Highlights from South Beach

A rather late update on one of the venues of the the Singapore Biennale 2008.

This wasn't the most interesting work on site, but it was pretty visualy striking.
The most interesting works on site were video installations: two which were really documentaries and another which addressed the finer points of reality on film and was irreverently self-referential in the spirit of Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach. Perhaps documentaries could be considered art too, if one considers the primary purpose of art to be communication about the human condition.
There was also a barbershop, no, a pair of barbershops set up to be exact mirrors of each other, and a mixed-media installation involving a luminous acrylic crescent moon.

If I put up a similar wall for every novel I found interesting and wanted more people to know about, Singapore would be full of concrete slabs proclaiming various contemporary translated titles. That would be ... mildly surreal. Anyway, if you see the BG in the bottom left-hand corner of that picture somewhere around early October, do wish her a Happy Birthday. Hehe.

Another relatively visually striking work. This temple made entirely out of sugar had rather decayed by the time we saw it ...

At times it seemed that the architecture itself, still exuding an air of abandoned desolation, was more appealing than the exhibits. The exhibits were, on the whole, not terribly good. Too many of them were absolutely baffling before they were explained in words; then they became just baffling in the usual manner. If the purpose of art is to communicate, then we should consider these artworks to have failed.
But hey, the company was wonderful. So it wasn't really a waste of time.