You Cannot anyhow touch

A collaboration with Polish visual artist, Karolina Breguła as part of her being in the Objectifs Residency and Lab that is supported by the National Arts Council of Singapore.

This work is a social commentary on the physical limitations that are installed in spaces that contain art, such as the lines that are marked out on the floors, and signs discouraging physical proximity, and crowd control tapes and ropes that make up just some of the barriers integral to Singapore’s galleries and museums that mark the borders between the spaces planned for artworks and the areas where visitors are allowed to enter. 

These resources are meant to protect the artworks from the wear and tear of handling and accidental damage. Nevertheless, they can also be perceived as a domineering gesture over the visitors. Through the use of these signs and demarcations, the cultural institution (i.e. museums, galleries, curators, programmers and even artists themselves) could be seen as intimidating visitors, restricting their emotional perception and natural behavior. Using the allegory of the art space as a stage, we can say that with these signs and demarcations, the institution takes on the role of a director in a performance of which the visitors are actors. In fact, the actors would include not only the visitors of the galleries and museums but also their workers, who spend entire days with the pieces of art as a human manifestation of the exact same signs and demarcations.

Modern art collections embody a wide variety of artistic impulses: ephemeral, revolutionary, auto-destructive and even interactive. Some works that are specifically created to mingle with the receivers’ everyday lives are more often than not, treated as absolute objects by today’s institutions. These objects thus become more important than the concept behind it. The consequence of such art fetishism could lead to a need to break the institutional taboo of not touching the artworks.

This project explores this growing will to experience physical contact with the art pieces through the actions of people whose work is to enforce institutionally approved behaviour. Requests to not touch the works on display are repeated, but as the repetitions progress, it almost begins to take on a tone of jealousy, as though the restrictions are meant to keep the artworks for themselves.

You cannot anyhow touch is a 6 minutes multi-channel video featuring gallerists, curators and museum and gallery guards who perform a spoken choral work consisting of some words used in their common interactions with visitors to their art spaces, as well as a section composed by Wilson using the local vernacular, Singlish, “You cannot anyhow touch” as a statement of warning they might use. The text is set to 4 overlapping traditional rhythms that are used in the playing of a local Malay hand drum called a kompang that is typically played during festivals or special events.