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