Ask you ah. When you refer to Damien Hirst’s most famous work, do you call it The Physical Impossibility In The Mind Of Someone Living? Or do you call it The Shark?

Yeah, I thought so, too.

The title of a piece of art — they can be functional or mere afterthought, complementary or supplementary, a ready safety net for bad art or a harmless footnote. In a world where we’re visually bombarded — or even, say, just in a museum or a gallery where we’re visually bombarded anyway — do you really look and consider a piece’s title?

Singapore Art Museum is on a roll. After the wonderfully curated Terms & Conditions show on Arab art, you’ve got another nice little sideline show called Not Against Interpretation: Untitled.

It’s the second in the Not Against Interpretation series (the first one had curators and museum docents writing wall label texts for two works by Vincent Leow and Jason Lim), and this time it looks at the absence (or presence-in-absence) of titles.

It really shouldn’t be a sideline show, I think. I’d love to see more of these conceptual exhibitions on a much bigger scale, a museum-wide show on humour, for instance. Or madness. Or, okay lah, something that screams Southeast Asia, like pop art.

Back to Untitled.

Curator Michelle Ho said she wants to look at this whole bit about our “anxiety of meaning” and getting the interpretation “wrong”. (Assuming you do look at titles in the first place.)

The point of titles, of course, varies across time — self-explanatory names for patronage portraiture, yadda. From the `90s onwards, you’ve had lots of statement pieces and conceptual works, said, Ho, who added that contemporary art is characterised by “meaning being located in different parts of the work” (not necessarily just the object per se, I add). Abstract works often gave a collective shrug to titles. Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko couldn’t care less.

The impulse to put a stamp to a work occasionally remains, though. You’ll sometimes get titles like, I don’t know, Untitled (Booyah!) or Booyah! (Untitled).

So the show attempts to strips away everything except for the thing and its aura.

But not really. It’s not seen in a vacuum, of course. You’re in a museum. The show has a title in, erm, Untitled. The artists are mentioned. You’ve got notes to contextualize the artist, if not the artwork.

And finally, you’ve got visitors who are encouraged to give their own titles to the works. It’s “a powerful thing” to be able to have their “thoughts and ideas next to the artwork,” said Ho.

I partly agree. Thought processes, how people perceive the artworks on display, whether reading a symbol, a figure, or an emotion unto one, are revealed.

But in a way, it also seems to have the complete opposite result — instead of no titles, you’ve got a proliferation of titles. In decentralising meaning, the visitor’s so-called anxiety gives way to confidence, taking things very seriously or very flippantly and everything in-between.

And they’re all sharing space on the wall. The layout is very prominently shaped like an arrow that points to the work, but what happens when your eyes are drawn more towards this arrow than towards what it’s pointing at in the first place?

But anyways, we did have fun with it, lah. Check out the slideshow above to see the “titles” given by Ho and fellow SAM-sters Kim May and Nabilah Said, as well as some from museum-goers too.

(Not Against Interpretation: Untitled is up until next year at the Mr & Mrs Koh Seow Chuan Gallery, Level 2. For more details, visit http://www.singaporeartmuseum.sg.)