Astari in search for woman's self

Astari in search for woman's self

By Jean Couteau

DENPASAR, Bali (JP): The 21st century, we have been told,
promises to be a century of cultural eclecticism and women's
power. As ideas and symbols freely flow across the world in
modern man's hectic and sometimes contradictory search for
personal recognition, ethnic identity and international
communication, women, the eternal bearers of man's roots, will
probably be those who articulate, as in ancient times, the new
values in the making.

Astari Rasjid's Wings and Excursions exhibition at the Ganesha
Gallery in the Four Seasons Resort in Bali, from Dec. 11, 2000,
to Jan. 12, 2001, may be a forerunner of this new trend, with
eclecticism and womanhood as the two main pillars of her work.
Most of her paintings feature a standing woman -- the artist --
whose face occupies the upper-central part of the canvas. The
composition is almost perfectly symmetrical; the treatment is
realist, but there is a calculated stiffness in the posture and
the gaze that gives it an air of meditative concentration. What
immediately comes to mind are the Byzantine icons and the imagery
of the Middle Ages.

Astari said: "I just arrived from Moscow where I participated
in an international exhibition, and I was surprised to see the
affinity in spirit between my works and those of the Christian
Orthodox tradition."

The affinity is at times stunning. In one painting the central
woman, Virgin Mary-like, is holding a child in her arms. In
another, she has angel-like wings; in yet another he is shown
killing a winged dragon. Is the artist proposing imitations,
simulacrum or an ironical deconstruction of Western religious
symbolism? She is doing none of these. A modern, cosmopolitan-
minded Indonesian woman, yet with roots in the culture of Java,
Astari is using the symbols of the various cultural backgrounds
she has known during her life and career as so many tools toward
a reflection, "her" reflection, on the condition of woman. These
tools may be mainly "Western", as in her present series on
goddesses, or "Eastern-Javanese", as in much of the discourse and
symbols of her past works, but they are always personalized.

Astari's eclecticism is not a sham. It is rooted in her life
experience and corresponds to her real identity. Astari was
raised in a "traditional" Javanese family, i.e. in a milieu that
emphasized propriety of behavior and control of one's emotions
and in which women were to conform to rather than set the rules.
Yet by a whim of fate Astari's father was posted abroad during
her youth, and she gained an international exposure and
education.

Add to this that she grew up to be stunningly beautiful and we
have all the contradictory ingredients that have formed her
personality and now her painting: the duality of tradition and
modernity, Java and the West, submissiveness and liberty, all
seen through the eyes of a woman who is demanding recognition
beyond her attractiveness and beyond the demands of both
tradition and modernity.

This explains the apparent narcissism of Astari's paintings.
Astari's self-portrait is at the center of almost all her works.
And, if it is not, she is shown symmetrically to a male figure.
She is thus a sort of cosmic figure: occupying the center, she
gives meaning to the world of symbols that surround her -- a
harpoon, signs of modernity (planes, time, background cities) and
signs of tradition (the composure, the dress, the background
references). Yet, as the female element of a duality, she is part
of a world of order, that of the complementary opposites of
Javanese tradition (male/female, tradition/modernity, etc.)

Interestingly, although she depicts herself as obviously
beautiful, Astari never insists on her sex appeal. The woman she
depicts is symbolic, and this woman is Astari herself: she
incarnates the Modern Indonesian Woman, a woman aware of the
contradictions, positive and negative, that are weighing on her.
So she is the "healer", the "slayer", "Saraswati" the goddess of
knowledge or the woman in the couple of a "discontinued episode".

She epitomizes the modern Indonesian woman standing
imperturbable, "conscious", amid the winds of change and
contradiction of values. Her self-representation, therefore, is
not narcissistic. Far from being blinded by her own image, Astari
uses it as a means to open to the world, and to expose to us the
contradictions of the condition of woman.

All of Astari's paintings are painstakingly coded. To the left
of Solitaire, perhaps the key painting of the exhibition, is
written the French word tiroir, meaning that each of Astari's
paintings has several layers of meaning that should be deciphered
one by one, symbol after symbol. In the same painting, a modern-
looking Astari is featured with wings nailed to a wall: she
dreams of freedom, yet is immobilized. On her wings are drawn
images of a modern city to the right, and of a tropical paradise
to the left: she is trapped between tradition and modernity. A
clock symbolizes the passing of time and a label she holds in her
hand the traps of one's social image; above her head a plane is
flying, calling to mind the presence of distant lands.

Discontinued Episode shows similar constraints, but this time
originating from the Javanese cultural background. The painting,
a triptych in the European tradition, depicts a stiffly standing
woman in Javanese wedding dress to the right, and her husband to
the left. Both are wearing a broken chain on their wrists. In the
middle is a door on which are painted scenes of Indonesian
politics, images of city and village life, and, overlooking the
whole, a smoking volcano. Tradition thus seems to be an
impediment to the wife-husband relationship and to the stability
of political life.

In a third painting, The Slayer, the woman reacts in a violent
way: carrying her child on her back, she is shown slaying, St-
George-like, a winged dragon, while in the background is a small
representation of Rangda, the Balinese witch and symbol of
woman's revolt.

Astari Rasjid's paintings are often depicted as being embedded
in Javanese tradition. Her present exhibition, however, shows
that she borrows many elements from other cultural backgrounds:
classical Western mythology (Icarus); Christian iconography (The
Mother, The Slayer); Balinese imagery (the Rangda figure and the
Kamasan painting background). In fact, unlike most Indonesian
male painters dealing with traditional symbols, Astari's
paintings express no longing for an idyllic past and a lost
identity. Her work is instead a protest against the cultural
fetters that hinder women's full expression of their individual
personalities. It so happen that this protest is formulated using
the symbols and structural formulation of the very culture she is
protesting against.

As she further grows in age and wisdom, it will be interesting
to see how Astari continues redefining symbols in her
inexhaustible search for her woman's self.