Anusapati's creativity speaks through nature

Stuart Koop, Contributor, Yogyakarta

Last Sunday afternoon was interrupted by the snarling sound of machinery. I assumed it was the garage next door, where they regularly beat car panels. "But surely not on a Sunday?" I thought.

When I listened closely, it sounded more like a chain saw at wood than a metal-working tool. In fact, it wasn't the garage at all but the artist Anusapati preparing his latest exhibition of timber sculptures, which was to open at Cemeti Art House that evening.

I went to the source of the sound and found Anusapati and his assistant bent over a stalled chain saw, pulling furiously to bring it once more to life. The gallery was full of sawdust and the smell of freshly cut, green wood. They were just finishing the last of the works, Diikat, a large bundle of short, split timbers. For this work, many small pieces had been collected and stacked to form a circle, like a giant coin standing on one edge, or as if an enormous tree trunk were cut in cross section and stood on its side.

Anusapati and his assistant were using a chain saw to trim the ends to make them even, yet they were trimming them after they had already been bundled. Why not trim each one before, I thought later (it would be much easier dealing with single pieces than this big, unwieldy stack)?

There may be several reasons, but we may also take this as a clue to Anusapati's approach to materials; he responds to the symbolic form of the work rather than its actual materials. For example, he made this work as if it really were a massive single trunk, as if the idea in his mind for the work had already transformed small kindling into a giant log. The implication leads us to a central question: can Anusapati (and can art) improve on nature?

Many small plantation trees cannot really replace old growth forests, even though most of us would wish it otherwise. Thus Anusapati's work might represent our longing for environmental healing despite the unlikely prospect. Indeed, much of Anusapati's work in the exhibition takes the same melancholic tone.

To this end, he does not use specially cut wood -- only found timber and usually cheaper, common varieties. And while the sounds I heard last Sunday reminded me more of a timber mill than an artist's studio, Anusapati enacts a gentler, subtler transformation of timber than any profiteering furniture exporter or paper miller.

One of the most subtle works on show, I wish I belong here, involved combining dried tree branches of different types. The trunks were lashed together with string and their bifurcating, dead branches were interlaced so that it was difficult to finally tell the different trees apart. Thus a new whole tree was made out of fallen, scattered brushwood. But the title tells more, expressing once again a desire for rejuvenation and completion, which refers equally to nature as to the peaceful coexistence of different cultures (or different "species").

However in another work, unification has an insidious aspect. Several long, thin saplings are bound and stitched together with grasses to form a graceful arc, delicately balanced within the gallery space. The saplings are bent uniformly, strengthened by their agreement, and the ultimate form is aesthetic. But they are equally retarded and restricted, prevented any free, individual movements or expression (these reeds couldn't even bend with the wind).

There is some figuration too, in several recognizable but dysfunctional works. In Imbalanced, Anusapati has roughly hewed a spinning top. The chiseled offcuts lie scattered around. Yet the spindle is clearly off-center. This top could never spin. Indeed, the path of the top is traced by a line marked in the timber shavings. Evidently, this top simply rolls pathetically around its skewed axis, a hopeless toy.

In another work, resembling a fork, two different woods are again combined. One timber is used for the scoop and another for the pointed tines. However, these sharpened prongs are hinged freely to the rest of the work, quite useless for digging since they readily give way. Like the top it's a useless tool, precisely made so as not to work.

So the news of nature is not good: Anusapati rarely improves upon it, but as it turns out, nor does he intend to. Indeed, these odd and flawed objects, and the impossible hopes they embody, comprise a tragedy overall. While old forests burn out of control in Kalimantan and a haze settles over Indonesia, Anusapati reflects the environmental imbalance that logging and unchecked development entails.

His sensitive and careful handling of material releases some powerful metaphors still inhering in nature despite the threat of its rapid depletion, like a song or sound held within the very grain of timber, crying out for care and respect.

A final work, Underground Sound, sums it up eloquently. Three old fern stumps are hollowed out to resemble bells or gongs. They lie scattered about on the gallery floor, some on their side, all are idle and silent, perhaps waiting to be struck. What sound would they make? A sad song I'm sure, rising up from the earth.