Art Is Idea Is No Box

There’s something haunting, and not quite right about Pinar Yolacan’s portraits of old women in Victorian fashions. Look carefully, her clothes fit her models like sagging skin. Wait a minute. It *is* sagging skin.

Not just animal skin, but tripe, stomach, chicken heads and other animal insides feature in her clothing. New Yorker Yolacan’s “ Perishables ” exhibition opens December 10 at Rivington Arms Gallery.

I’ve got to hand it to her. How did she come up with an idea like that? And how did she convince the women to put the animal-cloth creations on? (Apparently a vegetarian model declined at the last minute, forcing Yolacan to rush to the nearest Starbucks to find a replacement before her clothes rotted.) Best of all, Yolacan’s work found an audience of admirers.

I admire someone who doesn’t give lip service to the term “thinking outside the box”. Can you imagine what her a-ha moment must have been like?

“Hmmm, this chicken stew is amazing!”
“I quite agree.”
“Look at this skin. It’s beautiful, and so flexible, and so… You know what I’m thinking? This could be a dress.”

Is Singapore ready for new ideas? Enough self-congratulatory talk about entrepreneurship and enough stories about Kenny Yap. I realize change takes time, and institutional change will take a longer time. But a top-down approach won’t work. The government needs to know when to cut the apron strings: It wants Singaporeans to loosen up, but it will tell its citizens how, when and where.

The problem is, they want people to “think outside the box”. They show you the box, carefully outline its dimensions, and then say, “Go think outside this box.” Creativity has no box. Eliminate the box. Don’t judge how clever an idea is by how far away from the box it is. There is no box.

Sometimes, outrageous doesn’t mean silly. New doesn’t mean unacceptable. Different doesn’t mean bad. I’d like to see how chicken skin will go down in Singapore.

If anyone wants to listen, I’ve got a killer idea for parallel parking.