Wianta's Dream Land?: A show in blood

Wianta's Dream Land?: A show in blood

Jean Couteau, Contributor, Denpasar, Bali

Wianta's exhibition at Gaya Fusion of Arts Gallery in Ubud, Bali,
is at first glance a strange show indeed.

One enters the place in total darkness, a torch in hand,
hesitating, the walls black. Then, as the beam pierces the
darkness, the elements of the show appear one by one. On the
ground a large mound of rice, shaped in the form of the island of
Bali, with skeletons scattered over part of it, and with two
Balinese bamboo shrines standing at its other end.

But this is nothing compared to what appears next. Red
"paintings" are hung on the walls. At first, they look abstract,
in the manner of "classical" action paintings, but as the torch
focuses on them, one after the other, horror appears. These
paintings have been painted not in any old red pigment, but in
blood -- in the blood, I was told later, of cows slaughtered at
the Denpasar abattoir, blood spread by Wianta himself on his
waiting canvas. And, hold your breath! The paint is a transparent
wash beneath which appear real scenes of horror: aggrandized
photographs of the October bombing in Kuta. Not just any
photographs, these, but the kind that one doesn't see on TV or in
newspapers, which censor them out of a "sense of decency".

Presented hidden, yet visible in semi-transparence behind the
wash of blood, they illustrate the sudden eruption of death: a
burned, blackened limb sticking out of a car window; limbs, heads
and bowels heaped on each other in the corner of a hospital room;
a calcified corpse on a stretcher; the sprawled body of a dead
man. Wianta thus purposely selects the photographs that represent
"instant" images of horror and picture in the most unbearable way
the consequences of "Evil" incarnate, and he paints them in
blood.

On one level, such a show can be construed as a statement -- a
statement of repulsion -- about the real and symbolic presence of
blood in Bali. The island of Bali, the artist's birthplace, has
been suddenly transformed from an imaginary "Dream Land" into a
land of pain and death in the wake of the Oct. 12, 2002,
terrorist bombings. Blood has become a real presence, and it
looms over the future. The artist uses blood as a way to protest,
warn, and cry in awe.

There is also a Balinese aspect to Wianta's installation. To
the Balinese, the shedding of blood is a sign of cosmic disorder.
This disorder is ritually treated in a "reversed" use of
violence: by the shedding of blood as offerings (tabuh rah).
Blood, which heretofore symbolized death then becomes, through
the offering, the blood of life. To this reference to offerings
must be added the 2 shrines set on the mound of rice. Yet, in
spite of these Balinese allusions, the installation is more than
the duplicate of a rite of exorcism. It is, by its very daring, a
gesture of distancing, and hence an act of "modernity", not of
faith.

Wianta is in fact featuring a simulacrum of an exorcism to
invite us to think. Laying bare the impotence of his tradition --
the Balinese offerings -- to deal with actual violence, he seems
to be telling us that the recourse to rites and religion may
indeed be fine and well intentioned, but it is bound to fail. To
cope with violence, he suggests, one has first to acknowledge its
presence, and then expose its ills if need be by using outrageous
allegories such as blood and suffering. Thus Wianta is inviting
us to face the bloodied reality of Bali, of Indonesia, and indeed
of the world, and to confront it in the only realistic and
efficacious way open to us: through consciousness. Only then will
healing follow.

What about the exhibition of photographs of death? These
photographs are not there to simply create a moral sensation.
They can be construed as a questioning of, and protest against,
the way representation and reality are dealt with in the media.

By taking the obscenity of the images to its utmost limit
through the visualization of the unbearable, Wianta is telling us
that the media don't represent "the" objective reality. Rather,
they select the images and henceforth create a new, autonomous
"reality", the product of politics and marketing as well as of
our unquenchable thirst for images. It eventually becomes a de-
dramatized show of non-reality, or rather, borrowing
Beaudrillard's word, a "hyperreality". As reality thus disappears
behind its mediated construction, authentic horror continues to
be allowed to occur, and to go on unnoticed, or to wait to burst
into the open, as tragically illustrated by the situation in
Iraq.

Indeed, watching Wianta's exhibition the humanity in us
protests. It leaves us disgusted, haunted by nightmarish images,
perhaps even physically ill. We ask whether such a show is
immoral, then wonder whether morality is even relevant to an
evaluation of such art. His exhibition is indeed violent and
provocative, but it is also clear that Wianta has extracted
morality from horror itself and that the usual sense of the word
doesn't fit easily here. A moral evaluation is all the more
problematic because perception and the medium through which the
horror is viewed are an integral part of the exhibition. The
artist exposes himself within his work as both a denunciator and
a manipulator of the media. As previously suggested, the media
thrive on horror and create a second degree of horror, that of
its banalisation through hyperreality; the artist thrives on this
representation of horror created by the media. But here the
reality is too powerful. Neither the media nor Wianta's addition
of a third degree of horror -- that of the manipulative artist
who will use anything, including horror, to enhance his media
recognition and satisfy his narcissistic obsession -- can wash
this reality away. The result is a strange clarity, a view of the
nude narcissistic creator who dares to denounce all the levels of
horror with which he is faced. It is precisely through his
ambiguous use of horror for expressive purposes that Wianta is
able to generate enough clarity to denounce the media's use of
horror and the reality of horror itself.

Wianta's show should thus be construed as a loud, daring,
lonely, scream among all the hushed men and women stricken by the
terror of evil. His is an absolute scream, in which he forgets
that he should be human because he can't be; he suddenly
discovers, and then uncovers, evil itself.

But Wianta's scream is more than protest. It is symbolic art
at its most vivid. Here the Balinese side of the work rejoins the
contemporary one. The world Wianta represents is made of rice and
is therefore life itself. The bones and human remains are symbols
of death and represent the natural, cosmic opposites of life. The
blood with which he paints the horrific photographs is the blood
of the awareness of blood, and hence the blood of life. The
message is therefore cosmic, in a Hindu sense, but also in a
universal one. The blood of awareness is also the blood of hope.
To darkness will succeed light -- as fireflies released on the
opening day announced; to impurity purity; and to death life, as
the artist's show itself should make clear to us. Ultimately Made
Wianta is an artist and a demiurge. His show is an attempt to
create meaning out of the horror of reality and the deception of
hyperreality. He teaches us how to scream and to live as humans
must.

Well rooted in the artist's culture, relevance, imagination,
and most of all earnestness, Wianta's Dream Land has all the
hallmarks of a great contemporary artistic event. The artist, to
this day often controversial, is reaching in this work the peak
of his career. His show should draw much public attention at the
Venice Biennalle, where it is scheduled to be exhibited.

The exhibition runs until May 15 at Gaya Fusion of Arts Gallery
Jl. Raya Sayan, Ubud, Gianyar. Phone: 0361-979253. Fax: 0361-975895.
email: gaya@gayafusion.com