Dendang Koboi Gelap
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Here is a slightly revised (and annotated) extract from a message I sent to my cousin Chelvam (C. R. Rajah), in seeking permission to include the above image in my work -
"I am sure you will recall our happy visit to the National Art gallery of Singapore in December of 2015. Particularly the photo taken of you and me in one of the Southeast Asian galleries - the one that used to be Perriappa's courtroom (my uncle, the late Justice A. P. Rajah,is Chelvam’s
father). I want to include, in the Dendang Koboi Gelap photographic series, this image of the two of us standing where Perriappa's bench used to be, the place from which he delivered his legal judgments all those years ago. It is an image of us standing as brothers in a familiar and, in a sense, familial, space - a prime space (location, location, location) that was once reserved for the dispensing of judgments in law, your profession, and is now usurped by my profession to serve as a venue for displaying judgments on art. The title of this image, 4 Daya Pertimbangan, or The Power of Judgement, alludes to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, wherein it is the a priori faculty of judgment that enables us to experience beauty and, further, that there are common principles informing both aesthetic judgement and moral judgement (from which legal judgement derives legitimacy)."
In his treatise on aesthetics, titled Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Kant asserts that the capacity to make meaningful judgements is the central cognitive faculty of the human mind. This a priori faculty or condition of mind is what enables 'the subsumption of a particular under a universal' as it mediates between the faculty of understanding which supplies universals and the faculty of reason which draws inferences, as a kind of metacognition. He goes on to distinguish between determinate judgements when the universals that are sufficient to determine the particular, and reflective judgements that enable the establishment of new universals. He suggests that aesthetic judgement is a form of reflective judgment. Having united the physical and moral realms by showing how aesthetic judgment is analogous to both the theoretical cognition of nature and to moral judgment, Kant goes on to emphasize the similarity between judgements of beauty and moral judgements, both of which involve a non-purposive or non-instrumental conformity to or realization of some underlying order. Both judgements please us directly, even as we maintain an unmotivated or 'disinterested' disposition towards them.