censorship” section, as some will recall, was somewhat infamously launched in FOCAS 5; it contains country reports on art and censorship from Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Some writers have submitted lists of key moments of censorship during the past one or two years, others have chosen to analyse particular tendencies and events in more detail.

One worrying theme emerging from a number of these reports is the way in which non-governmental interests and even individuals have been, of late, able to take on the mantle of the “guardian” of religion or traditional values and gain censorial power — either in place of the state, or by pressurising the state to censor on their behalf. Examples might be new Christian groups in Singapore, defenders of Thai-ness or Buddhist-ness in Thailand, or supposed defenders of Islamic values in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Such discussions will continue beyond the pages of FOCAS in the context of the documenta leitmotif session entitled “What is to be done?” on censorship in South East Asia, curated by documenta South East Asia editor, Keiko Sei, and to be held in Kassel in the second week of August 2007.

Tributes & Remembrances

Finally in this volume of FOCAS, as sadly with the last FOCAS 5, we have a section of remembrance. In the three years since we were last able to bring out another volume of FOCAS, arts communities in South East Asia and beyond have suffered the loss of three more visionary artists and commentators on art and society. Thoughts of Kuo Pao Kun — intercultural playwright, founder of The Substation arts centre, the Theatre Training and Research Programme (TTRP) and Practice Performing Arts School (PPAS) Singapore, who passed away on 10 September 2002 — are still very much with us as we remember three of his contemporaries.

Krishen Jit, Malaysian director, critic, scholar, teacher and co-founder of Five Arts Centre, left us on 28 April 2005. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, world renowned Indonesian novelist and outspoken social critic who was detained without trial during the Suharto years, died 30 April 2006. And Redza Piyadasa, Malaysian artist, art historian, critic and curator passed away on 7 May 2007.

An Independent Arts Community Publication

It has been indeed three years since we were last able to bring out a volume in the FOCAS series. After the NAC abruptly withdrew their support for this publication, we have not been able to source local or international funding for FOCAS to continue.

In March 2007 we sent out a press statement saying that although we had a full volume ready to run and an invitation to participate in documenta, we would have to close down, as we had no financial means of bringing the publication out. What happened next was an unprecedented demonstration of support for an independent arts publishing initiative as supporters of FOCAS rallied round and in the space of three weeks, we were able to raise enough funds to bring out FOCAS 6. We are proud to state that this volume of FOCAS is entirely supported by arts communities in Singapore, South East Asia and beyond, with no formal institutional, governmental or foundational support whatsoever.

It’s not really possible to talk of an “arts community” in Singapore, without speaking of probably the most successful way such a community or communities have been constituted — via the online artscommunity e-group or “artscomm” started by Alvin Tan of The Necessary Stage seven years ago, now with over 2,000 members. The artscomm is discussed in a dialogue between Alvin, Matheiu O’Neil and myself in Section II “Art & Activism in Singapore”.

Some of us were at the historic meeting (in The Substation Gallery) in 1999 when Alvin first raised the idea of forming the artscommunity e-group. And it was one year later, together with Alvin Tan and Haresh Sharma while I was Associate Artist at The Necessary Stage, that we started FOCAS. It’s been partially through the artscomm that our funding pleas have been able to reach supporters outside FOCAS’s immediate circle.

And here the FOCAS board and editorial would like the opportunity to thank the following for their generous support:

Deborah Alden & Lawrence Abrahamson; Alex Au & People Like Us; Shannon Lee Castleman; Heman Chong; Terence Chong; Kevin Chua; Roberto Columa; Alan Cruikshank & Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia; Janadas Devan & Geraldine Heng; Ken Feinstein; Matilda Gabrielpillai; John Gee & Transient Workers Count Too; Nirmal Ghosh; Bridget Grady; Panuksmi Hardjowirogo & Michel Cayla; Stephen Hazell; Ivan Heng, Tony Trickett & W!ld Rice; The Heritage Society; Russel Heng; Scott Hessels; Ho Tzu Nyen; Philip Holden; Claire Hsu & Asia Art Archive; George Jacobs & The Vegetarian Society; Kate & Vesa Kangaslahti; Isaac Kerlow & School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University; Paul Khoo; Melissa Kwee & Stop The Haze; Janice Koh & Lionel Yeo; Dana Lam; Ray Langenbach; Lee Wen; Jason Lim; William & Lena Lim; Noor Effendy Ibrahim; Oh Soon Hwa; Ong Keng Sen, Tay Tong & TheatreWorks; Laksmi Pamuntjak; Lindy Poh; Serge Pomonti; Eileen Reynolds; Meridel Rubenstein; Dori & Kanaga Sabapathy; T. Sasitharan; Christina Sergeant; Sha Najak; Arai Shinich; Shirley Soh; Russel Storer; Alvin Tan, Haresh Sharma, Melissa Lim & The Necessary Stage; Tan Tarn How; Verena Tay; Katelijn Verstraete; C.J. Wan-ling Wee; Jason Wee, Audrey Wong; Tien Woon, Jennifer Teo & P-10; Jimmy Yap and June Yap.

Thanks to Kevin Chua, Ray Langenbach, Laksmi Pamuntjak and Paul Rae for carefully engaging essay drafts and corresponding with our writers. Thanks as always for the tireless intelligence and cheer of focas copy-editor Yu-Mei Balasingamchow and for the infinite patience and clarity of our focas designer Jenn Rée. Thanks to Ben Slater, John Gee and Suzanne Wong, our proofreaders, and to Audrey Wong and Lee Weng Choy from The Substation for agreeing to co-publish FOCAS one more time, and for hosting this launch. Thanks to James and Kerr from Lin Long Printing for accommodating our quirks and last-minute adjustments. Many many thanks to Balasingham Matchap for helping out with the launch. Finally thanks again to my dearest friends Weng Choy and Laksmi (both mentioned above in their official capacity) for being around and about throughout.

The Last Volume of FOCAS

This will be the last volume of FOCAS. We can’t go on like this, by emotionally blackmailing friends and supporters to cough up money every time we are to come out. In the last three years I have tried everything, local international, funding and foundations have to offer. No sustainable possibilities have emerged for the publication, however, and we will have to close.

I would like to think, though, that we’ve produced six great volumes that will continue to provide reference points for researchers, artists and activists for a long time.