'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.