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.