Sardono, Jim honored as guardian of Indonesia's arts

Sardono, Jim honored as guardian of Indonesia's arts

By Chandra Johan

JAKARTA (JP): The year 1997 ended in joy for Indonesians
Sardono W. Kusumo and Jim Supangkat.

Sardono, a choreographer, dancer and filmmaker, and Jim, an
art critic and curator, received Prince Claus Awards from The
Prince Claus Fund, a Den Haag-based independent foundation, on
Dec. 20.

Other award winners came from Latin America and Africa.

What were the contributions which qualified them for the
awards?

Simply put, Sardono and Jim succeeded in becoming "guardians"
and "interpreters" of Indonesian arts in foreign countries.

Their contributions are significant considering the major
problems and challenges they face in the development of art and
culture.

Developing countries, also known as Southern nations, do have
greater challenges in art and culture development than their
richer cousins in the North.

In the globalization era in which the world is becoming
increasingly interlinked, the North has extended its impact to
many cultural matters and dominated perceptions in nearly all
fields. The resulting tendency is to judge any development in the
South through the paradigm of the developed world.

In fine arts, the critical question is related to common
understanding of contemporary art in an international context,
which is based on the perception formed in the North. This
reality shows that in global art development, the Southern
countries have never obtained the opportunity to find, understand
or identify their own artistic development due to the dominance
of perceptions and theories from the North.

This is why art from developing countries has been
misinterpreted.

This situation resulted in the denial of the existence of
modern art in developing countries. Modernist beliefs, which
dominate the development of international modern art, put the
world of traditional cultures and the modern world at
contradictory poles.

Thus, representations of modern art from developing countries
-- which often show the influence of traditional cultures -- are
seen as unrepresentative of modern values.

Contemporary art, which contradicts modernist art in many ways
and in some ways extends it, has liberated developing countries'
art from being denied or marginalized. In the midst of the
world's great changes, the North-South concept is finding
context.

In line with the collapse of avant garde ideas and modernism,
thoughts about pluralism stick out and have become significant
issues this century, occurring side by side with the North-South
concept.

In this concept, reality and all things are mixtures of
"oneness" and "manyness". Therefore, in concept and consensus,
agreement and cooperation are the cores of togetherness and aim
to guarantee autonomy and single sovereignty.

Together with the postmodern thoughts, intellectuals and
artists have started to see alternatives through the local
strengths of each nations. As The Prince Claus Fund put it: "The
Fund recognizes the desire to rediscover and revaluate one's own
history, while old values are sometimes reinterpreted in new
circumstances with new meaning ... The Fund assigns importance to
intercultural exchange which opens up new horizons, both 'South-
South' and 'South-North'."

At this point, Sardono W. Kusumo and Jim Supangkat become
significant. Their different ways with ideas, thoughts and other
forms of expressions represent a postmodern era.

Through dance, Sardono combines traditional and indigenous
forms with modern dance techniques and improvisation.

Sardono says: "My work is to search into the future through
the past to recover the essential link between man and nature. I
dance the man who has lost his cultural roots, or from whom they
have been torn, wandering in our contemporary forests."

Hailed as a brilliant theatrical imagist, Sardono's work
emerges from the pluralistic multicultural society of modern
Indonesia. Throughout his career, he has staged the tensions
between a centuries-old ecosystem (both cultural and natural) and
the "advances" of contemporary society that may jeopardize its
very existence.

He regards dance as a continuous process of innovation in
which elements foreign to dance can inseminate his work. His
search for man's place in his cultural and natural environment
sometimes culminates in personal activities.

Trained in classical Javanese and modern American dance,
Sardono is now the most prominent figure in Indonesian
contemporary dance.

Jim, as we know through New Art Movement 1975 (Gerakan
Senirupa Baru 1975), has, from the beginning, opposed principles
of modernism. Through his writings and ideas on multimodernism,
he has succeeded in entrusting his discourse into contemporary or
postmodern thoughts.

In 1979, he advocated a creed which rejected modern Indonesian
fine arts because when creating a work of art, one must throw out
the accepted image of fine art, limited to forms of painting,
sculpture and printmaking. Actually, much more was rejected;
formalism, the tradition of avant garde and high art, the
autonomy of art, the decorative tendency in painting and the
search for national identity.

How did Jim Supangkat come to terms with this sweeping
rejection of what was part and parcel of the modernist movement?

According to him, the concept of modernism is still ambiguous,
for its reference is limited to the art history of the West.
Therefore, it became relevant only if interpreted as
multimodernism, taking into consideration that in Indonesia,
modernism followed specific local paths of development.

He firmly opposed the determination of Euro-American thoughts
that see a development of art based on theories and history of
art in Western cultures. Modern art in Indonesia is not only an
adaptation of the modernism of the 1950s, but also a continuity
of local developments since the 18th century.

Jim often stressed in international forums that there must be
another kind of modernism besides Western modernism within the
development of modern art in Asia, especially in Indonesia.

"I have identified this predicted condition, the plurality of
modernism, as multimodernism."

Jim is also one of the few stimulators and propagators of
modern and contemporary art in the nation, and his activities
have given tremendous support to Indonesian artists and art. He
curated exhibitions of modern Indonesian art in San Francisco in
1991; the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, in 1993; at the Johannesburg
Biennial, South Africa, in 1995; and in Brisbane, Australia, for
the Triennial of 1996.

His views as an art critic and theorist should be seen in an
Indonesian context, in which they are strikingly fresh and
independent.