The Singapore 2008 Art Biennale

What is Art? This is a big question, and it is overly ambitious of me to tackle it in a necessarily short posting, perhaps even pretentious, since I never studied art history.

But I was driven to ask myself this question during a visit of some of the installations of the Art Biennale in Singapore. Certainly, nothing that I saw there falls under the usual conception of what constitutes what most people would think of as art exhibited in museum galleries: paintings and sculptures.

But, even though they are not like the paintings or sculptures seen in galleries, are these installations still art?

The Oxford Shorter Dictionary defines Art as follows:

"A pursuit or occupation in which skill is directed towards the production of a work of imagination, imitation or design, or towards the gratification of the aesthetic senses; the products of any such pursuit."

In those definitions, the adjective "aesthetic" is used. The same dictionary provides this definition of the word, when it is applied to a thing: "in accordance with the principles of good taste; beautiful".

If we accept those definitions, we can agree that works of art are works of imagination, imitation or design which should gratify our sense of good taste and of the beautiful. The production of these works requires the application of skill.

This definition is broad, for it encompasses classical art (which most often mainly attempted to reproduce, through imitation, the beauty of what we see around us), and modern art (which mainly produces abstract works of imagination). It also encompasses, within the broad category of design, architecture, fashion design, decorative arts, etc.

This is a simplification, for there are classical works of art that are purely imaginative. Much of Hieronymus Bosch's work is such. And classical works are rarely only imitative. The artist interprets imaginatively the reality that surrounds him, to extract and enhance its beauty or its sublime character: one can think for instance of Rembrandt's or Turner's use of light. Similarly, modern works often blend abstract and representative elements.

Our definition mentions good taste and beauty. These are, of course, subjective concepts, and they may vary across cultures and times. But I believe that there is a universal idea of Beauty that crosses cultural and time boundaries. Without it, how could we explain the reaction of a Westerner stirred by a Tang Dynasty vase, or of a Chinese or Japanese awed by Picasso's Guernica?

Beauty will be found in the harmonious proportions of an object, in the rich colours and brush strokes that will give depth to an abstract painting, in the play of light on the models reproduced in a classical painting, in the amazing lines and volumes of a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti or Henry Moore. Beauty is what inexplicably arrests us, stirs us deep inside, and makes us look in awe and admiration. It is because beauty defies any precise definition that, to produce it, an artist needs to be skilful. And the acquisition of such skill requires a hard and long apprenticeship.

Works of art also are usually durable. And this is a salutary characteristic, for they can be enjoyed through decades, centuries or millenia, and, if initially rejected, they may be eventually appreciated, as taste evolves and finally recognizes an artist who was ahead of his time.

Contemporary art sometimes is not, however, durable. Andy Goldsworthy's art immediately comes to mind as an example. Although ephemeral, Goldsworthy's creations show his artistic skills. First, he is able to visualize how materials he finds in nature will, after they have been cut, shaped, molded, assembled, or simply thrown in the air or dissolved in a stream, form, for a short period of time, a thing of beauty. And these ephemeral aesthetic events can be immortalized with photography.

The works of art displayed at the Singapore Biennale, at least those I have seen so far, fail to qualify as art, if we accept the definition of art elaborated here, using as reference the Oxford Shorter Dictionary.

They are all temporary installations, but this, in itself, does not disqualify them as aesthetic works, as Goldsworthy's art shows.



The one work that comes closest to deserving the label of art is a piece of architecture, the Containart Pavilion, a temporary building designed by Shigeru Ban which houses several of the Biennale "art" installations.

As a piece of architecture, it is not beautiful, for it uses, as principal structural components, 150 20-foot long shipping containers (together with reusable paper tubes and other materials). Containers are big steel boxes designed to transport goods on ships, trains and trucks around the globe. They are not beautiful, and purely utilitarian. However, the Japanese architect demonstrates his skill by arranging these containers in such a manner that they let light and wind from the outside flow freely through the building, while being wide or long enough to ensure that, even with violent winds, rainstorms will not penetrate inside the building through the empty spaces between the containers.

There is a certain aesthetic appeal in the rythmical geometric arrangement of the containers, and the contrast between the unexpected steel boxes as huge bricks and the more traditional classical shape of those tall columns made of paper tubes.

But the art installations inside are another matter.


This wood structure and its contents are called Location (6), an installation conceived by Hans Op de Beeck, a Belgian artist. The circular shape at the end of the corridor contains the heart of the installation.
You leave your shoes outside before entering the corridor, which is entirely lined with a white fiber fabric. It takes you to a circular room, also entirely white, furnished with three white leather sand-filled ottomans, on which you can sit to contemplate through translucid plastic windows the landscape surrounding you.


The landscape is dismally bleak. You feel as if you are at the center of a hole on a grey winter day, surrounded by low-grade slopes covered with snow as far as you can see, with only sparse small naked trees standing out as sentinels watching you. This is otherworldly, but it is not beautiful. And, although it is not like anything you ever saw before, after the original idea has come to the artist, it does not require great skill in realizing it. It is interesting, but it is not art.

Our next stop is Between You and I (sic), an installation by Anthony McCall, who lives in the US.
You enter a tall, relatively narrow dark room, where you see nothing but two beams of white light originating from sources in the ceiling. They intersect the black floor on which one inscribes a cross which has the rough shape of an incomplete svastika, and the other a circle. A haze coming from humidifiers invisible in this very dark room rises in the beams of light.

It is difficult to see this as a work of art, according to our working definition. Here is what the Biennale guide has to say: "McCall's solid -light films deal with light in space and something elemental that can have the effect of opening up existential questions for us as viewers [really?]. This, combined with the inherent elegance and scale of Between You and I, may allow us an experience that is essentially sublime in nature when we encounter the work in Ban's open structure ..."

We immediately regognize the pseudo-philosophical babble often used to describe worthless contemporary "art": "something elemental ... opening up existential questions ... an experience that is essentially sublime in nature ... [whatever this may mean]". This language is used by the "sophisticated" people (those who go to the openings of these modern art installations and really get it) to intimidate the uninitiated into believing that they are seeing and "experiencing" something great. You do not understand this babble (do not feel bad, nobody does, even those who speak or write it), but it sounds profound, and, surely, this work of art, to inspire such deep thoughts, must be something you must admire, even though you do not find it beautiful and do not respond in any way to it.

The other large installation in Ban's Containart Pavilion was Manas (Utopian City) by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Ukrainian artists who live and work in the US. This work is a model, assembled with plywood, of a utopian city, presumably located in Northern Tibet. Eight steep mountains stand around a perfectly circular crater, illuminated by a light issued from a crater in the ceiling, also surrounded by eight mountains, mirroring those on the boat-like structure supporting this imaginary city.


This structure is enclosed in an oval room made of plywood, with just enough space to walk around the model of the city. The room is surrounded by a doughnut shaped gallery where you can see maquettes of the mountains surrounding the crater, with the buildings they support.
In case you do not appreciate the beauty or the meaning of this installation, the guide provides a helpful explanation: "The Kabakov's narrative maintains that the inhabitants of this city had contact with the cosmos, and on the peak of each mountain a structure was built to hold an object with singular abilities. Their stories, or rather the purposes of these utopian structures, are elucidated in accompanying texts. In one, time can move in several directions; in others, cosmic energy or transcendent experience can be transferred. Some are shown to be observatories to witness other universes. As such, each maquette acts as a node, or conduit to another world. Manas is our escape route from the banality to the commonplace."

This is less than clear to me ... except for the last sentence ... This installation is an escape from the banality to the commonplace.

Aside from those three large installations, which are anything you like but not art, more modest displays could be found in some of the containers, such as this one, Art of the T Bungalow 50. This is nothing more than a few zany T-shirts suspended on a rack, with intermittent neon lighting at the center.

This T-shirt proudly proclaims, in French, "We are young, we are proud." Perhaps it was created in 1968 when Paris burnt under student riots. There were many proud young people then, who thought they made a revolution, when in fact they accomplished nothing.
A titillating T-shirt, but who would dare wearing it? I think that we can all agree that this installation is not art. Some of the T-shirts themselves are interesting, but putting them on hangers on a rack in a container and illuminating them with neon lights is not art, and it certainly does not require any artistic skill.



Another container had been transformed into a projection room. A video showed the prow of a boat being tossed on a heaving sea, flipping over and flipping back up. This is Floating, a creation of Yuan Goang Ming, a Taiwanese artist. According to the guide, "the artist was inspired while he was studying in Germany, where he felt an invisible cultural gap that caused a sense of isolation." Well, perhaps ...
On one side of the Containart Pavilion stood a forest of 4000 bamboo poles, on top of which could be seen plastic slippers. This is Flight, by Alfredo Juan Aquilizan and Maria Isabel Gaudinez-Aquilizan, both from the Philippines, but living and working in Australia. Here is a detail.
A guide in the pavilion explained to me that these slippers perched on the bamboo poles had actually been worn by prisoners in Singapore's Changi Prison.
Our last stop in this exploration of art installations at the Singapore Biennale will be Fog Sculpture "Noontide", by Fujiko Nakaya, with a lighting design by Takayuki Fujimoto, both of Japan.

This is a huge waterfall-like fog, created by steam emanating from a drain below the Esplanade Bridge. People stop to take pictures of it and kids love getting wet running through it.

So what are those installations, if they are not art? Modern art works are not always created for aesthetic purposes. Sometimes, the artist wants to deliver a message, often a political message. In those works, it is difficult to see a message. Perhaps the creator of Location (6) has a deep concern about the environment and wants to show us the desolate world that would result from industry and pollution running amok. This is the closest the art on display comes to a political message.

But art, in my opinion, should not carry a political message, or any message. The more art wants to tell us something specific, the less it succeeds as art.

Unless we change the definition of "art" in the dictionaries, the works on display at the Biennale are not art. People still associate art with the pursuit of the beautiful, which can be attained only through rigorous training.

Those works are not art, and the artists who produced them did not, in the doing, display any artistic skill.