Time and Space

It will soon be two years since the Supreme Court moved to its new building. During last year's biennale, the court rooms at City Hall were used for various installations. For example, Singaporean artist Donna Ong's imagination transformed three of the judges' chambers. The most striking of her installations featured dolls submerged in unidentified liquids held in containers connected by tubes to jars of nutrients - ginseng, wool, earth - the scene harshly lit by unshaded incandescent bulbs. A curious laboratory indeed. For an old user of the space like myself, it aroused an extra frisson, the shock of the familiar made strange.

Soon, the old Supreme Court building will be converted into a museum for contemporary art. On the whole, lawyers are unbothered by these intrusions into what was once space dedicated to justice. The National Art Gallery is taking views from the profession on the conversion of the space, but few lawyers are interested in responding to artists' desire to hear concerns, hopes or fears for the use of the space. It seems as if lawyers are a strongly practical bunch - for whom the past is only that. This is odd given how historical an enterprise law really is - what the law is today is an interpretation of what it was yesterday, and so on into the future.

Perhaps it is that Singapore lawyers, like all Singaporeans, have gotten used to the transformation of the physical landscape: if the loss of old buildings and neighbourhoods prompts little more than a shrug, then the conversion of an old building to a radically different use raises not even an eyebrow. After all, one of the most successful bar and restaurant complexes today is an old school, complete with a once solemn chapel - I am referring to Chijmes of course.

I am far from indifferent to old spaces. There's no doubt also that continuity of space over time is a great comfort. The other night, taking my wife to the A&E at Gleneagles (a badly sprained ankle, since recovered), brought to mind many earlier visits to that same space, even a visit unremembered, the day that I was born there. But one must not indulge nostalgia too long, for it all too easily turns the past into a sort of frozen kitsch - an inflexible memory of what was once a living past (compare the conservation areas around Serangoon Road and Eu Tong Sen Street - the former is lively, reinventing itself by interaction with new immigrants and visitors from India, the latter is in danger of becoming an exoticised yet sanitised version of what it once was).

I am certainly confident that the conversion of the old Supreme Court building into a contemporary art museum will add to and not detract from its valued and powerful history in the service of justice. The work of many contemporary artists is often much more the search for particular justice in the meaning of specific events than abstract idealisations of truth or beauty. Thus, in the same exhibition at City Hall were many extraordinarily powerful and up-to-the-minute installations, dealing with urgent political issues of today. Mexican artist Julio Cesar Morales, for example, depicted attempts to cross the border into the US without detection - man moulded into car seat, small boy in washing machine - while on the facing wall a filmed journey across the desert played at high speed. The setting of a court house adds resonance to the art work.

Lawyers do indulge in nostalgia in a different way though, harking back to a golden age of better manners. It is often said that professional values are in decline. A fairer statement would actually be that every generation must renew those values, that ethical living cannot be taken for granted but must be worked for.

In this issue we are reproducing with permission a letter written by an American lawyer, Roland Boyd, to his son. It dates from 1963. It contains many gems about how to succeed in the law. It is not about business tools and management strategies but about personal attitudes and approaches. The success it speaks of is not financial, but professional. Underlying it all is the message that aiming for financial success will distract from the true tasks of a professional, and sometimes even cause a professional's ruin, while seeking professional success, including understanding how one's work may benefit society at large, will bring sufficient, even ample, financial rewards (as he says, money loses 'most of its importance when you get sufficient food, clothing and shelter for you and your family'- although I would add 'and savings for your children's university education').

The letter shows that the challenges to professional values that we worry about today were present too, forty years ago, yet by its quiet advice offers the hope that we can renew and perpetuate professional values for the next generation.

Philip Jeyaretnam, SC
President
The Law Society of Singapore