SMU-Substation Arts and Culture Matters Series

A perennial concern of cultural policy in Singapore has been to enable greater access to the arts and culture in Singapore. This is most evident in the state’s consistent focus on audience numbers as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) and rationale for public funding. Since 2012, this is best exemplified by the key vision statement of the most recent cultural policy –  Arts and Culture Strategic Review (ACSR) Report – which aims to transform Singapore into a vibrant city where the arts and culture is available to “everyone, everywhere everyday”. This qualitative aspiration has also been translated into quantitative terms, which includes doubling the percentage of Singaporeans attending arts and culture events from 40% to 80% (National Arts Council, 2012: 15)

In recent years, this has resulted in the propagation of free and low cost public arts programmes offered by national institutions, including free entry to national museums and heritage institutions, urban arts festivals such as the Singapore Night Festival and “i Light Marina Bay”, and community outreach initiatives like the “Arts in Your Neighbourhood” series. Arts organisations and institutions have also been strongly encouraged to offer free and/or low cost programmes, or participate in state-organised free programming in the name of placemaking, community engagement and social inclusion.

The Price of Free is a two-part Closed-Door Discussion on the context, impact and sustainability of the state’s emphasis on free and/or low cost arts programming. Questions to be explored include: How has this state emphasis on increasing arts access impacted the operations of arts organisations and institutions? What are the operational challenges and potential opportunities? Are there disparities between the presumed benefits and actual opportunity costs of the state’s emphasis on increased arts access? Should the arts be a public/common/free good in Singapore? Are there alternative models and opportunities for arts practitioners and organisations to rationalise their impact while ensuring sustainability?

Part I is a facilitated sharing-session for those working in arts organisations who have been impacted by this focus on free and/or low cost arts programming to com together and share experiences and insights, and suggest concrete strategies and directions. Through this dialogue, we hope to consolidate shared concerns and structural issues, which will help frame the focus and direction for Part II.

Part II will be a targeted roundtable discussion involving broader stakeholders with expertise and/or experience in this topic. It aims to critically examine and fine-tune the common issues surfaced in Part I, as well as forge better communication and understanding between the varying stakeholders.

Ultimately, we hope that this two-part Discussion will enable an ongoing dialogue on the impact of state policies and programming on arts practices and development in Singapore, develop new ways for (re)thinking relations between the arts, state and society, and ignite potential for further study and collaboration.

Chinatowns in the West have traditionally functioned as ethnic enclaves which were despised by the dominant western culture, while functioning for Chinese immigrants as a refuge from the hostile white society they were surrounded by. In today’s globalised world the meaning of Chinatowns has been transformed, as they have become more open, hybrid and transnational urban spaces, increasingly interconnected within the broader Asia-Pacific region. For Australians of Asian background, Chinatown may be a site of conflicting memories of Australia’s racist history and of cultural marginalisation and ethnic survival, but it is also – in today’s multicultural and cosmopolitan age – an area to be claimed for the expression of new Asian-Australian identities. In Sydney’s Chinatown, public art projects by Asian Australian artists such as Jason Wing and Lindy Lee articulate some of the complexities and ambiguities of what it means to be Asian in Australia today.

BIOGRAPHY

PROFESSOR IEN ANG is Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University (Australia). She is the author of many books, including On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West and The Art of Engagement: Culture, Collaboration, Innovation (co-edited with Elaine Lally and Kay Anderson). Her work deals broadly with patterns of cultural flow and exchange in our globalised, focusing on contentious issues related to the politics of identity and difference, migration, ethnicity and multiculturalism in Australia and Asia, and issues of representation and complexity in contemporary cultural institutions. She is currently finalising a three-year research project, to result in a new book, provisionally titled ‘Sydney’s Chinatown in the Asian Century: From Ethnic Enclave to Global Hub’.

Whereas museums and art histories have long sought to imagine the national, large-scale international art exhibitions such as biennials are, for the most part, resolutely anchored in the more localised world of the city. Their funding, impetus, name and purpose often derive from their host cities, which seek to draw global attention to particular metropolitan contexts, often for the purposes of civic boosterism. This is the most well-known argument about biennials – that, in their branding of cities as “destination zones” for contemporary art, biennials are little more than handmaidens to neoliberal globalisation.

Professor Gardner will approach biennials from a slightly different angle, however, for this presumed globality of biennials should be better understood as forms of the trans-local rather than the transnational, the global or the international per se. These translocal connections have a long history, as do biennials. Tracing those histories is my main concern in this talk.

In particular, he wishes to explore the prospects and challenges posed to contemporary art, and especially contemporary art histories, by the translocal operations of biennials, both today but also, and perhaps especially, during thae development of biennials worldwide after World War Two. Not only was this the time when translocal histories became the cornerstone of biennial cultures, but those exhibitions are posing very important questions for the development of a new field in contemporary art: that of curatorial and exhibition histories.

BIOGRAPHY

DR ANTHONY GARDNER is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Oxford, where he is also the Director of Graduate Studies at the Ruskin School of Art. He has published widely on subjects including postcolonialism, postsocialism and curatorial histories, and is an editor of the MIT Press journal ARTMargins. Among his books are Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations (Melbourne, 2013), Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (MIT Press, 2015) and, also through MIT Press in 2015, the anthology Neue Slowenische Kunst: From Kapital to Capital (with Zdenka Badovinac and Eda Čufer). His latest book, co-authored with Charles Green, isBiennials, Triennials and Documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art, published by Wiley-Blackwell in summer 2016.