Artist challenges art establishment to take another look
Artist challenges art establishment to take another look
By Sarah Murray
JAKARTA (JP): Indonesian art has revolved around style and
..isms for too long. People have forgotten that the very essence
of Indonesian art has to do with the environment.
"The main aspirations of Indonesian modern art from
Soedjojono and Affandi's era have been forgotten," says Yos
Suprapto as he stands in front of stacks of his boldly executed
paintings. He was in the middle of preparing for an exhibition of
his work at Taman Ismail Marzuki. It will be held at the Ruang
Pameran Utama from Jan. 9 to 15.
His exhibition will include 43 paintings, a sculpture-
installation made especially for the exhibit and performances
that will open and close the exhibition. Yos promises new
spontaneous performances, a little like ludruk (satirical
performance). Offering a new kind of performance fits in with
Yos's desire to stimulate new kinds of creativity in Indonesia.
"We can't just see fine arts as an entertainment industry,"
he writes in his catalog essay. He tells me he believes the
development of Indonesian art and imagination has been stunted
because of the trauma of 1965 has not yet been confronted and
processed through creative work. Yos was trained at ASRI (Yogya)
in the early 1970s, a member of the same generation as Semsar
Siahaan, Agus Dermawan, F.X. Harsono and Hardi. His work is not
as widely known in Indonesia as theirs is, because he has made
Australia his home for the past 18 years. He has established
himself as a successful artist and musician. This will be his
first exhibition in Indonesia since his student days at ASRI.
According to Yos, it is not where he has been that is important
but where he is going.
"I want to offer not only a new style, but also new themes
and a new way of looking at the problem of art in the Indonesian
art scene."
It's impossible to know in advance how his work might
influence others, but it is certain his paintings will cause
quite a stir. Many of them address problems such as corruption,
the gap between rich and poor, the destruction of the environment
and the exploitation of workers in Indonesia. He addresses these
timely problems in striking, glowing oils that never sleep.
While the influence of Indonesian masters like Affandi and
Soedjojono is apparent in the social consciousness shown in his
work, Yos's themes and style are his own. They show a directness
rarely seen in Indonesian painting. His characters are often
allegorical, even when the figures have distinctive features and
are based on people Yos has sketched. They are not obviously
Indonesian, but they are not European either. They are citizens
of the world. His subjects often derive from his intellectual
analysis of social realities, but aim to teach through the power
of their images, not the power of thought. They vibrate with
color and bold lines that bend and curve and swirl, taking the
eye on a roller-coaster ride through his elaborately executed,
but easily understood imagery.
They aren't realistic chronicles of daily life and troubles,
but powerful mythic transformations of universal problems and
experiences into an Indonesian context. Yos explains that
Indonesia cannot be separated form the effects of globalization.
"My paintings try to reveal the effects of globalization.
They are about Indonesia, but at the same time they are about the
world."
Tangga-Tangga (Ladder) shows a pyramidal heap of green, blue
and purple men each licking the other's posterior, reaching at
the top that of the yellow Bapak who reclines on a bed. His head
is protected by a peci (field cap) and an umbrella as he gazes in
the other direction at a beautiful landscape. Your eye is drawn
by the beautiful colors even as you recoil from the sight of
these lickers.
Sofa Hijau (Green Sofa) takes off on the Odalisque image in
European painting, showing a corpulent and smug-looking nude
woman splayed out on a green sofa. A white dog lies sleeping on
the floor by her head while a brown dog's tongue reaches for her
private parts. She holds a cigarette and the smoke rises upward
to blend with the smoke spewing from the factory smokestacks
that, along with skyscrapers, make up the view from her window.
The rather sickening green of the sofa dominates the mood of the
painting, contributing to its grotesque quality. Yos has
transformed an image considered the height of beauty in European
painting into a sign of decadence and environmental decay.
Aborigines
Not all of Yos's paintings address social problems head on.
A number of abstract works from the late 80s show Yos' developing
style, his experimenting with color and line. A few paintings,
including one of the strongest in the show, Crooked Dij,
reflects his encounters with Aborigines in Australia. In Crooked
Dij, a squatting aborigine, painted in bold blocks of brown, red
and yellow, plays a curving dijeridoo. The dijeridoo, or dij, is
an aboriginal rhythm instrument made from a hollow piece of wood.
To play the instrument is extremely difficult, because you must
recycle your breath to provide a continuous flow of air and learn
to relax the lips even while using them to control the flow of
air. In the painting, one end of the dij is pressed up against
his lips, his checks blown out as he stores the needed breath.
The dij curves out towards the viewer and the bottom of the
canvas along with the lines depicting the land and the man's
body, as if the land around the him is pulled into a circle by
the very act of circular breathing.
The upper left-hand section balances the dominant circular
movement with a series of straight lines making trees, cliffs and
a heavy, dark rain falling from a cloud in the corner. The
composition is tied together by colors that repeat in each
section, drawing the eye around to take in the whole.
For Yos, the subtext of these paintings of Aborigines is his
belief that they are people who still know how to live with
nature and respect its gifts and power. In Crooked Dij, the
Aborigine plays not for love, money or fame, but to bring rain in
a dry land where water is the price of life. He is a true artist,
one who understand the power of symbolic action to transform the
world and also knows that he must first master his own force of
life, in this case his breath, to participate in transformation.
It remains to be seen if Yos has the power to transform the
world. However, these paintings leave no doubt that he has
mastered his own talent and force of life. His message for the
people of Indonesia is clear.
"...I believe that each culture that endeavors to stimulate
intellectual achievements must also be prepared to accept the
bitter awareness of past events by developing the capacity for
thinking and imagination, because the highest intellectual
achievements become the foundation of the ultimate sustainability
of humanity itself," he writes in the catalog.
As told me in his studio, the master of his imagination is
the master of his own fate.