E for Effort: 4 Exhibitions from February

Consent – Temu House
David Blumenstein, Linda Brescia, Lada Dedić, Giselle Stanborough, & Garry Trinh, Joanne Loo, Nadia Nizamuddin, Xeem Noor, Trina Teoh, Umar Sharif & Tep York

A show that seems purpose built for children, by which I mean there are at least three stations within the space where pen and papers are provided for people to doodle or to write their feelings...

There’s an installation with bells at the staircase landing which seems touchable because most of the works at the ground floor are, but at the top of the landing there's a "do not touch" sign – this gave me a chuckle, but the joke wears off quick. There are some painted people suits placed in corners of the gallery which were quite funny: the artist, an elderly person, used to wear them to openings to masquerade her shyness. The theme of "consent" is pretty amorphous, with many seeming to interpret it as consent over whether an artwork can be interacted with or not, but there was one artist who actually created a series of embroidered pieces on sexual consent. Audience interaction and participation in the making of an artwork are not things that are interesting to me. Engagement with these qualities strikes me as a concession to the idea that art and galleries should be “entertaining” for visitors,  offering a dumbed-down vision of the art-going public as bored people who are just itching for cheap entertainment through tactile and sensory objects — in essence, a playground for attention-deficit overgrown children. As such the works in this were much too cute and juvenile for me, from the subjects being depicted to the strategies of execution.  

That’s Cute – A+ Works of Art
Angie Fan, Apichaya Wannakit, BUDDHAANDZ, Ella Wijt, MM. Kosum, Unchalee Anantawat, Vu Dieu Huong, Wiyoga Muhardanto

An exhibition for children in a different sense. The feeling of nostalgia for a childhood – fuzzy edges and simple lines made with aerosol or crayons – 

Pale fireworks exploding in the sky, a lilac wall of a kindergarten or nursery, small figurines from a childhood cartoon, sepia-tinted memories of the dog running around a chair and getting itself tangled up, or the look of the empty lawn of one’s childhood home at dusk after all the guests have left, memories of a gas station at night (perhaps you are in the backseat of your parents’ car), a spiky-haired boy (perhaps a childhood crush), a stubbed out cigarette, all hazily seen through the mist of many years passed –

It's very evocative. But I think one of the dangers of cute is that everything happens on the surface, there is not much beyond the acknowledgement that yes, this painting or tiny sculpture is indeed cute. The danger of cute, the disappointment of cute, is that it’s a quick fix that doesn’t stick for a deeper spiritual malaise; and all cute things seem to turn rotten after a while; cute can’t be preserved within its bubble of pastel naïveté. The works don’t offer much beyond what they are on the surface, there is no need to move closer to them or to study them for a prolonged period of time, because what they are exists purely on the surface, the overall view that you get of them from a distance, and the nostalgic or emotional feelings that they hopefully evoke within you. They twinkle and smile at you within their protected bubble, like a snow globe. The exhibition is warm and inviting, because it shrugs off the tone of curatorial seriousness and pretension and embraces a simple pleasure in childlike aesthetics; unlike the Consent show it doesn't ned to try so hard to invite you in to just have fun and find things cute. The works are fun because of their promise of innocence and the pardon from responsibility – but personally I can’t stay in a space like this for long, it’s too much of a cloying sweetness. 

Folded Lines – The Back Room
Gabriela Giroletti, Laura Porter, Lee Mok Yee, and Mark Tan

What are material-driven artists trying to say when they employ the phrase "material-driven" to describe their practice? Most artists, even conventional painters, seem to be engaging with their material and kneading it into further territory where it can transform into something that might be called a 'breakthrough'. I'm interested in what the 'material-driven' denomination positions itself against, I suppose it's in response to other kinds of art that are narrative-driven or representational, but I wonder how this rift in interpreting art came about, where an artwork is read as either narrative- or message-driven and therefore either not concerned with material or using material in a purely utilitarian way in order to achieve the 'depiction' of something, versus art that's 'material-driven', and therefore appreciated in craftsmanlike terms, where success is measured by how the artist achieves novelty with the material or the creation of unexpected objects, intended to create a response among audiences along the lines of 'oh how clever, to use this [insert common material] in such a way'. The creation of this distinction seems to aid in explaining works to people with low comprehension of art, i.e. the typical Malaysian art-goer who 'demands' meaning from art or that art should 'explain itself' to them, but I also think this precludes a more complex understanding of art, artistic intentions, and art's effects.

The small, oddly-shaped paintings by Gabriela Giroletti were really good, especially the greyish-beigeish one with a curving slash through it and the green-yellow one that appears pregnant in the middle. Laura Porter's fabric-pulp wall-hanging sculptures also had a nice sense of completion in them, I guess because they play on that rather common trope in contemporary art, of soft feminine material (the cut-up clothes, in this case) combined with hard, industrial and masculine-coded materials (the rusted steel bars). Lee Mok Yee's wood cork and found furniture sculptures had a Dadaist humour about them which is quite enjoyable and perhaps a more entertaining accomplishment of the 'soft + hard' trope, as the broken chair legs do look quite funny in their aged darkness and how awkwardly they're joined to the central wood-cork bits and how they contrast against the blisteringly white gallery space. The "Moving Castle" and little bonsai-esque ones were cute, but still tilted a bit more on the decorative side. Mark Tan's prints looked underdeveloped and perhaps were executed on too small of a scale to appreciate the process... This seems like a very silly and pedantic point to make, but the scale of the paper to printed portion seemed off.

6 ways of seeing – CULT Gallery
Aer, Alexdrina Chong, Anissa R, Jada Lyla, Joanne Loo, Silas Oo

This show got me to thinking about the wider Malaysian art landscape and about what sort of situation we’re finding ourselves in now. You can’t help but flash back to the 3 young contemporaries archives of Valentine Willie Fine Art, and wonder if we're losing a whole generation of critical thinking artists – artists whose work principle was beyond mere craft i.e. mere tinkering with materials and tools until something "new" happens. What's going on in the art schools? What's happening to the quality of works being produced by young artists?

The drawings by Silas Oo are quite enjoyable for those who are into sci-fi and HR Giger-ish drawings, but still lacking a certain surrealism and ingenuity that can push them over the edge into real uncanny or horror territory. They still appear just a little manufactured, a little juvenile, expecting the depicted drawing and the form to contain everything, instead of – and this is the great thing about fantasy and sci-fi – leaving space for the viewer’s imagination to flow in and to be awed. The drawings evoke awe over the technical skill needed to execute them with such fine precision, but not yet the awe of terror or the surreal. The other works in the show were too crafty for me to really engage with; the problem with crafty art is that it shuts down conversation because of how bluntly superficial it is. Regardless of how much artists pour into their artist statements about their state of mind while making the work, or what the work is supposed to say, yet when the final product is so totally crafted, it leaves no gap for the viewer to enter. That 'gap' is where mystery and allure comes in. The works in this show have a crude finality in them - there is nothing in the quality of the painting for me to inspect deeper, there is nothing in the quality of the brass-work that might suggest to me that it is anything more than fine brass-work. Sculptures by Alexdrina Chong appear to show various breast-collecting creatures: they almost could be something like primitive idols, but they are too "properly" constructed; nothing about the patterns decorating them suggests that their designs are anything more than arbitrary, the expressions of the creatures are too precise and monotonous (in the manner of toys) to suggest any of the mystical quality that might be possessed by some strange elongated creature with a tray-like back for collecting dismembered breasts.

On a tangential note, this show also got me to thinking about my role as an art reviewer or critic, because I didn’t want to write about this show - or, in fact, about any of the shows on this list - for two reasons. Firstly, I didn’t find them interesting or substantial enough to comment on and secondly, the artists in the shows are people that I’m friendly with and considering the first point, I didn’t see why I should risk hurting their feelings for something so trifling. It just didn't seem worth it, basically. But then I thought that, if I had that approach to every show I visit in Malaysia then nothing would be worth it at all and I can’t just be waiting for Singapore Art Week to come around every year to update my blog. I have to work with the things I have, for purposes that are as yet unclear to me beyond straightforward principle – because I cannot call myself an art critic or even an observer of Malaysian art until I actually engage with every single thing that I go to, even the things that don't seem worth engaging with. When people say that Malaysia needs more art critics, my first thought is always: and have them review and critic what, exactly? There is barely anything worth critically engaging with; if I truly had it my way, every single review would be a bad one and my entire blog would turn into a rag with me nagging in every single post. Anyone who tries to take most contemporary art "seriously" always looks like a total loser clutching at straws. And it’s no use either just waiting for “good” (at least substantial) shows to come around because that wouldn't reflect a true picture of contemporary art in Malaysia. It’s no good to ignore the interactive and participatory, the crafty and cute, in favour of only commenting on shows that ILHAM puts up, or solo exhibitions by established artists, because the truer picture of Malaysian art now would feature much, much more instances of the former than the latter. And I have to meet Malaysian contemporary art on its level, to engage with what the artists are doing there, because it is true, because it is a picture of the contemporary, because if we’re talking about the now, the 2nd decade of the 21st-century, where “discourse” happens over Instagram story re-shares and flame emojis in the comments, where we are on the brink of losing whatever already meagre scraps of art comprehension we have in Malaysia for an even more simplified and emotional idea of art, where we are on the brink of total societal retardation and concession to the Apple Vision Pro-ification of everything, by which I mean conceding to the greater reality of things happening within our phones over actual reality, then this is what it is.