Resistance and memory in the visual field

Astri Wright prepared this article on a special publication of a terracotta art exhibition featuring the works of Dadang Christianto, which took place between June 24 and 30 in Bentara Budaya, Yogyakarta.

YOGYAKARTA: It's highly appropriate that an exhibition like this takes place in the year which celebrates the 50th anniversary of Indonesia's declaration of independence. The decade leading up to this historic declaration saw more Indonesian artists pick up their pens, paintbrushes and chisels in the name of the revolution. Revolutionary struggle -- on the battlefield, in the media, on the canvas or paper -- is always two sided; it is both highly specific, rooted in its particular historical context and moment, and, at the same time, its sheer intensity pushes it into the dimension of universal struggle against oppression and suffering characteristic to humankind in all ages. All fundamental human struggle exists at once on the material, political plane and on the cosmic, symbolic plane.

Dadang Christianto represents the younger artists working on the themes of oppression and liberation since the time of Indonesia's nationalist struggle. This is not to say, however, that Dadang is a newcomer to the field of engaged art making. Since the mid 1970s, he has distinguished himself as an innovative artist with the ability to combine intensely relevant social messages with an eye-opening yet stringent aesthetic form.

Sometimes art critics accurately observe that innovation in modern Asian art is confused with introducing and copying foreign styles with no personal reworking or synthesis. This is not the case with Dadang. His message, content, form and intent meld specifically and concretely with his own Indonesian context. Dadang is made of native clay -- a metaphor which is given literal meaning by the artist's wide spread use of the medium.

The terracotta figures found in all installations are the result of the artist's conscious choice of a humble, local medium associated to popular culture. The educated observer may recall the architectural decorative figures of the Mojopahit kingdom. To the viewer familiar with a crosscultural art history, the material and forms of the figures summon prehistoric Japanese Haniwa figures, which were believed to provide body to invisible but influential spirits. The forms also reverberate with early western modernist sculpture and, looking to one of the sources for such modernist innovation, to ancestor figures of indigenous people from around the Indonesian archipelago. All these traditions have in common an ability to represent, in simplified but monumentally effective visual short hand, the essence and transcendent dignity of the human figure.

For the last two decades, Dadang Christanto has shown a commitment to communal, shared and reciprocally oriented living and working. A sense of true gotong royong has also always characterized the messages of his works in contrast to so many of his peers in both the Western and Asian art world. Dadang's work is not primarily about himself or his experiences. Its scope is much broader. With these numerous terracotta figures, it is clear that the artist is not solely interested in having his own, individual voice heard. The open mouths and intent expressions of the heads add an aural quality to the exhibition, making the viewer almost hear a voice singing, speaking, crying or screaming. The actively intoning open mouth (the imagined sound reinforced by rays of light from within) ensures that these figures cannot be perceived as passive. They return the viewer's gaze and mix their voices with those of the audience.

Despite the large number of heads, we are not faced with a mass of identical clones. Each face is different, and indeed the various expressions are orchestrated in such a way that deeper messages can be found by tracing the pattern of how they change. The variation in the expressions is augmented by the varied markings of ash from the firing process. This is an art symbol for the fire and pain in the human experience off violence. On another level, it functions as a symbolic geographical marker that identifies the land of origin as volcanic, where fire and ashes at once can mean entombment and fertility.

We witness hardness, harshness, and violence around us daily -- violence both organized and occidental, on a mass as well as on an individual scale. At the same time, we have witnessed an increasingly broad and graphic representation of violence in the entertainment media, a kind of illusion-making which all too often loses touch with any ethical or moral base. Like most sensitive people with a sense of moral conscience, Dadang is concerned with these issues. Both historically and in the present, humans perpetrating violence on others less powerful than themselves has been an undeniable aspect of human life everywhere and yet these realities are often repressed or denied.

With this exhibition, Dadang attempts to create an eloquent memorial to those who have died violently. He attempts to give form and voice to people who no longer have either. He attempts to create a visual representation of violence that does not gloss over the power-relations at work, but that also does not gloat, sensationalistically, in dismemberment and blood. Instead, Dadang brings to the subject deep dignity, pathos and compassion. The artist states that human beings are not isolated islands and that it is not only the present that masters. By resurrecting in abstracted, stylized form, vehicles for the spirits that have passed out of this world in great pain and agony, Dadang sends the clear message that their lives and death matter; that we are all connected in the webs of life and life after death, and that the fine threads of memory must be honored and cannot be repressed. And in contrast to many contemporary art installations in Indonesia, we see here a refusal to abandon the human form.

Medium as Message

The choice by Indonesian artists like Dadang of a medium like installation -- according to some critics, the hottest medium in Southeast Asia at present -- is significant. Some of the reasons why installation is especially attractive to Indonesian artists whose works embodies messages relating to social realities, and their ambiguities and breakdowns, may be that installation is non-elitist. It provides a departure from the establishment emphasis on the traditional categories of painting and sculpture, which reflect Euro-American and colonial definitions of "high art".

Furthermore, installation is not commercial, as it is rarely bought or sold on the Asian art market, that was born in the last five years and has fundamentally influenced the public view of art works as commodities. More importantly, installation is not limited to certain media and techniques, but allows a multi-media approach which can incorporate both natural materials indigenous to Indonesia or found objects from real life with conceptual forms.

Another important aspect is that installation takes place in real space. The format allows the artist to move away from two- dimensional illusion-making to real, three dimensional spaces, which draw the viewer into the work, adding a realistic dimension to the viewing experience.

In many of the ways mentioned, installation creates links both to the indigenous past and the global present. Installation restores the multimedia format the indigenous theater and ritual to the artist's sphere of activity, allowing for the incorporation of physical movement and vocal, verbal or other sound into the work. At the same time, installation takes place in the contemporary, international sphere of language and text.

All of the above format and artistic elements entail a marriage between elements of veracity, or realism, and the conceptual aspect of the work -- a synthesis which facilitates the tackling of real issues of social or political importance rather than remaining content with formalist experimentation with the purely aesthetic, as the majority of Indonesian artist are perceived by some critics as doing.

In a February 1995 letter to the author, Dadang Christanto wrote about his view of the relationship between art and social change:

"I am aware that developing a critical attitude and becoming a free human being is not easy or short term work. I also understand that works of art are not the only cause of change in the individual or beyond, in his or her society. Changes in attitude are related to many aspects, which form backdrop to and the context for change... for example politic, economics, religion, and so on. ... But I believe -- I am even optimistic -- because the history of change has always drawn in and involved arts. Art contributes to the conditioning and maturing of social change. Art is always present, playing in a role in any change which liberates."

Artists like Dadang Christanto reflect and concertize social realities and recreate new choices to speak the experiences of their worlds. In the past, the Javanese artist created images that combined spiritually symbolic or recognizable and representational elements, distorting them to serve an imagined ideal. Today's engaged artist in Indonesia can no longer afford such a luxury combining imagined with natural elements. They orchestrate a message which is as urgent as it is real, and which concern us all.

Astri Wright, PhD, is a professor of South and Southeast Asian Art; Specialist in Modern Indonesian Art, University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.