Kartika Affandi inspires many women

Kartika Affandi inspires many women

By Astri Wright

JAKARTA (JP): Kartika Affandi, 61, has been recognized as one
of Indonesia's most important female artists for nearly a decade.
However, as the daughter of the celebrated painter Affandi and
his first wife, Maryati, also an artist, Kartika has been in the
public eye since she was born. From childhood on, she was raised
around art, artists and art making, and she was already painting
as a young child. That it should take so long for her to gain
recognition has to do not only with the demands of mothering a
brood of eight, but also with the dominance of men in the modern
Indonesian art world since it emerged as an important cultural
arena in the 1930s.

Since the mid-1980s, Kartika and a small group of Indonesian
women artists have, largely due their own tenacity and group
efforts, succeeded in exhibiting their work on a regular basis.
As their numbers have steadily grown, as their work has matured,
and as more and more people have seen and began to collect it,
both at home and abroad, they have begun to gain critical
recognition.

It is still symptomatic, however, that when Indonesian group
shows travel abroad, such as the KIAS exhibitions in the U.S.A.
and in Holland in 1990-1993, foreign curators encounter great
reluctance to include Indonesian women artists. And when an
exhibition of Indonesia's best senior artists is arranged, such
as in 1994, no senior women are represented. The increasingly
commercialized Indonesian art world, as encountered in the
mainstream galleries, is still far more comfortable with keeping
women in their traditional place as far as art goes: as passive,
pretty objects, cliched Balinese dancers, or nourishing goddesses
in men's paintings.

Within this narrow context, Kartika has nonetheless succeeded
in holding solo exhibitions on a regular basis.

Today, five years after the death of her father, in whose
shadow both Maryati and Kartika's art remained during his life,
Kartika's art emerges as an energetic, personally conceived and
original contribution. It ranges from fairly conventional but
highly sensual landscapes to subversive, confessional self-
portraits and insightful portraits of other people, often people
who have suffered in some way or other.

In a culture where the individual self rarely is put to the
fore, Kartika has made the self-portrait one of her main themes.
In a society where emotion is suppressed, Kartika fills her
canvases with intense feeling. In a culture where genitals are
considered taboo in representation, Kartika has painted her own
and others' nudity graphically and without the prescribed,
distancing sweetness. Going against the Javanese insistence that
harmony and beauty be normative for all forms of creative
expression, Kartika creates real-life, sometimes turbulent and
disturbing images. In ways that may not be immediately apparent
to the western eye, her work seen from within the context of
Indonesian values and esthetics, proclaims the artist's freedom
from all rules and conventions.

Inner strength

Following in the populist footsteps of Affandi, Kartika paints
farmers, fishermen, workers, beggars and handicapped women. She
paints people in a way that gives them a tangible psychological
dimension, never flattering her subjects by painting them more
superficial or beautiful than she sees them. The beauty Kartika
presents is one of inner strength emerging from the experience of
hardship.

In some of her self-portraits and portraits of others, Kartika
depicts the uncompromising progress of old age. Beginning in
1957, with her Portrait of Daddy, and ending with her parents'
death in 1990 and 1991, she has created a moving series of
portraits of her mother and father, both singly and together.
Especially eloquent are the paintings of her sick, aging father,
captured as life ebbed slowly, leaving his body feeble, while his
powerful mind was still "hungry to paint", as the title of the
excellent movie about him by Yasir Marzuki states. Kartika's last
portraits of Affandi, such as the one showing an emaciated old
man painting in the nude as he liked to do, are eloquent
documents of aging and of a daughter's love which does not shy
away from reality to hide behind a nostalgic or romantic fiction,
as Papi Painting in then Nude, 1989 and Empty Papi, 1990 clearly
show.

When viewed at a short distance, both Affandi's and Kartika's
work communicate the aesthetic experience of high-pitched
creative energy deposited in thickly flowing, curving lines of
paint. One of the things which distinguished Kartika from her
father is the range of colors in the thin background washes under
the thick impasto relief of oil paints. Kartika's compositions
are more controlled and planned, her lines less wild and
emotional. In style, Kartika's work ranges from the sweet and
idyllic to an expressive realism that can be harsh. The latter is
particularly evident in her paintings of beggars, handicapped
people, and suffering animals -- the latter themes are often
depicted in black and white.

The self portraits

Most intensely involving of all, are Kartika's paintings of
herself. Since an artist's self-image and life experiences
usually inform her self-portraits, central moments in Kartika's
life emerge, often in symbolic form in her depictions of herself.

The two paintings painted when studying painting restoration
in Austria in 1981, entitled The Beginning and Rebirth, are two
of the most painful and powerful autobiographical statements in
modern Indonesian art. They are probably also the most overt
statements in Indonesia about the pain of a woman's search for an
identity which truly reflects her as an individual as opposed to
reflecting social roles which were imposed on her. Such works are
especially shocking in a culture which emphasizes emotional
restraint. These paintings are disturbing, confessional and by
some standards, ugly -- all qualities which are not sanctioned by
conventional Indonesian values.

Not seeking to idealize her own features, Kartika has in these
two paintings given us images which are instantly recognizable as
her. At the same time, however, she comes to represent every
woman (and by extension, every human being) who has fought to
gain freedom from imposed definitions of self and self-respect.
Tearing off face after face till she reaches the bare bones of
her skeleton is a powerful way of suggesting that those faces
were masks representing roles she was socialized to play and not
ones she chose herself or that representing who she truly was.

Depicting herself as an old woman with a shaven head being
reborn from her own body is a potent illustration of the idea
that liberation and psychic rebirth can only come from within the
husk of the old self. Giving birth to a new and truer self also
becomes the platform from which one can reach out to others in an
honest and open way, creating connections across what before was
a gap. To Kartika, these paintings have such deeply personal
resonance that she will not sell them; they are part of her
personal collection.

The urge to merge

In mid-September 1988, Kartika started working on a new type
of self-portrait. It was a triple portrait, showing Affandi to
the left, Maryati to the right, and herself in the middle. All
three faces are rooted in the same neck and one of each of her
parents' eyes merge with her face to form both of Kartika's eyes.
This portrait embodies a view of the individual self intricately
rooted in a larger family context: there is no rejection of
parentage here, none of the strain felt in so many parent-child
relationships. Even though the inter-personal relations were in
the past not always free from strains, Kartika shows here a clear
embracing of and identification with her source.

New dimensions related to the above discussion have in recent
years been emerging also in Kartika's general portraiture. Since
her reaching personal integration and self-acceptance by the mid-
1980s, Kartika has increasingly been using her own experience of
gender discrimination, emotional suffering and social
ostracizing as a vehicle to connect with, and to represent, other
people of different ethnic and geographical backgrounds living
similar experiences. Raised a Javanese in a dominantly Islamic
culture, Kartika has painted Christians in Austria, Hindus in
Bali, Asmat in Irian Jaya, and aboriginal peoples in Flores,
China and Australia. Both in the actual paintings as in the way
Kartika works, there is little apparent distance between the
artist, as active creator-subject, and her subject matter --
people of dramatically different backgrounds from either the
artist or from each other.

Rather than negating them to create a false sense of
togetherness, Kartika carefully notes necessary details of ethnic
and cultural difference in her work. With her direct, open and
warm personality, Kartika manages to establish a personal and
artistic connection across ethnic, national, geographical,
sociological or gender boundaries, to encompass many different
realms of experience. She frequently manages to establish a sense
of trust with people who, often with good historical reasons, are
otherwise hostile to outsiders. This is evident in the paintings
entitled Aboriginal Family from 1991 and 1993.

One of the provocative techniques Kartika uses to both note
and overcome difference, is one of identity merging, in a similar
way she did with her triple family self-portrait. For example,
when an Australian aboriginal woman in 1991 decided she did not
want to be painted after all, leaving Kartika alone in the desert
without a subject, she sat down to paint herself -- this time
with aboriginal features. The same can be seen in one of her
portraits of flood victims from Flores, 1993, and in a canvas
from China 1994.

In Self-portrait at Tien An Men, Kartika envisions herself as
Chinese, wearing a blue cotton jacket and Mao cap. Seated to the
side facing the viewer, with the square behind her, Kartika's
eyes appear to be focused on an internal replay of memories,
which causes her face to crumple in concentration and grief.
Behind her, a mass of yellow flowers is surrounded by swirling,
billowing red paint, which flickers around the yellow-tiled
Gateway to the Forbidden City and up into the sky. Kartika's face
is colored dark red as if reflecting a blazing fire or as if the
skin is transparent, showing the blood vessels underneath. The
location, the composition, the colors and the facial expression
all point to the events of June 1989, when the demonstrations for
greater democratic participation ended in a blood-bath as the
military opened fire on a peaceful mass of students,
intellectuals and workers. Like a witness and a mourning family
member, the artist places herself in the middle of Tienanmen,
where the voices silenced and the blood spilled can speak to, and
through, her body and her subsequent act of painting.

This kind of identity merging, rather than being an
appropriation of other people's images, must be seen as a kind of
bridge building, inspired by a position of empathy, solidarity
and an urge to merge. These constitute a web of feelings and
intellectual positions which negates the fragmentation,
powerlessness, and dispossession that characterizes so much post-
modern writing. Kartika's work challenges Derrida's position that
everything (including action and the personal subject) can be
reduced to speech, which, the theory goes, does not matter anyway
as it cannot effect positive change or make any difference in the
world.

In ways that parallel much contemporary feminist writing that
denounces postmodern thought, Kartika's work and life posits an
alternative which allows action and meaning as well as the
personal subject to exist. Her radical portraiture and self-
portraiture, rooted in real life contexts and carrying narrative
meanings, lends sanction to the validity of individual people's
identities and experiences.

Conclusion

The late 1980s saw Kartika finally confident about being in
control of her life and art. She is comfortable with her multiple
roles as artist, painting restorer, president of the Affandi
Foundation, employer, mother and grandmother. She is the economic
matriarch of a large family and patron to the people of a small
mountain village where she has built her retreat-home.

Although Kartika in 1989 was represented in only one of Bali's
three major galleries, Rudana's, and in one of Jakarta's, Duta,
the last five years have seen a growing interest in her work
internationally, leading to invitations for Kartika to give
lectures, workshops and hold exhibitions in the U.S. and
Australia, with more planned for Austria and Japan. Furthermore,
Kartika sells as well as many highly acclaimed male painters.
Like other Indonesian artists between exhibitions, she sells from
home, the Affandi Museum in Yogyakarta, which also houses the art
of Affandi and Maryati.

Kartika is one of less than a handful of female painters in
Indonesia who have thought or dared to openly express the pain
and struggle of a woman in search of her true identity no matter
how this might clash with culturally imposed roles of womanhood
and wifehood. Through her art, workshops, exhibitions and
lectures, such as the ones she gave at the Seniwati Gallery for
Women Artists in Ubud, Bali, in December 1992, she has inspired
many women who were struggling against family-members and social
perceptions to gain the freedom to pursue an art career. Indeed,
Kartika could be called the mother of contemporary Indonesian
painting. So far, three fathers -- a biological and developmental
impossibility -- have been positioned by the art critics,
Sudjojono, Affandi and Hendra Gunawan.

On a more general level, Kartika champions the right of
Indonesian women to pursue careers in any area of their choice,
also in professions not conventionally open to them. By
successfully bridging distances between herself and other human
beings, both in Indonesia and in different parts of the world,
Kartika is carving out a new Indonesian model for female self-
empowerment and global concern. A painting is worth a thousand
words and knows no language barriers.

Astri Wright is professor of South and Southeast Asian Art,
University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.