Nindityo lets society's hair down

Nindityo lets society's hair down

The CP Open Biennale has 128 participants, among which 80
percent are Indonesian and 20 percent foreign. There are great
names, and not so great names, good works and not so good ones.

But there is only one work that shows art in a surprisingly
refreshing manner.

A floor at Galeri Nasional is covered with black stones in the
shape of konde traditional Javanese hairpieces, in combination
with wooden hairpieces with a surface similar to health or
massage sandals. Here people are invited to take off their shoes
and traverse the symbolic konde to enjoy a foot massage.

Titled The Massage a la The Hairbun Party, it is Nindityo
Adipurnomo's continuing effort to break down cultural taboos by
literally walking all over them.

The konde is the typical hairpiece worn by women as an
inseparable part of the formal Indonesian dress code originating
in Javanese tradition.

While most women wearing this hairpiece today will only
think of how to abide by "tradition" and fashion, the konde for
Nindityo has become a metaphor to visualize burdensome and
repressive strategies in real life.

Born and raised in Javanese culture and traditions, Nindityo
as a boy admired the beauty of the hairpiece worn by his mother
and his grandmother. As he grew up, however, he came to see the
burden it meant to women -- how they were required to wear it
even as they suffered with the heat creeping down to the neck --
and the fallacy of so-called beauty and harmony.

The konde is like a prison, he once said, and while
continuously exploring it, it became a metaphor of
noncommunication, prejudice and intolerance in Javanese as well
as other societies.

Nindityo started to explore the traditional Javanese hairpiece
more than 10 years ago. Early in his artistic life, he became
fascinated with the culture in which he was born and raised into
manhood. Initially he was drawn to dance, studying the Bedoyo, a
Javanese dance that is said to symbolize the highest achievement
during samedi (meditation) by closing nine human orifices and
deflating all bad desires.

"All I wanted was actually to know in depth and understand the
ground plan of the dance," he said.

He came to understand that this mythical court dance, usually
performed by nine young female dancers of advanced spiritual
attainment, required a high level of introspective ability; in
fact it was a major feature of the dance. As he started painting,
he found he could not very well visualize the element of
"introspective" and "introvert" required of the dancers.

One of the Bedoyo dancers told him that the sacred classical
dance was actually a symbol of intimate communication between the
sole choreographer and the nine dancers. While Nindityo tried to
visualize that in his work titled Lingga-Yoni (1992), he
was not satisfied, as he perceived that as being too formal.

This was the point when konde began to be a metaphor for his
creative works. In the konde, he found the same element of
privacy that marked the dancers of the Bedoyo.

Among his various explorations with material, his installation
works made of river stones like Step on Heirloom (2001) and Konde
Batu Beyond the Modesty evoke a sense of prehistory amid modern
times. The title of the first work alone was an open invitation
for audiences to, in a sense, trample on Javanese culture. In
Java, touching the head (or hairpiece) of someone you do not know
is impolite. The head is regarded as the holiest part of the
body, whereas feet have the lowest status.

It was no great surprise that people were reluctant to step on
the stones. But Nindityo is adept at creating vehicles for
interaction, and he invented the hairpiece as a tool for massage
in an installation where everybody is offered the sensation of
the hairpiece.

As young and old eagerly take off their shoes to get a foot
massage, Nindityo hopes they also contemplate the symbolic
hairpiece. Most probably, however, they are hardly aware they are
treading on symbols of once sacred meanings.

-- Carla Bianpoen

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CP Open Biennale Jakarta
Galeri Nasional, Jl. Merdeka Timur (opposite Gambir railway
station)
Sept. 4 - Oct. 3, 2003
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