Dadang's performance mesmerizes Vancouver's art lovers

Dadang's performance mesmerizes Vancouver's art lovers

By Astri Wright

VANCOUVER, CANADA (JP): It was a long time coming but
Vancouver artists and art lovers witnessed for the first time
recently a live performance by Dadang Christanto, one of
Indonesia's foremost contemporary artists.

While modern and contemporary Indonesian and Southeast Asian
art history have been taught at the university level in Canada
for the past six years, the event marked the first direct
experience of contemporary Indonesian art by the professional
Canadian art world.

Dadang was visiting Canada early last month in connection with
the opening of the exhibition Traditions, Tensions: Contemporary
Art in Asia. He was one of five artists from each of the
countries invited to Vancouver for the opening and symposium.
The other artists were Imelda CajipeqEndaya from the Philippines,
Navin Rawanchaikul from Thailand, Bhupen Khakar from India and
Soo Ja-kim from Korea.

Though all the artists participated in the symposium, Dadang
was the only one to perform. He had just arrived from Japan,
where his most recent installation piece Witness was displayed in
Tokyo for the exhibition Glimpses into the Future: Art in
Southeast Asia 1997.

After the 10 days in Vancouver, he was headed for Germany,
where he was going to visit, work and perform before returning to
Indonesia in early July.

Multiracial

Canada as a nation was shaped by the history of the encounter
between its aboriginal peoples and successive waves of colonizing
and immigrating peoples from other parts of the world. As a
multiracial state soon dominated by people of North European
ancestry, Canada has in the last two decades developed a policy
and a language to attempt to accommodate the many different
racial and ethnic groups living within its borders.

The idea of multiculturalism was launched here many years
before the word came into common use in the United States. Asian
art and Asian-Canadian art, encompassing visual art, film and
literature, has had increasing exposure and gained in interest in
the last 10 years.

It is thus perhaps surprising that Canada only now hosted its
first Indonesian artist. This probably reflects the small number
of Indonesian immigrants to Canada. Although Indonesian
immigrants are few, their numbers are augmented by the many
people who have traveled or lived in Indonesia and who desire to
maintain their interest in Indonesian culture after their return.

This has contributed to the general increase in recent
political and economic developments in the Asia-Pacific region.
The cultural side-effects of such change are clearly evident in a
city like Vancouver, which is characterized by the presence of
large populations from various parts of Asia.

Shedding self

Dadang's performance was held at the Western Front in
Vancouver, a cooperatively run artist space and gallery
celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Apart from the large
art space, the old renovated building houses offices, a guest
room, and a library/archive with audio and video recordings of
all their events, ranging from music to drama to installation.

The space offers an alternative to the commercial or the
establishment gallery and museum world, where artists can be
experimental. Western Front pioneered many directions that later
became mainstream, like performance art, interactive art events
and attention to multicultural or inter-racial concerns in art
and expression.

Asian-Canadian artists began to perform at Western Front as
early as 1987, a good 10 years before the established art world
was ready to embrace an exhibition like Traditions/Tensions,
which opened at the Vancouver Art Gallery at the same time.

On the night of the performance, Dadang was introduced by his
local artist host, Warren Arcan, an aboriginal Canadian artist
and filmmaker of Cree background. The installation piece glowed
silently white in the spotlights. On the top of about 20 white
wooden pedestals were perched larger-than-lifesize, unfired clay
heads.

In the center, above the pedestals and suspended from the
ceiling, was a whitewashed baseball bat. Before the stage of
pedestals was a small platform with a single large pan filled
with wet white clay.

As the lights dimmed, people stopped talking. Silence fell and
deepened. No movement in the room. Growing anticipation. Time
passed tangibly. A woman got up and went to sit on her knees to
the right of the platform, Javanese sinden singer, style. She
intoned a Javanese song, singing softly, intimately, in a high,
pure voice, in part singing words, in part just humming.

The audience sat between wakefulness and sleep, between dream
and observation, ready like clay to be shaped into a new form. We
drifted on her notes away from time-specific places and lives and
up, into the attracted, still empty canvas of the imagination.

With slow, deliberate movements, Dadang walked into the center
and up onto the platform. Pensive, his thoughts filled with a
memory or a premonition, he began to take off his dark jacket,
folding it carefully and placing it on the edge of the platform.

He took off his shoes and socks. Each movement was careful,
meaningful, pointing to a history none of us knew, perhaps a
private history we were not meant to know. Under his streetpants
were nylon jogging pants and under his shirt was a T-shirt. The
logo, Asia-Pacific Triennale, made everyone laugh before lapsing
back into the fullness of silent observation. As a trained and
professional actor, the laughter from the audience did not for a
moment bring Dadang out of his role. Soon the artist stood there,
naked but for red strips of cloth wrapped around his private
parts.

He sat down before the bowl of clay and slowly began to
lather it over his entire body, beginning with his feet and
working upward. The slowness, the strange transformation of the
skin into wet clay, the mixture of melancholy and happiness
remembered and held in the mind of the artist, and the smacking
sounds of the wet, viscous clay all mixed with the humming of the
female vocalist to create a moment of intensity and intimacy.

Smashing event

With only the area around his mouth and eyes uncovered, the
artist stood up and looked out into the darkness one last time.
Then he turned, moved up on the stage and, crouching with his
back to the audience, covered his face with his hands. When he
turned around again, still crouching like an animal, Dadang's
face was completely transformed into a white mask with the
reddish stare of inhuman eyes turned toward us.

The artist as we had known him was no longer there. Shorn of
recognizable signs of humanity, before us was a male being of an
unknown kind. The creature now represented something completely
unknown. Gone was also the human voice; the sinden had vanished.

The white clay creature moved slowly among the pedestals and
heads with crouching movements, all human intelligence gone from
his eyes. As he searched around with no plan and no goal, high
sounds, somewhere between grunts and whines, emitted from his
mouth at intervals. Encountering the bat hanging at face level,
he reached up and grabbed it, breaking the string which held it.

Suddenly, with a movement faster than the eye could register,
the bat was raised and came crashing down on a terracotta head,
smashing it to pieces. A thick, black liquid inside the head
smeared the bat and splattered the body.

The reaction to the violence in the movement, the sound of the
shattering of the hard clay and the destruction of that shape we
had recognized as symbolic of a human head and face, by extension
ourselves, was palpable in the room. People seemed to stop
breathing.

Eyes strained wider. Clay creature lurked on, through the
forest of heads, occasionally grunting. His sounds signaled no
meaning or intent. These were sounds someone would make who had
not yet understood the potential for exchange, negotiation and
communication inherent in the human or animal vocal chords. Words
like primitive, violent and precivilization-civilization echoed
in my head.

All at once the bat swung through the air again, we jumped in
our seats, and another head lay smashed to pieces on the floor.
Our bodies strained against the next repetitions we knew must
follow: mesmerized, forty pairs of eyes followed the slow
progress of the creature as its actions escalated with a sense of
deepening drunkenness mixed with confusion. When confusion became
dominant in the creature's small-size consciousness, it slowly
backed off the stage and disappeared into the dark. Silence fell
once again.