Catalogue Essay
November 2002
Exhibit I Space

Claire Wolf Krantz
Java, In Time and Memory
by Franz Schulze

Her background as a writer is evident in the title Claire Wolf Krantz has given the painting featured in this exhibition. Five words are enough to sum up the subject matter she has chosen as well as her emotional response to it. Krantz has made three trips to Java, on one occasion living there for a half a year. In the course of these visits, she studied the culture and art of Indonesia, both ancient and modern, and in the process developed an informed affection for what she discovered.

In an article in Art in America (July, 1996), she reflected on the uncommonly pluralistic character of both Indonesian society and the art produced there. Some of her own recollections of that complexity are conveyed in this imposing five-paneled canvas. She effectively leads the viewer on a walking tour through the centuries, as historic landmarks and scenes of contemporary countryside, towns and people, conveyed through her own photographs, are disposed against loosely painted passages depicting sky, mountains, rivers and fields. If the painted portions refer to things remembered, in their brushwork they appear to be treated more interpretively, while the photographs seem crisply literal by contrast. Yet closer inspection reveals that she has altered the photos to suit her expressive ends, using the computer as a tool, which sometimes changes not only the color but the size and shape of objects. And some further liberties are taken less for narrative than for purely formal reasons.

Nonetheless, the narrative dominates. In one space a bustling street scene in the city of Yogyakarta is seen up close, while in another, history takes over in the form of images, surveyed at a distance, of two of the grandest, most venerable buildings of Java, the eight to ninth century Stupa of Barabudur, a Hindu temple, and the tenth century Buddhist Siva temple group at Prambanam. Nearby a mosque of much later vintage appears behind ruins of Hindu temples that were demolished after the Muslims assumed command of the land. Krantz's intention, to show how cultures sometimes violently replace each other, adds a political dimension to her story that has been born of her experience in Java and all she learned about the post-World War II struggle of the Indonesians to assert their national identity while gaining independence from the Dutch.

Anyone familiar with Krantz's work will recognize her personal manner of playing photography off against painting. It has long been her way of articulating a belief that information can be processed at multiple levels, with the literal connecting to the expressive and yielding a form that constitutes an image of the artist's experience. What gives this particular painting a special place in the body of her work - evidence enough from the title and the scale - is her accumulated knowledge of the subject and her intimate identification with it.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.