Arts and Cultural Leadership in Asia

Jo Caust

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780815364290
• eBook ISBN: 9781317599210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Arts and cultural activity in Asia is increasingly seen as important internationally, and Asia's growing prosperity is enabling the full range of artistic activities to be better encouraged, supported and managed. At the same time, cultural frameworks and contexts vary hugely across Asia, and it is not appropriate to apply Westerns theories and models of leadership and management. This book presents a range of case studies of arts and cultural leadership across a large number of Asian countries. Besides examining different cultural frameworks and contexts, the book considers different cultural approaches to leadership, discusses external challenges and entrepreneurialism, and explores how politics can have a profound impact. Throughout the book covers different art forms, and different sorts of arts and cultural organisations.

Part I

Politics, art and culture

1 Deviance and nation-building

Terence Chong

Do not attempt to define Art for others

Art has no necessary and sufficient. What is artistically necessary and sufficient for one person or community may not be so for another.

Do not attempt to define Art for others

Art has no necessary and sufficient. What is artistically necessary and sufficient for one person or community may not be so for another.

Art unifies and divides

Art draws us together and reveals universal truths. However, art can also unveil differences and contradictions. We should not just celebrate the former while demonising the latter.

Art is about possibilities

Art not only allows us to examine our way of life and to make sense of it but also to question, and to transform ourselves. Art-making requires independent thinking, freedom of expression, risk-taking and experimentation. Art has no enemies except ignorance and prejudice.

Art can be challenged but not censored

Everyone has a right to be delighted by, indifferent to or repulsed by art. But no one has the right to deny another the right to decide for his or her self

Art is political

Art comes from and speaks to life. It therefore should inform all aspects of policy and politics that affect our lives. Art enables perspectives and offers alternatives, keeps us uncertain and doubtful to our benefit, and warns us of the hazards of moral certainty.

Arts Manifesto 2013 By ArtsEngage

Introduction

In early 2013, a small group of established theater practitioners and academics presented an Arts Manifesto to a broader audience of artists and writers at a small town hall meeting in Singapore.¹ This Arts Manifesto was written in response to the Arts and Culture Strategic Review report that was released in early 2012 (Martin 2013). The Manifesto, among other things, sought to challenge the prescribed role of art in the State’s nation-building project. As expected, profound issues such as the place of art in society and politics, as well as the role of the artist in the community, were discussed. Lost in the free-wheeling dialog were two questions from two 20-something artists, one a poet, the other a designer, “What will the authorities say about the Manifesto?” and “Can a Manifesto speak for the entire arts community?”. These two questions, expressed with a sincerity only youth can muster, go to the very heart of this chapter. How has the Singapore State so successfully positioned itself in the minds of young artists as an arbiter of Art and is it possible for any artist, regardless of his or her standing, to claim leadership of the local arts community in the post-industrial hyper-capitalist city?

While the neon sheen, glut of public funds and numerous arts festivals in the city-State are befitting its aspirations for global city status, the arts field is very much a contested one. It is a field where the heterodoxy of art struggles with the orthodoxy of the State, often exposing the ideological tensions over the values and interests of different groups. Such contestations are, of course, not new. For example, the emergence of an authentic Singaporean English-language theater during the late 1980s and early 1990s not only came about because of a middle-class search for national identity, but also because local theater offered itself as one of the most critical spaces from which to critique the State and the Singapore condition. In the face of an ideologically dominant one-party State, English-language theater was seen as the heterodoxical alternative. It was a site in which stories of social injustices, identity politics of minorities, and political satire among others, could be explored.

The State-theater relationship is a complicated one. Like conjoined twins, they cannot disentangle themselves from each other despite artistic and ideological disputes because, in reality, they need each other. Theater remains the most mature local art form in Singapore and has long been the People’s Action Party (PAP) government’s poster child in its advertisement of the city-State as “cultural city”. Meanwhile, public funds remain the lifeblood of theater and other arts groups, without which they will surely flounder. On the one hand, it is in the interest of the political élite to have a culturally vibrant, even acceptably “deviant”, arts and entertainment landscape, while on the other hand, arts practitioners realize that in the absence of sustained corporate sponsorship or traditions of arts philanthropy, the State continues to enjoy a monopoly over resources, and must thus be depended upon in varying degrees for survival. This Faustian pact between local arts practitioners and bureaucrats is one of the key causes of tension in the landscape.

This chapter argues that traditional forms of artistic habitus such as the artist as “deviant” were, in the not so distant past, celebrated and recognized in the artistic field. And although artists and bureaucrats have always jostled for influence and leadership, the persona of the deviant artist has had to compete with the political realities of State funding and support, resulting in a greater diversity of values within the artistic community. In the bureaucratic imagination, the arts are a vehicle for social cohesion and multiculturalism, and since the State’s heavy investment in the arts and culture from the early 1990s onwards, it has sought to refine and define the role of arts according to the political and economic conditions of the day. This orthodoxy is not necessarily rejected by all artists, thus making it challenging for clear artistic leadership from the community to emerge.

Approach

Constructing deviance

According to art historian Janet Wolff (1993), the universal construction of the artist as a marginalized and deviant figure originates from the nineteenth century Romantic notion of the artist. The rise of individualism grew in tandem with the development of industrial capitalism, while the separation of the artist from any clear social group or class, unlike earlier systems of patronage and academies, left the artist economically vulnerable in the market. Without socio-economic structures such as guilds or the Church from where commissions to paint and sculpt traditionally came from, the artist began to cultivate a more independent aura, one in which notions of creativity and individuality, and unpredictable genius, were layered into the persona.

Not surprisingly, an orthodox State took pains to deconstruct this romantic persona of the artist. Dhanabalan, then Culture Minister, reminded Singaporeans, as Wolff did above, that:

Since the Romantic Movement of the early nineteenth century, the notion has developed that a true artist is a free spirit, even a rebel against society, a Bohemian often with unsavoury habits, and a visionary with long hair and wild eyes, doing whatever he is inspired to do … This is considered the ideal world of art and culture.

(Dhanabalan 1984: 32)

However, he went on to add:

The Renaissance world was quite different. In the Renaissance world and for much of Western history, the artist was often considered a craftsman. The artist did not consider it demeaning to be working to meet the demands of his patron within the bounds set by his patron.

(Dhanabalan 1984: 32–33)

In the same spirit, Dr Tay Eng Soon, then Minister of State for Education observed that:

Ours is still a traditional society which values what is private and personal and is not comfortable with public values and explicit discussions of sexuality and what it considers as deviant values. By all means, let our “cultural desert” bloom. But please let the blossoms be beautiful and wholesome and not be prickly pears or weeds.

(Lim 1992)

Nevertheless, it is “deviant values”, “prickly pears” and “weeds” that are valued and prized in the theater field (see Chong 2010a). The need for heterodoxy in art is accepted even by establishment circles as seen by the Censorship Review Committee Report 1992, which affirmed art’s right to challenge orthodoxy and to be a stimulus for social change (Censorship Review Committee 1992). As such, the exercise of State censorship is the uneasy and unresolved negotiation between recognizing art’s heterodox role and conservative interests. The artistic field is, after all, “internally differentiated” from other fields (Bourdieu 1983). As a site for theater-making, script-writing and acting, the theater field is one with its own rules and norms, as well as its own forms of cultural and symbolic capital that shape social action in the field. For example, creativity and artistic talent are more valued in the theater field than, say, the accounting field, and the very ability of the artist to play the “deviant” or outsider is a key part of the artistic habitus:

By habitus Bourdieu understands ways of doing and being which social subjects acquire during their socialization. Their habitus is not a matter of conscious learning, or of ideological imposition, but is acquired through practice.

(Lovell 2000: 27)

As much as we can speak of a military, teaching or academic habitus, we can speak too of, “ … the artistic habitus, or learnt dispositions, through which artists expressed their social position in a distinctive artistic philosophy or set of meanings” (Fowler 1997: 77).

Returning to Wolff:

The artist/author/composer as social outcast, starving in a garret, persists as a common idea of a social type, and can be found in the constructions of theatre practitioners like the late Kuo Pao Kun.

(Wolff 1993: 11)

One of the most revered theater practitioners in Singapore, Kuo’s personal narrative exemplifies the artist as deviant outsider. He was born in Hubei, China, and moved to Hong Kong, then to Singapore, Australia, and back again to Singapore. Kuo’s life and politics fall neatly into the narrative of the heterodox artist. His activism and engagement in left-wing Chinese-language theater led to his detention without trial under the Internal Security Act (ISA) in 1976. His release in 1980 came with restrictions on residence and travel until 1983, while his Singapore citizenship, revoked in 1977, was only restored in 1994. Indeed, Kuo’s biography may be discursively read as the archetypal heterodox artist who challenged State orthodoxies over politics, social justice and cultural ideologies, and yet possessed a strong sense of humanity and wisdom which did not desert him even after State incarceration. Although Kuo was awarded the Cultural Medallion Award in 1990, he certainly understood the need for the artist to be seen as an outsider, noting that, “I think that kind of marginality, a fringe kind of experience, allows one to compare and reflect” (Kuo 1997).

One of the enduring myths of artistic leadership is its universality. Just like the notion of universal genius or creativity, so too the artist-as-leader is trans-cultural. Traversing different cultures, East to West, and effectively bilingual, Kuo’s biography is often constructed by local writers, “ … as someone who was linguistically gifted and capable of being culturally at home in different countries” (Kwok 2003: 194–195). However, the flipside to being at home in different countries is the loss of exclusivity. Cosmopolitans, after all, have been historically perceived as “non-citizens” and “deviant” for refusing to define themselves by location, ancestry, citizenship or language (Waldron 1992). The cosmopolitan artist may thus be viewed suspiciously against, “ … a readily identifiable provenance, an integrated and predictable pattern of behavioural practice, including loyalty to a single nation-state or cultural identity” (Vertovec and Cohen 2002: 6). Very often, this particular construction of the Singaporean artist as a deviant “other” has been a useful counterpoint to the State’s nation-building project.

A more polarizing figure within the theater field is the playwright and artistic director of Agni Koothu (Theater of Fire), Elangovan. His plays are characterized by expletives and crude language, and he has even resorted to locking auditorium doors to prevent his audience from leaving, flouting safety regulations (Elangovan 1999). Time and time again, it has been shown that, “Elangovan sees the dramatist as a kind of agent provocateur and construes the artistic behaviour as necessarily challenging the status quo” (Seet 2002: 154). Most famous for his plays Talaq (1999) and Smegma (2006), both of which address religion in a controversial manner, Elangovan and his wife, S. Themoli, head of Agni Koothu, have an astute understanding of the local media’s relationship with local theater, and have been highly successful in leveraging on the media and its interests for exposure and attention (Seet 2002). The artist-as-deviant, while startling and shocking, is perfectly aligned with the narratives in the artistic field. According to Theatreworks’s Artistic Director, Ong Ken Seng, the official perception of the artist is as “an outsider in Singapore … the ‘other’ in the face of materialism and capitalism” (quoted in Seet 2002: 157). And as a heterodox outsider located in the margins of a materialist and capitalist society, the Singapore theater practitioner is often seen as an embodied form of authenticity.

The artist-as-deviant is nowhere more evident than in the “conflation of artist with homosexual in Singapore” (Seet 2002: 157). The increasing presence of sexual minorities on the Singapore stage, as well as the traditionally greater tolerance for homosexuality in the theater field has, like the broader gay community, been associated with “sexual deviance” (Heng 2001: 88) or as “aberrant, antisocial and/or immoral” (Lo 2004: 121). Unsurprisingly, the Singapore theater practitioner as a cultural producer of “sexually deviant” plays, together with his effeminate bodily hexis, has become an embodiment of deviance, much to the consternation of the paternalist State.

Prominent artists such as Kuo and Elangovan may be as different as chalk and cheese in personality and work, but what they have in common is the possession of the archetypal artist biography of deviance and heterodoxy from which “charismatic authority” (Bourdieu 1993) may emerge. Such artists occupy formal or informal positions of leadership by championing the values and norms of the artistic field such as freedom from censorship, artistic creativity, alternative lifestyles, political and critical heterodoxy, and so on. These values and norms define the artistic field and distinguish it from other communities. But this habitus has become increasingly challenged, less by draconian State laws, and more by the lure of public funds available.

Challenges

Bureaucratic imagination of the arts

While the ideological yoking of the arts is as old as propaganda itself, the absence of powerful art critics and art historians has allowed politicians and bureaucrats an almost freehand in defining Art and its role in Singapore society. For one, they have attempted to use the arts as a vehicle for the promotion of a multicultural and multiracial society. The Minister of State for Culture, Lee Khoon Choy, proclaim...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgement
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Politics, art and culture
• Part II Integrity, adaption and entrepreneurialism
• Part III Organizations, collaborations and individuals
• Index