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.