Controversy surrounds the merits of performance art

By Prasetyohadi

JAKARTA (JP): If you cannot understand what performance art is all about, look at the activities in your everyday life. Imagine cooking in the kitchen; if you find the act of cooking is "beautiful" and you have the same feelings as when you fall in love, then you may consider cooking art. Now picture taking off your clothes to take a shower or bath. When you feel this is OK or "aesthetic" you can bring it to the stage, and you might become a performance artist, or an action artist.

That is what painter and performer Arahmaiani suggested those who find performance art incomprehensible do. She made the statement on Wednesday during a debate of the Jakarta Performance Art Festival, which was held at Teater Utan Kayu in early March. The event sparked controversy among the Jakarta art circle and caused some art critics to shrug their shoulders.

Some viewers asked what performance art was as, for example, Canadian artist Richard Martel cut into pieces a Rp 1,000 banknote. The artist considered the banknote to be worthless and was acting out an embittered parody of people's distress during the economic crisis in Indonesia. Martel himself said, "The success of performance art should lay in whether it raises more questions than answers."

With the controversy surrounding the merits of performance art, with artists, curators and art critics staking out their own positions, art lovers may gain very little benefit from the presence of performance art in Indonesia. The debate on Wednesday lingered over the question of the existence of performance art, whether it really represents real life.

A skeptical participant of the discussion asked, "Is performance art eventually, as a branch of contemporary art nowadays, so simple, requiring no skill after all?" This participant went on to ask, "Is it an art when you simply transfer your bathing routine onto a stage?"

Performance art continues to be "controversial" and "provoking", even as the artists themselves remain relaxed in the face of increased criticism of their art.

Veteran art performer Gendut Riyanto said that despite all of the criticism, the festival showed that performance art had been accepted in Indonesia.

Riyanto staged a controversial performance in Yogyakarta in 1978, riding a motorcycle around and around in an art gallery in an exhibition which was eventually banned by the police.

Art commentator Jim Supangkat conveyed his account of the history of performance art in the country, which, according to him, was one of "madness and outrage" as the artists asserted their rejection of the suffocating boundaries and specializations within art.

"The performers still feel awkward with the new concept of performance art. They are still fixing their own ideas about this art, which is still confusing." However, he admitted that at the heart of the matter was the fact that "beauty", or better still "aesthetic", was arbitrary. It is like falling in love, he said.

Literary critic Nirwan Dewanto went so far as to suggest that "(performance) art is dangerous". He said he failed to understand performance artists' claim to merge with reality. He said performance art diverted from its task of establishing a common denomination, which any art critic desperately requires.

"So what," artist Gendut Riyanto said after the discussion. As Thai art critic Thanom Chapakdee, who was present at the festival, put it, "Reality is sometimes so crude that we cover it with categories of arts or science or whatever, constraining our life."

Dewanto assumed that "in pursuing the essence of reality, any discipline unavoidably strictly draws its definition as compared to the other disciplines".

Dewanto further maintained that any art ultimately required the artist to fully consider the so-called creative necessity of balance between "form" and "content", lest they fail to authorize themselves as artists.

"Is it possible, because of the high spirit of heroism, the performance artist is reluctant to wrestle with forms of art," he asked.

Arahmaiani, one of the organizers of the Performance Art Festival, however, responded that it was necessary not to confuse the interests of the artists with those of art critics. As most artists unceasingly assert the aesthetic experience as a universal claim of any people, they basically want to set art free from excessive intervention, she said.

Arahmaiani said art performers chiefly presented their aesthetic urge to return to the origin of art experience, or "lived experience", and accordingly discarded all constraints, be they curators, critics, religious and political leaders, media owners or their own parents.

"I want to be free from any shackles of life," Arahmaiani said, answering a participant's question about what she dreamed of in her life as an artist. And she said such a dream had cost her dearly, including being detained by the police after staging an exhibition titled Accident Art in Bandung, West Java, in 1980.

A similar view is held by artist Ma Liu-Ming from Beijing, a view which was transferred to the audience when he removed his clothes on stage during the festival. He said of his aesthetic statement: "I sometimes feel that now some ready-made expressions have been made so inorganic and meaningless and purified that viewers cannot easily enter into the world. I want to sweep away the dependence on all clothes and media in art expression, delivering an aspect of our present complicated social conditions using my body."