Canadians have mixed reactions to Dadang's show

Canadians have mixed reactions to Dadang's show

VANCOUVER, CANADA (JP): After the performance and while Dadang
Christanto was bathing and dressing, Warren Arcan announced that
the artist wished to hear the audience's reactions to his
performance.

This feedback session is in the tradition of grassroots
theater in Indonesia and many places around the world.

Yet it is somewhat antithetical in the West today, where
people are used to being able to remain passive consumers of
events (think of TV, movies, theater, art exhibitions).

Dadang returned in his dark jacket and pants to enthusiastic
applause and sat down to hear what people thought. At first, they
were still transfixed by the experience and shy to speak up.
Slowly, one after the other, they began to relate how the
performance had affected them. Some had experienced the work at
an intensely individualistic and personal level, others as a
moving philosophical and humanistic statement.

Yet others had sensed a clear political message. They
attempted to get the artist to explain how particular features
were meant to symbolize specific aspects of the current situation
in Indonesia.

Some people even went on from speaking about their feelings to
giving authoritative statements about what the artist had
intended to convey, with little regard for the fact that the
artist was right there to be asked. This was a sad comment on the
high status given to criticism which ignores artistic intent
altogether.

A well-known American political scientist's question about
whether Dadang's smashing of five heads held particular meaning
was answered with a big smile and the comment "No, there was no
intentional meaning to the number".

Dadang explained that he never planned the smallest details of
the performance, but improvised as he went along and as the mood
inspired him. In his first performance of the piece, in New York
City in connection with the first large opening of
Traditions/Tensions, he had only smashed three heads. He said the
exercise had been so emotionally draining that he couldn't go on.

Dadang said he would not have undressed completely if he had
done the performance in Indonesia. Nudity easily becomes an issue
at home, he added.

A veteran artist at Western Front said Dadang's performance
was the most moving he had seen performed there.

Many questions came to people's minds as they silently sat
transfixed by the drama -- was the shedding of clothing symbolic
of the shedding of culture and civilization? Was the covering of
the body with clay the return to a more pure, natural state of
being or a symbol of death?

Was the depiction of the progression of the state of mind
evidence how violence, once started, feeds on itself and lowers
the consciousness to the very deepest levels? Can watching such
a performance purge the violence inherent in every person who
views it?

Dadang's performance lay in its masterful yet simple
conception and execution, his skills as an actor and the fact
that the meaning worked on many levels. One could interpret it as
a statement about human evolution and the essence of
civilization, or a statement about the potential for violence
that lies within every individual. It also illustrated something
about the addictive quality of violent action. It also, perhaps,
draws on specific historical and biographical experiences.

The meaning of the work is thus rooted in a place where the
philosophical and the political, the personal and the social,
intersect. In this way, although the specific readings and
meanings of the performances vary according to the time, place
and audience concerned, Dadang's work has something to offer
wherever he takes it in the world.

Chantal Pontbriand has written that performance art "is a form
of art in which the reception the spectator offers to the work is
integrated into the process of production. By reception, we
understand the ability of the spectator to play the role of
receiver, to exercise a critical function, and even to become a
producer himself. Performance makes possible the reversibility of
communication's terms, producer and receiver interchanging their
roles".

The strength of performance art that goes beyond the
narcissistic concerns of a single individual to address issues of
broader relevance, like that created by Dadang and other
Indonesian, Southeast Asian, Chinese, Dutch, American, Brazilian
or aboriginal artists, is that it involves the spectator directly
in the act of making meaning out of form and expression.

People come to the art event as viewers but they may leave
with a much fuller and more satisfying experience, having been
asked to be cocreators to an entire event which will never again
be repeated in exactly the same way. The audience in this case
left after a first-hand encounter with Indonesia's contemporary
art, one of its exponents and his concerns. (Astri Wright)

The writer is an expert on Southeast Asian Arts and an associate
professor at the University of Victoria, Canada.