This research considers the performance of situated subjectivity where the state and the individual vie for dominion over the drives that construct the body as what one has (the body as object), as what one is (the body as subject), and as what one becomes (the absent body). To turn power into pain, the State prospects the body of the subject to anchor its power through abjection. In so doing, it compels that body to channel the abject as a power to be wielded as a weapon of the weak, thus forcing into view the true interior of the State. Sections I and II position a discourse of trauma in Singapore using a parenthetical framework that is constructed by and mediated through the criminalized and punishable bodies of two young Asian males. The first discusses the carefully constructed ob-scene (off-stage) nature of the obscene (abhorrent) execution of convicted drug trafficker Van Nguyen in 2005 (the body as object); the second examines its inverse – the public spectacle of creative ‘death’ imposed upon artist Josef Ng (the body as subject) through government condemnation and expulsion for an alleged obscene (immoral) performance at 5th Passage in 1994. To do this, the thesis engages with the enforced interchangeable processes of disembodiment (for the display of symbolic violence) and embodiment (for the exertion of physical violence). Comparisons are also made of the way the State demonstrates its preparedness to turn the display of power into a process of exacting the ultimate pain from the punishable body. This is perpetrated on the one hand via a spectacle of invisibility that keeps the mandatory death penalty a secretive process, and on the other, its inverse, the publicly staged media spectacle of persecuting performance artist/s and 5th Passage. The events that follow led to the defacto banning of performance art and 5th Passage’s demise in 1994, ending my role as its artistic director. By relocating the performance of death from the high courts and offices of Singapore’s Home Affairs Ministry (the site of symbolic violence) and Changi Prison (site of physical violence) into plain sight in the Australian media, the press is discussed as an instrumental force in deploying a penal counter-aesthetic to pierce through Singapore’s veil of secrecy surrounding its executions. The thesis demonstrates how this engendered a ‘seeing through’ that galvanized acts of intersubjectivity and the performance of social witnessing in Australia as an attempt to save Van Nguyen from the gallows. The institutional censorship of an artwork about the execution in 2005 is discussed to show how signifying practices such as visual art continued to agitate the state’s performance to construct itself as a “global city for arts and culture” on one hand while crushing artistic subjectivity when it is perceived as dissent on the other. This glimpse into the fragility of the Singapore nation’s divergent desires, where one performance portrays the disintegration of another, recalled the originary cultural rupture at 5th Passage in 1994 when artists engaged in performance were sensationalized in the Singapore media as social deviants. As an extension of state apparatus, the media is shown to repress artistic subjectivity through its creation of a controversy that led to the illegitimization of scriptless performance art, thus producing a distinctively Singaporean cultural artefact – the absent body. Out of the personal and social trauma framed by this confrontation with the state, Section III presents a body of visual work that I have since produced in the period marked by these two events (between 1994 to 2008) as a reply to the state. From this place of banishment, the thesis traces its evolvement into the body machine (Rich Manoeuvre series) as part of a practice that sees it for what it is within the paternal order, to locate the points where fragility occur. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/242539 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Victor, Suzann, University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, School of Humanities and Languages |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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