Sculptors stick to what they know in Jakarta
By Yusuf Susilo Hartono
JAKARTA (JP): A statue of a goddess, playing a mandolin in a standing position wearing a transparent dress with her long hair blown by the wind welcomes visitors at Taman Ismail Marzuki's Galeri Cipta in Central Jakarta.
The statue -- made of fiber glass and twice the size of a normal human being has been created by 58-year-old Suhartono H. from Banyuwangi, East Java -- is just one of the statues being displayed at Pameran Karya Pematung Jakarta 2001 (Jakarta sculptors' works exhibition 2001) from Sept. 5 to Sept. 30.
The statue appears to be distanced from the visitors, because it has a heavenly face and not the familiar face of anyone's mother, aunt or sister.
There is also a scorched body, a Eurasian woman playing music, a Kama Sutra love-making subject, a man guarding his neighborhood community, alienated people in low-cost apartments, a body stuck with many hypodermic needles, toilets and chamber pots with intravenous tubes, a family wailing over a victim, a tied-up accordion and a child praying for beloved souls.
The aim of the exhibition has been to provide freedom to sculptors to come up with different forms of spatial expression, using the form known as installation art.
"By giving this freedom we expected to see a kind of doubt that could be categorized as an evaluation of the development of sculpture in Jakarta in 2001," said Hanung Mahadi, a sculptor and graduate of Jakarta Arts Institute, who is also the exhibition coordinator.
However, the numerous creations of Jakarta's 26 sculptors are still dominated by sculpture only. It indicates how loyal they still are to the old sense of sculpture inherited from the previous millennium and originating from the West.
It seems difficult for local artists to free themselves from the shackles of old meanings from the West, which are deeply rooted here and have become a kind of art religion for them.
It's comparable to the difficulty a bird would have to fly away from its cage even though the door had been opened wide. Even in the name of freedom, the bird might die as it doesn't know how to survive.
Different media
Among the installation art displayed at the exhibition is A nation that can't piss and shit, created by 42-year-old Agus Jolly of Kediri, East Java. It's a blend of different media comprising bamboo, dozens of intravenous tubes, several toilets, chamber pots, lamps and strings.
A clay sculpture Apocalypse stands nearby, presented by Benny Ronald Tahalele of Makassar, South Sulawesi, a 1981 graduate of the Jakarta Institute of the Arts (IKJ). It represents a man looking at the sky, both arms stretched but cut here and there, with 18 hypodermic needles and joss sticks piercing his shoulders, neck and chest. Is this the way that modern men seek the divine message?
Meanwhile, 49-year-old Sibolga-born feminist sculptor Dolorosa Sinaga attempts to make a close-up picture of social and physical death through her Pieta, a bronze work of 2001.
The IKJ lecturer is now active in domestic and overseas displays presenting a group of six women grieving over a dead body on their laps, with one of them screaming in contrast to the others' drooping pose.
Dolorosa's statues are characterized by an frenetic atmosphere, with mouths yelling. Her other sculpture represents a woman's figure flapping her dance garb. The hard metal is in Dolorosa's hands, softened to show the dancer's flexible swinging movement.
She's not alone in turning rigidity into flexibility. Hanung and Iriantine Karnaya also share this skill. Iriantine, now a fine art lecturer at her alma mater, the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), tries to form a pliant and stereoscopic impression through her Festival I and II. The latter is like tissue paper being pulled from its box, a flexible attitude in the process of change, even in the face of those squeezing our luck.
Hardiman Radjab comes with his surprising Message in the Bottle. The IKJ lecturer, also engaged in theater, dance, film, ads and car decoration, utilizes an old, open bag filled with water and a floating bottle bearing the word "Help!". The inner part of the bag cover is erected with the picture of a coconut tree and cloudy sky. One can imagine a tragedy and a screaming victim.
His other creation, Accordion & Lilliput, presents an accordion rendered silent for being tied up all over by dozens of Lilliputian men. This drama makes our collective memory awake to the long hard time when those in power put a bridle on freedom of speech. Now that freedom has been regained, many people lose their restraint and sometimes use harsh words, at demos as well as in the mass media.
Besides death, wanderings and prayers, life needs love as well. Sculptor Altje Ully Panjaitan ventures to give a touch of love through her work Gibran. This 1999 sculpture stands firmly like a gravestone with affectionate expressions carved on a glazed surface. And the wood chips left at its base resemble falling leaves gathered by the wind to revere the pair, Gibran and May.
Statues, according to Roedjito of the Jakarta Art Council's Committee of Arts, constitute a manifestation of the art of object-modeling or sculpture in space. Their independent existence challenges nature or open space, radiating their force into space and also absorbing space, making them more than just artistic objects.