Surabaya festival will put city on national arts stage

Surabaya festival will put city on national arts stage

By Sarah E. Murray

SURABAYA (JP): There's a story about Pak Amang Rachman, the
painter, one of Surabaya's famous native sons. It goes like this:
Pak Amang likes to go to Jakarta from time to time and takes his
wife. They always stay at the guest house at Taman Ismail Marzuki
(TIM) art center. Once, they went to Jakarta, checked into the
TIM guest house and immediately went to eat at one of the many
small food stalls that line the parking lot. They met a young
arts journalist and critic who recognized Pak Amang and struck up
a conversation with him and his wife. As it happens, this
journalist was also a woman. As it happens, she was also
beautiful. And smart. And a good conversationalist. The talk
continued for a long time, and Pak Amang and the beautiful
journalist became involved in a knotty technical discussion about
painting. They left the stall together to go to the nearby
gallery to continue the discussion in front of some paintings.
Many hours later, Pak Amang suddenly remembered he had left his
wife at the stall. Oh my! The problem was, there was only one key
to their room at the guest house -- and it was in Pak Amang's
pocket!

He immediately rushed back to the food stall to find his wife
no longer there. He went to the guest house, and found her there,
sitting outside crying and sniffling. "Oh my! You're so cruel!
You've gone off with that beautiful woman and left me here
alone!" his wife sobbed. "After so many years, how could you just
abandon our marriage like that?" "Well, you're right," Pak Amang
said, "she is young, and beautiful, and smart." His wife sobbed
even harder. "And rich," he added. "Any man would be happy to
have her." Her sobbing reached new peaks. "I would certainly be
happy with her," he said. He stroked his white mustache
meditatively. "But, the question is, would she be happy with me?
I don't know. I'm not young. Allah knows, I'm not handsome. I'm
not very smart either. And I'm certainly not rich. Who, after
all, would take me? Who could I make happy?" He thought for a
moment while looking at his wife. "I don't think anyone but you."
His wife tried to hide the smile that came through the tears, but
she wasn't entirely successful. "Yes, after all," Pak Amang
repeated, "who else would have me?"

Surabaya is a bit like Pak Amang: a bit disheveled, a bit
naughty, a wicked sense of humor, drawn to Jakarta by its glamor
and promise as the center, hoping and needing to be recognized
and accepted just as it is. But Surabaya feels it is not
attractive or interesting enough to be accepted by her bigger,
richer, more beautiful and more cosmopolitan cousin. In the world
of art alone, Pak Amang's world, Surabaya has given birth to
talented painters, writers and dancers but is rarely included on
the arts map of Indonesia.

Ready

The recent exhibition of 11 painters from Surabaya at Bentara
Budaya in Jakarta was a small effort to overcome this neglect.
But Surabaya, the perpetual also-ran of Indonesian cities, the
number two with a lot to prove, is ready to emerge into the
national and international spotlight in a big way. And it isn't
depending on Jakarta to do it, either.

On May 31, the Surabaya Arts Festival, a month-long festival
offering theater performances, music, poetry, fine art, video,
and seminars on art from local, national and international
figures will open at the Gedung Negara Grahadi. It is as
ambitious in scope as the Jakarta Arts Festival that ran last
year at TIM, but the difference is that it is entirely a private
effort -- the first such arts festival in the country.

Seeded by a grant of Rp 150 million (US$64,000) from the
regional media power, the Jawa Pos publishing group, the festival
is also expecting support in cash and in kind from other local
businesses and private individuals. The organizing committee is
also promoting the idea of festival memberships at various
levels, a concept common in Western art worlds but rarely
encountered in Indonesia where the commercialization of art is
still a new and sometimes uncomfortable phenomenon.

This fact of private sponsorship alone was enough to attract
attention from Australia. Last year, after the first year of the
festival (under a different name), members of the organizing
committee, including the head Kadaruslan, were invited to Perth
to observe the ArtRage festival there. In Perth, they signed a
memorandum of understanding about future exchanges between Perth
and the Surabaya Arts Festival.

One result of that exchange is that this year, two Australian
groups are confirmed as participants in the festival: Black Swan
theater group, and Mike Burns and his wayang (shadow puppetry)
Kelly group. (see sidebar)

Another and perhaps more significant result is the shape of
this year's organizing committee. Learning from the organization
of the ArtRage festival and discussions with Perth artists and
arts administrators, the Surabaya Arts Festival organizers
decided to split the administrative and curatorial functions in
two. The administrative committee is responsible for all
financial and administrative matters, including arranging venues,
handling correspondence with invited artists, and making
arrangements for the accommodation of out-of-town participants.
The artistic board, headed by noted Surakarta choreographer and
dancer Sardono W. Kusumo, has only one job: to develop the
criteria for selecting participants and choosing who will be
invited.

Administrative committee member Henri Nurcahyo, who is in
charge of publications, explains that they thought this would
solve the problem of nepotism that cropped up last year. "We
learned from last year's experience. The organizing committee
members were also the people who had the right to choose the
artists to be invited. Lots of people who had personal
relationships with the committee members asked to be invited. And
of course, it was hard to refuse them. The result was that the
festival didn't have a strong enough focus."

Clear

This year, the focus is clear (although it is only being
communicated to artists after the selections have been made).
First of all, the festival is eschewing established stars (which
includes Pak Amang) in favor of highlighting younger promising
artists. Secondly, it seeks to put forward artists who create in
more than one field or medium. Thirdly, although it is being
selective and wants to accept only high quality works, it is not
forwarding any pretension of selecting "the best" or "the top"
(which is partly why it is not including already established
"stars" with recognized talent). Instead, the festival, although
national in scope, aims to focus on Surabayan artists who are
unique in some way and/or are particularly important figures in
the Surabaya arts world. Some of these artists are indeed
acclaimed as among the best in their fields while others are
worthy of note and attention for other reasons.

For example, artist Nurzolis Koto is an artist who has
received little attention from the mainstream Indonesian fine
arts world. He has also not enjoyed the kind of commercial
success many other painters have enjoyed in recent years -- both
because he paints in a challenging abstract style and because he
is reluctant to become caught up in the commercial carnival that
he feels the current art world has become. A ceramicist and
sculptor as well as a painter, Nurzolis is one of a small group
of dedicated teachers trying to sustain the one serious fine arts
school in Surabaya, the privately run Wilwaktikta School of Arts.
He is also a dedicated documentarian of Indonesian fine art, with
the most extensive and best organized fine arts clippings file in
the country, dating back to the beginning of the New Order --
which he generously allows other artists and researchers to
peruse. The festival will honor Nurzolis's contributions to the
Surabaya art world, and his 50th birthday, with a one-man
retrospective of his works in all media.

Henri and Pak Amang are two of the big motors behind the arts
festival, and they, along with a devoted core of others in the
Surabaya arts world, plan to ensure that the festival will not
just make a big splash and then disappear, like so many
activities and organizations in Indonesia. "We've already set up
a foundation, the Surabaya Arts Foundation, to become the
official supporting organization. My plan is that as soon as this
year's festival is over, we'll already begin planning and raising
money for next year's festival," explained Henri while sitting in
the sparsely furnished office on Jl. Sumatra that serves as both
his and the festival's home.

It's easy to believe Henri, because he is a man with a
mission. He explains, "Surabayans have a reputation for being
arrogant. And it's true, you know, someone like me who wants to
organize a festival like this, with artists from all over
Indonesia, not to mention overseas. Even though there aren't yet
clear sources of funding other than the promise of the Java Pos
to provide Rp 150 million, even though we've already calculated
we'll need Rp 350 million. Yeah, that's arrogant. In such a short
time too! We began only in January. From a technical point of
view, yes, that's arrogant. From the point of view of art as
well, it's arrogant -- to want Surabaya to emerge as a center of
art and not wanting just Jakarta alone to become the center. But
with the emergence of this festival, maybe the famed arrogance of
Surabaya will become meaningful."

Even though it has not looked to them for funding, the
festival has not eschewed cooperation with government-sponsored
arts and culture agencies. Aribowo, the head of Dewan Kesenian
Surabaya, the city-sponsored arts council, sits on the organizing
committee as do members of the regional Ministry of Education and
Culture. The governor of East Java himself will open the festival
in a grand ceremony in the state building, Grahadi, on the
evening of May 31.

The festival could in fact not be mounted without such
cooperation, as the number of suitable spaces for arts events are
few and they need to use them all, including the government-owned
and run Balai Pemuda, home of Dewan Kesenian Surabaya, which will
also serve as the center of the festival. They are scrounging up
every space they can, including open spaces in the Surabaya and
Tunjungan shopping plazas and public rooms in Surabaya hotels.
The thinking of the organizers is the reverse of Kevin Costner's
character in Field of Dreams: build the event, and the buildings
will come. Indeed, eventually they hope that the on-going
presence of the festival will both raise funds and consciousness
towards the building of a real arts center that is worthy of
Surabaya's 3 million-plus population and status as second-largest
city in Indonesia.

Right now, the festival is nothing more than a large
whiteboard calendar on the wall scrawled with the names of
artists and groups already scheduled to appear and a gleam in the
eye of the organizing committee. But come the end of May, the
lights will go up and the show will go on: and Surabaya will have
its chance to strut its stuff, to Indonesia, and, it hopes, the
world. It may not want to "marry" the cosmopolitan wealth, polish
and style of Jakarta. It may be content with its old ways, its
rough-and-tumble nature. However, like Pak Amang and his Jakarta
journalist, Surabaya will certainly not be unhappy to attract
Jakarta's attention -- if only in the end to refuse her advances
and reaffirm the old, comfortable values of home.