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.