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.