Ray Langenbach

(MFA, PhD)
 

Originally from Boston, living and working in Kuala Lumpur, Langenbach “performs theory, ” focusing on cognitive phenomena & propaganda. His video works, installations and performances have been presented in the Singapore Film Festival, Philippines Film Festival, Film Festival of the South, Norway; Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Singapore Art Museum, the National Art Gallery of Malaysia, Whitney Museum of Art (New York), Museum of Neon Art (Los Angeles), LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), Nevada Museum of Art (Reno), National Centre for the Arts (Mumbai), Artspace (Sydney), 3rd Werkleitz Biennial-Germany, Asia Pacific Triennale, Gwangju Biennale and others. Langenbach curates and writes cultural theory. He has published in Art Asia Pacific, Artlink, Asian Art News, Afterimage. He served as Singapore Editorial Consultant for World Art, and appears in several collections. , including House of Glass: Culture, Modernity and the State in Southeast Asia, Oxford Dictionary of Performance (2004).

DOCTORAL RESEARCH IN CONTEMPORARY ART HISTORY (SINGAPORE), PERFORMANCE STUDIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES, CENTRE FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY
My dissertation, Performing the Singapore State: 1988-1995, historicizes a series of important performance art events in the mid-1990s in Singapore, at 5th Passage, an art space (and collective) formerly run by Suzann Victor and her colleagues. The Artists’ General Assembly in 1993/1994 ended with the arrests and criminal prosecutions, and new government regulations concerning Performance Art and Forum Theatre. The dissertation has been accepted for review by a publisher. It may be downloaded from the Australian Digital Theses site.


Presently lecturing at School of Performance + Media, Sunway University College, Malaysia

THE PERFORMATIVE INDOCTRINATION MODEL PIM THAILAND

First presented at the Perforritatice Art, Culture and Pedagogy Symposium at Penn State University in November'96, The Performative Indoctrination Model generated considerable controversy.

Excerpts from PIM were subsequently presented at Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan, December 1996, and in the complete lecture/performance has been presented at the Nevada Museum of Art, Arizona State University and Bard-Simon's Rock College. Video documentation was shown at Artspace, Sydney, Australia in 1997 and a live version is scheduled for 1998. Video Documentation of PIM is available through the address/fax/email above.
PIM falls into that category of performance that has grown out of the merging of cultural theory and performance art. In a nutshell, PIM theorizes the performative through the performance of theory.
Appropriating the work of Southeast Asian ideologues and artists*, along with historical footage documenting American interventions abroad, the Performative Indoctrination Model lays out a theory of propaganda and indoctrination. The theory is then applied to contemporary American foreign diplomacy and art practice. PIM offers a portrait of performance art as an integral part of the totalized" internal and external propaganda project of the United States.
The presentation is in the form of a 45 to 60 minute monologue (depending on audience interaction) with video projection and audio complement. Whenever possible, PlM is adapted to the specific dynamics of the political/cultural milieu and language where it is presented.

*especially Lee Weng Choy and Lan Gen Bah
The end of performance art.
Source: Janet Pillai, Malaysian Theatre Director about PIM-

Who shot Guy Debord ?

in New Criteria - a Pictorial Supplement, Ray Langenbach, Suzann Victor, Ng Siew Kuan & Jason Lim

...When capital accumulates to a great enough degree, it becomes an image and it is this image that the French artist, Guy Debord, calls the `spectacle'. Meaning lives not within any image but in the charged space between viewer and image, where the viewer has become mere image as well. The simple act of seeing becomes an act of selfconsumption or what Langenbach calls `panoptic cannibalism'. Because this charged space contains veils of information imposed by an alienating capitalist economy culture, one can only arrive at `true meaning' (if there is such a thing) through a strategy of acknowledging the alienation in the work of art.

Ray Langenbach 'Theatre of Agencies: The LGB Story'
In the following pages I will present a reading of the intellectual lives of two cognitive scientists, a Singaporean-born, Chinese-American, Lan Gen-Bah (who in recent years has often presented herself simply by the initials LGB), and her mother, the late Chiang Mo-Jo. It is my hope that these personal topographies may reveal certain performative tendencies embedded in the 'cultures of science'.

Warning
(2002) Ray Langenbach
7 minit
Digital Video
Bahasa Inggeris Experimental mix of text and found footage, created for the ArtisProActiv pavillion at Korea's Gwangju Biennale 2002.

PERFORMING THE SINGAPORE STATE 1988-1995

ABSTRACT1INTRODUCTION2PART 1: SETTING THE SCENEI. SCOPOPHILIA: Clapham Junction From the Air18II. IDEOLOGICAL FRAMES: Instrumentally Imagining Singapore38III. PERFORMATIVITY AND PERFORMANCE67PART 2: PERFORMANCE OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATEIV. STATE FATHERHOOD & THE BODY POLITIC: The Taxonomy of Progress98V. "THE SINGAPORE STORY": Invention & Foreclosure136PART 3: PERFORMANCE ARTVI. "COFFEE TALK": A Metadiscourse of Daily Life178VII. "BROTHER CANE": The Exception that Articulates the Norm207VIII. THE AFTERMATH: Performance Indicators240CONCLUSION288BIBLIOGRAPHYi-xxxiii

Source: Ray Langenbach