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