Video workshop digs artistic possibility

By Helly Minarti

JAKARTA (JP): Alongside mainstream artistic expressions such as painting and sculpting, video art has emerged as a new medium serving the same purpose. It has been widely developed in Europe over the last two decades; there are now some video art museums and regularly held festivals on that continent, like the Biennale Venezia in Italy or Documenta Kassel in Germany. But video art is relatively new for Indonesian artists.

To explore this new artistic possibility the Goethe Institut in cooperation with Yogyakarta-based PUSKAT audio visual center, the Indonesia Art Institute (ISI) and the Institution of Javanese Study recently invited two video artists from Germany and France to collaborate in a two-week workshop with 12 artists and practitioners from Yogyakarta.

The participants came from various backgrounds including practitioners (editors, directors, computer graphic animators and cameramen), artists (painters), and art institute lecturers as well as students majoring in broadcasting.

The result is a 36-minute edited video, titled Tanda Api (Signs of Fire), which is divided into 12 parts showing many scenes associated with fire.

It was displayed in Galeri Ardiyanto in Yogyakarta for two weeks and now can be seen in Teguh Galeri, Jl. Gaharu 1/3, Cilandak, South Jakarta, up to Dec. 3.

The husband-wife video artists, Gerard Couty, 48, of France and Rotraut Pape, 41, of Germany, led the workshop in a more idea exchange-style rather than a teaching-learning experience.

In the morning, they presented some video art works from their suitcase collection to the participants so as to give some view of the video art world as well as to generate some creative thinking. The rest of the day was spent in group discussion, filming and editing.

"Firstly we came up with four themes to work with. These were fire, bamboo, traveling and words and images," said Pape whose video art works were shown several times in Jakarta in 1995 and early 1997.

"We were all happy with the theme of fire right away because it's very political in a way, and (it has a relation to actual) ecological problems. It's also very visual -- you can have black fire, blue fire, red fire, cold and hot fire," added Pape. Philosophically, "fire also can mean the beginning and the end of social life".

Then Couty and Pape provided stimulation to carry the idea of fire further by quoting the famous statement of French author, Georges Perec in his book, Je me souviens (I remember). Pape used this simple statement as a trigger to dig out ideas from every participant. Only two hours after the first session, they put everyone on camera to express their personal memory of fire in their own words. The diversity of thoughts simply flew, creating raw material for their video workshop.

"I was astonished to see how easily the participants reacted on camera. You really have an oral culture," said Pape. This collection of ideas led into some experimental shots of fire with matches and candles at the end of the first day of the workshop.

Over the next 11 days they explored all possibilities around the theme -- both technically and from the idea base. They worked with the input sentences, chose the best, made new ones and started to build up a scenario based on that.

The next step was to film the desired images using the sentences as the clue. The participants were grouped into three to make the work faster. What came up was an experimental musical loop (a technique of repetition), images using a different style of direction such as performance style, documentary or narrative direction.

The 12 parts of the video reflect the manifold creative approaches of each participant though they used the same scenes.

"You can see the 'handwriting'," said Pape pointing at some visual effects applied by different groups to the same scene. These include super imposing, fast cutting or looping.

The technical aspects: the lighting, the sound and composition, were discussed in the workshop.

"There's nothing new in terms of technique from this workshop, but it is new in terms of searching for alternative forms in expressing artistic works. It's a totally new phenomenon," said one participant, Arif Eko Suprihono, 34, a director of documentary film and lecturer at the Indonesia Art Institute in Yogyakarta.

New Medium

But what actually is video art after all? According to Pape and Couty, the essence of video art is exactly the same as other artistic forms.

"Like any form of art, you can not strip the works out from the content," explained Pape, a guest lecturer in the Hochschule der Kunst (The Institute of Art) in Berlin.

"It's basically a continuation of art, only using a new technical aspect, video, as a new medium for doing art," added Couty, who once taught at the Institute of Art of Nancy.

"Video art is like a window to look into the world and subjectivity of people's minds," said Pape. This role is totally different to the more popular function of video as a visual communication medium, as commonly used in making television programs the goal of which is to be understandable for a mass audience.

Besides, as a new creative field in exploring ideas, video art also infuses many forms of technical effect that in turn affect the commercial world of video. "For example the technique of scratching film in MTV's music videos was taken from video art works," said Couty. Creative people from advertising also flock into video art museums and festivals to "steal" ideas for their TV commercials.

The couple will show the video made during the workshop at several video art festivals in Europe. "I'm sure it will be shown worldwide," said Pape. While in Indonesia, progress takes its course. "We have scheduled a special section to show video art works in next year's Yogyakarta Art Festival in June-July. We hope we can make our own video art festival later on," said Suprihono.