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Art review: Pinacotheque

The latest addition to Singapore’s art and cultural landscape, the Singapore Pinacotheque de Paris, recently took up residence at the renovated Fort Canning Arts Centre with the seemingly noble-sounding goal of bringing high art to the masses. In one interview, its founder Marc Restellini spoke about its new space as the “perfect vantage point from which to cascade this mission throughout Singapore, the region and globally”.

The latest addition to Singapore’s art and cultural landscape, the Singapore Pinacotheque de Paris, recently took up residence at the renovated Fort Canning Arts Centre with the seemingly noble-sounding goal of bringing high art to the masses. In one interview, its founder Marc Restellini spoke about its new space as the “perfect vantage point from which to cascade this mission throughout Singapore, the region and globally”.

But what exactly is cascading from the summit of Fort Canning? To begin with, the museum’s Heritage Gallery — the only free gallery in the museum — pays tribute, as the name suggests, to the history and heritage of the region. The period under consideration is vast, ranging from the Neolithic to the 19th century.

Unfortunately, the size of the collection on display — and the confines of the gallery itself — fail to measure up to the sheer breadth and depth of the subject at hand; an accumulation of miscellany akin to summarising the technological history of the 20th century in a shoebox containing a double-edged safety razor, an aerosol spray can, a mobile phone, and a blister-pack of Viagra. As a practical duplicate, in miniature, of the purview of both the National Museum of Singapore and the Asian Civilisations Museum, it’s hard to see what the museum’s Heritage Gallery brings to the table. (Its access to various private collections, perhaps.)

These private collections take the fore once more in the museum’s current collections show, The Cabinet Of Curiosities, which frames private collections as vivifying forces set to renew lacklustre museums and public institutions. “A museum must not become a cemetery,” warned French novelist Andre Malraux in the exhibition’s wall text, and curator Restellini prescribes his signature approach of “transversality” to ward off this dire prospect.

In The Cabinet, masterpieces of the art historical canon are juxtaposed, for the most part, with East African and South-east Asian tribal artefacts. Restellini’s transversality appears to consist of drawing our attention to these objects’ most obvious, tangible details, as if to suggest some ahistorical sense of communion between creative souls separated by time and culture, reaching to some tired old notion of aesthetic universality.

While it’s wonderful to see masterful paintings and exquisite artefacts, it’s worth noting that the curatorial approach, in invoking cabinets of curiosities, fails to make note of one of their major functions — to flaunt the power and taste of their owners.

As for the highlight of the museum, The Myth Of Cleopatra is billed as an opportunity to unravel the legends of the Egyptian queen and discover, as it were, the real Cleopatra. Framed by video loops of the opening and closing scenes of the 1963 film starring Elizabeth Taylor, the exhibition brings together a wealth of objects in the following, broad categories: Miscellaneous artefacts of Ptolemaic Egypt bearing, at best, a tangential relationship with Cleopatra VII; lavish costumes and props from various depictions of Cleopatra, particularly the aforementioned film; and a small selection of paintings from about the 17th to 19th century that depicts Cleopatra. It seems little more than an executive summary of the Ptolemaic dynasty, with information imparted mostly through wall texts. However, the cross-cultural Ptolemaic artefacts are interesting enough, such as a Greek-style statue of the Egyptian god Anubis, while fans of the 1963 film Cleopatra might appreciate the costumes and props.

While a good number of the artworks and artefacts on show throughout the museum’s exhibitions are remarkable in their own right, in each instance the curation leaves much to be desired, with little relation between what’s promised and what’s presented — particularly at the steep prices asked (an all-access pass costs S$28 for regular adult visitors and S$21 for Singaporeans and PRs).

There’s a sense of tone-deafness which pervades the institution, ranging from the curious choice of opening with a Cleopatra “blockbuster” or the feat of ignoring the modern and contemporary art of the region in favour of its primitive artefacts — an outlook which seems practically neo-colonialist.

The Myth of Cleopatra runs until Oct 11, 10am to 7.30pm, at Singapore Pinacotheque de Paris, 5 Cox Terrace. For details, visit http://www.pinacotheque.com.sg/

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