Voices of the past inform RI's contemporary arts

Voices of the past inform RI's contemporary arts

Soul, Spirit and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary
Indonesian Painters
Astri Wright
Oxford University Press
Oxford Singapore, New York
1994, 328 pages.

JAKARTA (JP): In order to achieve a greater understanding of
the contemporary art of Indonesia, Astri Wright, who holds a
doctoral degree in art history and Southeast Asian studies from
Cornell University, takes those reading her book on a journey
through recent Indonesian history, with occasional enlightening
excursions deeper into the past.

Without knowledge of ancient faiths, superstitions, customs
and ways of thinking, the contemporary art of Indonesia would
remain a mystery and continue to be viewed as an irrelevant
anachronism in the eyes of mainstream international art.

Wright, whose study of Asian art began in 1982, with a special
focus on Southeast Asia and Indonesia emerging in 1987, presents
not a book as such, but rather a discussion of Indonesia's
contemporary art. Most interesting perhaps, she focuses on how
the contemporary artists of Indonesia perceive and orient
themselves in the midst of a clash between their diverse cultural
heritage and the present with its impetus toward economic and
cultural development.

In her informative, lively text, Wright delves into the
question of "... who really is the artist...?" She also makes the
insightful point that "In the modern era, in Indonesia, as
elsewhere, it is by no means certain that ... the artist's
concept ... arises from the same ideas that inform the audience".

In order to better inform the audience, Wright begins with a
brief overview of Indonesian art history, ranging from the
beliefs and symbols of the distant past, including the "mountain"
mentioned in the title of her book, to the specific history of
modern and contemporary Indonesian art.

Throughout the book, the author consistently adheres to the
principle that the artist must be heard. And unlike most volumes
on Indonesian art, this one allows women artists to have their
say as well as men. The voices of the past and their links to the
present are woven carefully together into the fabric of the book.

The first segment of Part I: The Mountain as Metaphor for the
Spiritual explores the art and thinking of the past, while
linking that influence to the currents and trends flowing through
modern and contemporary Indonesian art.

In the section of part one titled Soul, Spirit and Mountain,
Wright effectively links the images produced by the artists of
Indonesia's past and those produced by the archipelago's artists
of today.

She explains "The ideas surrounding the image of the mountain
in modern Indonesia resonate against millennia-old preoccupations
with the soul and with spirit power ... These ideas have
metamorphosed slowly during centuries ... Continuing into the
modern era of nationalism and industrialization, they have
changed but were never wholly lost."

In the section of the first part titled Transition from `Soul'
to `Psyche' the author takes the reader a step further into
understanding the development of Indonesian art through an
explanation of how the view of the mountain as a metaphor for a
spiritual world view shifted to that of a view in which
psychological dimensions are emphasized.

Wright says of this shift in perception that, "...the mountain
is seen more as graph of society, with its pattern of social
interaction and ways of perceiving power and selfhood. In the
artists' lives and the work discussed here, ideas about soul and
spirit are still present but with psychological overtones; ideas
about the influence of social realities on individual fate and
personality also play a role..."

Wright attributes this in part to the influence of western art
and thought as well as to modernization and a more secularized
education and a new emphasis on personal experience.

It is in this segment of the book that Wright brings the focus
most closely to bear on individual artists, which gives the book
a richness and depth often lacking in academic works that focus
more exclusively on the aspects of esthetics and art history.

She cites Affandi, who died in Yogyakarta in 1990 at the age
of 83, as among the first Indonesian painters to involve in
himself and his art with the human condition. Affandi probed the
emotional experiences of human beings from the time of birth to
death in colorful paintings done over 60 years in a decidedly
individual manner involving the squeezing of paint directly from
the tube onto the canvas.

In this segment, she also takes a look at what she calls "a
notable group of young painters" working in a range of
"surrealist" styles. Again she observes a shift toward the
depiction of the human condition, "the transience of human life,
and the tension felt by the individual caught between life's
existential experience and the demands of communal life."

In the first segment of Part II of the book, titled The
Mountain as Metaphor for Society, the author carries her basic
premise further by pointing out another shift in perception
taking place in the modern era. "The inclusion of divine,
mystical, and magical forces as aspects of reality (and therefore
of society) still persists, but these are no longer always
automatically placed at the center of explanations of causality;
something of a separation between the 'sacred' and the 'secular'
takes place," she writes. The art and artists discussed in this
section of the book show the influence of ideas introduced after
Islam and further shaped during the nationalist movement,
independence and the political upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s.

Among the most interesting aspects of this book are Wright's
observations on the impact the political changes occurring in
Indonesia between 1945 and the early 1980s. She cites in
particular the pendulum swings in art between intense concern
about the people's socio-economic and psychological experiences
to a preoccupation with art as the focus of personal expression.

Wright also points out that "For reasons both cultural and
political, modern Indonesian art does not explore the same range
of ideas and styles as seen in modern art movements in the West.
From the Western point of view, such differences in the modern
art of non-Western cultures have been interpreted as signifying
underdevelopment; from the Indonesian point of view, however,
they reflect a different set of conditions, challenges and
preoccupations."

The final segment of Wright's discussion of modern and
contemporary Indonesian art in relation to its cultural heritage
is concerned with the question of whether there is an "Indonesian
esthetic".

She says, "Any discussion of an Indonesian esthetic must treat
it as a pluralistic phenomenon which includes ... the variety of
existing and potential solutions to form and content within the
context of life in Indonesia."

In all, this well-researched volume, with its wealth of
striking color and black and white reproductions, is a fine
addition to the far too few scholarly and in-depth studies that
have been done of modern Indonesian art to date.

-- Margaret Agusta