“We have done away with the true world: what world is left over? The apparent one, maybe? . . . But no! Along with the true world, we have also done away with the apparent!”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophise with a Hammer

It was with great trepidation that I approached the writing of this overview – but a brief 800-to-a-thousand words – intended in some sense to do justice to many a month of labour from 13 individuals who have laid bare their hearts and minds. It is a task further problematised by a loaded exhibition title they have gathered under: Rationale for fables. The title itself was an unforeseen complication arising only following my agreement to this task, and at once stirred within me that Nietzschean dread of the ‘fabling of the world’. 

It would be a fool’s errand to clarify the distinct positions adopted by the 13 graduands within the following lines. Yet, the succinctness with which a fable communicates its moral entreats me to the possibility of finding a commonality amidst their divergences. After all, within the curatorial statement, the exhibition’s curators – Adeline Kueh and Ian Woo – have directed us towards four questions that fittingly serve as a guide to the nebulousness of the creative offerings within the show: 

1. Are reasonings needed in the process of making meaning and making art? 

2. Are all artistic practices biomythographies (à la Audre Lorde) to a certain extent, and that art-making on its own is a form of poetic encounter with different realities?

3. Are fables proxies of life? 

4. Do we need some forms of logic to help us maintain temporary closures and make sense of things as we journey to find our voice and vocabulary to speak about our stories and our works? 

It is perhaps with a touch of audacity that I may offer up a broader question distilled from the aforementioned four: How can an artist make a story that will help you understand where they are coming from and where they are headed? Ergo, with the prioritisation of the act of storytelling above the story itself forming the basis of the exhibition, the distinctions between each tale remains, nonetheless, bound together by the desire to be empathised with. 

This is not to say that the tales entailed are inconsequential in arresting the exhibition. But rather, emanating from memories of generational trauma, marginalisation, contestation, politicisation and resistance, each artwork is marked as its own record of its positionality and temporality, whilst illuminating the inescapability of suffering across time. A necessary and fundamental precursor to (a deeper and more humane) understanding, if we are to adopt Nietzsche’s position on the matter. ¹

Tracy Strong, an eminent Nietzschean scholar’s clarification of such an ‘understanding’ introduces the element of ‘truth’ into the fold. Stating:

“What is crucial to this understanding, once it is earned, is not its truth (in the sense of accuracy), at least not immediately, but its truthfulness, its meaning, the relation it constitutes.”²

This “relation it constitutes” seemingly corroborates well with Walter Benjamin’s ideas pertaining to the relationship between an artwork’s authenticity (in place of truth) with respect to its place in space and time.³ However, within our post-modern fable – the contemporary everyday living characterised by the supplantation of facts by interpretation – the location of such a truth may very well present itself as an ethical quandary.⁴ For firstly, is there truth to be found in interpretation?⁵ And secondly, what would such a truth within a fable constitute?

Some would argue that the fabling of the world has necessarily placed art in a sphere beyond moral reproach – taking for instance, as how Adorno puts it, that “absolute expression would be objective, the object itself,” and therefore cannot be subject to an evaluation of subjectivities.⁶ Yet within his same magnum opus, the philosopher himself concedes the responsibility art maintains in relation towards society,  stating “artworks always turn one side toward society, the domination they internalised also radiated externally.”⁷ The inescapability of suffering seemingly rears its head once more. 
It is perhaps with no small measure of irony then, that while Adorno had desired to dedicate Aesthetic Theory to Samuel Beckett – and in spite of the numerous references to his many works – he never once discusses the symbiosis between his characters. While musing the antics of Didi and Gogo, I query the possibilities of another word in place of ‘truth’ and ‘understanding’… 

I defer to the words of Strong once more: 

“It is a voice lifted in what will be heard as song, a working given to us in our own opera, a clarity that as there are words which are my words, there are also words which are your words, “a trust of friendship, a shared blindness, without suspicion or question marks,” an end to idolatry, the clarity that there is love”⁸

Notes

1. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Reverie, Beacon Press Boston  1971, p. 163.
2. Ibid.
3. Benjamin, Walter, and Hannah Arendt. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Essay. In Illuminations, 217–52. New York: Harcourt, 1968. 
4. Chow, Rey. "Film As Ethnography." In Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, 198. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
 5. I would assert that the answer to this question would be ‘yes’. And I would defer to the speech made by jurisprudence thinker Ronald Dworkin, Is There Truth in Interpretation, for my personal position.  
6. Adorno, Theodor W., and Gretel Adorno. Aesthetic Theory, 43. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
 7. Ibid, 18.
8.  Strong , Tracy. “Introduction.” Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophise with a Hammer, xxiv. Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997.

John Z.W. Tung
John Z.W. Tung is an independent curator and exhibition-maker. To date, his close work with artists has realised more than 50 artwork commissions and site-specific adaptations ranging from the minute to monumental. Serving as a co-curator for the Singapore Biennale 2016 and Singapore Biennale 2019, three of the artwork commissions he curated were finalists for the Benesse Prize, with one work winning the prestigious award. His recent appointments as an independent curator include Festival Curator for the 7th and 8th Singapore International Photography Festival (2020 and 2022) and Associate Curator for the Open House programme, For the House; Against the House (2021, 2022 and 2023), and The Forest Institute, a large-scale architectural art installation dedicated to secondary forest ecologies. In 2023, he was the recipient of the inaugural Tan Boon Hui Curatorial Prize.