Pop culture reexamined at Kedai Kebun Gallery

Text and photos by R. Fadjri

YOGYAKARTA (JP): Plazas, malls, pubs and superstores are not just popular places in urban communities.

They have become the substance of city-dwellers, in the form of Coca-Cola, Hollywood, MTV, Batman and other pop culture icons. They are popular with children, they are loved by adolescents and needed by adults.

And then there is the less glamorous side of urban life, with traffic jams, pickpockets, muggers and reckless drivers.

Mix them all together, and you get a collage of urban culture.

The chaos of urban life was the subject of works by Surya Wirawan and Ugo Untoro, through drawings and other works, which were on exhibit at Kedai Kebun Gallery from Dec. 1 to Dec. 31.

The drawings and acrylic paintings by the artists from the Indonesian Fine Arts Institute (ISI) describe the grip of pop culture on urban areas.

One untitled drawing shows skyscrapers filling the upper half of a piece of paper. The text has a familiar ring to urban citizens: mall, plaza, pub, superstore.

The lower half shows headless figures performing some acrobatics while a TV camera records their actions.

Pop culture is more emphatic in the picture of a naked woman seated on a chair. She is surrounded by writings that remind us of hedonistic slogans: old is sin, sexiest ... so disgusting, fresh breath.

In the background a naked woman is seated with a hair drier blowing hot air. A nearby TV set shows a person shouting through a megaphone.

Wirawan strengthens elements of pop culture with various cosmetic bottles on which "image" is written. In large print amid the forms: Amazing is Beautiful.

The forms and symbols of words in these drawings are messages written in newspapers, magazines, on television, billboards along the roadside or on high-rise buildings. They are ads for consumer products.

In Candy Flattery, Wirawan strengthens the complexity of urban society. Using acrylic on paper, Wirawan depicts violence in urban life.

Skyscrapers are the setting of the acts of violence. Figures with menacing faces cover the entire paper. There is a figure holding a machete with one hand outstretched, another figure is running with a Molotov cocktail in his hand, another is holding down and strangling another figure. These scenes remind us of hoodlums in major urban centers.

Wirawan also describes street violence. A city bus with a broken windshield heads toward a group of people. The bus is crowded. A woman is seen dragging her feet when exiting the bus.

Our attention is drawn not only to people dressed as civilians, but also to soldiers. A soldier in riot gear on alert with shields and batons prepares for violence. Another larger figure is dressed in military fatigues with three stars on his sleeves. The officer and four figures in clown outfits carry a headless figure on a chair, as if indicating that the figure is the man behind all the violence.

Wirawan succeeds in illustrating chaos in urban society with all the pressures that come with it.

His work is a portrait of a Third World city facing the pressures of economic liberalization in a politically repressed society.

Ugo's lone work that was on display challenges the perception of identical expression among people in the lower-strata of society, through the expression of ordinary workers like kerosene hawkers, chicken noodle vendors and tire repairmen.

Their identical expression is revealed through symbols of trade names written on wooden boards or painted in red on the yellow background of their kiosks. Noodle vendors paint their carts in blue and red. A tire repairman hangs a used tire with some writing on it.

Ugo describes identity awareness within a group of ordinary workers in urban areas to show they contribute no matter how small their role in the economy is.

The exhibition's theme reminds us of pop art that has developed in the U.S. since the 1960s -- the art of expressing oneself through popular consumer products.

Andy Warhol, a pop culture artist, painted a portrait of 25 faces of Marilyn Monroe. In another work, Warhol painted Four Campbell's Soup Cans in 1965.

The enthusiasm to play with the idiom of pop culture products is very strong in Surya Wirawan's work.

There is indeed a tendency among artists of the 1990s in Yogyakarta to refer to pop culture as the language of expression.

This is possibly an indication of how cosmopolitan pop culture has penetrated small cities like Yogyakarta, with Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut, the Big Mac, etc.