Contemporary batik collaborations: Mountain meets ocean

Contemporary batik collaborations: Mountain meets ocean

By Astri Wright

JAKARTA (JP): On June 1, a unique exhibition opens at the
National Gallery. Not only are the art works which will be
hanging there unusually long; their textures and consistencies
are dramatically different from what is usually encountered in
contemporary art galleries.

These art works bear the traces of hands, minds and spirits
moving hot lines of molten material across soft surfaces of spun
and woven larvae-products. The subtle hues are memories of
immersions in pools of color and exposures in spaces of air and
light.

The art is the results of movements and acts undertaken in
humility and concentration, for the sake of invocation as much as
for pure expression--acts resulting in marks that whisper stories
about bringing bloodlines and ancestral lines from far and near
together in common seal and zeal.

Segaragunung is one of four exhibitions that make up the
JakArt Festival, held during the month of June. While modern and
contemporary Indonesian art today enriches a global art world
increasingly aware of the artistic treasures that exist beyond
Europe and America, also in conventional media like painting,
sculpture, and installation art, one could claim that this
exhibition offers the world a contemporary art form that is at
once contemporary, in the international sense, and uniquely
Indonesian, unseen in any earlier Euro-American modern version,
here offering glimpses of a vision unknown to the Western art
world.

Javanese batik is widely recognized as the pinnacle of
achievement in this resist-dye technique practiced in many areas
of the world from ancient times. Based on the detailed cloth
patterns visible on reliefs on Candi Borobudur, it is estimated
that the Javanese courtly batik arts date back to at least the
mid-9th C. AD. Many batik artists still work with sacred patterns
that have been copied meditatively for centuries. But Isnia's
approach has been somewhat different.

Ismoyo and Nia have studied the philosophical and aesthetic
roots of this batik art with the aim of continuing to give form
and life to its essence. To these artists, this does not mean a
purist or orthodox repeating of the old motifs, with old methods
in cloth making, patterning and dying, but an embracing of what
is seen as timeless spirit in contemporary forms, reflecting
current sensibilities -- even while challenging some of the bases
of modern and contemporary art internationally.

Batik, Java and abroad

Segaragunung (Oceanmountain) features nearly twenty large
works created collaboratively around the Brahma Tirta Sari (BTS)
Batik Studio headed by Agus Ismoyo and Nia Fliam in Kota Gede,
Yogyakarta. Collaborative artist-partners for the last sixteen
years, two remarkable artistic journeys and geo-social histories
have joined together in these two people: Ismoyo's ancestors in
Solo were batik-makers; his father is a spiritual teacher
renowned throughout Java and Bali; Nia's art studies in New York
had turned to Asian and particularly African resist-dye
techniques before she made her voyage to Java in 1983 to study
the ancient techniques there.

With their studio's thirty-plus batik workers in Yogyakarta,
the two artists, signing their work Isnia, have since embraced
artistic traditions and philosophical ideas that span from India
to Aboriginal Australia, and most recently also include the work
of youth who live on Mount Lawu near Solo in Central Java.

One of the main collaborations featured in this exhibition is
the longstanding one between BTS and Aboriginal women artists
from Australia.

The Utopia and Brahma Tirta Sari Studio Collaborative Batik
Project, entitled Songs of Peace-Songs of the Ancestors-Batik
From the Land, was featured in the 1999 Asia-Pacific Triennial of
Contemporary Art at the Queensland Gallery of Art in Brisbane.

This extraordinary artistic collaboration, which began in
1994, resulted in a deep sharing of spiritual and artistic
knowledge rooted in the apparently so different cultures of Java
and aboriginal Australia.

The record of this exchange is the art created by the hands of
Isnia and artists from the Utopia artist group. The practice of
disparate traditions of rituals honoring the land, the lifeforms
that inhabit both the material and the immaterial worlds, and the
ancestors, enabled the Javanese-American artists and the
Aboriginal artists to connect with increasing respect and
openness towards each other.

Violet Petyarr, one of the Utopia artists, writes: "We've
still got our Law, and we've got together to make batik. Those
two (Nia and Ismoyo) brought their things from the north so that
we could get together. Our things have Law and theirs are the
same - they have Law as well. Theirs comes from the land, and
ours comes from the land as well. Everybody comes and gathers
together for ceremony - people come from all over the place. In
the same way we are getting together to make batik."

Despite the similarity in ritually and verbally expressed
intent and in the materials used, the different styles, color
schemes, and motifs created by each individual artists, also
evident in the differences between the two cultural groups, offer
stunning evidence to the creative breadth of the medium of batik.
Also, for further comparison, two works done purely by the Utopia
women artists, non-collaboratively, will be exhibited.

In addition to the Utopia Women Artists, several completely
new collaborations are featured in this exhibition, bringing new
glimpses of artistic explorations in batik both by Javanese and
by foreign artists.

A new collaboration is evident in the wayang piece by Yono and
Martono (two of BTS's longstanding batik-workers) and Ismoyo.
Here one is witnessing an unusual event: batikers formerly
anonymous to the art world emerging as named artists in their own
right, in peer-collaboration with their "boss".

Yono, described by Nia as "one of the most creative people in
the studio," will also be showing some of his individual work for
the first time.

Finally, Nia will show some reverse applique pieces made from
cloths by Elsje Van Keppel, an Australian textile artist who died
in March. This adds a commemorative note to the exhibition which
could be said to memorialize essential dimensions of life on so
many levels.

The Kejawen Artist

The title of the exhibition holds an important conceptual key
to the artists' intended meaning with the event. Segaragunung
joins two words that resonate with deep meaning in Java.

Arjuno, an archaeologist and cultural observer, writes:
"Segara, the ocean, and Gunung, the mountain, are not two
elements that oppose one another. They are a pair of pyramids
that exist simultaneously and are impossible to separate. The
mountain is a pyramid whose summit soars high, piercing the
modern world and penetrating future ages. The ocean is a pyramid
with a summit that plunges in the reverse direction, though
penetrating the past, to the very depths of tradition."

In their collaborative artist statement about their
collaboratively created art, Isnia writes: "The principle which
is a motivating factor in our work, is Tribuwono. As an integral
part of Javanese philosophy Tribuwono holds to the concept that
there are three worlds... As in nature, with the elements, there
is water, fire, earth and air and each has its own function,
power, character and importance, while maintaining a relationship
to each other and to the earth."

The goal of the individual, seeker, artist, priest and
layperson, is to achieve balance between the three dimensions or
worlds. Only then can truly meaningful work result.

The creative concept behind the art by the Brahma Tirta Sari
Studio and their various collaborative partners is rooted in a
kejawen philosophy as expounded by the charismatic teacher, known
as Romo or Resi Djayakusuma of Padepokan Segara Gunung (Ocean
Mountain Cultural Centre) on Mount Lawu, near Solo in Central
Java.

Within the kejawen world view, all things are connected and at
once independent and interdependent. The relations and
relationships between all things may be expounded from the
largest, unseen or invisible perspective to the smallest visible
and micro level of things, or vice-versa.

The largest perspective is the all-encompassing Void - the
unseen world. The void is not empty yet nothing is
differentiated; it is full to the brim of no-things. Somewhere
within this never-ending void a vibration begins, imperceptibly
as a pinprick, and then grows into the world of Light.

Living in the middle of a cosmos consisting of three worlds or
dimensions (Tribuwono: the Light dimension, the Macro dimension
and the Micro dimension), the artist is an empty vessel. At a
certain time, the spiritually open and sensitized artist receives
a vibration transmitted from the supernatural world, where the
higher consciousness resides in the world of light. Via the
"Golden Cord," which connects humans to the pure, spiritual
dimension, this vibration transmits from the world of Light to
the artist's soul and a the urge to create a work of art that
combines the wisdom of the divine self with the form-giving
nature of the ego-self in dynamic harmony. Such work is
experienced as having a certain super-natural vibration and is
spoken of as Kapti Kerdating Sukma (work that has been created
by a vibration from the soul).

Art to Heart Vibrations

Soft, Connecting, Profound: in cloth there is always movement
as the material continually responds to its environment. Unlike
the static surface of painted canvas or sculpture, cloth wraps,
folds, and shimmers.

Light dances over its surfaces in minutely varied angles as
the cloth billows on drafts and currents. Of old, these art works
would have been worn, wrapping living, moving bodies as well as
the bodies of the dead, ancestors-to-be, on their last journey.

Similarly, the catalog that accompanies this exhibition speaks
with many voices -- from the Utopian Aboriginal women artists
from Australia to the Java-based and Javanese artists, and the
voice of spiritual teacher Romo Djayakusuma; from the
archaeologist's voice to curators voices, locally and abroad.

This remarkable exhibition can teach younger generations of
Javanese artists about a heritage which has been replaced in many
people's minds by less patient and rigorous systems of thinking,
living and making.

It can also teach Jakarta's and Indonesia's expatriate art
lovers an important historical (but not fossilized) dimension of
the country they are working in. And, across the board, this
exhibition can envelop every visitor with the gentle yet
pervasive aesthetics of cloth marked, layer upon rich layer, with
the signs of thoughtfulness and prayer: for remembrance and
protection, for increasing social and spiritual harmony, and for
peaceful unification -- unification of stranger with stranger, of
the material world with the spiritual, of the past with the
present and future, of here with there -- of mountain with ocean,
and all that such a metaphor can contain.

The writer is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Art,
University of Victoria, Canada, and Researcher of Contemporary
Indonesian Art.