David Teh
Description:
David Teh is a writer, curator and assistant professor in the English department at the National University of Singapore. His work spans a variety of topics within the art world, from modern and contemporary Asian art, critical art theory and history, to curatorship and exhibitions. In this episode we discuss the balancing act between the art world and academia, the difficulties of attaching language to art, and seek to better define “contemporary art”. Additionally, we talk about the influence of government and wealth on art markets and exposure and the importance of institutions in art dissemination. In a world dominated by short format video clips, Professor Teh encourages the audience to take more pride in their visual literacy and understand the traps and tricks that might be influencing us.
Websites:
Publications:
MISFITS <<Pages from loose-leaf modernity
Regionality and Contemporaneity
Artist-to-Artist: Chiang Mai Social Installation in Historical Perspective
Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992-98
Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary (introduction)
Articles:
“Misfits”: Pages from loose-leaf modernity
Exhibitions:
Returns, 2018 (exhibition folio)
Books:
Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary
Videos:
Show Notes:
[0:00:01] Introduction and background of Professor David Teh
[0:02:36] Transition to academia in Singapore and the importance of writing
[0:09:21] The balance between visual and cerebral experiences in art
[0:12:10] The challenge of artists expressing their work through language.
[0:19:33] Questioning the timeline of globalization in the West.
[0:24:44] The Challenge of Being "Contemporary" without Going International
[0:28:23] Wealth Discrepancy and Government Influence in Art Markets
[0:35:59] The Importance of Institutions and Viewers in Art Value
[0:40:57] Seeking Lessons and Knowledge from Work and Exhibitions
[0:41:35] The Importance of Art Reflecting Time and Place
[0:48:42] Opportunities and Privilege in Making Exhibitions
[0:50:21] The Differences between Exhibition Making and Academic Publications
[0:56:27] Engaging with a Limited Audience in the Humanities
[1:00:45] The Dominance of Video in our Digital World
[1:01:26] The Impact of social media on News and Information
Unedited AI Generated Transcript:
Introduction and background of Professor David Teh
Brent:
[0:01] Welcome, Professor David Teh. Thank you for coming on today.
David:
[0:04] Thank you for having me.
Keller:
[0:06] We'd love to start off by hearing a little bit about your story.
What got you interested in Thai art, especially coming from a comparative literature background, and how did you get to NUS?
David:
[0:14] How did I get to NUS? I studied art history and theory in Australia.
It was fairly close to what you might call comparative literature.
In the end, I was studying mostly continental continental critical theory and philosophy.
But in a department of art history, that was my background, my training, I guess you could say.
But when I graduated, I was determined to get away from academia.
And what brought me to Asia actually was more the push factors of wanting to leave where I was.
I was pretty young, but I had sort of finished a doctorate and I wanted to get get out of academia.
Thailand was a place that I'd already visited quite a few times.
And I had some friends there and I knew it was a place where I probably wouldn't have anything to do with universities.
And that was a strong pull factor actually, because I wanted to do something different.
I wanted to see what else I might be able to do.
And so I did a lot of odd jobs in the the art scene.
It turned out that Thai artists had no use for a critical theorist.
But one of the things I could do is organize shows, help to organize the presentation of contemporary art.
I was working mainly with artists of my own generation.
And I lived there.
[1:43] Basically, for about five years, doing these sorts of things, sometimes editorial work, sometimes curating an exhibition, sometimes helping other people with their exhibitions, and alittle bit of teaching in universities.
Universities, I tried to avoid it, but it was one of the handy ways of getting visas because it's kind of exhausting in some of the countries in the region being sort of informal, having aninformal immigration status whilst trying to kind of work.
But it was really fascinating. I had a lot of great experiences there.
I learned a lot from the people I was working with.
There were lots of interesting projects.
There's a very healthy art scene there.
I was living in Bangkok. It's a real city, you know. It's a big city.
It's busy and chaotic and there's lots of contemporary activity.
Transition to academia in Singapore and the importance of writing
[2:36] So, yeah, I was really enjoying life except for one thing, and that is that it's not a very literary society at all, and I like to write, you know, and it was quite hard for me to get awayfrom that production enough to really process the experiences I was having. and I missed writing.
[2:58] I was writing criticism, you know, for a newspaper or magazine, whatever, but I didn't feel like I was really rendering the experiences that I have, which for me happens mainly inwriting.
And so, yeah, I was fortunate to have an opportunity to get a kind of rank-and-file academic position here in Singapore.
[3:21] And when they came knocking, I eventually said yes, and was here ever since.
That was in 2009 that I moved here.
So, yeah, the answer is I wanted to get away from academia and coming to live in Singapore and take a job at NUS was, I mean, sort of the first grown-up decision I ever made, I guess.
Brent:
[3:42] Yeah. Yeah.
And then, were you writing for your own pleasure or just to keep track of all the experiences you were having in Thailand?
David:
[3:51] Yeah, for both. I mean, it is pleasurable for me to write.
I sort of feel like I learn more about what I see.
[4:02] Like, it's kind of impossible to be a critic.
It's very hard to be an art critic, right? Very few people in very few places in the world can be a full-time art critic.
I thought I was pretty good at it but there was no way I could make a living doing it especially in this part of the world right Singapore criticism as you know is kind of illegal right so youdon't do it here in places like Thailand you can pretty much get away with saying almost anything you want but there aren't necessarily many readers right so especially in the Englishlanguage my Thai was kind of conversational I wasn't you know I didn't study the Thai language Um, so, you know, it's, it's kind of a, it's kind of a compromise actually then to find a jobthat can keep you in, you know, relative comfort, um, where you can also practice these other things like making exhibitions or writing criticism.
And so, academia is a haven for a lot of people like me, I think, who, you know, maybe don't see themselves as careerist academics or even as career, like lifelong academics, but who, youknow, appreciate the latitude that this kind of intellectual environment provides for doing these other things, which, you know, to greater and lesser degree, universities do.
Brent:
[5:27] Definitely. Yeah. Yeah.
Keller:
[5:28] Had you worked directly in the art world while you were getting your PhD?
David:
[5:33] To some extent, yeah. I grew up in Sydney and I studied in Sydney.
And Sydney had a, you know, a pretty active contemporary art scene and there were some parts of it that I was quite involved with.
I wouldn't say that I was that serious about it. It was more that, once again, I had a lot of friends who were artists.
I could sort of help them out making a show, maybe writing something for their whatever they were printing for an exhibition.
And I shared studio space with artists for, I think the whole time I was a grad student, I rented with a group of friends, rented studio spaces to work in, to write in as an office, which was amix of writers and artists, visual artists.
And so, yeah, I guess I was fairly close to the action, but I wouldn't say that I was serious about, you know, becoming a curator.
I sort of disavowed the job title of curator for quite a long time.
It's only recently that I've sort of accepted that that's how some people see me.
Brent:
[6:43] You know. So, how would you define yourself?
David:
[6:47] I had a string of words at the end of my email signature that kind of summed up the range of things.
I mean, I did odd jobs, really, you know, I was, I was, um, I was pretty poor for those years, particularly the years I was in Thailand, because it's hard to make any money doing thesethings.
I got by on a range of teaching, as I said, a bit of published writing in, you know, some of the bigger mastheads would pay, like, you know, for the metropolitan dailies that are Englishlanguage.
They might pay you a little bit for doing a review or something.
[7:23] And every now and then a grant of some sort. but yeah i mean it's not easy to it's not easy to do that freelance and i was also exhausted after five years of doing that you're alwayslooking for the next job you're always kind of you know looking out for opportunities and it really becomes hard to yeah to sort of i i learn more about the the artworks when i get a bit ofdistance and a bit of time to think and read and right.
You know, I want to know about the context in which they're produced and that you do face to face.
But I also want to know about the context that they kind of open up, context that they advert to.
There might be historical context, social political context.
And yeah, I mean, you need a bit of distance to prepare for that, you know.
And so, then when I moved to Singapore, I had that distance. I had a good library.
I had plenty of time. NUS is quite gentlemanly, I suppose, when it comes to the point of the initial hire.
You're not thrashed as a teacher in this institution, which is one of its great draw cards.
And I was able to, yeah, to render that experience in the form of, yeah, academic publications, basically.
Brent:
[8:42] Certainly. It makes a lot of sense.
Keller:
[8:44] So how should people with no experience with thai art think about thailand and in particular think about the influences that art has on thai culture.
David:
[8:52] Yeah it's a really hard question for me to answer um my my overall kind of position would be that i i think really good art shouldn't require background knowledge if an artist isreally doing their job most of the time you You shouldn't have to read too much, you shouldn't have to prepare too much to have a meaningful encounter with it.
The balance between visual and cerebral experiences in art
[9:21] There's a lot of criticism out there about contemporary art having become too discursive, you know, that in order to go and see an exhibition now, you spend half the time readingand you need to know all this background and so on.
And I think to some extent, you know, that criticism is valid.
But at the same time, I'm not someone who thinks that, you know, art exhibitions should be entirely visual, sensual experiences.
You know, I enjoy the cerebral side of a good show. So, if there's research behind it and there's insights in the work, I'm happy to know more about the context.
So, I mean, that reading that goes along with viewing, I think, is not something I'm against.
When it comes to Thailand in particular, I think one thing you have to bear in mind is that, as I said, it's not a literary society.
It's not a literary culture. One thing that I wasn't prepared for is the different degree to which people inhabit their language, you know, and I inhabit the English language as a reader and asa writer.
And I didn't realize that I am like, because I grew up in an affluent society where, you know, the vast majority of people are pretty much fully literate.
[10:36] You know, I didn't realize what a privilege that was until I moved to Thailand.
A lot of my friends in Thailand were not poor.
They were middle class, by and large.
I was lucky that I had friends right across the class spectrum of a very broad class spectrum, you know, because I got to see the different purchase that different people had on theirlanguage.
And it's hugely different in that place. So, I had friends who were very multilingual and very educated.
I had friends who were absolutely like rural working class and not literate.
And I had a lot of friends in between who were educated, maybe had one or even two university degrees, but who still didn't inhabit the Thai language in the way that I inhabit the Englishlanguage.
[11:30] So, for example, to give you a kind of concrete example, I might ask someone, what does this word mean? You know, a Thai word.
And my friends who are educated people often would say, you know, you should really go and talk to Ajahn so-and-so about that, to talk to this professor about that.
[11:52] You know, whereas, you know, sitting on the bus in many languages, certainly in European languages, I can ask the person next to me what a word that I am not familiar withmeans and get a, expect to get a pretty decent stab of an answer, you know.
So, this was really an eye opener for me.
The challenge of artists expressing their work through language
[12:10] And so, one thing I would say is that in order to get more out of Thai art, if you're interested in it, reading has a really different place, you know.
Know, artists don't read as much generally, I think, and artists don't write as much in contexts like that.
[12:30] They're also not expected to produce that discourse that frames their work in the same way that artists are in other places.
This also kind of was a jolt to me, you know, to see artists whose work you found really really interesting and engaging and deep and, you know, opening up interesting histories orcontexts for you, but who were not necessarily able to articulate that, either on the spot or in writing, in words, you know.
So that's not the same everywhere.
It's not even the same everywhere in Southeast Asia. It's also something that changes, I think, between generations.
I think younger artists in this region today are far more capable of giving the discursive, you know, the kind of textual version of what they're doing and explaining their practices in a kindof, you know, not necessarily technical way that well, but in an intellectual way.
And that wasn't the case when I arrived in this part of the world. That was rare.
Brent:
[13:37] So if an artist isn't able to contextualize or fully describe their entire process, is it fair for a critic to put some of that context on them if they weren't conscious of it when they werecreating it?
David:
[13:54] Maybe not, but it's not for the critic to worry about that. That would be my answer.
I mean, everybody would have a different point of view on this, I suppose.
Tough is what I would say, and art critics not beholden to the artist.
Brent:
[14:11] Sure.
David:
[14:12] I think the art critics beholden to a public. And if the work is leaving a lot of those questions unanswered And when it comes to an interpretation or which contexts the work seemsto want to be opened up within, I think it is the role of the critic to step in and point those out or speculate or fill it in sometimes. Yeah.
Brent:
[14:45] Definitely. Yeah.
Keller:
[14:46] And diving a little bit further into contemporary art, what have you found in the boundary between modern art and contemporary art?
David:
[14:53] This is a topic that I've spent a lot of time thinking about.
The first thing I would say is that for me, contemporary art is kind of a subset of modern art, right?
Let's use small c, small a.
Keller:
[15:09] Small m.
David:
[15:09] Small a for now. Contemporary art for me is a subset of modern art, by which I mean the vast majority of people that I know who consider themselves to be contemporary artistshad some kind of training in some kind of art school, and the pedagogy that they encountered there is that of modern art, right?
And that's a very loose but inclusive category of activity.
One can, of course, you know, debate its modernity in all sorts of interesting ways.
And that's something that, you know, art critics and historians in this part of the world spend a lot of time doing.
Personally, I got interested in what would specifically make something out of that mix contemporary, right?
So you could say that what interests me the most is the process by which some modern art becomes contemporary, right?
And another way of putting that would be to say that what I'm interested in is this moment when the contemporary is no longer a kind of chronological category.
[16:24] Which it has been pretty much all over the place.
When you say this is a contemporary work of art, often you're just saying it was made in the present.
It's of this period, the present, usually meaning the present and the recent past.
This is stretched in various ways in different places.
Where you guys come from, contemporary is used in a more inclusive way by, for example, art museums.
And often in the United States, that is to say, post-1945, right? It's a big category.
[16:56] The world that I kind of circulate in has a more specific meaning in mind, and a lot of people in the US do too, when they use the word contemporary.
So for me, I'm interested in the moment when Then contemporary ceases to have really a chronological meaning in the first instance and starts to have what, for want of a better word, Iwould call an ideological meaning.
In other words, becomes a value judgment.
This is contemporary and that's not. right when it's used in that way and one can be you know economic about this one could be an economist about this um that value judgment assignsvalue i mean in a very concrete way a material way right certain work gets valued by a marketplace in a different way because it holds that qualification of contemporaneity right so i'mvery interested in that how that line between between the modern and the contemporary because it seems to me that that line gets crossed in different places at different times and indifferent ways and with reference to different currencies, you know, like different things make something contemporary in Myanmar.
[18:17] Versus the things that make something contemporary in Los Angeles, right?
And it happened in a different time in history, in different circumstances, you know, but then it ends up sharing this term, which is a kind of, you know, password that allows an object tocirculate in a certain global economy, right? Sometimes lucrativity.
So, that is a very important and interesting kind of line for me to try to draw in different contexts.
One of the sort of sub-questions there that is also interesting to me is to what extent is that currency an international one?
Brent:
[18:58] And by currency, you're talking about the attributes that make it contemporary?
David:
[19:02] Yes, exactly. What is the importance of internationalism, with a small i, in that currency? Yeah.
Brent:
[19:12] Is that where you see the state having an influence on contemporary art, especially if, like, in this part of the world where, like, globalization has happened later than in the Westernside?
Like, do you see, like, Western influences coming in and then that trickling down to the artists and then now those works are starting to become labeled as contemporary?
Questioning the timeline of globalization in the West
David:
[19:34] I mean, there is this lag that you're pointing to. I would also sort of query it, though. Like, um...
Is it, in fact, was the West globalised before a place like Singapore, you know, which in probably the 1850s or 60s already had a population that was massively more cosmopolitan thanmost cities in the West, right?
Brent:
[20:03] Yeah.
David:
[20:05] And what's more, had the kind of collision of modernities happening, Which is really what generates this kind of interesting kind of global culture is about different modernitieskind of competing and banging against one another.
I would sort of query the timelines that are implied in that sort of question.
But at the same time, yeah, it's possible to see a Western art system.
Historically, I mean, it's possible to track a kind of like the way that a Western modern art system, which is an institutional system, you know, and a market, opened itself and absorbedother markets, you know, put it that way.
In which process, you know, I think the 1990s is a very important period to look at for answering these questions.
[21:05] And, yeah, I mean, Asia enters that larger contemporary arts circuit from the end of the 80s really at the earliest.
After the mid-90s, it's quite common for a contemporary artist to do shows in, you know, a reasonably good one, successful one, to do shows in, you know, 10 different countries in a year.
It's not that unusual, even in Southeast Asia, right, by the late 90s.
In the early 90s, that was way unusual.
So there's a quite discernible, you know, integration that you can study historically.
And I've done some work on exactly that.
And while doing that, I'm asking this question, what are the things that make it contemporary in that way?
What are things that make it contemporary in a way that allows it to pass in that larger circuit, to be recognized as contemporary by people in these very different settings with completelydifferent historical baggage or art historical knowledge, but who can nevertheless identify this as contemporary art?
But one of the giveaways, I guess, was form, right? How formally did it change?
[22:26] Through the 1960s, 70s, and even most of the 80s in Southeast Asia, most of these nations had formal academies for modern art training.
And the majority of the output was still in what in the West was considered traditional media, the traditional media of the European fine arts, basically, which means painting painting andsculpture, primarily artists do drawing and whatever, they're trained in a certain way.
And the output of that, you know, academic, institutional kind of modern art was largely paintings and sculptures.
That was the work that was debated.
It was the work that went in the salons, exhibitions and so on.
And it's the work indeed that's primarily been historicised as the canon of, you know, and if you go to NGS, the National Gallery Singapore, you can see a kind of collection, section,regional collection of Southeast Asian modern art in those forms, painting and sculpture.
Now, when I arrived in Bangkok in the late 90s and then early 2000s, I got to know a whole bunch of artists and I was friends with them and we were working together.
[23:35] Nobody was making paintings and sculptures. None of the people I thought were interesting, lots of people were, but the people I thought were interesting were all makingsomething else.
They were making installations, they were making performances, they were making video, some of them making kind of events, happenings, all sorts of different things, but nobody wasselling paintings and sculptures. sculptures.
Most of them had been trained in how to make paintings and sculptures because that's what the art school still did.
But that wasn't what contemporary art was doing. And if you wanted to be trafficked in that global way, you couldn't do it with paintings, except if you were really outstanding, right?
But most of the people who kind of got into that orbit did so by modulating the forms that they use towards these, you know, more quote-unquote contemporary forms, right?
Another dimension I'll add to it on that point is that I also felt.
The Challenge of Being "Contemporary" without Going International
[24:44] That it should be possible to qualify as contemporary without getting on that international kind of caravan.
Right and i still think that i've had a hard time proving it right and maybe this is one of these, perennial kind of problems um it's very hard to point to an artist who has been celebrated,specifically with that word contemporary who has not, made an international path for themselves it's really hard to find one i'm interested in who those figures are as well like what forexample is there another layer of cosmopolitan experience that is not global globe trotting you know international wheeler dealer type.
[25:43] That for example might open up in an archipelagic context that may or may not cross national national boundaries.
[25:53] So this comes to the other part of your question, like what has been the role of nation states in kind of determining or helping to determine the criteria by which something qualifiesas contemporary or not?
And the answer is mixed, actually.
At least I'm speaking from a regional point of view, which is where I've focused my research in the last 15 years or so.
And in Southeast Asia, I can say with reasonable confidence, you know, that this is not a question that one can answer generally.
Actually, there is a huge range in Southeast Asia when it comes to the state's influence on the contemporaneity of art.
There is much less diversity when one speaks of the modernity of art, right?
In the case of the modernity of art, the state was almost, and usually the post-colonial nation, right?
So we're talking about the second half of the 20th century. is the period when modern art, which is something that already existed in all of these places, became institutionalised.
And it was normally the post-colonial state that kind of took over a colonial academy of some kind, which might have been quite small and informal, and made it into a kind of article ofnational production, right, into a national culture factory.
[27:21] And so that gives a certain standardization, in fact, to the regional landscape where modern art is concerned.
Where contemporary art is concerned, I think you have a very different story.
On the one hand, you have places like Cambodia or Laos where the state has virtually zero interest in contemporary art, pretty much to this day.
[27:47] In the middle, you have places where the state is interested in art, in contemporary production, in contemporary forms, and maybe in this value of contemporaneity, but is not reallydriving it, right?
It's not really orchestrating contemporary production, and this includes most of the kind of quasi-democracies in the region, your Thailand, your Philippines, Indonesia, and so on, right?These are places with markets, art markets.
They're places with typically a...
Wealth Discrepancy and Government Influence in Art Markets
[28:23] High discrepancy of wealth, you know, uneven distribution of wealth.
There are places with crony capitalism.
There are places with military, you know, military, a strong military institution that is often very much a part of government.
And there are places that have indigenous, let's say, whatever, local art markets, national art markets.
And in those places, I think investment in the contemporary is usually a kind of messy co-production where some government agencies sometimes get involved, sometimes municipalagencies, a city hall will have a museum, an exhibiting institution, whatever.
And that's a mix. And then you have Singapore. I think Singapore in some respects is in a class of its own here in the Southeast Asian context.
If you include East Asia, it's much less unique, I think. In Southeast Asia, it's unique.
It's a place where one might say contemporary art is largely a creation of the state.
Brent:
[29:28] Okay.
David:
[29:30] That will upset some Singapore listeners, I imagine, but I think it's more than arguable.
I'd say it's possible to substantiate a kind of Singapore contemporary art history in which the state is very much an active author.
Brent:
[29:51] Yeah. Do they author it by funding certain types and only giving recognition to those artworks?
David:
[29:59] I wouldn't say only giving recognition to. Funding, yes. Yes.
They're actively funding contemporary art production here and they have done, you know, pretty assiduously since the late 90s.
In the mid-90s, they started a museum for contemporary arts called the Singapore Art Museum. It still exists.
It's a changed institution, but it still exists.
There were a handful of groups and spaces in Singapore already at that time who were active in the production of what I've styled contemporary art.
[30:36] And the state got involved in the mid-90s In 96 they opened the Singapore Art Museum It was the first museum of its kind And it's a fairly significant investment over the years Tocollect contemporary art from the Southeast Asian region As well as Singapore And to show it, to organise exhibitions of it in various ways, By the late 90s This government, I think, wasstarting to see the kind of instrumental value of contemporary art a lot more clearly, and there was this famous policy document called the Renaissance City Plan, which was authored in, Ithink, 99.
I think it was published maybe at the end of 99 or in the year 2000.
Now, this plan, which is an ongoing thing they do, I think, every four or five years, they kind of reissue the state arts plan, made provision for or made the argument, made the case for apretty generous funding regime, which has become considerably more generous over the years.
And that, of course, has a very dramatic impact on the sorts of activity that happens here, the sorts of things that get supported, the sorts of things that institutions can comfortably and oreconomically easily show and program.
[32:00] At the same time, I mean, the suggestion that that narrows, I don't think it narrows what is funded.
I think in a strange way, it's perversely the opposite in Singapore.
The art sector here is a distributive sector.
Agency, right? Almost all of the money comes from the state, and that's very unusual, right?
There was until recently no market to speak of, very little market to speak of, very few collectors, very few people, individuals, even companies that had an interest in art collecting,contemporary art collecting.
It's a little different if you're talking about painting, If you go back to that kind of traditional forms of modern art, there's a bit more.
[32:52] Corporations in the 80s were putting big, ugly sculptures in front of their buildings, and there was already certain kinds of modern art. art.
Contemporary art, in the way I've defined it, is something that almost nobody had an interest in in the 90s when it comes to high net worth individuals, right?
Or those that did, didn't believe that it existed here. When I started a gallery in 2011, many of the collectors you would meet in Singapore never bought a single thing in Singapore.
This is not that long ago, right?
It's changed now, I think, for the better. In those days, even just like 10 years ago, go, you would meet somebody who has a really impressive international contemporary art collection.
100% of it was bought in like Basel, Zurich, and London, right?
They're the places that these people are going for their business trips or whatever.
They have a Saturday off, they might go shopping in some of the local galleries, right?
So, there was art here, but there wasn't any sort of connection between that market, between that economy and local producers, producers, right, local artists.
So, one of the main roles of the state in this picture has been distributive, right? So, the state puts aside this...
[34:06] Money. And the role of the National Arts Council, as it happens here, as it's called here, is really to spread it far and wide within the nation, right?
It's restrictive in the sense that you have to have a passport to get it, pretty much, or at least be a permanent resident.
Keller:
[34:25] And it's restrictive, of course.
David:
[34:27] In the sense that there's certain topics that are taboo. This is the case in most funding regimes. Singapore shouldn't be singled out for that.
So, yeah, it's a kind of mixed bag when it comes to that question of restrictive.
It's also massively distributive. I would compare it more to a kind of Stalinist system, right?
Artists here rely on the state.
They know that accepting that patronage means behaving in a certain way and making work in a certain way, perhaps.
They also learn how to game that system, how to exploit its loopholes or its blind spots.
So, you know, that's a game that's kind of a separate issue, I think.
Brent:
[35:15] That makes a lot of sense.
Keller:
[35:16] Then talking about the global marketplace and the regional marketplace, possibly, I guess, void of monetary terms, what do you think gives art and gives artists value?
David:
[35:27] Well, I mean, there's a kind of glib way to answer that, and it's to say, I guess, you know, people like me, discourses, you know, discourses give art value.
An equally glib way of answering it is from that market point of view, right?
And you say, well, you know, exchange gives those things value.
I am probably more romantic than I sometimes sound.
The Importance of Institutions and Viewers in Art Value
[35:59] What gives art value? Institutions, definitely, and people, you know.
Definitely professionals, the professionals that are involved with it, but also I think viewers.
You know, I'm romantic enough maybe to say that I think audiences are important.
Contemporary art sort of changed its position in the food chain over the last 30, 40 years.
Whereas contemporary art was once considered a kind of elitist niche right to some extent i think that criticism remains valid but whereas as a visual culture if it was rarefied it wasexclusive i think it's demonstrable that it was for a period much more exclusive as an institution Right?
Contemporary art as a system.
That is not what art institutions want now.
That is not what any art institution wants now, exhibiting institutions, right?
There has been a popularization of contemporary art that in some respects, you know, loosens that stranglehold of a certain class over this kind of visual culture.
[37:21] And so, you know, I think those things give art value.
You know, what you put in front of that newer, bigger audience has a determinant impact on how much the owner of it or the maker of it can charge for it in a marketplace.
It's, you know, black and white. So, if you look at an institution like Tate Modern, say, in London, this organisation became the number one tourist destination of the United Kingdom.
I don't know if it still enjoys that rank, but for very many years, more people went to the UK to go there than for any other reason.
Right that means that the visual art inside it is making money you know it is creating value where there wasn't value so i think that you know institutions have a have a big role in sort ofchanneling the energies and the values that are generated by people including artists including critics including curators the other thing just to mention on that question is that over thisperiod that I've roughly sketched, the relative power of one player versus another, one actor in this network versus another has changed quite a lot as well.
[38:47] There was a time in the 20th century when the big artists were kind of the most, they were the whales, right?
[38:55] They were the most preponderant forms in the landscape of contemporary art production.
[39:02] In the 21st century, I think it would be hard to argue that the big artists have more gravity in this sense, in this kind of market and, you know- shtick right um i think it's hard toargue that big artists have more of that than the big curators do i think the rise of the curator is one of the kind of um for better or for worse right is is one of the appreciable differences ofthe contemporary art world now okay.
Brent:
[39:38] Yeah i just spent the last this whole summer in london and could definitely say the tate is still a very big institution of.
David:
[39:45] Course And.
Brent:
[39:46] One of the best exhibits I saw was, it was a mosque and a temple and different times of the year, different parts of the day. Right.
They would switch it and it was in Jerusalem and now given what's going on, it's even more timely.
But that's a little aside. side now as we kind of switch from well i talk about the blend of your academic and your artistic side as a curator what are some of the things that you are lookingfor in your process of creating a show and also to kind of piggyback on the last question what are some of those characteristics of an artist that you're looking to highlight especiallybecause earlier in the conversation you mentioned oh like back in thailand like not many of them would have broke out into the contemporary scene unless they were super likeoutstanding artists so maybe what are some of those attributes that you would try to pick up on in a local artist and then bring them into a curated show yeah.
David:
[40:45] I mean i don't always see myself as playing that role but but yeah i i mean i think I think it's fair to say that I have played that role.
Brent:
[40:53] Sometimes.
Seeking Lessons and Knowledge from Work and Exhibitions
David:
[40:57] There's a number of things I'm looking for. One of them is, quite frankly, what is this work teaching me?
You know, I'm somebody who I like to learn something from exhibitions.
I learn a lot from exhibitions.
Exhibitions are a form of knowledge production. I think making artworks is a form of knowledge production.
And I'm somebody who reads, let's say, contemporary art for that. I want to learn.
The Importance of Art Reflecting Time and Place
[41:36] I'm looking for people whose work reflects the time and place that they live in.
I think that's always been important for me.
It's not important for every curator. It's not paramount for some curators.
For me, there is still a kind of everyday sense of the word contemporary that sort of implies that, right?
That there is a relationship between what an artist is doing and the lived reality, be that political, economic, cultural, sometimes personal, the lived reality of their circumstances.
I think if an artist's work doesn't say something about the time and place that they live in, then I'm much less likely to be interested in it.
Is it possible to make an artwork that is really just form, you know, that's just about an experience of form?
Yes, it is. In my view, the best formalist work.
[42:42] Still says something about its context, you know.
There's a whole school of thought in a certain kind of now, fortunately now, outmoded North American scholarship in which, you know, the absolute extraction of all reference and allnarrative was the be-all and end-all of fine art production, you know.
Know it's associated with the critic clement greenberg and certain artists who rose to prominence in the 1950s um you know and it was really that this idea of the artwork as anautonomous thing should only be judged on its own terms you know you have an encounter with this thing and it's a form of mysticism actually this for me is a form of almost religiousinvestment investment right the thing itself is so other to me that i can only afford to have my encounter with it without context as it were this is what the white cube was about rightmuseums that tried to extract everything else from that encounter to make it a pure encounter right so there's a certain tradition of modernism that has tried to do that fortunately theglobalization of of the art world has sort of torpedoed that idea.
I think that's an incredibly limiting idea.
[44:06] And for me, you know, artworks that breathe in their context and that have something to say about it are just far more interesting.
I'm more interested in that than I am in the finer...
[44:22] Points of an aesthetic production and an aesthetic encounter.
You know, maybe I need to loosen up and just sort of enjoy the sensual.
[44:33] What art provides to the senses more or not.
I don't know. This is something that, you know, we continue to debate.
But I know some artists who are working in a formalist idiom even or working with modernisms.
[44:48] You know, and reinterpreting modern forms, modern visual language but whose work breathes in a context at the same time you know and i think this is the fascinating thing andwhy i'm excited to be doing what i'm doing is that i work in a period like i work in a time where um non-western modernism is sort of having its moment you know It's now all over theTate, right, for example.
It's all the big museums in these centres of Western, cosmopolitan centres of Western culture, you know.
All these big museums are desperate to understand non-Western modern art and I've had opportunities because of that, you know, and I'm very fortunate, I feel very grateful to have beeninvolved in the modern art of Southeast Asia, the modern and contemporary art of Southeast Asia at this period where there is a genuine appetite for it elsewhere in the world.
Because I think it starts to be really interesting. This is to answer the question of what I'm looking for.
I'm also looking for how these different experiences of modernity are.
[46:07] That often shared those avant-garde tendencies, often borrowed from them, sometimes critiqued them, that developed in dialogue with cosmopolitan modernism, Westernmodernism, or let's say the metropole, You know, concurrently articulated completely different forms of modern art, you know.
You know, I'm reading a little bit about India at the moment.
I don't know much about Indian art history, but I have to go there to give a talk.
And I want to know more of the context of modernism there so that I can compare a little bit.
And, you know, for example, in the case of India, when Indian artists started to break into this global circuit in the 90s, one of the things that was often a disappointment that was oftenexpressed is that there was this shift towards installation, performance, video, newer media, right?
When most of the artists had been trained in painting and while they did make those new forms, they were also still painting.
[47:24] And there's actually a very interesting dialogue going on with modernism and Indian modern painting in the work of people who've become celebrated as installation makers, right?
So, there's a kind of, there's also, this is a little bit off, you know, I've drifted off your question, but there's also a kind of forgetting, you know.
You know, there's certain blind spots and there's certain sorts of forgetting that happen in the course of this encounter between different worlds.
And that's another thing I'm looking for, you know.
Where is there a story to tell that could just be told differently with that change in perspective?
Brent:
[48:06] Yeah.
David:
[48:06] Yeah.
Brent:
[48:07] Yeah.
Keller:
[48:08] And with these, I guess, attempts at different perspectives and different ways of storytelling, how do you characterize your relationship between your academic work and yourartistic work?
David:
[48:19] There's definitely a difference in the attitude on each side.
The first thing I would say is that for me, they're both research practices, right?
The process of doing academic work for me involves research.
The process of making an exhibition involves research. For me, the research is not different.
Opportunities and Privilege in Making Exhibitions
[48:43] Basically, if I make a show, usually, sometimes you get an opportunity.
Sometimes something falls into your lap. Someone asks you to apply for something or someone asks you to make an exhibition.
You know, it's expensive to make exhibitions, right? If someone asks you to make an exhibition in a nice context, you think about it, you know, it's a privilege. privilege.
But then there's another kind of show where you're sort of making the shows you want to see.
And this is always my advice to young curators.
Make the shows you want to see. Do it with no money, but make the shows you want to see.
[49:18] All the people who are respected in this game are people who started by doing that, all of them, as far as I'm concerned.
And I think that this is a hard thing, especially in a place like Singapore, you know, where the role of the exhibition maker is, like, always already institutionalised.
There's almost no way to do it outside of this matrix of state institutions.
But to speak more directly to the question, when I start an exhibition project, there's no moment where I can say, oh, you know, this is where this project begins.
It's part of the research that I'm doing anyway as an academic.
And the same thing kind of works vice versa, right?
Like when I start to write something and I think, oh, this might be an essay, say. I might try to get this in a journal or whatever, you know, whatever it is academics do.
You know, usually it's because I'm often like I'm standing in a show.
The Differences between Exhibition Making and Academic Publications
[50:21] Or whatever, I'm having a coffee after having seen something or had a conversation or been, you know, in a panel discussion or whatever.
For me, they're really seamless, actually, you know, that research happens in both of these things and, you know, could lead to either of these things, you know.
There are, of course, differences, right? When you make an exhibition, while you might have the pretensions of an educator sometimes, you are addressing a public.
And when you make an academic publication, usually, I think you're not, actually, you know. Academic publications are for experts.
Audiences, broadly speaking, really good academics are addressing a public at the same time.
But they're few and far between in this day and age, I think.
The academic as the kind of organic public intellectual, whatever you want to call it, I think is an endangered species, frankly.
And that says more about the industrialization of higher education than it does about any given society.
I think this is a global business. It's changed a lot. lot.
[51:35] Exhibition making in some respects still has a kind of hokey down home sort of, you know, earthiness to like down to earth quality to it.
Because when somebody puts their resources behind an exhibition and gives their real estate to it, they want to get as many people through the door as they can.
And they really don't care who those people are usually, right?
Even in a very sort of fancy pants institution, you want a general public if you can get it. And it's hard to get it.
You've got to compete with a lot of other noise to get a big general public.
So this is why certain exhibition forms command greater budgets and maybe more attention than others.
And I think the research part of it is very important. I want.
[52:30] Say, those big platforms to also be research platforms where curators are learning something, where artists are learning something, where the public is learning something.
I have a romantic investment in this essentially enlightenment European idea of the, you know, of the, not necessarily the museum.
This is a set of expectations that emerged around museums. museums.
I've never worked in a museum.
I mean, I've worked in them. I've never worked for a museum, right?
But I do share this, and that is the public vocation, right?
It's a public calling, and to some extent, an educational one.
So, I guess that's just a personal answer.
Brent:
[53:14] And then, as you kind of wear different hats, where would you identify more?
Do you think you Do you tend to like to be more down to earth in the public facing, more academic facing, or do you identify yourself as one of the few academics who can bridge thatgap really well?
David:
[53:33] Oh, I don't know if I do it well. I've been doing it for a while, so I've got some practice, but I don't know if I do it well.
It's not an easy thing to do.
That's not just because of like how skillful an operator you are as an individual.
It comes down to the institutions that you're reckoning with around you and the institutions that might employ you.
I wouldn't say I identify more strongly with either. I think I'd go crazy if I did just one of the two.
Brent:
[54:04] Sure.
David:
[54:04] I don't think I'd be really happy doing just one of the two.
You know, there are jobs in museums where you get to do research and write things.
So, you know, it's possible on either side of the line. um what i would say in answer to your question more directly is that i identify if anything i identify as a critic and i think everybodyshould be a critic you know like when you go to an exhibition whether you like it or not you should be critical in how you, grapple with it. And I identify more easily with that position,which it turns out is a hopelessly unlucrative, you know, career.
But which has always been easy for me to identify with, even when I was a high school student, I felt that that was what I was.
And I was lucky at high school, I had some teachers who kind of encouraged me to write about what I was seeing. And, you know, I find that, and that's hard, you know, because your lifechanges.
I've lived in Singapore for now quite a long time, like 14 years.
And this is not a good place to be a critic, obviously.
[55:18] I also have a family. The critic breeds that encounter with shows, with works.
Some like to go to artist studios whatever a lot of curators like to spend time in artist studios i i'm more somebody who likes to see shows and when i see shows i come out normally angryright and hungry hangry and that's good for me that's a good state that's usually when work starts you know it's like i respond to what i see and that's what fires the urge to make the showsthat that I would want to see as well, I think, often.
It's like seeing what people are doing and identifying what's missing, identifying what I wish they were doing is often where the kind of impetus comes from to make a project.
Brent:
[56:11] Do you hope people leave your shows hangry? Yeah.
David:
[56:14] I guess.
Brent:
[56:15] Yeah.
David:
[56:16] I'd be really annoyed if people left my shows without an impression, without a response.
Engaging with a Limited Audience in the Humanities
[56:27] So that I think, and this is something that proves to me that I'm not straightforwardly an academic, because I think most academics in the humanities are pretty content addressing alimited audience.
And in some of the things I do, I am too. There's some things I write that I'm intending for that limited audience, people who already know a lot of the references that I'm making and soon.
But I don't think I'd be satisfied if that was my whole life.
I like that encounter. When you make a show, invariably in the early days of an exhibition, you're still around.
In my experience, it's always been, mostly it's been in other places, right? And I'm still around and I'm in the exhibition.
And all the public program has kind of been done.
So you've addressed the professional crowd.
You've had an opening. you've said polite things to the patrons and and the director of an institution or whatever you've maybe been to dinner with some collectors or something and thenyou know you in the last day of your stay in that place and you're in this you're in the space and you have you're in the wild you know you have real real humans there trying to makesense of what you've done.
[57:47] And talking about it or asking questions or looking puzzled when the invigilator says something or whatever.
This to me is you always learn something about the works that you don't learn from reading books, that you don't learn from talking with a scholarly constituency.
But the public teaches you something about what you're working with.
Um so that for me is is really important if i didn't have that i think i'd really feel the lack.
Keller:
[58:21] Yeah no it.
Brent:
[58:23] Makes a lot of sense and.
Keller:
[58:24] Then as we wrap up here do you have any other advice or parting words to our listeners.
David:
[58:28] Um yeah i mean life advice not not really but i i think one thing i would say is is try to look beneath the surface you know um a lot of media a lot of of our media culture in this dayand age.
Doesn't invite us to look beneath the surface of things and if my work has kind of taught me anything it's that appearances are often misleading you know um and and i think this this is alarger point about literacy i teach visual culture sometimes in in this institution and this is is one of the things that I find I get talking about with students quite a lot.
[59:18] Put it this way, in the 19th century, when the franchise of literacy was widely spread for the first time in advanced capitalist societies anyway, or industrializing societies, let's say,you learn to read and write if you were lucky enough to be a part of the middle class.
And this This got you access to a whole lot of stuff that you previously wouldn't have had access to, right?
Libraries, for one thing, knowledge, certain jobs, right?
Certain economic status that came with it, further education, and so on and so forth, right?
Literacy was embedded in these kind of enlightenment ideals that slowly spread around the world and have informed the cultures and the economies of pretty much every society on earthnow.
Like some degree of mass literacy is pretty much the norm.
Um it's interesting to me that the vast majority of our personal commerce with the world now and i don't just mean buying and selling stuff our our interchange with other people oursocial and economic existence is mediated by other media not literature richer.
The Dominance of Video in our Digital World
[1:00:45] It's mediated principally by video, digital, electronic moving images, right?
Constitutes probably a majority of our concentration bandwidth, right?
Videos. And yet, the vast majority of us, even for all our affluence, for all our wonderful higher degrees, are perfectly ignorant when it comes to the video form, utterly ignorant of itshistory, and absolutely illiterate in its production, in its grammar, in the way that it crafts and organizes meaning.
The Impact of Social Media on News and Information
[1:01:26] Dumbos you know this to me is a worry and if there's anything i have to say into this kind of you know this by now viral kind of hysteria about echo chambers and you know umwhat social media has done to to the media scape and particularly to kind of news and information you know the so-called old post-truth.
I mean, the number of vacuous buzzwords at our disposal is limitless.
But if I have anything to say into this kind of set of debates, it's that literacy still matters.
And we've really dropped the ball, I think. Visual literacy is one of these things. How are images constructed?
If they are to mediate so much of our exchange with each other, Why don't we learn how they're put together?
What are the tools that you need? What are the visual languages that organise information in visual terms?
What are the traps? What are the tricks? And art history teaches you that.
[1:02:36] So I feel lucky in a sense that I have some degree of visual literacy in a very visual contemporary culture. You know, I feel like I'm able to kind of pass it and maybe sift it in acritical way because of that study.
And this, I would hope, is something that we can share with more people.
You know, I think it would be a better world if we were more discerning when it came to images and if we were more literate when it came to images.
Brent:
[1:03:05] Perfect. Well, thank you so much for coming on today.
David:
[1:03:08] My pleasure. Thank you for having me.