Resistance and memory in the visual field

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.