Sudjana Kerton: A pioneer of transnationalist identity
Sudjana Kerton: A pioneer of transnationalist identity
By Astri Wright
VICTORIA, B.C., Canada (JP): The largest exhibition of Sudjana
Kerton's work opens today at the Ministry of Education and
Culture's exhibition gallery across from Gambir Station.
In the history of exhibitions of modern Indonesian art, this
one is of great importance. It marks the kind of effort that
Indonesian art history and the art public so much needs, a broad,
retrospective chance to view and discuss the work of the
generations of modern Indonesian artists now deceased.
These artists witnessed the transition from the colonial
period to Independence and fought with pen and brush (and
sometimes arms) alongside amateur soldiers and self-trained
guerrillas in the revolution.
These artists also witnessed the transition from traditional
arts to Europeanized, touristic arts, and finally to a modern art
with roots in the directly perceivable reality of Indonesian
history and society.
The first generation Indonesian artists have not yet received
their art historical due. Because art history is not yet taught
in Indonesia as a specialist discipline with its own focus, its
unique integrity and specific approaches, and because the modern
Indonesian art world is still comparatively young, the books and
articles that are published are like independent fireworks shot
into a randomly conceived space.
Although Affandi's work was very visible during most of his
long life, only a single major book has been published about him.
The art historical dimensions of his work and the meaning and
aesthetic of individual works still need to be explored further.
Major exhibitions of the work of Soedjojono and Hendra Gunawan
have yet to be held; apart from one PhD dissertation in French on
the former artist and a few scattered essays on the latter, there
is no in-depth and publicly accessible art historical writing
about these major artists.
Ahmad Sadali, Soedibio, Kartono Yudhokusumo and others have
slipped into a fog of general oblivion except in artist circles
where first-hand memories are maintained by those who are still
alive.
Artists like Basuki Abdullah, whose work was of less
importance in terms of innovation and the creation of broad
artistic movements, have received more attention because they
were good at promoting themselves.
Other artists of significance to the history of Indonesian art
-- like Zaini, Wahdi, and Nashar -- have passed away nearly
unnoticed. A very few first generation nationalist artists
remain, like Hariyadi, Amrus and many others. Will they also pass
away before their stories have been told to the public and their
art is documented from all the scattered sources in which it
exists today and is exhibited?
It is within this context that the mustering of a major
retrospective exhibition of Sudjana Kerton's work is of great
importance to artists, art students, art collectors and the
generally interested public.
Innovator
He ranks not only as one of the important nationalist artists,
but also as an important innovator in recent decades.
An artist's work is rooted in how that artist perceives, and
places, him or herself in the world in relation to important
ideas, religious practices, and community relationships. For some
artists, the self is encountered best in contrasts, new
experiences and surroundings, among strangers and foreign
customs; for others, they are encountered in the less dramatic
but equally profound journeys that take place internally and
externally, at home.
The life and work of Sudjana Kerton, born Nov. 22, 1922,
provides an eloquent illustration of this process, an example
rooted in different ways in the cultures of Sunda, Indonesia and
in America.
Sudjana's life and work seen as a whole place him
simultaneously inside and outside of Indonesian art history, as
he, in one period, followed patterns typical of first generation,
nationalist Indonesian artists, and at a later period, pioneered
patterns similar to those of younger generations of artists
emerging in the last ten years.
One might say that Sudjana Kerton's life encapsulates elements
one regularly sees over the span of several generations of
artists in Indonesia, spanning nationalist and internationalist,
local ethnic and universal concerns. His life can also be seen as
contributing to related designs traced in immigrant histories in
the "New World", where identities become bipolar or pluralistic.
Always open to change, Sudjana Kerton did not get stuck in one
psychological, cultural, stylistic or thematic mode; nor did he
slip into the inertia that early fame often spawns, in Indonesia
as elsewhere, once it has become institutionalized.
Sudjana was always on his way, moving on, while carrying his
memories with him like a snail carries its shell. He always drew,
painted and made graphic art that alternately reflected where he
was physically at the moment and the memories that were the most
important to him, memories of the shapes and forms and events of
his childhood in Sunda.
Three phases
Initially, Sudjana worked as an integral part of the
relatively small group of artists who in the 1940s pitched their
talents in with the battle for independence, working side by side
with underground soldiers, activists and politicians hunted by
the Dutch colonial police and army. He produced scores of
drawings on the battlefield, in the meetings halls during secret
underground nationalist leadership meetings, and during
international meetings like the Linggardjati meetings in 1946.
While foreign journalists took photographs of some of these
events, Sudjana documented them for Indonesian publications who
had to rely on simpler technologies of documentation and
reproduction. Some of these drawings still exist and can be seen
at the exhibition; others must still exist in surviving issues of
the newspapers, in national and colonial and research library
archives around the world.
Since most of Sudjana's early paintings were destroyed by fire
when the Dutch invaded Yogyakarta during the revolution, his most
famous painting from this period is Napitupulu, from the mid- to
late 1940s, was reproduced in the first edition of the Sukarno
collection publication (Beijing 1956, 1959). However, for some
reason this painting is missing from the second edition,
published in the early 1960s in Japan, and the whereabouts of the
painting is today unknown.
In the second phase of his career, Sudjana went abroad and
stayed, disappearing (so it seemed) from the stage of modern
Indonesian art. He spent time studying art and traveling in the
Netherlands, France and eventually America, where he enrolled at
the Art Students League in New York and settled, marrying and
fathering three children. Working at a range of different jobs,
most of them connected with his Indonesian background in some
form or other, he continued painting in new styles developed
during his studies. But the motifs and themes remained mostly
Indonesian ones.
While his work during the 1950s and early 1960s was somewhat
cool in color tonalities, and academically semi-abstract and
restrained in forms, Sudjana's visit to Mexico in 1963 caused a
radical shift in his art. Here, for the first time since leaving
Indonesia, Sudjana came in touch with another people who had
resisted colonization and carried out a revolution of their own,
in which artists like Diego Rivera had played a major role
and had, since the revolution, been recognized by the state with
major commissions of public art.
During his visit to Mexico, Sudjana's colors exploded into a
tropical intensity and richness, the human figure returned as the
most important form to be explored expressively, set against a
contrasting background, and the desire to return home to
Indonesia which had never left him seemed to increase in
intensity. This, and family circumstances in Indonesia, caused
him to return home for his first visit in 1964.
The final phase of his life and career saw Sudjana's return to
Indonesia in 1976, in his mid-fifties. Looking back, this was an
attempt to pick up, personally and professionally, where he left
off at the age of 28. The last 18 years of his life he spent in
Indonesia, leaving only on short trips to visit the U.S. and the
Netherlands. Once he had built his studio-home near the summit of
the Dago Atas mountain in Bandung, he settled into very
productive years of painting. His work from the 1980s and early
1990s is more familiar to Indonesian exhibition goers
from several solo exhibitions and numerous participations in
group shows.
To this period belong classics like Massage, Sundanese
Wedding, Wayang and Family on Motorbike.
Coming home, Sudjana brought with him the benefit of years of
study and exposure abroad to things foreign and, more
importantly, to a culture becoming increasingly influential
world-wide. With the clarifying of insight filtered through basic
personality traits that age and exile can bring, Sudjana desired
to contribute something new and different to the art world.
In particular he desired to develop teacher-student
relationships and a dialog with art students and younger artists,
having something different to offer from the experiences and
knowledge of the artists of his generation who had never left
home or had studied abroad more short-term.
He also desired to create significant mural paintings as a
contribution to public art in Indonesia. Some of his dreams were
never realized: the teaching of art had become institutionalized
during the years he was away and the role of the state and the
government vis-a-vis art patronage had changed after the end of
the Sukarno era. Sudjana's response was to just keep on
developing his art.
Art histories
With the increase in population movements (refugees, short-
and long-term immigrants and travelers) and with families split
up between continents yet maintaining contact and exchange in
several places, the way that art histories are written will
change. Art histories can no longer be exclusively limited to
histories of single nations. As the Western art and academic
worlds increasingly embrace the notion that plural cultural and
ethnic roots inform ever more complex patterns of identity and
concerns, new models of art history must be developed.
As a nationalist, Sudjana Kerton was fueled by passions of
resistance, battling destruction and imagining new forms of
construction.
As a battlefield artist and patriotic visual journalist, he
explored new ideas about society, power and government while
documenting underground activities and realities. Most
importantly, through this intensive immersion in life-and-death
action and existential reflection, Sudjana explored what it might
mean to be that new thing, an "Indonesian". As an international
traveler and eventually an emigrant, Sudjana explored yet another
level and type of art ideas, forms and media, seeking art
teachers, heroes and loves in different countries.
As an Indonesian and an artist, at home and abroad, Sudjana
Kerton explored the various aspects of his self -- his family and
cultural heritage, his memories, and his environment, testing and
seeking to give form to the various resonances that arose in the
course of his dialog with the world.
These are some of the issues which the art public
can enjoy the fruits of in the present exhibition. Apart from the
opportunity to view Sudjana Kerton's work in a broad context, it
is a first and perhaps last chance to see his early work and his
work made abroad before it disappears into private collections.
Finally, and of significance to a nationalist artist, the
exhibition is held in the space which is slated to in the near
future become Indonesia's National Gallery -- a long-overdue
fulfillment of the dream of Sukarno, later Adam Malik, and every
generation of serious Indonesian art patron since. The
exhibition runs through mid-December, with a symposium scheduled
for the second week of December.
The writer is associate professor of South and Southeast Asian
Art at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.