Deep, dark thoughts in contemporary artists' show

Deep, dark thoughts in contemporary artists' show

By R. Fadjri

YOGYAKARTA (JP): Crash! A chair is slammed against a glass
frame holding a picture of another chair in white. Fragments
scatter on a drawing of another chair, all part of the climax of
FX Harsono's presentation at the opening of the exhibition,
Meeting 3:3 in Yogya, on March 19.

Participants in the show, at the Taman Budaya Yogyakarta until
Sunday, are three local contemporary artists -- Dadang
Christanto, Arrahmaiani and Harsono himself -- matched with
Germans Gottfried Heinz, Jens Meyer and Rita Oerters.

The abovementioned work by Harsono, Power/Destruction No. 3
continues from a theme explored last year in the exhibition Slot
in the Box, held before the May elections, in which a chair was
also destroyed. It is a further shift away from esthetics.

"I don't feel like making anything beautiful now after seeing
the violence in the recent social and political condition,"
Harsono said.

The statement is among the strongest among artists since what
is called the New Fine Arts Movement came into being in 1975.
This was a protest among a group of younger artists, including
Harsono, against the dominance of the so-called "modernist"
artists.

Harsono and his contemporaries considered modernist artists to
be so engrossed in their own esthetic values that they were
detached from the social conditions around them.

In line with student protests at that time, the artists' work
expressed their resentment of an economic policy which they
blamed for the gap between rich and poor.

Through his work, Harsono says he aims to "rebuild public
consciousness" of surrounding conditions amid what he perceives
as a lack of transparency in the news media. Riots in Jakarta on
July 27, 1996, and in Ujungpandang, in which burned people were
dismissed as rioters, Harsono say, are examples of how the public
cannot fathom what has really happened.

Arahmaiani's works feature modern, battered products like a
television, along with old object like the wooden rest for Koran
reading. The artist appears to expose the imbalance between the
material and spiritual world.

Among the Germans, Oeters scatters real and fake mouse traps
in exaggerated sizes with U.S. dollar bills. It seems an
interesting way to share her apparent feelings about the region's
economic condition.

Outside and inside the exhibition hall the viewer is attracted
to sculptures of white pieces of cloth strung together tightly.
Inside, the cloths are hung from the ceiling, but outside they
are weighted to the ground with bamboo poles.

In these sculptures, Meyers works with elasticity and
tautness, impressing viewers with the calculation involved, and
the anxiety that the black basket of rocks to which the corners
of the cloths are tied may crash on them.

Perhaps this is Meyers' intention; to share tension,
elasticity and precision, beauty and a smidgen of fear.