An Amphoric Revolt
Tangible, Issue No. 2
My work has been rejected on the basis that I have used quotes from Jeremy Fernando’s book and I have cited him in my writing… and that we are friends. (How dare she!) Here is my response.
“I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living.”
Them, plural for person, for bodies…a group, a collective, a herd. Temples are made of bodies both physical and projected through the subscription and participation of rites and rituals. A repetition of ideas and gestures. Of speaking the same language, chanting the same prayers. Worshipping, perhaps, the same deities. They herald it as a safe space… sauf meaning whole and protected from the dangers of molestation… not exposed to any spectres that threatens their temple of sanctity.
And my writing - which I have imbued the entirety of my soul and passion- about education and young children, encroaches upon the threshold of safe just because I have quoted a fallen friend. He whom I must not name. So powerful is he that a mere quote and citation spelt redactions, blackouts (Experlliarmus!), and eventually a denial (which I – a bystander, an associate, a friend – faced) … a denial to be seen, to be shown, to be read. Just because of the spectre that is him looms in the distance of my writing. The omnipresent patriarch.
Pearl Tang Xiaow Jun, ‘ Silenced’, 2022
“I feel confined, only free to expand myself within boundaries.”
They purport to support victims of violence and allowed the marginalised to speak in the temple they have built and protected so carefully against misogyny, abuse, and those who are disparaged. Here, I digress, I salute their quest and designs…for it is a herculean task to build a community …because one is ever so different from the other… However, in their efforts of maintaining their definition of safety, any element of threat has to be eliminated…and conversations are mere token gestures to offer an illusion of receptiveness; of openness to possibilities and the subsequent risks it entails. It is sacred ground which needed to be trod on gently lest the space becomes tainted, contaminated, ideas fragmented, stability undermined. These structures spurred me to question the opinion posited by Them: one cannot separate the artist from the artwork.
This a strange conflation of person and idea/ images might have taken root in the days of Byzantine art and eventually the Renaissance period where religion and name became intimately intertwined. A patron’s moral (and socio-economic) standing was (and, perhaps, still is) determined by the number of religious murals commissioned. Fresco paintings like The Last Supper, The Creation of Adam, and The Birth of Venus were some of the masterpieces commissioned by the Medici, Borgia, and, Sforza families. These public spectacles not only displayed their affluence, but they also endow the families with cultural and religious gravity. (Cohen, 2018) Fast forward to the era of surrealism and dadaism…where the artist becomes more public. Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dali, and Andy Warhol (among others) have successfully created personas of themselves through self-portraits, sketches, and photographs. The audience is given a glimpse of their private lives which they are unabashed about: regular orgies, multiple affairs (And why not…? I mean…we all can have our own preferences right?). However, the audience, au which root word means to perceive, frames and affixes the artist to their art. They are what they create…personal squabbles, obsessions, transgressions (which is relative… and again reflects certain contexts) are swept under the carpet, or even better, they are used to amplify the image of the eccentric, avant-garde figure of the artist. As with saints, the artist is transformed into a symbol synonymous with their art.
However, this frames a very fluid individual – complete with their vulnerabilities and contradictions – into a static image to be worshipped. “To look is an act of choice” as John Berger states in Ways of Seeing. As with a painting, we can choose where or what we would like to look at and in turn it frames certain images. In that very gesture, we impose our subjectivities onto the image in the form of preference, readings, opinions of it. It is very much similar to moralising: one believes in one’s moral superiority in determining issues of right and wrong. One is framed by the viewer and this act structures and limits how else one sees or how one wants others to see. The critiqued is, therefore, imposed upon with a ‘Rule of Thirds’, or a framework of moral codes based on societal expectation. Failing which, one is deemed odd, perverse… going against the grain no matter the opinion of others. And in reality, this means that the Surveyed is silenced because of the judgement and the refusal to allow explanations…and… to make things a little more difficult - To whom is one accountable to? To problematise it even more, acting sanctimoniously comes with its dangers because one frames oneself in a position of moral superiority when in fact, everyone is susceptible to fallibility…to subjectivities that contradicts and/ or has yet to reveal itself to us. One brings one’s own narratives in making truths as realities are often poetic and painful in its multitudes.
And subjectivity is what we can find in a picture. “The painting maintains its own authority” (Berger, 2012) as it calls the viewer to look actively at it, around it, inside of it, and through it at the various facets at play. I argue that Art can be the subject distinct from the artist. Gaze upon the ancient murals adorning the temples in Thailand. They narrate stories of the buddha, stories of humour and tableaus of the past. Admire the lines and scriptures of Sak Yan curved around the body’s contour…it is blessed and it blesses the wearer. Feel the soul that resides within the Balinese mask. Go read a manga and fall in love with the characters. Art can speak for itself. You do not have to sit through an hour of artist talk to read an artwork. (That is just one of the many formal etiquettes institutionalised to maintain a vestige of authority…art and economy comes in hand-in-hand after all…) Sure, it helps you to create a better picture of what social-political issues that the artist might be trying to discuss. Even without it, you can read an artwork on its own. To conflate artist and artwork means limiting possibilities of looking. In the same fashion, moralising limits one’s interaction with realities. It denies possibilities (of reinventions, reappropriations, reclamations) as the narratives of perpetrator vis-à-vis victims continues to be perpetuated consciously or not.
Pearl Tang Xiaow Jun, ‘Fight’, 2022
“Well, I just think you should be able to compliment a woman’s eyebrows without having her personality dragged into it. ”
As in the words of Berger, moralising can be hypocritical (2012). One’s judgement places one in a position to be judged… to risk being seen as flawed. (Here I must state that I am flawed myself, go ask my family and friends) The intentional choice of narrowing down one’s perspective goes back to the idea of framing which at once depicts and limits. So, in that act of moralising, I am denied of my voice. This rejection made by Them served only to emphasise the power of patriarch: the very figure that They seek to overthrow. I am not seen …or read for me. I am, as Hélène Cixous describes, the she who is reduced to being the servant of …his shadow (Cixous, 1975 ). To them, my writing is reduced to a platform for which he could nefariously use. My voice is passive. My words - in which I use to speak, to define myself (as a woman, a She) – is swallowed by the potential narrative of the patriarch and the fear of him. I say ‘potential’ because it has the power to act even when he is not present…and so it has been taken to effect as I am now denied. It is ironic, that They allege vendetta against violence and yet have themselves mete out a vindictive punishment to smite my words …all in the name of morality (which ,one knows by now, is painfully vague at times). They have appropriated the voice of the patriarch - superior, all-knowing, and powerful - and I am subjugated under his gaze…or in this particular case, which I believe in, from one who is affected by the patriarch. By rejecting my writing, they have sentenced me, and the voices of my students, to a metaphorical death of an absolute which contradicts their promise of nuances, of supposed possibilities. And I am not talking about just one collective. It is more than Them. Much more.
They, too, are caught in this web and the fear of the patriarch is amplified through their actions. While my labour is acknowledged and there is an offer to represent reprints, it is pittance to the act of denial which is absolute. (Yes, I have feelings!) My words are censored. They are not seen, not read, not heard of. There is a fear of contact, of contamination and with it the absence of possibilities. The patriarch is removed entirely and his absence only pronounces the need to defend against …instead of possibly subverting his power, his presence, under a female, or a genderless, voice. He cannot be seen as a book (which involves other writers and artists…so are they implicated? Why? Or why not?), a quote, a citation… remote on its own. One has the agency not to read him. But, of course, I understand the dilemma They face, the friendships they have, and the subjectivities that they stand for. However, seen as a whole, their gestures prove again that the patriarch’s authority has yet to be subverted.
Pearl Tang Xiaow Jun, ‘Hear my calls’, 2022
So, how can we move forward? Perhaps one needs look at the prism with which one thinks and offer, perhaps, equanimity. Aequanimis or being ‘even-minded’. How? I do not know…perhaps… to pause and ponder…and to see art for itself. Art can be seen separate from the artist. My words can be read separately from me. From what you know, or do not know…or have yet to know about me. You do not even need to know me to read me.
So here I am. I, the subject, write myself. I put myself into words again…as a call…a response…
So hear Me
So read Me
“I am spacious, singing flesh…”
Pearl Tang Xiaow Jun, ‘Self-portrait as a Harpy’, 2022
Berger, J. (2012). Ways of seeing: Based on the Bbc television series with John Berger. British Broadcasting Corp.
Cixous, H. (1975). The laugh of the Medusa. Feminisms, 347–362. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14428-0_21
Cohen, A. (2018, August 20). In the Italian Renaissance, wealthy patrons used art for power. Artsy. Retrieved April 15, 2022, from https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-italian-renaissance-wealthy-patrons-art-power