Artistic Ideas

Some ideas:

Singapore has some of the toughest censorship laws in the world - with a special emphasis on political censorship. How about a piece of art that details the artist's painstaking process of obtaining a license for his work? It would have to contain an element of political antagonism, of course, just to ensure that it gets censured by the Media Development authority, but here's the terrifyingly brilliant part - this political agenda is actually secondary and arbitrary - it's only purpose is to ensure the art gets rejected for a license. It should therefore be displayed completely askew from the rest of the work, so as to show how extranuous it is. However, this makes it only the more essential - I can imagine MDA's puzzlement over it and their demands for it to be removed before a license can be obtained. The artist, of course, will have to reply that this element plays an essential role and thus must remain, yet because of the work's unpolitical nature it of course bears no significance politically and thus is emasculated. This goes into a loop, of course, which is the entire purpose of the act - to produce a piece of art that is wonderfully self-referential. I'm not sure it it classifies as performance art or dispaly - I suppose you could put on display the letters MDA sends, as well as responses from all the levels of bureaucracy the artist would approach. The graphic designer in me sees a close-up of a mouth, bound with red tape. I don't think it should be titled.

Fetish porn for withholding sex. It would just have two people who kept looking feverishly at each other and telling each other in whispered tones how horrible it would be of them to indulge in it, how terribly wrong and against all morality for them to have sex. They should be dressed in severe, black clothes, with white collars to give them that good-Christian look. They should pant and grunt as they stare at each other across a roomful of grunting, sweaty naked bodies, fully clothed and sweating also. It would have to be film, of course, and I don't think it should ever climax.