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.