Hendro Suseno presents 'drama of sacrifice' in drawings

By Chandra Johan

JAKARTA (JP): Contemporary artist Hendro Suseno sees people as victims who are sacrificed by those in power. He portrays these victims as tight bodies with protruding muscles and bones, repressed figures, skulls with holes, Semar wayang figures and leaves. His work is like a "drama of sacrifice".

Peter Berger revealed the myth of development which leads to the sacrifice of humans in his noted book Pyramide of Sacrifice. Hendro portrays the drama of sacrifice satirically, cynically and absurdly, with a simple black-and-white drawing technique which is capable of capturing the complexity of the human drama.

Hendro Suseno, 37, presents this drama in his solo exhibition running from May 19 to June 7 at the Millennium Gallery in South Jakarta through a number of black-and-white charcoal drawings.

In the exhibition, Tumbal (the victims who are sacrificed), Hendro takes us to a cemetery full of dull and deeply saddened fragments of life. By drawing in black-and-white charcoal and giving each figure anatomical deviations, the strength of the drawings is enhanced. As an ex-illustrator for the cultural magazine Basis, Hendro is a skillful drawer and a master of the use of chiaroscuro, which causes a deviation in the perspective of space.

Sometimes Hendro employs exaggeration, frightening us with a strange figure or object. He uses exaggeration intentionally to cause oddness which -- if we think about it -- reflects the oddness of our social reality.

According to Hendro, Tumbal is a symbol for the loss experienced by an individual as well as a group. This loss must be overcome because everyone wants to win the social struggle. In his opinion, everybody should be ready to accept loss as a reality, but they should not accept becoming a tumbal to the victors.

"Almost no one really knows about loss. As a word or as a meaning. Loss becomes foreign in our mind -- although we often experience it -- because it is considered to be something embarrassing," Hendro said.

However, in the end who really loses? And in the end, who wins? In his drawings, Hendro does not depict definite social attributes. He presents signs of the individual or the group. A grinning face and a face which grimaces; a fat figure and a thin one. By portraying figures like this, he employs social signs. However, he is using idioms which already have social conventions.

When we see a group of people crowded and jostled in an old, frail bus, as in DOT-Derita Orang Tersingkir (Misery of the Marginalized), it is impossible that we will see these people as privileged bankers who belong to DOT-Daftar Orang Tercela (List of... People). Clearly, they are people from the lower levels of society, jostled by the social dynamic and development.

Development is the keyword to the process of sacrifice. Development, in other words, requires victims. Hendro's aesthetic moral lies here: he shows humans who are crushed by the mechanization of development itself. A number of victims fall, while others enjoy the development. This is the impression one receives upon viewing his Indonesia Merdeka (Free Indonesia).

In another drawing, Manusia Komedi (People of Comedy), Hendro satirically shows a small group of humans, portrayed as "clowns" with fat bodies happily riding on a merry-go-round, while another group of people form the machinery upon which the merry-go-round spins. In the eyes of Hendro, a small group of people enjoy development and prosperity, overpowering others in order to achieve their enjoyment.

How hard and loud the people scream, how many victims are scattered about, as in Nyaring Tak Terdengar (Loud but Unheard), a work with portrays those people who are marginalized.

In Tumbal we are invited to see a human sacrifice or a burial ceremony. Our eyes focus on thin figures with protruding bones, trying to free themselves from iron handcuffs which bind their ankles and wrists, although their efforts are in vain. While two strange creatures, the black and the white, with heads like balloons, bigger than any of the surrounding objects, dominate the work, as if they were angels of death, accompanying the victims to the hereafter.

Hendro's art can thus be called l'art engage (one-sided art), not l'art dirige (art for political interests). Although he does not explicitly state which side he takes, in his works he invites us to ponder human fate and those humans which are sacrificed to the myths of development and modernization. These myths, in reality, result in victims and violence, as we are now experiencing.

In the eyes of Hendro, violence appears in two forms. One form nakedly shows itself, existing in space and time, where he himself is present. As he says, "I witness myself, hear and feel". The second form is unidentified, but exists when we "think" about it.

This second form of violence could be the result of social and cultural constructions, and could be called structural violence or mental violence.

The aesthetic of Hendro's art -- as in works based on l'art engage in general -- lies in the morality of the artist as a subject of morals and aesthetics. In this case, aesthetics are not the main goal. It is the problem of social reality itself.