"Ultimately, the Biennale’s gesture of an open door does not produce closeness, but rather paradoxically permeates the exhibition with signs of distance, as encounters and confrontations between artists, viewers, works, spaces, cultural symbols, and concepts transform into aesthetic vectors that attract and collide. In some ways, the curatorial statement that seeks to erase the public’s fear of art may function as a case study in “paternalistic models of communication,” marking the great rift between different types of participants in the power structure of the art world. Fear is always an active and essential ingredient in art, working at a specific distance that consumes the outlines of the familiar symbolic and realistic worlds in an instant: fear becomes a reality that demands an immediate reaction, but will be substituted by another fear when it is situated too far from the viewing subject. The Singapore Biennale seems to mediate this distance and make it, in the words of Rilke, “the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure.”
Posted on: Sun, 28 Jul 2013 18:10:13 +0000
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