Arts NMP! Audrey Wong's foot! A post-mortem!

Yesterday, the NUS’ Institute of Policy Studies held the seminar One Foot In: An ‘Arts NMP’ On Politics And Activism in Influencing Cultural Policy. It was mainly about ex-NMP Audrey Wong talking about her experiences in Parliament for 21 months. Yes, ex-NMP. Time flies doesn’t it? Totally slipped my mind that her term had ended after the Parliament was dissolved before the General Election. Gosh, we thought it’d go on forever! During the talk, Wong described her experience of having “a foot in the door” as “still a tiny foot”. Of her work with The Substation as providing vital training for her involvement in politics. Of entering the Parliament as an “unknown” and constantly trying to reconcile her position of being either an “activist” or a “politician” inside the House. Of the benefits of being a so-called Arts NMP. After her talk, I had the sense that the so-called “(tiny) foot in the door” was also one that walked on tiptoes. “I couldn’t just go out there and wave a flag and ‘We must do this, we must do that’,” she recalled, which resulted in a more low-key approach of having to “pick my battles” and being strategic in pushing for arts-related agenda. An example she gave was her ongoing research work on freelancers in the creative sector (along with assistant/theatre producer Terence Tan, who seriously deserves credit for being, as far as I know, the only one who stuck to his promise of helping Wong when she was “voted” in during that “election” by the arts community a couple of years ago.) Anyway, yes, the freelancers. Wong said she delved into it during a time when “creative industries” was the buzz word among her (ex) colleagues. I thought about putting down the Q&A that transpired after, but decided it was more important to actually post what she had said and let the chit-chat in the comments section begin (which I’ve again probably jinxed by simply mentioning it). After all, one of the things the ex-NMP mentioned was the difficulty in getting media to pick up on certain things, and heck, we'd previously posted her entire speech during the Budget debate so might as well right? Except for one very interesting comment by playwright and IPS dude Tan Tarn How. I’m not sure if there has been a full-blown discussion on what exactly an Arts NMP should be doing in Parliament. But I do recall that one of the comments about Wong was that she was too soft-spoken, non-confrontational and basically all the things that made her such an approachable and amiable figure at the Substation. But does that really work in Parliament? In his comments, Tan pointed out that there was a sense that Wong’s approach was, as an outsider who came from a sector that the government has arguably been distrustful of, to slowly win the trust of the government. His “mad theory” was Wong did not need to do so. Rather than trying to integrate into a kind of theoretical all boy’s club and make them feel comfortable with her presence, Tan pointed out that maybe she should’ve made them feel “extremely uncomfortable”. “It’s better to be hated and be listened to than liked and be ignored,” he said. The Arts NMP thing is new territory for not only Wong but the arts community as a whole. And now that our first “champion”, as one commentator called Wong, has, well, survived 21 months in the lion’s den so to speak, it’s time to assess. Have a read below and do share your thoughts about Wong’s term as NMP. Would you have wanted a more vocal NMP? Does her quiet style of work suit you? Do you think she made any impact in Parliament or outside of it? Should the arts community take this as a sign to put forth another candidate or was it an experiment that fizzled out? We cheekily asked her to rate her performance as NMP and Wong gamely gave her stint as an "almost four" out of five stars. How would you rate her? *** ONE FOOT IN: AN ‘ARTS NMP’ ON POLITICS AND ACTIVISM IN INFLUENCING CULTURAL POLICY Audrey Wong In this talk, I would like to speak about my experience as ‘arts’ NMP for the past 21 months, so it is a personal point of view. I will talk about how I strategized what I hoped to achieve as NMP, how I learnt to do my job, the lessons I learnt, and the limitations and possibilities for the work of arts advocacy after having the first NMP speaking for the arts in parliament. A note: ‘arts’ NMP is an informal term that came about because of how the arts community got together in 2009 to select their candidates for consideration as NMP. It is not an official title. I feel that it’s necessary for me to start with some background in order to make sense of my NMP work. Before I applied for the position of NMP, I had spent the past decade-plus at The Substation – an independent, non-profit art space; dedi1cated to nurturing artists, experimental/cutting-edge art, pushing boundaries and promoting dialogue in arts and culture. Such dialogues necessarily involved discussions about government policy impacts. Since the time when Kuo Pao Kun was artistic director of The Substation, the arts centre had been a meeting-point for people interested in cultural issues. Pao Kun initiated the annual Arts Conferences of the 1990s, which saw commentators, critics, artists, academics, and others engaging in discussions about heritage, space for arts, censorship, and other areas of arts policy-making.  With few channels for public discussion of these matters, The Substation had become a ‘third space’ for such discussion and for alternative voices. Collaborations between artists, the arts and other interest groups and NGOs/ NPOs were commonplace – one example being a project for The Substation’s annual festival SeptFest, Artists and Other Animals (2004), which incorporated an exhibition, a conference featuring artists, academics, conservationists and scientists, and a carnival/fair with booths by environmental and animal welfare groups and performances by musicians and artists. Coming from this history, artists who chose to present work at The Substation often incorporate social or political commentary in their work. In my job, I saw myself as a cultural worker, and my role at The Substation was also to enable and build capacity for artists and creatives, as well as build communities that would nurture a Singaporean artistic culture. These communities included the ‘public’ who may come from non-artistic backgrounds. I worked with people from different sectors: welfare organizations and civil society groups, and not only people in the arts. I was interested not simply in organizing and presenting arts projects like shows and exhibitions; from my experience, it was hard for artists to make themselves heard and put their work out there unless they had the capacity, skills, networks and inclination to make things happen. In the 21st century, it was no longer enough for artists to remain in the studio and wait for presenters or dealers to take their work to the public; many of the artists I worked with, were producers, public and youth educators, and arts advocates as well. And artists and artistic directors playing the role of advocates to the public and policymakers are not uncommon elsewhere. One aspect of being an intermediary in arts and culture is advocacy. You need to persuade the public, funders, sponsors, arts audiences, art buyers, other artists, networks in the arts (local and global), the media, to support the artistic work and to share the values of the work to as wide a sector of society as possible. There are two main aspects of arts advocacy in Singapore. One is the more rational, bottomline-focused work of persuading people to put resources into the arts, where you make your argument based on both the intangible and tangible (ie. demonstrable or measureable) outcomes of the arts. A second aspect is what we call ‘opening up space’ for arts and culture, for expression of our views about who we are, in Singapore. Contemporary arts in Singapore has, for decades, been a public space for discussion about socio-cultural issues. We still remember of course, the performance art controversy of 1993- 1994 at Fifth Passage art gallery, which led to the withdrawal of funding for performance art in Singapore for 10 years – a de facto ‘ban’ on the art form. Theatre groups have always been inspired by social, political and cultural currents of the time, Wild Rice and The Necessary Stage being two popular examples. Issues of freedom of speech, the Internal Security Act, migrantion and more, have been explored on the Singapore stage. In some respects, Singapore theatre often appears to be a dialogue with the state. Because of the Public Entertainments Act which states that all scripts for public performance need to be approved by the Media Development Authority, artworks very often become test cases of what is permitted to be said in public. This has led to some artists feeling vulnerable – but, interestingly, we do not speak of our vulnerability very much.  Ironically, despite the Renaissance City plan and all the state investment in the arts, there has been a growing sense among artists of being disempowered. There are times when I feel that the economic argument for the arts has been won; yet, despite the commitment of the government to developing the arts in Singapore, the benefits have not been equally or fairly distributed or trickled down to practicing artists – and this is very clear if you talk to enough artists. Artists are struggling to find space for studios, for opportunities for paying work, for professional development, and public recognition. Here again, artists feel vulnerable and at the mercy of socio-economic forces and policies which they perceive to be beyond their control. I think my experience as an intermediary, understanding and seeing first-hand the impacts of arts policy on the players in the scene, and also my experiences negotiating with ‘the authorities’ whether they are the MDA, National Arts Council (and through them, MICA) or the censors, were important in ‘training’ me for the NMP role.  There were a few interesting developments around the time when I was appointed as NMP in 2009, and this made me very aware of the possibilities and limits of speaking up.  Recent amendments to the Films Act and the Public Order Act had been passed in Parliament, and while they were cast as liberalizing the existing laws, there were also aspects of the amendments which were cause for concern to many Singaporeans. For instance, the requirement for ‘political’ films to be considered by an advisory committee, and the narrow definition of what was permissible in a political film (eg, only objective and factual portrayals were permitted, without animations or distortions of shot footage). In the arts, we had also seen cases where a film or art event had been granted a licence or rated by the censors and the MDA, but were not permitted to be screened or staged in state-owned buildings and properties. For myself personally, I had just gone through negotiations with the National Arts Council regarding the conditions on The Substation’s annual grant and lease of the building – the organisation had been advised to limit its participation in non-artistic civil society activity. In early 2009, The Substation had to deal with a crisis with an arts project, Tank Man Tango by Australian artist Deborah Kelly, a video and performance which had as its theme, the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Tian An Men incident. The Substation was presenting the project as part of a simultaneous worldwide art event which also involved the cities of Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Taichung (Taiwan), Seoul, Weimar, Leipzig, London, Bristol, Washington DC, and Mexico City. The art event had been granted a licence by the MDA; however, just a few days before it was due to be presented, we were informed by other authorities to cancel the event. A flurry of discussions finally led the authorities to allow the event to proceed at the last minute. How does one make sense of this contradiction between policy (of Singapore as a global, Renaissance arts hub)  and practice (where artistic expression is curtailed due to anxiety on the part of policy-makers and government agencies)? How do you push for the opening up of spaces for artistic expression of views and opinions which may not be completely palatable to government, or are critical of policy and policy impacts, without losing the trust of the powers-that-be? Because if there is one thing that history has taught us, it is that alternative and critical voices can be viewed by government as being subversive and untrustworthy. In my maiden speech in Parliament, the debate on a motion by fellow NMP Viswa Sadasivan on the Singapore Pledge, I spoke of the climate of fear in Singapore. When I said this, senior Cabinet members who were then present in Parliament said “no … no… no”, clearly disagreeing. Yet, I knew friends who, at that time, had lost their credit with the powers-that-be because of views that they had expressed; how could that not make people worry, and lead to self-censorship? As I had more encounters with policy-makers, I saw that they were also in a conundrum of sorts. They wanted to hear views from and include more people working ‘on the ground’, yet they could not or would not listen to those who were too obviously vocal and critical. The question of who to trust, is just tricky for them as for activists and advocates. We as advocates want them to hear our views – all views, regardless of what these are and who expresses them. They would ask, why should we wait to be invited into a circle of trust? For the longest time in Singapore too, the word ‘activist’ has had negative connotations of being a troublemaker or worse, a subversive. ‘Activists’ were the people who were not allowed into Singapore during the 2006 IMF-World Bank meetings, the image is that of people who cause public disorder. In the arts community, there is a loose network or grouping of people called ArtsEngage, who initiated and drove the process of sending a paper outlining an alternative position on censorship to the Censorship Review Committee in 2009. That’s a form of activism because it is about public education, raising awareness or consciousness-raising, but people here don’t openly identify themselves as ‘arts activists’. The question was, how far could I be an activist as an NMP? Could I push, for example, for the government to publicly recognize the ArtsEngage position? Would that be construed as personal activism, too partisan, and lead to doors being shut to further dialogue? I was also aware that, coming from a background of English-language contemporary arts, I might be seen as representing a particular segment of the arts community (the ones who were vocal and always getting media coverage), whereas I had to try to speak for as many in the arts as I could, including traditional arts and arts educators. I had to be strategic. It would be too much to expect the government and policy-makers to change deepseated beliefs and philosophies during my brief term – for example, the belief that Singapore society is still largely conservative, and not ready for more liberalization. I could argue for liberalization, but what I would be doing there is adding to the numbers – which is necessary, but is long-term, slow, and incremental. What might be possible and perhaps more pragmatic, is to leverage on existing values underpinning policy  – for example, the idea that the arts and creative ‘industries’ contribute to Singapore’s economic well-being. One area I decided to focus on was the improvement of conditions for freelancers in the arts and creative sector, as after all, these are ‘Singapore workers’ in an ‘industrial sector’. But most of all, I focused on trying to develop an understanding among policy-makers, of the artistic processes and day-to-day concerns of being in the arts sector in Singapore. I felt that what was needed was to stick one foot in the door, and try to keep it open for the future. This brings me to the benefits of having someone representing the arts in parliament: the access it gives the artists and arts communities to policy-makers and government. I could directly approach senior officials and even the Minister for the arts, to request for meetings and offer input on policies based on my experiences of working ‘on the ground’ with artists and my understanding of how policies have impacted on people.  There are obviously limits to approaching Ministers or senior officials directly, because you don’t want to be seen as taking advantage of your access to them to push ‘partisan’ or personal issues or ask for personal favours! However, it helps to draw senior officials’ attention to certain issues because it means that action can be taken by the Ministry, and also because it is about accountability – policies impact the public, and Ministries need to know about these impacts. The NMP can also draw public attention to issues that statutory boards and ministries can’t, but which might be necessary for policy-making. An example I can discuss here, is my work in terms of pushing the issue of poor working conditions for freelancers in the arts and creative sector. Many talents in this sector are underpaid, unpaid, and often unprotected. While freelancers themselves could group together to help one another, it was also important for government to recognize their problems as issues that affect the long-term development of the creative sector, and take steps to address bad practices in the industry. MICA had already started to look into this area, but I think that, in asking questions in parliament, meeting MICA officials and giving interviews to the media, I was able draw public attention and interest from creatives who were directly affected, and in doing so, hopefully contributed to putting the issue on the agenda of MICA’s planning. And, having been invited to sit on the Arts and Culture Strategic Review Committee, I am can also put this issue on the table for future policy-making consideration. Also in the ACSR committee, I am able to offer a perspective from the non-profit arts sector and the independent artist, which are easily neglected because the staff who are in charge of researching and suggesting strategic directions and might be career civil servants, are unlikely have this experience and therefore may not see the impacts on the ground level of the policy strategies they may suggest. I think it’s safe to say that I would not have been invited to the ACSR if I wasn’t an NMP. This brings me to another point, of being a ‘bridge’ between the community and policy-makers, between the people’s sector in the arts and government agencies. I’m in contact with Six Degrees, which is developing a network for capacity-building for the creative sector in Singapore. Yet, because I’m not actually part of Six Degrees or any organization working on behalf of creative talents, I can be perceived as impartial to some extent and act as a bridge between the people’s sector and the government agencies looking after the development of the sector. In similar vein, when NAC embarked on developing a new framework for arts housing and convened focus group discussions involving diverse representatives in the arts, they asked me to facilitate these discussions, I suppose because I understand that concerns of arts housing tenants (having been one before), but as an NMP, I presumably have a wider overview of arts housing policy and therefore can communicate the policy-maker’s perspective to the artists. Does that help to enact change though? I can’t answer with a direct Yes or No. What I can say is that my experience has taught me that policy change has to occur as a combination of government initiatives and people’s advocacy efforts. The community has to raise its game, build its capacity to help themselves – for instance, through professional associations and developing strong people’s sector and private institutions – even as government has to embed the lessons from existing policy impacts into future policy-making. Dialogue is necessary between the two, because each party sees issues and benefits in the light of their own, occasionally limiting, experiences. The government is now saying that they need to really listen to the people – their challenge is how and by what means to include differing views in their consideration, expanding the circle of trust. As for the people or people’s sector, those who are on the receiving end of policies, they too need to consciously raise their game. It’s not simply making demands from the government. It’s also about equipping ourselves with the knowledge, know-how, networks, structures, and having the will to make things happen. I believe that as advocates, the arts community is still lacking in maturity in these areas. There is still not very much awareness of policy issues among artists and arts managers, and some indeed want to avoid these because it means ‘politics’. For example, I hear there are younger artists who say that ‘censorship doesn’t affect me’, and I meet young people and aspiring arts administrators who do not know the history of artistic development in our country. It’s important to circulate our stories and experiences so that people learn how to cope and how to push things further. This is also something that some of the ArtsEngage members have recognized. So, I’d like to keep working to develop this sort of capacity in the arts – to pass on knowledge of arts policy and what’s involved in policy-making to others, to nurture leadership, strengthen networks, and help others to start initiatives to benefit the community as a whole. I will end with a note about making political speeches. Parliament obviously is where you can make your voice heard, but I have also learnt there are limitations on how far you can be heard publicly. Firstly, a lot of speeches get made in parliament and only those that are picked up by the media generate a lot of public discussion. A politician therefore, learns to make the ‘right’ kind of speeches or say the things that would capture press attention. Whether government and decision-makers pick up on what you say in Parliament, is another matter. I have to say that I do not think I became a real politician. Picking the ‘right’ avenue for your speeches is also a strategic matter. I learnt that the Budget and Committee of Supply debates are the arenas where MPs argue their most passionate causes, and so in this year’s budget debates I chose to focus my speeches on MICA, which as it turns out, proved to be timely as the Finance Minister announced an increase in arts spending. I felt that strict rules in parliament and the lack of opposition MPs, do limit robust debate, but on the other hand, Parliament is effective in getting day-to-day business done. Another avenue for getting government to do something, is to move a Motion, and I have to say that during my 21 months in parliament I did not find a compelling topic to raise a motion on, although I supported NMP Viswa Sadasivan’s motion on Preschool Education and contributed to the debate on Mrs Josephine Teo’s motion on Inclusive Growth tabled in January this year. In conclusion, it’s possible that there are more expectations on an ‘arts’ NMP than the average NMP, being a representative of a community and its voices, as well as an individual citizen with his/her own voice and convictions. The bridge and intermediary position of the ‘arts’ NMP to policymakers is also important in Singapore where very often, critical voices are ignored by policy-makers and those in power. The ‘foot in the door’ I feel, is still a tiny foot, and there’s more work to be done to keep the door open. More intermediaries and leaders must be found: people who are willing to work to keep the community together and can put forth the community’s views to government effectively. It’s been a real privilege to be an NMP, and I feel that I’ve really manage to exercise my rights as a citizen.