Year of Art and its meaning

By Ignas Kleden

JAKARTA (JP): On New Year's Eve President Soeharto announced that 1998 was the Year of Art and Culture in Indonesia.

And as the two ministers with the President during his announcement were Minister of Education and Culture Wardiman Djojonegoro and Minister of Tourism Joop Ave it is easy to guess that art and culture will be promoted in relation to tourism.

In a sense, tourism is a sort of cultural trade.

Indonesians go to Germany to admire the crafts which produce very refined violins or huge organs, and tourists from Hamburg and Bremen come to South Sulawesi to see how the people of Bulukumba build huge boats with their simple traditional techniques and equipment.

What are they all looking for?

Do they want to see a finished musical instrument, or a completed pinisi boat? Or are they more interested in the whole process in which craftspeople plan their work, organize the division of labor, and carry out the time- and energy-consuming tasks which bring an idea into its material and physical form?

The question is: are art and culture just artifacts and things, or a process of forming and fabricating in which a natural thing is imbued with its cultural form? Are art and culture things or works, nouns or verbs, products or production?

Obviously, they are both.

The problem is everybody looks at art and culture from a different point of view.

If I go to a performance of, say, Koma Theater in Jakarta, I will not trouble myself by thinking about the whole process of its production: the financing of the performance, the selection of theme and play, the methods and techniques of training, the division of labor and income, or the very boring negotiations with officials to get a license.

What interests me is whether the performance meets my cultural needs. Can I learn something from looking at it? Does it entertain me in one way or another? Can it make explicit a problem which only lingers vaguely in my head? Or perhaps does it provide me with an answer to a question I am grappling with?

From a consumer point of view one tends to treat a theater performance as a finished product. However, in a cultural learning process this is not enough, though it is much easier. To consume brown bread at breakfast in Jakarta is a great deal easier than trying to produce it. Eating brown bread is treating it as thing. But producing brown bread is looking at it in terms of its production process.

Culture and art do not by any means exist automatically. They are created, made and produced. One cannot imagine the existence of so many cultural goods without paying attention to the agents of cultural creation and art production: Choreographers and dancers for dance, playwrights and actors for theater, authors and publishers for novels, composers, conductors and musicians for music, craftsmen for cultural artifacts.

It would be contradictory in implementation (and in definition) to promote art and culture while at the same time being reluctant to give more opportunity and freedom to the agents of cultural production to develop their imagination and creation.

Cultural creation and art production have been spontaneous activities in many parts of Indonesia since time immemorial. This is recognized domestically and internationally.

From a consumer's point of view, promoting art and culture means improving the launching of the products, demonstrating their unique and interesting aspects and developing marketing techniques.

One cannot overestimate the importance of initiatives to enhance promotion.

From producer's point of view, promoting art and culture can be done seriously if enough initiatives are taken to motivate, enhance and facilitate the work of artists and cultural producers so that what they produce better satisfies the expectations which are brought about by sales promotion.

Without supporting cultural production cultural trade is nothing but a mirage.

If we look at many parts of the country, cultural production is something which has always been there, with or without tourism, with or without promotion.

In the traditional and modern sectors cultural creation takes place quite naturally. The young poets in Surabaya, Solo or Jember are doing their best to write, to read and to publish their poems, while their colleagues may go all out to perform a play that one of them has just written.

Young girls go regularly to the art centers in Solo and Yogya to learn the very sophisticated bedoyo dance. And at the same time people in Tasikmalaya and Cirebon keep producing their traditional hats and rattan goods, and the people of South Kalimantan preserve the art of cutting precious stones and jewels.

In other words, unlike the sports and sciences which might require motivation and subsidy from outside, art and cultural production are so deeply embedded in the traditions and consciousness of so many parts of Indonesia that even without any outside push-factor it will continue, and the quality of the sophisticated and refined products will be maintained.

The only support producers seem to need is unhampered opportunity and enough freedom to carry on doing their work. Possibility is created by their imaginations, their creative spirits, and materials available in their surroundings.

Obviously, more keris and batik will be produced by the Javanese people, not only because these are potentially saleable, but because they are a part of the identity of Javanese people.

To put it differently: one has to produce certain cultural products because in so doing one produces one's own identity.

This is something that used to be forgotten by people from outside coming in to support local cultural production. They tended to look at the products merely as something which either fit or did not fit market demand.

What is often neglected is asking whether or not proposals for improving or even financially supporting production could be detrimental to the identification of cultural producers and what they produce. If the producers' identification with what they make is seriously disturbed, people will sooner or later be trapped in a sort of cultural estrangement which in turn will be destructive to cultural production.

The same can be said of the cultural industry. One can imagine that it would do more justice to the local genius of each part of the country if the local production of cultural products was maintained and kept in their hands.

Conversely, it will do less than justice to them if production is taken over by people with big capital in the big cities, who are able to produce more, faster, in standardized form, but with much less authenticity.

This argument might sound very shaky, because what is cultural authenticity in the first place? Is it not merely the result of social production of a group of people? And, still, is identity something static, or something always on the move and on the make? So why bother about identity which is basically open to change and transformation?

The argument of course carries its own truth but this truth has its limits. Every culture is open to change, and is maintained not only through reproduction but also through reconstruction. Changes are never totally external but are part of the identification process and even of the very core of identity itself.

However, changes within a culture are those which are produced by the participants of that culture. They are the agents of their own change. In order to enable cultural changes without too many disintegrative effects, changes must be perceived by those participants as their own affair. Conversely, if those changes appear as something totally alien, originating from unidentifiable forces, people become disoriented.

The question is therefore: how do we enable our people in each local community to perceive rapid changes as something which not only affect their lives, but as new opportunities so they cope with changing patterns constructively, successfully and meaningfully?

What is to be done to make sure those changes render the locals not as victims but as beneficiaries?

One proposal is; let the local communities be the masters of their own cultural production. They should never be made to be merely craftsmen who produce for agents in the big cities. If there is a cultural trade, let it take place directly between those producers without too much intervention and manipulation by middlemen, particularly those who are practically illiterate in cultural affairs and who treat cultural products as mere commodities to be sold.

In cultural affairs, differences and pluralism are the main sources of life and creativity. The more you give the opportunity to as many flowers as possible to blossom the more beautiful it will be, the more life and creativity will grow and develop.

Conversely, if you treat cultural products as mere commodities and standardize everything in a cultural package to be sent through cultural containers, the sooner the cultural life fades away.

Cultural creativity and spontaneity will die, and one cannot predict how long it will take to restore new beginnings of that life.

Needless to say, in modern trade everything should be organized. However, organizing cultural trade is different from organizing other non-oil export goods.

In other words, cultural trade can be successful if it is treated not merely as trade. It is only one form of cultural interaction, which becomes the main source of cultural life and cultural development.

Our choice is limited; treat culture and art as items of trade and they will surely decline and die. Treat them as something living and you will have enough time to trade on it.

The writer is a sociologist based in Jakarta.