Kartika Affandi steps out of life's shackles
Kartika Affandi steps out of life's shackles
Carla Bianpoen, Contributor, Jakarta
After a lifelong struggle to shed the shackles of male domination, Kartika Affandi is free at last. Her triptych of lotus flowers blowing in the wind denotes her sense of bliss in the face of her 70th birthday on Nov. 27.
In a retrospective, encompassing about 100 works of her oeuvre of 48 years, now on show at the National Gallery in Jakarta, Kartika testifies to the course of her life and the hardships she endured as a woman, the only child of Affandi, the great maestro, and as a wife -- first of artist Sapto Hudoyo who did not allow her to paint, then of Austrian Gerhard Koberl, who could not stand her love for her extended family and culture.
She requested a divorce when she was expecting her 8th child, as she could no longer bear Sapto's polygamous activities, and faced another divorce, from Koberl, in 2000.
While Kartika is well-traveled and has painted a vast array of subjects, it is her self-portraits that really speak of her passage through life.
When I first married at the age of 17, I wondered whether a woman was destined only to bear children, then raise them and take care of the family, she reminisced.
Painting opened up a new world to her and allowed her to be herself. The earlier anxiety of self-portraits painted in 1957, 1966 and 1975 was gradually replaced with a new determination. She spoke out against the "fallacy of a harmonious society" in which women were not allowed to excel, let alone show emotion. It was only in 1981, in Austria, that she radically shattered the glass ceiling of her culture by painting Rebirth, through which she portrayed herself as both a new born and a new mother, with legs spread wide open and showing her genitalia.
She longed for a new beginning. Starting Point, 1982, a lithograph depicting the mask she was taking off says it all. She met Koberl, and married him in 1985, bringing him back to Indonesia with hopes of a peaceful life. It was not to be. She was torn between Koberl and her roots.
My Head's Broken she said in her self-portrait of 1995. I'm Half Dead she cried in her work of 1996. She found herself shackled as seen in her self-portrait of 1997, not by the limits of her culture, but by the demands of a man who remained foreign to her basic needs as an artist and as a Javanese. Her mood grew dark in 1998, her self-portraits were troubled and lacked color.
The next year saw her painting white on white. Her seven paintings from this period include one of her hands, used as protection against accusations she felt were unfair. Why use white? To denote her "near-saintly" efforts in trying to please the man she married, she said. Or was it rage transformed into spiritual acceptance?
The last work in that series is of a sunflower. The leaves are withered but the stem is still firm. Free at last? Perhaps, but even as she steps out of his shadow, she draws energy from her late father.
Born on Nov. 27, 1934, the only child of the maestro and his wife Maryati, Kartika started playing with paint when she was a toddler, painting with her fingers as her father did, and using paint straight from the tube. And while part of her work shows the unmistakable influence of her late father, her self-portraits are radical and rooted in real life.
A pioneer of women's self-portraiture that talks of discrimination on the basis of gender, emotional suffering and social ostracism, her soul has always reached out to others. She has connected with people of various ethnicities and religious beliefs during her many escapades, at home and away.
Kartika Affandi, a Javanese matriarch with eight children, 19 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, is at peace with the world. Painting remains her main activity, but she dreams of a flower-shaped Kartika Museum that houses the work of female artists.
Kartika Looking Back Through Life, a retrospective at the National Gallery 28 Oct. until Nov. 6