The rosy slant of mainstream RI paintings

By Chandra Johan

JAKARTA (JP): The late Indonesian art critic Sanento Yuliman described the negative flip side to a commercial art boom.

When art enters the world of big business, collectors, patrons and commercial galleries come aboard in droves. Yuliman referred to the "impoverishment" and "provincialism" in genre, media and techniques which often accompany this development, as painters cling to rigid subjects and themes which they believe are more marketable.

Mainstream modern Indonesian painting conforms to Yuliman's observation. Witness the painting exhibitions, both individual and group, in hotels and galleries. The medium is nearly always oil or acrylic, practically excluding the use of other media. While a few painters do use charcoal, pastel or pencil, their works are not favored by galleries or buyers.

Mixed media was popular in the 1970s but is now a rarity. There is also the rejection of the art forms produced by painters in the past. This narrowing of the acceptable inevitably translates into a diminishing of the aesthetic experience.

The recent painting exhibition organized by the Indonesian Arts Foundation at the Regent Hotel in Jakarta included a set of requirements for prospective exhibitors. One of these was that all paintings should not stray from a joyous theme.

This penchant for the upbeat and positive has actually emerged as a dominant marker of the contemporary painting scene.

Works are so often defined by safety, security and comfort, glowing as part of a peaceful, sweet and joyful existence. Troubling subjects which may disturb viewers are banished from the canvas.

Realistic paintings depicting the burdens of the common man, once the main theme of many painters, have been shunted aside. Painters such as Semsar Siahaan, Agus Suwage and Dede Eri Supria continue to focus on social problems but they are a rare breed.

When the man on the street is featured in mainstream paintings, his features have been polished to a benign softness as he reflects with nostalgia on life back in the village.

Indonesian paintings now offer compositions which are more limited in scope than those in the past. One seldom comes across complex or intricate compositions, especially on the border between order and crisis. What we repeatedly see are compositions expressing order according to the benevolent Gestalt principle. They are compositions that do not demand mental ability to digest and understand the structure and harmony in the paintings. This does not mean the compositions are not successful as art works. Many of these paintings are artistically accomplished pieces.

The problem is that the subjects are centered almost exclusively on happiness, to the exclusion of other genre and themes. That which does not conform to this accepted view of a worthy subject is inevitably demeaned within the art world.

The narrowing of the artistic horizon means isolation from the international stage, exactly what Yuliman described as provincialism.

Indonesian art is not internationally-oriented, cosmopolitan or even metropolitan. A lack of appreciation for media like pencils, charcoal, Chinese ink and watercolors indicates that Indonesian artists do not comprehend the masterworks painted with those media. They do not understand the viability of Chinese and Japanese classical paintings or modern Western painters famed for their use of the same media.

"Art may be good, bad or indifferent," painter Marcel Duchamp once said. "But whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way as bad emotion is still an emotion." If we truly believe that art is rooted in emotion, then that which is negative and melancholic about us, our "bad" feelings, still qualify as deserving subjects for us to paint.