Lee Weng Choy
In the context of contemporary art, what is your vision of a yet unknown art?
In the context of contemporary art, what is your vision of a yet unknown art?
LEE Weng Choy: The question discomforts me. The "yet unknown" does not seem to refer to the present moment, even though the "contemporary" is supposedly its context. Rather, the vision invoked appears future-oriented. So how different is this from asking what we wish for in the "better tomorrows" of our own design? I would like to think of myself as a proponent of change -- there is so much that is wrong in our world today. But if I am wary of the desire for the next new thing, it is because often our imagination of the future is predicated upon frozen images of the past. These days, when I hear the words "the future", I do not think about the future so much as remember people from the last century -- white, middle-class, suburban Americans of the 1950s, for example -- all chirpy and a little smug, beaming with hopelessly naive good cheer. I imagine them captivated by the latest advertisements in lifestyle magazines that illustrate "the modern style of the future", or sitting in front of brand new black and white television sets, watching with mouths slightly parted as some gentleman in a grey suit declares: "in the future ... aeroplanes will be supersonic ... every home will be fully automated ... and families will holiday in outer space". The desire for "the future" often strikes me as a peculiar form of nostalgia. As Jacques Derrida might say, the future is spectral: it is a dream of what is to come that belies dreaming of what is to come back. True, a "yet unknown" suggests something radically open. But the way the question is structured, whatever instability this unknown may have had seems domesticated by the query's implicit and overriding "futurism". What if this "yet unknown" did indeed refer to the full complexity of the present, or, as I want to suggest, the Real? Here, I am referring to Jacques Lacan's concept -- that which resists representation -- but also the word's everyday uses: real life, real experience, reality. I would like to define the "present" by its resistance to representation, by its "realness". Only when the present moment becomes history, or is projected as the future can we pin it down and speak about it. Yet I should also say that I firmly believe in the imperative to try to historicise both the present and the Real. In a recent essay of mine, "Biennale Time and the Spectres of Exhibition", I wondered aloud what we could ask of contemporary art. I'll quote from that essay's last paragraphs, which could stand for an answer to the question above. In his preface to the Documenta 11 exhibition catalogue, Artistic Director Okwui Enwezor begins with an admission that his enterprise is haunted: "Almost fifty years after its founding, Documenta finds itself confronted once again with the spectres of yet another turbulent time of unceasing cultural, social, and political frictions, transitions, transformations, fissures, and global institutional consolidations ... . [T]he prospects for contemporary art ... could not be more daunting and demanding." But, for me, what Documenta 11 as a whole seemed to demand most from its viewers was guilt. A peculiar guilt -- guilt as a defensive reflex, an admission of not knowing how or not being able to confront our historical burdens; guilt as a symptom of the last century's defeated self-reflexivity. Yet, guilt and its twin, blame, are not adequate responses. To denounce something like colonialism is not enough to exorcise its spectres in contemporary art. We -- this largest of we's -- are the reluctant heirs of colonialism and other legacies of our troubled past. And we have to work through this inheritance -- but how? In Farewell to an Idea, T. J. Clark confronts modernism's failures -- and as responsibly as anyone else. But unlike those who take as a foregone conclusion that modernism resides in history's dustbin, he emphasises its shared history with something he believes was worth fighting for, even if it too was not the solution: socialism. The debts are not merely old, they are still topical. Don't get me wrong, I am not suggesting that we look for what's best in colonialism, and try to recuperate it. I am arguing for the historiography that Walter Benjamin advocated: to imagine events not in a fixed sequence of past, present and future, but as radically adjacent to each other. To confront the burden of history is not to recognise it as distant or past, but fully present. It is not to project ourselves into history, but history into our selves. I suppose this is another way of saying that what I want from the grand biennale is for it to demand something more from me than just my guilt or my time spent in its exhibitions. A reconciliation with the Real is too pat, so let me leave it to an art work to try to articulate what we could ask of our contemporary visual culture: To see Alfredo Jaar's installation at Documenta 11, you entered a darkened room; on the grey walls were three texts, their white letters emitting their own light. The first text talked about how there were videos and films of Nelson Mandela's release from prison but apparently no photographs; moreover, during his long detention, he had worked in the lime mines, which were so blinding white, it's said that his tear ducts no longer work because of that. The second text referred to an American business venture that intends to protect vast archives of images by burying them underground in a nuclear bomb-proof shelter. The third text spoke of how the US military recently took control of satellite and air surveillance images of Afghanistan. To exit the installation, you walked through a dark corridor into a room where you confronted a wall-sized screen of intensely bright white light. The piece is called The Lament of Images (2002). Lee Weng Choy Singapore ............ References Clark, T. J., Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, New Haven: Yale University Press (1999) Enwezor, Okwui, Documenta 11 Platform 5: Exhibition catalogue, Hatje Cantz Verlag (2002) Lee, Weng Choy, "Biennale Time and the Spectres of Exhibition", focas: Forum On Contemporary Art & Society, vol. 4, Singapore (2002) |
