Boon Hau Tan - Degree Programme Final Project: The Good Co-op

Final Year Project, Bachelor of Arts: Graphic Communication – 'The Good Co-op'

The body of work that made up my Final Year Project, was centered around a meta approach: from my interests in sociological urbanist enquiries, Hegelian philosophy and questioning the positivist social-engineering indoctrination that was resulting in intellectually poorer and less critical citizenry, and interest in narrative-driven, post-truth work from artists like Taryn Simon, Simon Fujiwara, Walid Raad — and Koons/Hirst's ideology and stances toward art.

The work resulted in a fictionalised setting; I was "presenting" a body of work, from a public, civic-minded council, run by fictional acclaimed artists, who were using Situationist ideas (masquerading as a dystopian "culture gestapo") to provoke and push the zeitgeist on current topics from news to pop culture, as well as evolve the methodology of our message delivery in government PSAs which were largely ineffective (straight-up telling people "thou shall not"), and having the reverse result rather. An investigation into new ways to approach Public Service Announcements and campaigns, through a fictionalised group of people.

A much larger "universe" was scripted and planned, but given the short time frames, I had to present this as one arc of the many stories for the 'Good Co-op' collective. The works were meta-intended to be triggers for thought; pieces were conceived as "artworks". This project was developed alongside the 2012 blockbuster exhibition at the National Library Board, 'Campaign City: Life in Posters', itself a historical look and intervention into how Singaporean campaigns have run our lives and charted the current path for our nation.

Fictional intervention to a piece of "undesirable" piece of public visual — the "artwork" was a piece of adhesive tarpaulin, designed by the Cooperative as "censorship weaponery" to blanket-cover any existing physical image in the public sphere.

In this installation (image taken during final assessment), a framed liberal piece of visual was forcefully and haphazardly heavy-duty stickered over, permanently damaging the visual and the physical environment — that it was not able to remove without damaging the wall and image. This was a metaphor as well to the subtle perma-damage in the public ethical and intellectual sphere with acts of heavy-handed laissez faire censorship. The classroom wall was permanently damaged IRL after I removed the piece.

Most of the artworks were interventionalist and quasi-interactive in nature.

Environmental steel sign

Research notes