Helpmann artists display their works in Yogyakarta

Helpmann artists display their works in Yogyakarta

By R. Fadjri

YOGYAKARTA (JP): Today's fine arts have developed beyond pure
art (painting, sculpture, graphic arts), thanks to the teaching
of applied arts, such as craft and design, at fine arts academies
which have yielded works on a par with fine arts works.
Contemporary fine arts on the basis of pluralism, and its
characteristic that allows great freedom in exploration, have
brought applied art to the non-functional world. Applied art
works are no longer simply serving their basic function as
functional objects with artistic touches, but have become art
works whose sole function is to meet man's esthetic requirements.

This is the trend that is obvious in a fine arts exhibition by
39 artists, all graduates from the Helpmann Academy, displayed at
Dimata Gallery, Yogyakarta, from July 24 to Aug. 17. The Helpmann
Academy is an arts education institute that is a joint venture of
three universities in South Australia -- the Adelaide University,
South Australia University and South Australia Flinders
University -- in cooperation with the Department for Employment
Training and Further Education. This exhibition is the result of
cooperation between the Helpmann Academy and the Indonesian Arts
Institute in Yogyakarta.

Interestingly, this fine arts exhibition takes place at the
same time that diplomatic relations between Indonesia and
Australia are strained.

Besides works of pure art, applied art works are also on
display, such as ceramic, photography, computer, textile and
design, all with a touch of the contemporary fine arts spirit.

Take, for example, the painting of Kirsten Chambers, of the
North Adelaide School of Art, entitled What Kind of Fool Am I,
oil on canvass. It features a chubby, naked woman, staring wide-
eyed, as if hurled from a sea of skyscrapers. She is holding a
flower in her hand. Or Tom Jellet's drawing entitled The Cask of
Amontillado, acrylic and pencil on hard board. The work of this
graduate from the School of Design, University of South
Australia, describes a man holding stones and a trowel, while
behind him, a head appears, representing an old man who is on the
other side of the wall being built by the man. These two works
seem full of the problems of city dwellers, problems of
individual estrangement, as well as criminal actions.

Apart from the narrative aspects of those two works, there are
also paintings with abstract, expressionist styles (Jiang Zhong
Chen's Bird, and Simon Maloney's Would You Like to Listen, I Have
Something to Say), or decorative aspects (Paula Josling's Tic Tac
Toe).

The development of computer technology has been used to
yield fine arts works. In Japan a robot is able to reproduce
renaissance paintings with a very high degree of accuracy; the
result of a computer program. The computer can produce forms,
arrange color compositions and the thickness of paint like the
original paintings. On a lower level, Nicole Marie Chalmers
endeavors to do the same, by modifying etching works with a
computer and a computer printer. The result may not be as good as
the original etching, but this shows that high technology has
found its way into works of art.

The intervention of technology is also visible in
photographic works by Tania Innocente, who applies a cibachrome
printing technique to a piece entitled Body Shop Series, a
photograph of a woman lying naked, the textures of her body lines
and feet resembling a concrete statue with its surface peeled
off. Here we do not see the photographic work simply as a
complement to the design of an advertisement, for example, but it
can become a strong work of art, although it is only a work of
photography.

Nevertheless, those works involving technology seem cold. We
feel the rigid and arid breath of technology lacking in shades.
It is very different from the other works which, despite the use
of modern technology, are still dominated by the artists' touch.
For example, the object of Christina Atkinson's work entitled
Balloons, or Gavin Malone's installation work entitled
Boundaries. Atkinson, a Master in Visual Arts from the South
Australian School of Art, makes objects in the form of balloons;
one of thin rubber, and a cloth to which horse hair is added on
the whole surface, and two balloon forms as a drawing on paper.

Balloons may not be symbols that produce clear
interpretations, but the objects of Atkinson's work emit warmth
and seem alive, something that can inflate or deflate. Hadrian
Zerbe's ceramic work Bowlt is a bowl with a lip that looks
cracked, with a piece of iron running across it. We feel traces
of the touch of a human hand, on the ceramic surface, of this
graduate of the North Adelaide School of Art, or traces of baking
that have been left black.

Although ceramic works are traditionally closer to functional
objects, as contemporary fine arts works they have abandoned
their function to become pure art works. In this case ceramics
are no more than mere mediums of expression, such as computer,
textile, or photography technology.

Contemporary fine arts have convincingly broken, to a great
extent, conventional boundaries, and have enabled artists to
explore very diverse media. This development has lifted fine arts
from the rigid limitations of conventional fine arts; even
traditional arts -- aboriginal arts in Australia, or crafts in
Indonesia -- are entitled to live side by side with contemporary
fine arts. It is not surprising that subsequently the idioms of
traditional arts are often used by contemporary artists in their
works.

It is very different from modern fine arts, which very
strongly maintains the fine arts convention, and as such does not
offer a place that is parallel to traditional art works.
Modernists refuse traditional arts as art works, which then gives
rise to a dichotomy of high art and low art in fine arts terms.
This unfair treatment is tenaciously opposed by contemporary
artists who very much appreciate pluralism in the form and medium
of expression.

The exhibition describes the spirit of contemporary artists,
to express art by putting art in a wider context, and
categorically refuse to remain within fine arts convention
categories which limit their creativity.