'Rel Waktu' illustrates life on a train

'Rel Waktu' illustrates life on a train

Andrew Fuller, Contributor/Jakarta

The day before, I had gone to Bogor. I arrived at the train station and I said to a friend who met me there in front of a donut shop: "I feel like I've actually left Jakarta."

Unlike traveling by bus, the train journey gave an illusion of separation and distance. We passengers sat looking out of the windows, not to where we were going, but at the greater panorama. The slowness, the rhythm and the stopping reminded us of an older technology.

The doors are open and students lean out. A man unfolds a newspaper and lays it out on the steps before sitting down. A child squats and crawls along the floor, shuffling a small broom between his knees. He extends his right hand, apparently having cleaned the floor of the train car. He taps a young woman on her right knee: three or four seconds pass before she is finally startled out of a conversation with her boyfriend -- or at least the person she is treating as her intimate. She gasps, then waves her left hand at the boy: Not today. The "boyfriend" has already contributed three thin silver coins and that shall be enough. The child shuffles back down the car, his legs covered with dust.

The photographs in Edy Purnomo's solo exhibition -- Rel Waktu or Railway of Time, which ran from Nov. 19 through Dec. 10 at the Galeri Fotojurnalistik Antara -- are untitled.

Edy said, "I wanted to leave this up to the viewer. The viewer can name the works according to how each work makes them feel."

Fine. This is a minor criticism of the practice of looking at art. Yet, it makes reviewing and describing the exhibition more difficult, since each review would only make sense to the author, and so communication could fail. But Edy has a point.

The truth of a work's impact and what it means to a viewer does not stem from the artist's intentions. Viewing art is a conflation of accidents and circumstances.

For example, I hadn't planned to take the economy train to Bogor the previous day; and I hadn't planned to go to Edy's exhibition. I had planned to take the Pakuan express train and to spend more time at the National Gallery opposite Gambir station.

Yet, the two exhibitions there had closed early and I had time on my hands. Time enough to go to Galeri Antara.

My experience of Rel Waktu occurred after taking one of the trains that Edy himself may have traveled on and photographed on his trips from Jakarta to Bogor.

So, the works are untitled. There are no placards dating the photographs, detailing the media upon which they are printed or their dimensions. The works are therefore, even if only slightly, reduced of their artifice. A statement is made: "This is not a work of art; it is just a photograph on a wall" -- but a wall which, of course, just happens to be in a gallery.

A series of six photographs includes the following: schoolgirls descending from a train; a man holding a toy machine gun; a beverage and instant noodle seller; a cracked window; a graffiti of a red skull; a man in a baseball cap, carrying a guitar; a hand gently grasping a horizontal bar.

To the left of the red-skull graffiti, a woman is waiting listlessly on a platform. Her head is aslant, skewed toward her left shoulder, her arms are folded and she leans against a pole. The platform captured in this frame is empty, except for her.

This numberless and nameless series tells us of several aspects of train life: trade, music or busking, vandalism as shown by the broken window, street art or graffiti as an image, and loneliness, waiting, impatience.

It seems that being a passenger on a train is merely a small part of train life.

In the gallery, the air conditioning is off; there are no fans. A radio plays hip hop from a front room. A group of four or five chats enthusiastically, in part about the exhibition and surely about other matters. I don't catch what they're saying.

Their voices echo and mingle with the assertiveness and the melodies coming from the radio.

This sense of loudness, or ramai-ness, is not far from the experience of being on a train or being at a train station, where all sorts of people, behaving in all sorts of ways, are present for all sorts of reasons -- just as this gallery has possibly become the site of an accidental reunion between old friends.

Outside the gallery on Jl. Antara, a bajaj passes and the noise of its sputtering motor becomes another element of the gallery's ambience.

In this series of six photographs -- unframed and joined together -- faces are blurred, disguised or absent. The face is one way of knowing, of recognizing another. Yet, in Edy's work, we are denied this opportunity for basic communication with the figures captured by the photographer. This work thus declares the individuality and the possible public loneliness of traveling by public transport, in which one is among and separate from others at the same time.

This series of incomplete portraits is an anthropological and sociological work, providing evidence of the daily happenings on a suburban or local train. It gives evidence of a society with an oppressed economy, the workers in desperate need of money.

How much can one really make in a single day as a busker, as a hawker of toy guns?

There is a stall on the platform next to the train: trade can, and needs, to take place wherever possible. A basket of crackers rests upon the floor of a train car, plastic boxes are wrapped in a Marlboro advertisement, the unmistakable cowboy with his lasso at the ready. The crackers overflow in the plastic boxes, around which a plastic strap is tied. The viewer speculates: is this the beginning of the day, or the end of an(other) unprofitable and unsatisfying day?

Many of the images show little of the sky -- Edy makes no romantic statements about traveling by train. The photographs are of closed interiors, each containing numerous points of focus, and show the unstructured and rapid visual experience of riding on a train. This is not a luxurious way to travel. Dirt, rubbish and grime are present throughout many of the photographs.

I step out of the gallery and pass some street stalls that have just opened at the fall of dusk. Inside, the group of five friends continue to chat and laugh. The smell of the nearby river in the ditch below, the fumes from a bajaj, a bus, permeate the air.

I escape alone into a taxi, which removes me at once from Jakarta, and the driver asks, "Where to?" I reply, and the air- conditioning penetrates through my shirt; it is silent and cold.

No, this is not the kereta api to Bogor.