Making art public in Singapore: performativity, communication, and archiving Tang Da Wu's practice (1979 to 1995)

• Main Author: Tan, Adrian Peng Chai
• Other Authors: -
• Format: Thesis-Doctor of Philosophy
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/169970
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Making Art Public in Singapore: Performativity, Communication, and Archiving Tang Da Wu’s Practice (1979 to 1995) examines the city-state and its ‘public space-in-the-making’ (Hee, 2017) as the locus of performativity, communication, and acts of archival practice. It explores how in a period of cultural development and spatial change between 1979 and 1995, Tang's practice alternated between intervening in the public sphere and the museum, provoking modifications of the space of everyday life, in giving rise to ‘making things visible that would otherwise remain invisible’ in ‘interrupting the city’ (Gielen, 2015). Through an analysis of events, activities, and exhibitions, a close examination of Tang’s site- specific and durational works made in public spaces trace the artist’s enactment of his ‘right to the city’ (Harvey, 2008; Lefebvre, 1996; Purcell, 2014). Tang’s Earth Work (1979, 1980) and its re-staging at National Gallery Singapore in 2016 is a cue for the significance of connecting the idea of publicness with themes of repetition, re-enactment, and intervening in public space. Starting from Earth Work is helpful in developing an understanding of the impact of radically changing urban forms and showing how the city undergoing tabula rasa (or clean slate) connected to the development of making art in and with the city. It is through a close study of public art, dialogical art, and performativity; that these negotiations, tactics, and critical strategies of an artist collaborating with cultural institutions like National Museum Art Gallery (NMAG) and artists associated with The Artists Village (TAV); can be read as creative labour. Rather than a linear art historical understanding of the artist, a multidisciplinary approach is adopted in which the city (as protagonist) is encountered through the analytical framework of art, public space, and the archive’s praxis in contemporary art. The question of why and how Tang made art in and intervened in public space, is explored in the operational, processual, and communicative methods adopted in events like The First and Second Open Studio Shows (1989) and A Sculpture Seminar 1 (1991). The uses of bodies, actions, and the installative are further analysed in Life Boat (1989), Tiger’s Whip (1991, 1992), and Don’t Give Money to the Arts (1995) in understanding how and why these temporal engagements with the city spatially and socially challenged and disrupted the role of an artist in society. Tang’s practice features prominently in the collection of documents, re-staging of archival installations, and re-narration of archival photographic representations in Koh Nguang How’s Singapore Art Archive Project (SAAP). SAAP is an important ‘subject' and ‘object’ in the analysing of events as ‘scenes’ in the performative cityscape of Singapore, where this study was made possible through the artist’s ‘presence’ as observer, audience, and documenter. For this reason, giving attention to SAAP as ‘archives of artworks to archive as artwork’ articulates a new focus to one’s reading of the city, the artists’ encounters with the public, their embodied experiences connected to human desire, aspirations, and sometimes, utopian ideas about transforming Singapore. In arguing for voices of artists to be heard and their pedagogical and cultural role realised, there is an emergent need for an immersion and a more discursive look at how nations, institutions, and artists engage with the archive in establishing art production, new dialogue, and new histories.