Sunday December 7, 2008

Snaps of life

Review by RACHEL JENAGARATNAM

An exhibition that presents the humble snapshot as art raises intriguing questions about how we evaluate art in Malaysia.

ART AS PHOTOGRAPHY AS ART
Nov 30-Dec 14, 12 Art Space Gallery, Kuala Lumpur

PHOTOGRAPHER Puah Chin Kok marks his first solo exhibition, art as photography as art, at 12artspace in Kuala Lumpur with only one work: an installation called the title of the piece.

More than 10,000 snapshots were used to line this space in Puah Chin Kok’s installation. – Photos from 12 Art Space Gallery

But that one installation is made up of 10,009 photographs that cover the entire ground floor of the gallery, from ceiling to floor. The 3R (traditionally, 3.5 inch by 5 inch) photos blanket the gallery’s normally stark white space with what looks like the world’s busiest and glossiest wallpaper.

On the first floor, in contrast, only nine photographs are displayed, also in 3R size and spaced far apart. They are snapshots from the now infamous New Zealand holiday that former chief justice Tun Mohd Eusoff, lawyer V.K. Lingam, and their families took together in 1994 – and for which Lingam allegedly paid.

There’s reason for these nine photographs taking precedence, and for their encasement in cheap, gilded photo frames that deceivingly convey an air of importance and solemnity: they are among some of the most recognisable images in Malaysia today.

Most first appeared on the Internet early in the year, and subsequently defined one of the year’s hallmark events, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into allegations of judicial impropriety.

The most publicised of those images, that of Mohd Eusof with his arm around Lingam, reminded Puah of the hoard of photographs he had amassed over a four- to five-year period when he ran a photo studio in Taman Melawati, KL. And so the exhibition was conceptualised.

On the gallery’s first floor, nine snapshots are displayed in a way that conveys their importance in defining one of the year’s hallmark events, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into allegations of judicial impropriety.

Later, Puah sourced more images from friends still working in photo studios, resulting in a motley crew of subjects gathered together under one commonality: art. All the photographs were abandoned by customers and cover a gamut of themes.

Events, ceremonies, and rituals are present in the images of weddings, formal school photographs, birthdays, and graduations, while memories are preserved in the photographs of newborns, holiday snapshots, and even a game of adult musical chairs.

There’s also the element of documentation in the passport images and scattered glass in vehicles (presumably photographed for insurance claims), and the chance mirroring of seminal photographs, namely American photographer Diane Arbus’ Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey (1967).

I cannot point to the exact location of the Malaysian replica of this image, though I think it is located close to the staircase. Good luck – there are all together 10,009 images (I didn’t count them, I cheated by asking).

The manifold arguments presented in this single exhibition are more quantifiable than the number of images it is made of.

Recognise this? It was this now-infamous photo that prompted Puah to conceptualise his art as photography as art.

Firstly, art as photography as art tackles the subject of the artist as producer or – to appropriate a term coined by noted French semiologist, Roland Barthes – the artist-God.

The term, by no means intending blasphemy, was used disparagingly to attack the importance the Modernist movement placed on the artist as sole justification for the end product. The artist’s singular voice was heralded above anything else, and the art object, critically sanctified.

This approach remains the modus operandi of Malaysian contemporary art, but Puah – and here, credit, of course, must be extended to the gallery and curator, Roopesh Sitharan – adopts one of postmodernism’s main achievements: the impetus to deconstruct this long-held preference for the artist above all others, even you, the audience.

Indeed, Puah did not directly photograph any of the images in this exhibition; the images are products of many unidentified individuals who clicked their camera’s shutter. Who are they? Does this matter? After all, as in the case of the nine photographs on the first floor, it is the subjects who take precedence.

In art as photography as art, the unnamed photographers and subjects share the limelight as producers, and even you – the audience – play a significant role in reading these pictures for yourself, thus producing your own interpretations.

Puah’s installation also exalts the “common” snapshot. The quality of the images are often poor (many are blurred or unfocused, and composition isn’t always spot on), but this creates a semi-nostalgic quality by recalling the pre-digital age, when taking a photograph still commanded a level of ceremony.

Photography then was an event on its own. You had to wait patiently for your shot (since you couldn’t simply erase a bad shot from a memory stick or card), dark shadows could not be lightened by digital software, and subjects were, arguably, less conscious of the lens than they are in today’s world of reality TV shows and celebrity image overkill.

And after all that, you still had to wait while the shop or studio developed your roll of film. Some might have lost patience, hence all these abandoned images – little did their owners know that their efforts would end up staking a claim within the corpus of Malaysian art.

In the book Thinking Photography (Palgrave MacMillan, 1982), editor and contributing essayist Victor Burgin comments on the conundrum that besets the medium:

“... photographs offer themselves gratuitously; whereas paintings and films readily present themselves to critical attention as objects, photographs are received rather as an environment”.

While this perception has shifted somewhat, it is one that still beleaguers photography within Malaysian art – that it remains the younger, and less popular, sister to painting.

In one fell swoop, Puah’s artwork has raised a number of issues: that the common holiday snapshot – indeed any image at all – can become a document, and consecutively, a work of art in its own right; and that the photographer (and, indeed, artists like Puah) can play a role in pushing the argument that art needs to be evaluated on conceptual terms also and not purely on aesthetic, preferential, or monetary terms.

‘art as photography as art’ by Puah Chin Kok is on at 12 Art Space Gallery (No. 12, Jalan Gombak, Off Jalan Pahang, Kuala Lumpur) until Dec 14. For further information, call 03-4023 4128 or e-mail info@12as12.com.