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.