Indonesia’s radical artists contend with rivals reflecting ethnic, religious and economic agendas

While politics has dominated the foreground of Indonesian art, the country’s contemporary art world faces a struggle between art’s engagement with society and the forces of commercialisation.

Mangu Putra’s career started in advertising (featured work: Exploitation, mixed media on canvas, 2000)  Courtesy of the artist

During the Suharto era, the role of artists was clear: to oppose the regime, through irony and satire, and through undermining official cultural discourse. This motivation shaped the public face of art, from the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (New Art Movement) of 1975, to the dramatic challenges of Semsar Siahaan in the 1980s and early 1990s, to the youthful radicalism of the Taring Padi (Fang of the Rice-plant) collective in the late 1990s. Many of these anti-regimist stances also posed challenges to the art establishment. Strictly speaking such works belong to a modernist trajectory; they were an avant-garde radically redefining art.

This collection of articles, edited by by Hawe Setiawan (from the Bandung Institute of Technology and Pasundan University) and Julian Millie (Monash University), brings together the diverse, heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory narratives of Indonesian contemporary art. The articles show that the radical political stream of art, while still present in Indonesia, vies with a variety of ‘ethnic’, religious and economic imperatives to shape the current contemporary art scene.

Streams of art

Radical politics is by no means the sole narrative explaining the current state of Indonesian art. Alongside the works of political activists such as the New Art Movement, Semsar and Taring Padi, the mainstream of Indonesian art has long had a strong line of abstract and abstract expressionist art. This art was a feature of the Bandung school based around the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), and was promoted by the US as part of the Cold War struggle against leftist realism, once a hallmark of Yogyakarta’s art school (now Institut Seni Indonesia, ISI).

A range of localised art forms is found outside these two streams of national art history, the oppositional and the abstract expressionist. Bali provides the location for the most complex and the most famous examples of such localised art. On Bali, the designation ‘traditional’ covers the art of Kamasan village, in Klungkung district, which continues a form of wayang painting that goes back at least to the ancient kingdoms of East Java. Alongside this variety of wayang-based art are forms of art that were ‘modern’ in the 1930s, but have become conventionalised as tourist art over the last four decades.

In their contributions to this issue Ari Adriansyah and Kevin Murray draw attention to the intimate connections between ‘folk’ and ‘high’ art in the contemporary scene. The art of Jelekong village in West Java might easily be labelled as ‘tourist’ work, but like that of the artists of Ubud, Bali, it provides an ongoing and important background to more contemporary work.

Besides performance arts, other regions have strong traditions of carving, weaving and batik. These various forms include the varieties of ‘folk’ or village-based art, such as the woven grass wayang puppets of East Java. Jim Supangkat has labelled these arts as ‘ethnic’, demonstrating that it is difficult to position them within a linear history of national art. Religious art has a similarly difficult position in relation to that history. Artists such as Pirous have taken Islamic styles of ‘decorative’ art and entered them into the mainstream of Indonesian painting.

Alternative streams

Hawe Setiawan’s example of Budi Brahmantyo’s work reminds us that there is not a single linear narrative of Indonesian art. Brahmantyo’s landscapes are not the product of art school romanticism, but come out of a line of ‘technical’ art that stretches back to the illustrator and photographer Mas Pirngadi.

Such ‘technical’ concerns also shape the work of contemporary painters such as Nyoman Sani, whose work began from fashion design, or Mangu Putra, who moved from advertising to art. While the exhibition of Islamic art discussed by Viriginia Hooker is firmly located in the mainstream of Indonesian art, it demonstrates that different visual traditions continue to provide alternative streams of art.

Nyoman Sani, besides being a leading artist working on the critique of the female image, also heads Bali’s art collective, Seniwati. This collective was originally founded by the expatriate Mary Northmore to balance out the heavy male dominance in the Indonesian art world. Wulan Dirgantoro’s article on Titarubi presents another challenge to that male dominance, reminding us, as with the Islamic artists documented by Hooker, that there are different and subtle ways to push the boundaries of art.

An institutional lack

The plethora of national modernist and ethnic traditional arts exists largely outside any kind of institutional structure. The art institutes, pre-eminently ITB (Bandung), ISI (Yogyakarta) and IKJ (Jakarta), are the primary sites for teaching and networking, and for launching the careers of leading artists. But there is just as much activity taking place outside these institutions, evident especially in the development of new artistic directions since the fall of Suharto.

Nyoman Sani leads the Bali-based collective Seniwati (featured work: Abu-abu, 2002)  Courtesy of the artist

Despite the existence of the art institutes, Indonesian artists must operate without the kinds of state grant schemes that are important for Western artists. In addition, there is no national art collection around which to frame Indonesian art history. These twin vacuums are filled by private patronage and private collections, with the result that many works are removed from public space, and can only be viewed if they happen to be reproduced in the expensive display books that private collectors sponsor.

These vacuums have also contributed to the creation of an art world that is highly-commercialised, where, with some notable exceptions, collectors act as a conservative force, steering the work of artists in the direction of paintings, particularly large and vibrantly coloured works. In the wake of the global popularity of Chinese art, Indonesian art is increasingly featuring in the auctions of Singapore, Hong Kong, and further afield, with speculators driving the prices to previously unimaginable levels. One of Nyoman Masriadi’s works was the first to sell for a million dollar price tag, in 2008.

Art versus commerce

The commercial tendency towards painting is at odds with the desire in contemporary art to explore new media. During the days of oppositional art, even conventional artists became involved in forms of performance art. Larger and more complex installations and performances developed during the 1990s, some merging directly with public protests, or attempting to link up with folk arts.

In the early 2000s, video became an important way to extend the possibilities of performances and installations. However it is difficult to sell performances and videos at auction, so many artists have had to choose between pursuing the radical possibilities of their art and making a comfortable living, something that is a reality for Indonesia’s current crop of top artists.

The hegemony of art auctions also highlights the ‘star’ status of individuals, a development inimical to the collective ethos found both in regional traditions and in contemporary art, and championed by groups such as Klinik Taxu, ruangrupa, or Punkasila. Allegations of ‘selling out’ are commonly levelled at some artists and, given the impoverished Bohemian lifestyle of some street artists, it is not hard to see why they might resent contemporaries who now own private jets.

Certainly not everyone has sold out. The examples discussed by Edwin Jurriens demonstrate the persistence of social engagement by Indonesian artists. Here, as in some of his other academic articles, Jurriens traces the lines of descent of video and installation artists. He maps spaces that artists consider to be simultaneously sites of production as well as focal points for projects of social improvement.

Ruangrupa includes many of the leading artists and critics prominent in other parts of the art world, such as Ade Dermawan, and their complex installations in the 2012 Singapore Biennale demonstrated their ability to engage with urban social worlds outside Indonesia. Their depictions of Singapore’s popular culture and social history climaxed in a series of images retelling the rampage of Godzilla, with Singapore replacing Tokyo as the object of his fury!

Debating art

The debates going on within Indonesian art are an aspect of its globalisation. Aminuddin Siregar’s article captures the sense of polemic and challenge that continues to push the boundaries of the art scene. Like a number of his contemporaries, Siregar (who is more commonly known as Ucok) seeks to give a radical critique of the complacency of the post-Suharto art world, believing that the hegemony of the art auction undermines the potential for radical expression still found in other aspects of cultural production. Such polemics go back at least to the collision of LEKRA (the People’s Art Institute) and Manikebu (the Cultural Manifesto Group) in the early 1960s, but continue to arise in different sites in the art world.

To compound the challenge to conventional art, the sharp rise in prices has seen an accompanying growth in fakery, exposed in a 2012 scandal extensively documented in Tempo magazine.

From local to global

Contemporary creations by artists such as Punkasila’s Danius Kesminas frequently involve ‘artisans’ like the painters of Jelekong. In Punkasila, art is simultaneously localised and globalised. That a non-Indonesian such as Kesminas can be incorporated into the art world is not unusual, given the long cosmopolitan history of Indonesian society. But projects such as Punkasila signal how easily artists move from village-based locales to international biennales and triennials. These movements are stimulated by the increasingly close collaborations between Indonesians and their Southeast Asian contemporaries. Indonesia’s contemporary art scene cannot be reduced to a single trend, but its current diversity reveals undiminished creativity.

Adrian Vickers (adrian.vickers@sydney.edu.au) is currently carrying out research on the histories of modern and contemporary art in Indonesia.

Virginia Hooker

The Bayang exhibition was a showcase for contemporary Islam-inspired art in Indonesia  Yusuf Susilo Hartono

During the fasting month of 2011, Indonesia’s national gallery hosted a major exhibition of Islamic art. It was no coincidence that the exhibition was held during Ramadan because the fasting month is also the time for spiritual reflection. The organisers chose the title Bayang (shadows, reflections, illusions) to encourage imaginative creations – in any medium or style – that would invigorate Islamic art. Three hundred artists were invited to participate. Their responses displayed a great diversity of styles, including calligraphic, abstract, and figurative works, executed in a range of media such as painting, installation, sculpture, photography, and new media.

Some of the artists had never previously created Islamically-themed works. Others, like AD Pirous, had established reputations for their religiously-based art. In this way, the exhibition brought together ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ artists with the brief to explore the theme of shadows or reflections. In the invitation, the curators Rizki A Zaelani and A Rikrik Kusmara provided contributors with two questions as starting points: What creates a shadow? How can we understand the nature of a shadow?

Islam in art

The exhibition coincided with the inauguration of Jakarta as the ‘Capital of Islamic Culture in the Asia Region’ for 2011. This provided added stimulus for public discussion about the representation of Islam through art and the significance of the Bayang exhibition. The Yogya-based curator Kuss Indarto blogged that not all the contributing artists found it easy to express the theme in their works in a way that was ‘Islamic’. In his view, this was the reason why several ‘secular’ artists had resorted to painting Qur’anic verses in the belief that this would make the works ‘Islamic’. The result, according to Kuss Indarto, was works lacking in spiritual depth. Some of them even appeared ‘banal’.

A different response was expressed in a substantial review by the critic and artist Yusuf Susilo Hartono published in Visual Arts, the upmarket Jakarta magazine he edits. He identified a strong Islamic theme running through the exhibition. He suggested that the well-known Qur’anic image of the vertical and horizontal ties connecting God with humans and humans with each other (expressed in the Qur’an 3:112) was the inspiration for many of the works.

Diverse images and styles

AD Pirous is arguably Indonesia’s best known living exponent of Islam-inspired art. Since the early 1970s he has created strongly-stated, bold geometric images in dazzling colours, often highlighted with gold leaf and brilliant turquoise. Many of his works feature a verse or phrase from the Qur’an, highlighted by his use of marble paste to raise the Arabic calligraphy and produce a three-dimensional effect.

Ties That Are Firm and Strong reveals Didin Sirojuddin AR’s skills in calligraphy  Didin Sirojuddin AR

For this exhibition Pirous contributed a characteristically imposing work featuring the single stroke of the Arabic letter alif, the first in the Arabic alphabet. He entitled it Alif yang menancap bumi dan mencuat ke langit (The alif that is embedded in the earth and shoots up to the sky). The visual impact of the minimalist style arrests the viewer’s attention, and the title brings to mind the divine link between the heavens and this world of human beings.

A similar theme was chosen by master calligrapher and artist, Didin Sirojuddin AR, who expressed it in a radically different style. Sirojuddin is recognised for his mastery of the classical forms of Arabic calligraphy, but for this exhibition he chose an expressive style which he calls ‘contemporary.’ The title of his work, Tali nan kukuh kuat (Ties that are firm and strong), is based on the Qur’anic verses 3:103, ‘And hold fast all together to the Rope of God and be not divided among yourselves.’ To write the verses, Sirojuddin shaped the Arabic letters in forms that resemble ties or ropes. They link the earth and the heavens as they run down the canvas.

Many of the exhibits were eye-catching and boldly executed, but it was Komroden Haro’s Yang Satu (The One), which attracted Yusuf Susilo Hartono’s attention. Well-known for his sculptures, Komroden’s piece in this exhibition was a large, textured bronze capsule topped with a single leaf. Flowing down from the leaf and etched into the capsule is a single line, which can be read as alif. The seed-like capsule combined with the alif suggest the mystery of genesis and the might of Allah. The image would remind Muslims of the Qur’anic verse 6:95, ‘It is God Who causes the seed grain and the date stone to split and sprout.’

Other works in the exhibition seem to express dissatisfaction about the state of Islamic art in Indonesia. Hardiman Rajab’s series of photographs entitled Berakar tapi tak berpucuk (Roots but no growth) is a series of illustrations of human life-stories. Each of them has metaphorical roots but despite this they do not flourish and grow. In his review of the work, Yusuf Susilo Hartono pondered on its meaning. Is it, he wondered, a commentary on the state of modern Islamic art in Indonesia which, although in existence for over 40 years, has failed to thrive?

Neglected development

The Bayang exhibition was the brainchild of Inisaf (Yayasan Senirupa Islam Indonesia, the Indonesian Islamic Art Foundation) in conjunction with the Alumni Association of the Bandung Institute of Technology. Inisaf is concerned about the neglect of Islamic art in Indonesia and aims to redress this by encouraging dynamic Islam-inspired works of art. The group believes that Indonesia’s Islamic culture has the potential to contribute ideas and creative works that will enhance peace, progress and prosperity for all humankind.

Although almost 90 per cent of Indonesians profess Islam, no major art movement has consistently drawn on Islamic themes and images. Many Indonesians still remember the two blockbuster showings of Islamic art in the 1990s held with President Suharto’s backing at the national mosque (the Istiqlal Mosque). Known as Festival Istiqlal I (1991) and Festival Istiqlal II (1995), they were prestigious and highly successful. Festival Istiqlal II attracted 6.5 million viewers, a figure which remains unequalled for attendance at any exhibition of Indonesian art. But the momentum from these exhibitions was not maintained.

Smaller exhibitions of Islam-inspired works have been held regularly since the early 1970s. They featured highly respected artists such as Ahmad Sadali (acknowledged as the pioneer of abstract art in Indonesia), Affandi, Umi Dahlan, AD Pirous, Sunaryo, Didin Sirojuddin AR, Syaiful Adnan, Iwan Tirta and others. But a divide exists between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ art. Secular works dominate the mainstream art world, while ‘Islamic art’ remains in its own, marginal space. This ‘quarantining’ of Islam-inspired art suggests galleries, dealers, and critics are wary about how to approach and appraise such works.

Image problems

Komroden Haro’s The One attracted critical acclaim at the Bayang exhibition  Yusuf Susilo Hartono

There is a widespread perception that Islam prohibits the depiction of living beings. For this reason many artists, art dealers, and the viewing public are anxious that they might be infringing the laws of Islam if they create or view Islam-inspired works. The discussions flowing from the Bayang exhibition included these issues. Writing in the same issue of Visual Arts as the review of the Bayang exhibition, respected scholar Professor Abdul Hadi WM set out the Qur’an’s position on the representation of living beings. He emphasised that the Qur’an does not forbid it. What is forbidden in the Qur’an, he explained, is the creation of objects to be used for worship.

Many of the works of art now regarded as the best examples of classical Islamic civilisation feature images of people, birds, animals and plants. Persian philosophers and religious scholars, Professor Hadi writes in his article, defended the position of art and artists in Islamic cultures, arguing that they did not work from life models. Rather they depicted what they ‘saw’ in their imagination. If, they said, images in a painting are like reflections in a mirror, the real image is not in the mirror, but is stored in the soul of the artist.

Layers of meaning

Muslims approach the Qur’an as a source of unending inspiration. Its language is exceptionally rich in symbolism, allusion, and images of the transcendent power of Allah. Even Arabic calligraphic representations of words of the Qur’an are believed to symbolise some of the qualities of Allah. The circle and the straight line, the essential components of Arabic calligraphy, are especially rich in meaning and both shapes appear in many of the exhibits. The circle, symbol of perfection and unity, without beginning or end, is a reminder of the Oneness of Allah (tawhid), Islam’s fundamental principle. The straight line of the alif is believed to have been created by a ray of light and is imbued with creative energy.

Kuss Indarto gave special praise to one of the Bayang exhibits that uses the circle and a set of sculptures to remind viewers of the impermanence of the material world. Entitled ‘Last Journey’ by its creator, Gabriel Aries, it featured a large circle of marble dust, within which were placed stone sculptures of a pair of shoes and a suitcase. Kuss Indarto interprets this as a representation of the steps we take on the journey from this life to the next, and the baggage of this transitory world that accompanies us on the journey. When we pass from this life, however, the baggage will be left behind, as insubstantial as the shadow of human existence.

Invigorating Islamic art?

The Bayang exhibition was a showcase for contemporary Islam-inspired art in Indonesia. It attracted works from talented and well-known artists and stimulated discussion about the nature of Islamic art and the representation of spirituality in visual forms. The curators’ choice of shadows and reflections as the exhibition’s theme was an inspired one. Not only does it reference the shadow-puppet play traditions of the archipelago, it also draws on the Qur’anic metaphors of light (Allah) and reflected light (His creation). Whether the exhibition and the discussions it generated will result in renewed creative energy in Islam-inspired art remains to be seen. What is clear is that critical responses to the exhibition express respect for those artists who try to engage their viewers in deeper levels of thought using imagery that is neither arcane nor banal.

Virginia Hooker (Virginia.Hooker@anu.edu.au) is Emeritus Professor and Fellow in the School of International, Political and Strategic Studies, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University. She thanks Yusuf Susilo Hartono, Editor in Chief of Visual Arts, for permission to quote material and use images from the magazine (Volume 8, #50, September-October 2011).

Hawe Setiawan

Creating visual reproductions is something everybody can do nowadays. Most people own a digital camera or have one integrated into their mobile phone. Wherever one finds oneself, all one needs to do is press a small button on the magic device, and presto! A picturesque landscape can be created.

The Lembang Fault is a geological feature shaped by Bandung’s volcanic past - Courtesy of the artist

It was not always so. Throughout the nineteenth century, making an image of a landscape required skill, ability, and patience. The skill of rendering landscapes has long since disappeared from the daily lives of most people. Against this background, Budi Brahmantyo is an exception.

Dr. Brahmantyo works as a geologist at Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB). He has made many journeys throughout Indonesia, drawing natural landscapes along the way. Using simple techniques and equipment, he strikes a solitary figure as he stands motionless except for occasional movements of the head and hands. In fact, Budi is continuing a long artistic tradition that has developed within scientific circles in response to West Java’s mountainous landscape.

A life in landscapes

Budi Brahmantyo was born in the West Javanese capital of Bandung in 1962. He studied Geology at ITB until 1988. A decade later he obtained a masters degree in Geology from Graduate School of Geo and Biospheres at Niigata University in Japan. His thesis was entitled The Quaternary Geology of River Terraces at Okumiomote River, Niigata. In 2005 he obtained his doctoral degree in Geology from ITB for his dissertation The Geomorphological Development of Karangbolong Karst Mountain in Kebumen, Central Java, with Geology as a Determinant Factor. Now the head of ITB’s Geology Department, he is a true geologist.

Local features such as Ciomas Falls are commemorated in Brahmantyo’s sketches as well as his tourism initiatives - Courtesy of the artist

However, he has also enjoyed drawing since his early school years. He recalls winning a prize in a drawing competition in grade four at Muhamad Toha VI Elementary School in Bandung. It was not until 1986 that he began to seriously draw landscapes. The threshold occasion was his participation in a geological field study to the Central Javanese mountain of Karangsambung. ‘At that time, I realised that geological sketches of landscapes or outcrops were quite important for geological observations,’ he says.

According to Budi, a geologist’s skills should include sketching. But this should not be confused with the skill of making realistic impressions like those created by architects. A geologist should be able to depict the geological conditions of a place through lines and curves. If the geologist wishes to, she or he can enrich these geological sketches with attention to proportion and artistic touches. This has been Budi’s own experience. His landscape sketching evolved into a combination of professional and personal motivations. ‘I myself combine two undertakings: geological study and [pursuing my] hobby,’ he explains.

The art of geology

‘The most important thing in any geological sketch is the geological information it reveals, and not the picture it presents,’ says Budi. It is not surprising then that his methods are simple and few: observe, analyse, and sketch. He ascertains the proportion of his drawings by carefully measuring different heights and the slopes of natural landscapes. He represents the depth of the landscape through contrasts of strong and light lines, and provides accentuation with hatchings and shadings. His drawing tools are rudimentary as well: instead of using special devices like those usually used by architects, he just uses ordinary paper, pencils, eraser, pen, and clipboard. His first step is the making of a pencil draft. In the latter stages, he uses a ballpoint to edit and enhance.

Despite his emphasis on conveying geological information, Budi’s sketches have a compelling pictorial value. This emerges in his selection of sites. According to Budi, not every natural landscape is sufficiently interesting to be depicted in a geological sketch. Making a judgment depends partly on one’s perspective on the landscape. Sometimes, he climbs high in order to obtain a proper view. Natural light conditions also determine the suitability of a landscape for sketching. ‘Sometimes the need to sketch comes naturally as I walk or travel in a vehicle,’ he says.

This preparedness to sketch at impromptu moments is characteristic of his work. In his recent expeditions in Papua and Krakatau, Budi sketched landscapes despite the rocking of the motorboat in which he was travelling. The same thing happened in the Moluccas islands. He has even drafted sketches of mountainous areas from a plane.

Although Budi’s A4 sketch pad reveals images he has made of landscapes throughout almost the entirety of Indonesia, most of his works depict Bandung and environs. The city is located within an expansive volcanic basin, and for that reason, ITB has been the Indonesian centre for research in disciplines such as volcanology and geology. He is not the first expert to blend aesthetic and professional objectives in producing images of the region’s geological features. In fact, he stands in an august lineage.

Predecessors

Budi learned the skill of sketching from the prominent geologist Sampurno, who was his professor at ITB. He also studied the representation of geological features from the works of the Dutch geologists Herman Theodoor Verstappen and Antonie Johannes Pannekoek. He recalls also the work of geographer Alan H. Strahler and his brother Arthur Newell Strahler entitled Introducing Physical Geography as an influence. This work inspired Budi to study the visual aspects of the natural landscape.

Geological details, such as those of the Citatah Crater, are finely rendered in Brahmantyo’s sketches - Courtesy of the artist

Based on their research and exploration of the natural features of Indonesia, these men have produced a large corpus of images in diverse media. By far the best known of these scientist-artists was Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn (1809-1864). Junghuhn was a German-born Dutch naturalist who travelled through parts of Sumatra and the whole of Java. From his base in Bandung, he was involved in various scientific and agricultural projects for the Netherlands Indies government. He also produced a distinctive body of images of Indonesian landscapes that was shaped by progressive humanitarian thinking characteristic of many nineteenth-century naturalists.

Geotourism

Budi’s concern for the environment motivates his involvement in geotourism. This is a form of tourism that appreciates the geographical characteristics of tourist destinations. This branch of tourism has developed in Indonesia since a workshop on the subject was organised in Bandung in 1999.

Geotourism is not widely popular, but Brahmantyo is one of the few concerned to develop it. His teaching at ITB includes a course on the topic, and, along with like-minded people, he encourages public awareness of the Bandung Basin, drawing attention not just to its geological aspects, but also to environmental issues such as the limestone mining in Citatah, the flooding of the Citarum River, threats to archaeological sites, the instability of the Lembang Fault, landslides, and the risk of volcanic eruptions. As he explains, ‘Geotourism is a way to convey geological issues to general public. It is actually intended to make people aware of environmental conditions in Bandung. People need to know and care about the problems that are arising and will arise.’

Out of his deep concern with the environmental condition of Bandung Basin, Brahmantyo and his colleagues created an excursion program called Geotrek. College students, journalists and others have joined the tour over the past few years. On these journeys, Brahmantyo and his friend the geographer T. Bachtiar inform tour members about geological and geographical issues related to the places they visit, such as Mount Tangkubanparahu in the northern part of Bandung, and Pawon Cave in the western part of the city. ‘I always encourage the participants in Geotrek to capture natural phenomenon not only through simply observing, taking photographs or writing, but also by drawing sketches,’ he says.

Budi’s sketches have not yet been exhibited, but many of them can be found in publications. Some have appeared as illustrations in his books such as The Warning from Pawon Cave (2004, published with editor T. Bachtiar), Geology of the Bandung Basin (2004), and Geotourism in the Bandung Basin (2009, with co-author T. Bachtiar). Other sketches were recently printed in Geomagz, a Bandung-based magazine published by a body within the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources. He is also planning to publish a compilation of his sketches.

Budi belongs to a small but distinctive space for image production in Indonesia. Indonesia’s natural features have attracted the attention of scientists for whom the creation of visual images has been an aspect of their professional work. At the same time, their reproductions frequently resonate with artistic genres of landscape art. The legacy of Budi Brahmantyo, Junghuhn and others consists not only of a body of visual images that have scientific as well as aesthetic value. It also maintains the fast disappearing skill of landscape drawing.

Hawe Setiawan (hawe_setiawan@yahoo.com) is a freelance columnist and lecturer at Pasundan University, Bandung. He is completing a doctoral dissertation at ITB on the works and thinking of Franz Willhelm Junghuhn.

Edwin Jurriëns

Common Room link art and culture with local development  Common Room

The increased freedom of speech and access to consumer communication technology in Indonesia since the late 1990s have been reflected in the remarkable growth in independent art centres. These centres have been set up by youth from diverse backgrounds making use of a variety of creative media, ranging from painting, sculpture and graphic design to video, computer, and mobile phones. These multidisciplinary communities have become important sites for discussion about all sorts of topical issues, including art, media, politics, history, education, gender, health and the environment.

Fully aware of their identity as predominantly urban phenomena, members of the new art communities display a common desire for engaging with urban space. Some of them try to improve the urban infrastructure and economy by promoting local ‘creative industries’, but not at the cost of their primary identity as art initiatives. Partly in reaction against the commercialisation of painting in the booming Southeast Asian art market, they initiate projects and events that cannot be easily commodified, but are primarily meant to generate creative ideas and solutions for urban problems.

The space of shapes

Two major exhibitions in Jakarta in 2010 demonstrated that the development of Indonesian contemporary art since the turn of the century is inextricably linked to the (re-)use, (re-)presentation and (re-)imagination of urban space. These exhibitions, Fixer: An Exhibition of Alternative Spaces and Art Groups in Indonesia and Expanding the Space and Public, were both co-organised by the Jakarta-based art community ruangrupa (space of shapes).

Ruangrupa engages with Jakarta from the art space and community it maintains in Tebet, one of the city’s southern suburbs. This has required strong commitment, for Jakarta’s infrastructure does not make life easy for such communities. Because of the city’s pollution, traffic jams, high costs and low quality of housing, the community relocated three times to more affordable and suitable accommodation within the first ten years of its existence. But it never considered moving from the place where it was first established, Tebet. An essential part of the community’s identity is its interactions with its social surroundings, including dumpling sellers and motorcyle-taxi drivers.

The city of Jakarta has been a theme and/or location for most of ruangrupa’s art initiatives, including its biennial art festivals OK.Video and Jakarta 32 Degrees Celsius. Recurring events in the OK.Video festivals are video art exhibitions, seminars and workshops in various locations in Jakarta. Jakarta 32 Degree Celsius has similar events, but specifically focuses on Jakarta-based students without a formal education in art. It is meant to promote dialogue between students from different institutions and make them aware of their urban environment through art-related activities.

The Lenteng Forum

Another Jakarta-based art community with a strong commitment to themes concerning urban space and social life is Forum Lenteng, based in Lenteng Agung, South Jakarta. The community promotes social engagement in media and art through its video art and short documentaries, participatory video projects, public video screenings and discussions, and media research and publications.

The 2010 Nu-Substance festival included a synthesiser workshop  Common Room

Akumassa (I’m the Mass) is an example of their activities. This is a program of participatory video workshops with local communities. Since 2008, workshops have been organised in ten different urban and semi-urban areas in Java, Sumatra and Lombok. After receiving basic video training, the participants are encouraged to record aspects of their daily lives that normally do not reach the mass media. The videos are usually embedded in a blog explaining the background of the filmed story, and posted on the Akumassa website.

Videos by Forum Lenteng’s members have been published by the independent Indonesian DVD label and distributor The MarshallPlan. The videos appeared on a DVD tellingly titled Repelita 1: Urbanisasi (2008). The title is a play on the official five-year economic development plans (Repelita is an acronym for Rencana Pembangunan Lima Tahun) of Suharto’s authoritarian New Order government (1967-1998). Each of the official development plans had its own focus, for instance agriculture, industrialisation or transportation. The video label playfully picked its own theme: urbanisation.

Video Lab and Common Room

Arguably the most comprehensive engagements with urban space have taken place in Bandung, where the local art communities Video Lab and Common Room are based. In 2004, Video Lab organised the Beyond Panopticon exhibition, which was a reference to Indonesia’s first Palapa satellite, launched in 1976. According to Video Lab, Palapa supported Suharto’s nation building efforts by functioning as a ‘virtual control system’. In that sense, it was similar to the panopticon design of traditional prisons, in which prisoners were under surveillance by guards they could not see.

Video Lab attempted to undermine this and other types of control, and go ‘beyond panopticon’, by using television screens in a busy shopping mall to display their own videos in public. The choice of venue provided an excellent opportunity for the art community to transfer their video experiments to a semi-public environment, and transform the mall into a large-scale video laboratory itself.

Common Room is a pioneer in using contemporary and popular art as a means to improve the quality of urban life and infrastructure in Bandung and Indonesia more generally. It is known, among other things, for its involvement in the Bandung Creative City Forum, and for promoting the idea of the creative industry by linking art and culture to local economic development. This concept is now generally accepted and forms an important item on the agendas of Indonesia’s national and regional governments. One key aspect of Bandung’s creative industry is the flourishing of so-called distro, or independent fashion, music, art and craft outlets.

Nu-Substance

Common Room’s concepts and activities are not restricted to the creative industry in a narrow sense, but cover the broader area of urban ecology and environmental issues. In addition to mapping, promoting and actively participating in Bandung’s and Indonesia’s creative businesses, the community has developed art projects and events that approach the creative industry from a more distanced, experimental and/or scholarly perspective. The most important of these is the annual Nu-Substance urban art and culture festival, organised since 2007.

The Sundanese fusion group Karinding Attack played at the opening of the 2010 Nu-Substance festival  Common Room

Over the years, the festival’s focus has developed and gradually shifted. Initially, it focused on creating, exhibiting and discussing video and other ‘new media art’ as relatively new phenomena in the Indonesian art scene. In the more recent festivals, explicit connections are made between these forms of art and issues of urban development, and especially the sustainability of social and natural environments.

The Nu-Substance of 2009, titled Resonance; Festival for Open Culture, Technology and Urban Ecology, approached the issues of cultural diversity, the use of Open Source technology and environmental sustainability from an urban perspective. The festival explored the extent to which contemporary art and information and communication technologies could involve ordinary citizens in finding solutions or alternatives to the problems of over-urbanisation.

The festival had presentations of the Babakan Asih Project and the Bandung Oral History Project, two ongoing projects that address the intersections between new media art, local culture, economic development and the urban environment. Babakan Asih is the name of a densely populated suburban area of Bandung. Since 2008, the Bandung-based architect company Urbane has assisted the local community there with ecosystem preservation and management. One of their joint strategies has been the construction of absorption wells to contain rain water and prevent flooding. Common Room’s contributions have consisted of documentation, research, social events and art exhibitions related to environmental issues in the area.

Amongst other experiments, the Bandung Oral History Project has mixed Sundanese oral literature with punk and electronic music. Since 2009, the experiments have been led by the classical Sundanese music expert Iman Jimbot, and have included traditional musicians such as Mang Ayi Ruhimat (Subang) and Abah Olot (Parakanmuncang) as well as the Bandung-based contemporary music ensembles Trah, Karinding Attack!!!, Tcukimay and Ganjoles.

A priority of most of the projects mentioned here is the cross-fertilisation of art and commerce. At the same time, these communities avoid being completely absorbed by the demands of commerce as well as the art industry.

Groups such as Common Room do not set out to create tangible ‘art products’, but instead focus on social and creative processes. These movements seek to provide almost unconstrained ‘playgrounds’ or ‘laboratories’ for critical reflection, creative experimentation and utopian imagination. Although often marginalised in official city development projects, they are invaluable initiatives for measuring and improving the sustainability of Indonesia’s past, present and future urban expansion.

Edwin Jurriëns (Edwin.jurriens@unimelb.edu.au) is lecturer in Indonesian Studies at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne.

Kevin Murray

The sounds and sights of Punkasila are drawn from many spaces of Indonesian life  Andrius Lipsys

The history of government-sponsored cultural exchange between Australia and Indonesia is beginning to pay off. Since its commencement in 1991, the Asialink Arts Residency Program has sent almost 700 Australian artists to work and study in Asian countries. One of the program’s most curious offspring is an ongoing, Yogyakarta-based collective called Punkasila, founded by Danius Kesminas.

Kesminas embodies some of the wilder energies of the Australian cultural scene. Kesminas is a tireless Melbourne artist who is very much embedded in the art world – his exhibitions ransack modernist art history and appear in a cutting edge commercial art gallery. Yet Kesminas’ work is far from pretentious: his many projects set about attacking art’s elitism by popularising its most privileged secrets. His weapon of choice is rock music, particularly punk. His band The Histrionics perform songs about revered contemporary artists, like the Thai relational-art artist Rirkrit Tiravanija who transforms galleries into restaurants. The lyrics follow a familiar tune: ‘I don’t like Rirkrit, no, no / I love him, yeah / I don’t like your bean curd / Don’t mean no disrespect / I don’t like your tofu / If this dish is an art object.’

Kesminas shares a Lithuanian background with George Maciunas, the founder of the Fluxus movement. This international, ‘anti-art’ movement of the 1960s aimed to reinvigorate art by restoring ‘the everyday’ to artistic practice. Kesminas acknowledges Fluxus in the project Pipeline to Oblivion, which reveals an illegal, clandestine, underground vodka pipeline network in Lithuania. But in a different way, Kesminas’s work also seems quite at home in an egalitarian country like Australia, where the elitist authority of global visual arts has relatively little purchase.

The city of artisans

So we might be surprised to learn that Kesminas has commissioned work from traditional Indonesian artisans. This would seem exactly like the kind of credulous ‘politically correct’ art world project he would make the target of his satire. Despite its overt ‘worthiness’, Kesminas has been able to develop an anarchic mode of collaboration which challenges our understanding of what it is to work with artisans.

At the end of 2005, Kesminas arrived in Yogjakarta for a three month Asialink residency. His only preparation for the new culture was reading a book, The Politics of Indonesia, by Damien Kingsbury. It was a dense read, filled with acronyms. Despite their inscrutability, these acronyms would later end up being an important creative resource.

It is never clear exactly what or who Punkasila’s troops are fighting against - Andrius Lipsys

Soon after he arrived, Kesminas started hanging out at the National Art Institute (ISI). There he found a familiar scene of young rebels playing aggressive rock music. So he decided to form a band of his own and went about recruiting musicians, with immediate success. As Kesminas didn’t speak any Indonesian, they created lyrics together that were inspired by the acronyms he had read. Fortuitously, this method corresponded with a favourite local pastime of subverting words, acronyms, titles, bureaucratic talk, etc (this form of word play is known as ‘plesetan’ in Indonesian).

For example, the song TNI is based on the acronym that stands for Tentara Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian National Military) but which is sung as Tikyan Ning Idab-Idabi (Poor but Adorable, in Javanese). In a similar vein, the band adopted the title Punkasila, which is drawn from the Pancasila, the official five ideological tenets of Indonesian nationalism.

Local involvement in Punkasila expanded rapidly. A batik artist produced the band uniform in military camouflage. A wood artisan carved elaborate machine-gun electric guitars from mahogany. Much of this was well beyond Kesminas’s control, but this was exactly as he wanted it. As he puts it, he was ‘like a catalyst lighting a wick’.

Like many foreign artists, Kesminas enjoyed the freedom to make art in Indonesia. He contrasted this with the situation in a country like Australia where everything has to be paid for. ‘Over there it’s different. You just do things because you do them.’

The dangers of collaborating

Given the role of the military in Indonesian life, Kesminas was afraid their provocative repertoire would endanger his collaborators. He claimed that he ‘always had to defer to them for limits. We never did anything they didn’t want to do.’ Yet at the same time, he recognised that his role as an outsider was critical: ‘There was a nice unspoken agreement. I gave them a kind of cover, as a naïve Westerner.’ It’s hard to tell who is using who in this situation. Even though punk is an identifiably Western popular movement, Kesminas associates it more broadly with a Do It Yourself principle of cultural independence. Like the paraphernalia that was locally made for Punkasila, it represents self-sufficiency in culture and defies a reliance on imported readymade products.

Crash Nation displayed thirteen collectively-produced paintings, each with its own soundtrack, on the theme of disaster  Arunas Klupsas

For Kesminas, the most significant complaint against Punkasila came from ‘NGO do-gooder missionary types’ who thought he was showing disrespect for Indonesian culture. Kesminas would claim that he actually more respectful by following the authentically carnivalesque nature of Indonesian street culture. According to this line, the forms we normally associate with Indonesian traditions, such as wayang puppetry, are just cultural commodities sustained for western tourists. The real life is on the street.

But in the long run, there may be problems. While it is an important detour from cultural conservatism, we need to admit that our pleasure in Punkasila is an indulgent one. It shows an image of Indonesian society that reflects back our familiar ideology of Western individualism. In the spirit of good ol’ rock’n’roll, we have a natural tendency to champion those individuals who defy authority. We join them in solidarity against local leaders – the patriarchs, warlords and ‘tin pot dictators’.

But who are the foot solders of Punkasila really fighting for in the long term? We need to think of the broader context. Countries like Indonesia face significant pressures from overseas companies to ‘open up’ for ‘development’. So why should the polygamous village elder stop you from selling your land to Monsanto? Who’s the fat old chief to say you can’t sign away royalties for your village’s traditional chant? While rock’n’roll is great for breaking things down, such as a military regime, it’s not disposed to building new structures. And nor, it seems, is Punkasila.

Crashing into the future

But the ongoing development of the collaboration puts to rest any suggestion that Punkasila is a transitory publicity stunt. In July 2012, Punkasila exhibited Crash Nation at Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney. This exhibition extended the whole concept of collaboration. Crash Nation reflected on the association of Indonesia with disaster – earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, floods, etc. More than 40 people worked on the project in different ways. The 13 paintings were completed collectively by more than 25 Yogyakarta-based artists. Each painting depicted a specific catastrophe, from famine and corruption to visual plagiarism. The CD contained songs each individually corresponding to one of the paintings. The paintings were a collision of styles, genres and techniques including ‘Indo-realism’, abstraction, stencil art, comic art, batik, screen and digital printing, embroidery and collage.

Due to a maritime mishap, the Crash Nation images arrived too late for exhibition at the Sydney Biennale  Arunas Klupsas

As sometimes happens, the Crash Nation project ended up reflecting its own subject matter. The transport of the work to Australia was delayed when the ship caught fire. The late arrival meant that the exhibition missed the peak time of the Sydney Biennale, which would have provided sales, so nothing in the end sold. This is personally disappointing for Kesminas because the aim of the show was to raise money for a purpose built compound in Yogyakarta comprising art studio, recording studio, exhibition space, bar and other facilities. But the creative drive continues, regardless of what fortune dictates. Kesminas is currently working on the next Punkasila project, a collaboration with his art-music ensemble, Slave Pianos.

There’s plenty to suspect about Kesminas. ‘So he likes the fact that they don’t have to be paid! But, hey, doesn’t he end up marketing their product in his exhibitions back in Australia?’ This line of interrogation seems to be missing the point, and indeed plays into the very stereotype of political correctness that Kesminas satirises. As far as I know, the work coming out of Punkasila has not sold. In the meantime, benefits have flowed to his Yogya-based collaborators. Kesminas raised money for his fellow band members to participate in the Havana Biennale, which profiled them on an international stage. The band has visited Australia. Sure, it all contributes to his cultural capital, but compared to other artists who use artisans like Jeff Koons, it’s relatively high on the scale of collaboration.

Indonesian collaborators

Apart from the opportunities to travel, Kesminas feels that this exchange with his Yogya collaborators has borne other fruit. In particular, he has helped them grasp what is involved in pushing their own projects into international networks. He does not claim credit for any of their post-Punkasila successes, pointing out that some of his ‘troops’, especially co-vocalist Hahan, were destined for big things even without him. But he has helped them to turn their energetic improvisations into viable projects.

The glam-metal band Sangkakala, headed by Punkasila guitarist Rudy ‘Atjeh’ Dharmawan, is one of the projects to have blossomed in the wake of Punkasila  Courtesy of Rudy Dharmawan

Vocalist Uji ‘Hahan’ Handoko Eko Saputro has become a highly regarded and collectable painter who exhibited at the recent Asia Pacific Triennial at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA). He has exhibited with a commercial gallery at the Singapore and Hong Kong Art fairs. Guitarist Rudy ‘Atjeh’ Dharmawan is an excellent printmaker and draughtsperson who has recently undertaken an art residency in Myanmar. His music project Sangkakala is a glam-metal band that has performed at rock festivals in Indonesia. Krisna Widiathama combines his varied musical roles with his practice as a graphic artist, designing CD artwork and t-shirts for international metal bands. Prihatmoko ‘Moki’ Catur and Iyok Prayogo continue to work as printmakers, Erwan ‘Iwank’ Hersisusanto as a mural artist, and Terra Bajraghosa as a video artist and art lecturer, exhibiting in Japan. Woto ‘Wok the Rock’ Wibowo is a multi-media artist and web designer who has undertaken residencies in Australia and Japan and has exhibited in Vietnam. And so on.

Judging by the career development of Punkasila members, the Asialink residency has been productive for Kesminas as well as his collaborators. And this has happened in artistic forms that don’t exactly match with conventional understandings of Indonesian art. Indeed, Punkasila delivers a refreshing message: Work with artisans does not have to take the forms in which the artisans conventionally deal. It adds a pinch of salt to our sanctimony and a dash of chili in our philanthropy.

Kesminas is one of an increasing number of Australian artists working in Indonesia. The Australian sculptor Rodney Glick found working in Bali with local carvers so productive that he has now moved there, setting up a single origin café along the way. By contrast, to make an art work for a public audience in Australia encounters so many constraints, including funding priorities, legal contracts, intellectual property and risk management.

Yogyakarta, let’s go!

Kevin Murray (kevin@kitezh.com) is coordinator of the Australia India Design Platform (Sangam) and Southern Perspectives, a network promoting ways of thinking that emerge outside trans-Atlantic metropolitan centres.

Aminudin TH Siregar

‘Seeing Java’, an exhibition of work by Dadang Christanto, was one of the events held at the Soemardja gallery in 2012  Aminudin TH Siregar

Contemporary art practice in Indonesia is displaying a new complexity. As a result of the social and political transformations that have come with Reformasi since 1998, artists have had to show unprecedented sensitivity about their positioning within the art world, as opposed to orienting their work to projects located outside of that world. This sensitivity reflects a new environment for artistic production.

Indonesian art practice has left behind the period of unity it displayed just over a decade ago, when the avant-garde spoke up for the interests of the masses with ideological commitment. It is now in acceleration mode, with the last two years featuring innumerable exhibitions in comparison with the preceding years. This acceleration has brought disorderliness: nowadays, the art world appears to be overflowing. But ironically, the unceasing and rapid change we are experiencing in everyday life brings with it also a sense of boredom, or a sense that amidst all this activity, nothing is being achieved.

Such boredom was not possible in the days when art was a medium of rebellion. We now live in an era of open-mindedness, in a more democratic environment for artistic production. We have moved from an atmosphere in which ‘everything is prohibited’, like it was under the authoritarian rule of Suharto, to one in which ‘everything is allowed’.

Everything is allowed

The credo ‘everything is allowed’ emerged in the 1990s with the blossoming in Indonesia and elsewhere of the postmodernist paradigm, meaning art was open to a plurality of styles and references, and relished the exploration of its own mediatedness. Indonesian postmodernism, which is now identical with contemporary art in Indonesia, had its starting point in the Ninth Jakarta Biennale of 1993-1994.

But this postmodernist credo has become a boomerang, coming back to us with a revised message: ‘everything is prohibited’. What is this new prohibition? It is a sociological effect created by a novel class of artists, dealers and galleries. These form the new tyranny. Yesterday’s novel credo (postmodernism) has become a ‘new packaging’ that forces freedom of expression into a new captivity. Forms of artistic expression not supported by this novel class fall at the margins. In other words, too many points (postmodernism) have made the point itself (modernism) disappear, even before the point itself had been able to replace a starting point that has also disappeared (Indonesia’s creative heritages).

The credo of ‘everything is allowed’ exposes a new borderlessness: the shining façade of popular culture is its main actor; convention has disappeared; pastiche, kitsch and eclecticism have emerged as dominant spirits; many aesthetic rallying points vie against each other, including hyperrealist art, allegorical art, and realist photography; art history has reached its terminus; meaning and depth vanish; and the conservative paradigm that divided artistic practice into disciplines providing an absolute point of reference has disappeared.

These changes mark our exit from a period when art confronted ideological and spiritual meanings head on, when it referred to something outside itself. We have left traps like myth, tradition, and morals, behind us and now are ditching our dependency for an instrumentalism in which art is just a tool used by an artist to judge the world around him or herself. We have exited from the episode where the ‘function’ of art was highly valued and constantly sought out.

Contemporary Indonesian art reminds us of the fate of ‘modernism’, which eventually failed to fulfill the emancipatory promises that it roared to Indonesians in its pre-independence heyday. Its practitioners praised modernism as the agent that would free humans from the restraint of myths and pagan culture, as well as from the repression of colonialism. In 1938 the Union of Indonesian Artists (Persagi) set itself against the fetid vision of Mooi-Indië (The Beautiful Indies), an aesthetic in which our artists submitted to a colonial version of Indonesian realities. But modern art ended up restraining humans with new myths and pagan idols that were even more repressive, such as the market, elitism, ideological schisms, politicised nationalism, and universalisms that put art at a distance from most Indonesians.

The modernist paradigm has been left behind, superseded by the novelty of postmodern art, but this has also failed to provide better outcomes. This is art that people cannot understand. Contemporary artists appear to have been crowned as the voices for the expression of social pathology and cultural and moral crisis. We are forced to become the subjects of this crown, but we do not understand the allegiance we owe to it. We are forced to endure a new enlightenment in which it is not clear what is replacing what.

The reverse could be observed in the 1990s. Artists like Moelyono, with his conception of ‘awareness’, and Semsar Siahaan with his ‘Art of Liberation’, created art that was ideological, political and obvious. But these paradigms have faded in the 21st century. We have arrived in more complex new ground, and have to deal with the excesses of old paradigms that were never successfully resolved. We confront the era of ‘everything is allowed’ before we have digested the bold statements of Moelyono and Siahaan.

Perversion

The current art scene presents us with multiple perversions: revisions of language, piracy of signs, inversions of norms, breaches of taboo, maskings of meaning. Such practices have become a new normality, caused by the absence of laws or codes. Within the aesthetic of perversion, new art is marked by its capacity to ‘look like something else: this looks classical; this looks critical; this looks aesthetic; this looks social; this looks feminine; this looks masculine, realistic, formalistic. And so on.

The new player to surface from this scene is the market. Indonesian art is now trapped in commodification. But an art that is rooted in the freedom of the market cannot generate any meaningful agenda. Instead, the credo of ‘everything is allowed’ shapes an art that does not hold itself accountable to any social function.

Indonesian contemporary art at the beginning of the new millennium displays an ambivalence rooted in the refusal of artists to deal with major social or other issues. Our contemporary art is flooded with narrations of the miniscule. Of the personal. This is a crucial transition from the eras dominated by S. Sudjojono (1913-1985), Heri Dono (b. 1960) and other formative figures in our art history. In the mid-1990s the Yogyakarta-based ‘Window Group’ of Jumaldi Alfi, Yunizar, Handiwirman, Rudi Mantofani and Yusra Martinus, for example, with its highly personalised explorations of aesthetic forms, overlooked the nation’s social wounds, replacing them with its members’ own ‘personal wounds’. Since then, social catharsis has been replaced with individual catharsis, and the meanings of art are best understood only by the artists themselves.

The ‘boomerang’ of the ‘everything is allowed’ credo has returned to us, bringing back a yearning for consistency, firmness, orderliness, reference, boundaries and conventions. In short, we feel a rising urge to regain the modernist paradigm of innovation, progressiveness, and originality.

This is not to say that the contemporary narrations of the miniscule have not been received with appreciation by the public. Some artists display a keen eye in their explorations of new media and techniques. The efforts of Uji Handoko Eko Saputra (Hahan), Radi Arwinda, Terra Bajraghosa and others have been successful. The international art scene is very ready for Hahan’s naïve critique of the western artocracy, expressed in images sourced from popular culture and underground comics. However, just as the tastes of contemporary music listeners tend towards easy listening, the artists of this new generation no longer seek meaning. They produce easy visualisation: artworks that are merely good to look at.

New tendencies

The contemporary Indonesian art scene tells us that the nationalist project of Persagi and S. Sudjojono in the 1940s is a thing of the past. So is the political artwork of the 1990s. The current generation is open-minded, and also open to the game of signs. We find ourselves enjoying artworks that offer no reference points, because they are saturated with things we have seen before. The furthest boundaries of the possible have been reached. What we see now is games played with pieces of history.

This generation avoids the moral tension that always came with the dreams of the artists who believed they were trying to create an Indonesian identity or rectify social problems. They did not hesitate to occupy the high ground. But the foremost artists of today do not highlight mental decadence, social deprivation, or other society-wide problems. They no longer advocate on behalf of marginalised communities or political causes. They produce no weighty narrations. They prefer lighter stories, superficiality, and personal things. This generation grew up after the freedom of the Reformation era had already arrived. They are building their reputations in borderless captivity.

Aminudin TH Siregar (‘Ucok’) (b. 1973) (blupart@yahoo.com) is an independent curator and the director of the Soemardja Gallery in the Bandung Institute of Technology’s Fine Art Department. He is also a practicing artist and has exhibited widely in Indonesia as well as overseas.

Wulan Dirgantoro

Despite the author’s concerns about the reception of the work Singaporean audiences loved 'Surrounding David'  Courtesy of the artist

In 2008, visitors to the National Museum of Singapore were presented with a novel spectacle. Singapore’s art crowd is familiar with all kinds of contemporary art, but this was truly monumental, both literally and metaphorically. Entering the museum from the front door, visitors saw a giant pair of male legs in the familiar contrapposto position. Entering the rotunda of the museum, they would have recognised the work: it was a giant replica of Michelangelo’s famous sculpture David. However, the sculpture was 850 centimetres tall, nearly twice the height of the original sculpture and moreover, it was clad in skin-tight, neon-pink, floral brocade.

Surrounding David is an ambitious work from one of Indonesia’s prominent female artists, Titarubi. Born in Bandung in 1961, she completed her tertiary education in the Faculty of Fine Art and Design at the Bandung Institute of Technology in 1997, majoring in Ceramics. Currently residing in Yogyakarta, Titarubi is the co-founder and co-director of iCAN (Indonesian Contemporary Art Network), an arts management company whose projects reflect her diverse interests, from organising visual arts exhibitions and art residencies, to holding dance performances.

Traversing boundaries

She has also worked across disciplines, notably with the film director, Garin Nugroho in Opera Jawa (2009) and Fitri Setyaningsih, a notable Indonesian female choreographer, in a three-part dance performance entitled Selamat Datang dari Bawah (Welcome From Below, 2010). Tita, as she is colloquially called, worked as collaborator and artistic director in both these projects. But apart from her diverse artistic explorations, she is also known for her ongoing commitment to addressing gender issues in her works, most importantly through representations of the body.

Within Indonesia’s predominantly male art scene, female artists often face hurdles which are rarely encountered or even acknowledged by their male contemporaries. There is certainly no lack of talent amongst Indonesia’s women artists, but the careers of many talented Indonesian women artists have been impeded by deeply-rooted attitudes about the artistic life. These include gender expectations, the stigma of wildness or Bohemianism that inheres to the profession, and the financial instability that is commonly associated with it.

Even though the situation is now improving, with more female art graduates pursuing careers as professional artists, women who are heavily involved in the art scene often work behind the scenes as managers, and increasingly, as curators, gallery owners and collectors. But the public face of the Indonesian art world remains decidedly male.

This situation does not go unnoticed by women artists themselves. Many art projects, exhibitions and publications have been created by Indonesian women artists to address and challenge the gender bias in Indonesian art world, with varying degree of success. Titarubi is foremost among a group of women artists whose works have been able to simultaneously critique the masculine conventions of art-making and give expression to a distinct female subjectivity. This has recently come through strongly in her ‘political motherhood’ projects.

Attack of the brocade army

Exploring the body has emerged as a form of social, political and personal critique for many Indonesian women artists. Titarubi’s exploration of the intersections of art, medium and masculinity started in 2005 when she participated in the infamous CP Biennale 2005 Urban/Culture. Indonesia’s second international biennale was notorious for the controversy surrounding the installation Pink Swing Park. The installation featured Indonesian soap opera stars Anjasmara and Isabel Jahja in the nude within a post-apocalyptic garden. The ensuing media frenzy attracted the attention of Islamic hardliners, closed down the biennale, and ended with the artists (Agus Suwage and Davy Linggar), their models and the biennale organisers facing charges in court.

Vagina Brokat tells the story of Shinta’s sacrifice in the Ramayana epic  Courtesy of the artist

Her installation for the biennale, Bodyscape (fibreglass, brocade, light, 2005) was a critique of the masculine image in art. In the first manifestation of this evolving installation, the artist subverted the conventions of the sculptural representation of the male figure. Bronze or marble are traditionally used to emphasise masculinity in Indonesian sculpture, but in this installation the artist covered the male figures entirely in brocade.In Indonesia, brocade symbolises femininity, especially because of its use in the traditional blouse (kebaya).

Titarubi also used brocade in her collaboration with Garin Nugroho and Fitri Setyaningsih. A later piece, Vagina Brokat (Brocade Vagina) told the story of Shinta’s sacrifice in the Ramayana epic. The artist placed the male figures around a gold brocade tent, burying them up to their knees, a move which symbolically weakened their masculine power. Surrounding David is perhaps the culmination of her preoccupation with this theme. By deliberately enlarging such an iconic sculpture, the artist was able to emphasise the naked maleness of this renowned body, while at the same time feminising it with the pink floral brocade.

Bayang-bayang Maha Kecil (Shadows of the Tiniest Kind) places women’s ‘private domain’ into public space  Courtesy of the artist

One reviewer described Surrounding David as ‘breathtaking’, not only because of its sheer size, but also because it managed to delight so many Singaporeans. A conservative attitude towards nudity and political art prevails in Singapore, yet school groups and even bible groups were spotted taking happy snaps beside the sculpture. Clearly, there was no problem with nakedness here, even though the body’s genitalia, ‘covered’ in pink fabric, were more or less hanging above visitors’ heads.

Nonetheless, the artist was also aware of the possibility of censorship from the Singaporean government. So Tita prepared a leaf cover, similar to the leaf used in classical Renaissance paintings, to cover the penis. But instead of using a fig leaf, as the classical norm dictates, she used a papaya leaf. She stated cheekily that papaya leaf is traditionally used to soften meat in cooking. The cover however, was never used throughout the five month duration of the show.

Political motherhood

When the Asian financial crisis hit Indonesia in late 1997, the effect was devastating. Prices rose dramatically as the New Order government failed to control the economy. The value of the rupiah plummeted. Students began demonstrating, and other urban Indonesians took to the streets to protest alongside them.

Titarubi was heavily involved in the 1998 protests. She provided support for the activists and created performance art in support of the demonstrations. Shaped by her earlier participation in various social and cultural movements, and by her own experience as a mother of two girls, she began to introduce themes of political motherhood into her work.

These themes emerged in the work she made in support of the movement called SIP or Suara Ibu Peduli (Voice of the Concerned Mothers). This was a politicised statement on behalf of motherhood, the likes of which had not been seen since the days of high inflation and political turmoil in the 1950s and 1960s. The women behind SIP started with a focus on the failure of the state to support mothers in providing for their families, highlighting the rapidly rising prices of goods and services. The group’s activists organised funding to provide women with half-price milk-powder, an item that was then in short supply and skyrocketing in price.

Missing and Silent commemorates missing activists from a mother’s perspective  Courtesy of the artist

Critics of SIP stated that it was essentially a movement of middle-class women, for only they could afford milk-powder for babies and pregnant mothers. Furthermore, critics objected to the use of the ‘ibu’, or mother, persona in the movement, arguing that it was used to promote New Order ideology that subjugated women.

And yet, supporters of the group firmly believed that the use of the ‘ibu’ persona was important to emphasise the peaceful nature of the movement, and to create a contrast with the heavy-handed militarism of the time. In May 1998, when SIP raised the issue of student activists who were missing, abducted by the military, Titarubi began to create works which both directly and indirectly referenced this situation.

Representing the disappeared

Missing and Silent is an installation piece consisting of an arrangement of ceramic figurines in the form of foetuses, juxtaposed with photos of the disappeared activists. In the first version of the installation, the small foetuses made of earthenware were placed on top of illuminated boxes covered by earthenware bricks. The photos were placed around the sides of the base. There were no direct connections between the individual figurines and the photographs. The figurines appeared to have been strewn carelessly by the artist, and this random arrangement in fact emphasised the fragility of the figurines.

In the 2010 version of the installation, the artist recreated the foetuses in even smaller dimensions. The figurines were made from red wax, and were placed within transparent plastic bags filled with water. The bags were hung above black soil in which the artist placed photographs of the missing activists and glass jars filled with earthenware figurines. The installation evoked a strong sense of loss, but perhaps more importantly, the loss was expressed from a mother’s perspective.

Titarubi’s works reflect the ambiguity arising in politicised representations of motherhood in Indonesia. As a mother and artist, Titarubi is continuously exploring the tensions of motherhood, such as in her famous installation Bayang-bayang Maha Kecil (Shadows of the Tiniest Kind, ceramics, mixed media, 2002-2004). The political messages in such works are strongly stated, but are expressed through the perspective of the mother. In this way, the artist has placed women’s ‘private domain’ into the wider discourse of public space. Tita is attempting to redefine notions of the Indonesian domestic sphere, while also opening up a discursive space on female subjectivity in Indonesia.

Wulan Dirgantoro (Wulan.Dirgantoro@utas.edu.au) is currently writing her PhD thesis at the University of Tasmania on the artist’s body in Indonesian contemporary art.

Ari Adriansyah

Odin Rohidin pioneered painting in Jelekong in 1965  Ari Adriansyah

After passing through the arch welcoming visitors to the village, dozens of little painting studios and art galleries come into view, extending for about 700 metres along the village’s main street. Paintings in all shapes and sizes are hung outside the buildings and shopfronts, making an engaging sight for the visitor. Painters appear poised as they apply their various methods, manipulating their palette knives, making brush strokes, or smearing paint on their canvases with a sponge. Other people make noise as they bang frames together and stack paintings to be offered for sale at markets outside the village.

This is Jelekong, in the sub-district of Baleendah, Bandung. It lies about 17 kilometres to the east of the centre of Bandung, about 45-60 minutes by road. Positioned under the foot of Mount Geulis, this village has become well known because of a number of enterprises encountered within it. Apart from being known for the community of dalang, or puppetmasters, known as Giri Harja, for its anufacture of rod puppets (wayang golek), and for a number of artistic communities, Jelekong also has a reputation as the ‘painting village’ that supplies most of the paintings exported to other areas of Indonesia.

The pioneer

It was Odin Rohidin (71) who pioneered painting in Jelekong in 1965. Originally a dramatic actor, Odin became interested in painting the backgrounds for stage productions. In 1964 he began to learn painting from his brother-in-law, Wawan, and joined the artistic community known as Planet Senen in Jakarta. After one year studying painting, he returned to his home village.

Since then Odin has applied himself to his own art, while also teaching painting and martial arts to relatives and neighbours. In the beginning he had 12 students, who studied very simple painting techniques using canvas and oil paints. By now, the number of painters has increased, and their range of techniques has expanded also. Out of the nearly 5000 people making up Jelekong’s population, 35 per cent are painters. The village’s productive painters include artists aged as young as 10 and as old as 55, and count amongst them the well-known painter Hendra Gunawan.

Jelekong’s painters can handle a range of subjects that find favour with buyers around Indonesia  Ari Adriansyah

On average, one person can produce 10 to 20 pictures per day. Mostly, the artist already knows well the painting’s images in advance, having painted them many times in the past, though this is not the case with specific commissions or new creations. These need longer time. Nowadays, Odin himself rarely paints, because of frequent poor health. ‘Nowadays, painting is for the young ones. The old people just give inspiration. I will paint if I receive an order. But even then I don’t have the strength to do it for long, for my eyesight is not clear, and I no longer have much strength,’ he said.

Jelekong has become well-known for its paintings in the naturalistic style, especially landscapes. In the 1980s many variations of this theme were produced in the village, as well as scenes from daily life, animals, plants, calligraphy, abstracts and many others. But even today landscapes remain the compulsory subject matter for all of Jelekong’s painters. Painting techniques have also developed beyond the most basic ones to include brush effects, scrubbing, knife palate and sponge techniques.

Jelekong of today

Jelekong paintings are not expensive. The most costly are normally between one and six million rupiah (AU$100-600), and nothing will ever be over Rp.10,000,000 (approx. AU$1,000). The price of a painting depends on it size, materials, techniques and quality. Most of the expensive ones use the knife palate technique (relief painting). Size does not always make a difference, for some larger ones (ie 130 x 70 centimetres or more) might cost only Rp.35,000 because they use the sponge technique.

A painting as small as 40 x 60 centimetres made with the palate knife technique might cost as much as Rp.1,000,000. A painting on canvas made with brush effects could come in anywhere between Rp.100,000 ($AU10) and Rp.5,000,000 (AU$500).

The village’s paintings are marketed domestically in Java, Bali, Sumatra, Kalimantan and Sulawesi. But the majority go overseas, to Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, China, India and Saudi Arabia. Those sold within West Java can be found on the market in Bandung’s Braga Street, Bogor and Cianjur. Some people sell the paintings door-to-door in Bandung. Quite a few Jelekong painters have participated in exhibitions in Berlin, Germany, the Netherlands, Dubai and other countries in the Middle East. Some Jelekong painters who have gone to Arab countries as contract workers have become ‘local painters’ in those countries.

Landscapes are a stock theme for Jelekong’s artists  Ari Adriansyah

But in current times, the life of Jelekong painters is not as beautiful as their paintings. For a number of reasons - the poor economic situation, rising costs of equipment and materials, competition with other painting centres, a passive attitude to promotion and publicity, and a lack of assistance from the government – many Jelekong artists have changed their line of work. The village’s marketing has always relied on the efforts of individuals, and has failed to take advantage of the potential of art exhibitions. It has also failed to take advantage of the tourists who come specifically to the village, but whose times of arrival are not known in advance.

The national market for paintings is not working in the village’s favour. Not long ago, Jelekong painters did good business by undercutting the paintings produced and sold in the tourist markets of Ubud and Sukawati. But Jelekong is not the only village supplying such artworks to Indonesian and foreign buyers, and the resultant flooding of the market has pushed prices down.

The government has plans to make Jelekong into a ‘Tourism and Cultural Village’, and the village has received concrete benefits out of this plan. In a visit in December of 2012, the governor of West Java, Ahmad Heryawan, granted assistance for the completion of a studio and performance space for the Giri Harja puppetry group, something which will benefit the village widely. The painters, however, are still waiting for help.

If well-executed, the village’s outstanding potential could make it a profitable centre for artistic production in West Java. But today Jelekong’s painters are waiting before they decide whether they should stick with painting for the long term, or roll up their canvasses one by one before switching to a more reliable way of earning their livelihoods.

Ari Andriansyah (ariandriansyah40@yahoo.com) is a journalist, writer and teacher of Sundanese language at SMAN 1 Ciampel, Karawang, West Java. This article was originally published in Cupumanik magazine, and was translated from Sundanese by Julian Millie. Inside Indonesia thanks Cupumanik for permission to translate and publish the article.