Art in America,
July, 1996

Report from Indonesia
On Their Own Terms
by Claire Wolf Krantz

In a pluralistic society scattered across 3,000 miles of ocean, Indonesians are melding traditional arts, group identity, nationhood and international modernism.

Nowhere are the tensions between artistic spheres and cultural identities more evident an in Indonesia, a country whose flourishing contemporary art addresses these differences. An agglomeration of islands with widely varying histories geographies and traditions, Indonesia is culturally pluralistic and multifaceted. While the country's contemporary art is of course influenced by the West, outsiders find it difficult to interpret what Western images and ideas actually mean to Indonesians and how they are used to further Indonesian concerns. Visitors must constantly remember that local factors mold imported styles art works which only tangentially refer to their sources.

My understanding of these factors grew during he six months in which I lived in the ancient Javanese city of Yogyakarta and traveled extensively throughout Java and Bali researching Indonesian art. I spoke to artists, academicians, gallery and museum directors and journalists, as well as to American art historians, anthropologists and USIA personnel who provided introductions and reading Is and suggested interpretations for an often confusing welter of impressions and information.

This Southeast Asian nation of more than 3,000 Islands stretches for 3,000 miles along the equator. The population of 190 million includes some 300 ethnic groups. Indonesia is an intensely spiritual country in which present-day beliefs and traditions stem from loose layerings of indigenous animism, plus Hinduism and Buddhism imported from India, along with the late arrivals Islam and Christianity. Islam predominates in most places, including Java, the political and commercial center. These complex religious circumstances plus shifting regional political definitions and trading alliances mix with the more recent Asian and Western influences.

Indonesia's 350-year history as a Dutch colony and hard-won independence since 1949 shape its peoples’ self-images and their ideas about art. Dutch influence lingers in the Indonesian language as well as in engineering projects such as flood control and architecture. (For example, the roofs of many middle-class houses sport terra-cotta tiles similar to those found in Holland, although the rooflines still have the shape of village thatch roofs.) The country was virtually closed to external influences from 1950 to 1965, when Sukarno's government, in its drive towards nationalism and self-determination, championed the nonaligned-nations movement. Use of English and Dutch languages and reading matter were curtailed, limiting many artists' access to international art currents and hindering their understanding of Western ideas. On the other hand, because visual information was generally available, Indonesian artists integrated the "look" of many Western styles into their own idioms, just as Picasso borrowed the look of African masks but not their meaning.Today, young Indonesian artists and critics are more familiar with Western theories and thinking about art, although they often question the relevance of these imports.

Jakarta is the commercial hub for art in Indonesia. There, government- sponsored exhibition and performance spaces such as Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM) have showcased Indonesian artists since the 1970s in exhibitions aimed at local and international audiences, and have more recently stimulated the development of additional nonprofit and commercial galleries. However, Yogyakarta in Central Java, Bandung in West Java and the island of Bali are Indonesia's three centers for artistic and theoretical development, each with a small number of dedicated contemporary galleries as well as government- sponsored cultural centers, art schools, art festivals and competitions which both stimulate and control the exhibition of art. Artists and critics in these centers have developed distinct philosophies regarding what constitutes the Indonesian character and its expression via artistic styles and subjects.

The contemporary style the Indonesians call "traditional" or "decorative" originated in traditional Hindu story paintings, created for ritual, didactic and expressive purposes, in which fine drawings are colored with muted plant and mineral pigments and organized in flat, crowded compositions where all available spaces are filled. The traditional versions are still found on Balinese temple and palace walls, in fabric designs, in books and calendars. The contemporary works are esthetic objects which, to initiates, carry symbolic meanings and magical potency. Subjects are identified by status, family and geography. These works supplement the ancient stories and rituals with secular subjects such as landscape and village scenes, foliage and wildlife, and depictions of dance, musical events and puppet theater. Because of its esthetic appeal, the "traditional/decorative" style is prevalent in tourist art, yet it remains an important source for serious Indonesian painting as well.

Naturalistic painting is another ubiquitous Indonesian style. It was adopted first in Bali during the late 19th century by artists who admired and identified with the Dutch. Their recording of village life, usually in an idyllic and nostalgic manner, became the basis for a type of realism that they believed expressed Indonesian identity, and that style continues to be a strong force in all Indonesian art.

Contemporary Javanese art is syncretic. Artists are interested in dealing with international as well as local or nationalistic issues and using multiple sources for their work. They have consistently integrated modern subjects and techniques into their mixed traditions. Belief in the efficacy and symbolic value of gods and spirits coexists with Muslim tenets. The esthetic result of all this is a wide range of painting styles with abstracted codes for ideas, feelings and behavior.

Beginning in the 1940s and '50s, Yogyakarta, an ancient Javanese center of culture, became the scene of intense debates about how artists could participate in defining a national identity. Choice of subjects was one means of addressing identity questions. Important references include Hindu dances, wayang kulit (shadow puppet theater) and the great Buddhist and Hindu monuments, as well as Islamic calligraphy reproducing texts from the Koran-still-vital symbols of religious, social and cultural beliefs. All expressions of national identity inevitably reflect the social hierarchy. Because the aristocracy developed and controlled certain cultural forms and their meanings-such as the movements and costumes of certain dances, batik patterns, designs for the flat leather puppets of the wayang kulit - these modes are today associated with refinement and sophistication. Other rituals and entertainments -- the "horse dances" (trance dances), wayang berber (storytelling scrolls) and street theater-evolved in the villages and urban neighborhoods. Stylistically cruder and more direct, these are associated with the lower classes.

Some artists, such as the influential painter Widayat1 (b. 1923), embrace aspects of the "traditional/decorative" style as a vehicle for mysticism and symbolism, which have always been strong elements of Javanese culture. Widayat and his followers also have been influenced by the work of Western artists such as Henri Rousseau and Jean Dubuffet (both artists appeal to Indonesian preferences for imagination and fantasy), and they have developed an energized, cartoonlike figurative drawing style superficially resembling Art Brut as well as Chicago Imagism.

Widayat's drawing of a wayang character signifies a whole set of associated traits, stories and lessons. His landscapes carry both private and public meanings, and his figurative elements evoke mythological or historical beings and events. His oil "Watching a Free Soccer Match" (1991) depicts children perched on the branches of a centrally placed tree that resembles the gunungan, the leather puppet which begins and ends the scenes of the wayang kulit. The gunungan's traditional shape and symbolism are amalgams of the sacred mountain and the tree of life, filled with animals and birds. Widayat's tree is surrounded by other landscape elements, abstract forms and enlarged leaves that are themselves shaped like smaller gunungans. While Widayat's earlier paintings are nuanced and elegant, the most recent works break away from tradition with harsh acrylic colors, angular, violent drawings and contemporary sociopolitical references.

In conjunction with early debates on the establishment of new nationalistic images, a group of influential artists including Affandi, Soedjojono and Hendra Gunawan, whose ideas had been influenced during the War of Independence in which they participated as artist/witnesses and as fighters, proposed highly charged symbolic figuration and landscape painting as appropriate idioms. They rejected both the "traditional/decorative" and naturalistic styles because of their association with colonialism. Previously valued romantic landscape paintings were labeled "Mooie Indies" ("Beautiful Indies" in Dutch) and damned for presenting an Indonesia of Western fantasy. These artists rejected the bright, cheerful colors of "Mooie Indies" painting (today cranked out for tourists) and used dark colors and active brushwork to express the brooding seriousness of their esthetic goals and the hard lives of the common people they depicted.

The exquisite, emotionally gripping, expressionistic paintings of Affandi (1907-1990) are highly revered by his peers. Clearly influenced by Western expressionism, Affandi painted landscape and genre scenes which varied widely from naturalism to expressive abstraction, culminating in a series of powerful self-portraits. Yet his oeuvre exemplifies the dilemma that recent Indonesian art can pose to Westerners. To an outsider, the wide variety of styles and subjects of his oeuvre seems idiosyncratic and arbitrary. In international terms he shows neither stylistic innovation nor a distinctive approach to subject matter, and his paintings would not seem to explain his stature. But his art was innovative in the Indonesian context because it introduced new and personal styles, techniques and approaches to themes which helped to change Indonesian art and to convey national identity. His technical and expressive abilities were and are esteemed.

Sudjana Kerton (b. 1922, lives and works in Bandung) and Djoko Pekik (b. 1938, lives and works in Yogyakarta) paint the lives of the common people in villages and urban neighborhoods: farmers and prostitutes, bicycle rickshaw drivers and street performers. Kerton's humorous, expressive figures have a cartoon like quality which can be linked to the Javanese propensity for stylized drawing as well as to his exposure, during the 25 years that he lived in New York City, to the work of the Pop artists, Kienholz and others.

In contrast, Djoko Pekik's paintings are far more sober, even tragic. With distorted figures in simplified and flattened landscapes, his genre scenes depict the difficult economic conditions of ordinary people today. His 1989 painting of trance dancers portrays one of many extraordinary moments when the dancer performs superhuman feats, such as eating glass without being hurt. Since the tourist industry is beginning to use trance dances as exotic attractions, this work may also refer to the commodification of Javanese culture.

His "Girl at the Crossroads" reveals the perplexing junction where tradition and urbanization meet. In this 1992 oil, a barefoot girl stands with her bicycle at a street comer, looking frightened and confused. A red car is stopped behind her. She faces away from it toward empty streets leading out of the picture frame to the unknown. Her simple dress and bicycle suggest ordinary fife, while the car symbolizes Western modernization and technology. Djoko Pekik's landscape paintings differ from Western concepts of "landscape" or "pure nature." He regards those as commodities for esthetic pleasure, or what Suedjojono calls "the mental world of the tourist." For Djoko Pekik the countryside's beauty is irrelevant. His mountains and ocean are not places to look a but derive their import as places where people are born, where they labor, where they marry and have children, where they die.

Although Affandi and others of his generation were sympathetic to, for instance, the contemporaneous antibourgeois, angst-ridden Abstract-Expressionist artistic ideal, they remained psychologically far from their alienated Western counterparts because their identities were deeply rooted in and defined by the group. They were individualistic only in developing their own artistic expression. But with generational change has come a stronger sense of individuality. Kartika Affandi-Koberl (b, 1934), Affandi's daughter, in her strongest work anticipates the concerns of younger artists, especially a new generation of surrealists such as Lucia Hartini (see below). Particularly in her self-portraits, Kartika (as she is known professionally) conveys feelings of intense emotion and disquiet that extend Djoko Pekik's generalized concerns to the impact of social problems on people such as herself.

She is notable for expressing a female vision, overcoming not only the difficulty of developing an "I" in a society defined by "we" but the extra burden of being female in a paternalistic Muslim world. Few women are taken seriously as artists, and society pressures women to marry and devote their creative energies primarily to the considerable demands of Indonesian family life and community duties. Kartika's personal struggles are brutally clear in paintings such as Reborn and Me Beginning, in which depictions of the artist being torn apart and giving birth to herself are couched in disturbing, nightmarish terms.

In the mid-1970s, some younger artists began taking photographs to use as sources for their paintings. Photography provided alternatives to the flat space of the "traditional/decorative" style and the brushy vigor of expressionism and abstraction. Photographic imagery was a natural and easily communicable way to comment on social conditions, and also to show the new concern for individual emotions or problems.

Ivan Sagito (b. 1957) and Lucia Hartini (b. 1959) explore their psychic lives from an unmistakably non-Western point of view. In the context of intense social pressure for conformity, their search for individuation is a radical move. Sagito depicts puppets and masks, humans and animals in landscape settings. His figures are lonely but never alone; although seen in groups, they are separated from each other and neither look at nor touch one another. The women are sometimes only outlines filled in with clouds that signify the cosmos. The figures' incompleteness and lack of stability imply a feeling of uprootedness: unlike group identity, an emerging self has no fixed definitions.

Hartini's symbols are more esoteric. She paints horses (signifying gentleness and virility), flowers (fragility, beauty and femininity), earth and sea (dynamic interacting forces of nature) to create personal narratives emblematic of contemporary Javanese gender relationships. Her intimations of submerged violence, social coercion, lack of privacy and difficulties in establishing boundaries also speak to the problems of shaping a distinct self.

Other young Javanese artists, searching for ways to extend fine art into more vernacular and flexible realms, began in the mid-'70s to exhibit arrangements of found and created objects. Eventually some, such as Dadang Christanto (b. 1957), acquired the label of "installation artist." Like many other Western labels, this one only partially fits: the work is seldom site-specific. Yet in various guises, an installation concept has spread to other parts of Java and to Bali.

In his paintings, drawings and performances, in addition to his installations, Dadang Christanto uses local materials such as bamboo, banana and coconut leaves, and vernacular images from the wayang, etc., to integrate a spiritual dimension into his social commentary. His "Golf Ball" mural consists of cutout, cartoonlike figures which trace the trajectory of a golf ball as it changes into a demonic wayang character chasing farmers out of their ruined land. Actions that he stages as part of his installations are extensions of village performance traditions. In 1992 in Japan, clad only in shorts, he plastered himself with mud and then went shopping. The piece was titled "Earth Man in Tension."

An intriguing recent installation he made consisted of thick shafts of bamboo that were burned, pierced, incised and then topped by head and torso forms woven of coconut leaves (using a common technique for making temporary containers). He has hung them from trees or roof beams, where these mute, passive figures symbolize the soul suspended in the space between heaven and earth during the first 100 days after death according to traditional beliefs. A stylistically related piece refers to a convention in the wayang in which only slain fighters who fall to the ground remain dead. A figure made of bamboo and coconut leaves lies inert, propped up on arrows, neither alive nor permanently dead, as if waiting for the moment in the next episode of the unfolding epic when it will live again.

Heri Dono (b. 1960) and Eddie Hara (b. 1957) have extended Widayat's lyrical, primitivistic painted fantasies into tough narrative drawings, sculptures and installations that are reminiscent of Dubuffet, Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Their works rebel against the refinement of the wayang and court styles. In a painting titled "Acid Rain Magicians", Eddie Hara arranges schematized brute figures in an enigmatic, flattened space which he says expresses his concern about the environment. "Homage to the Water God," his 1992 installation along a road in rural Bali, is a three-sided enclosure with a working spigot from which water runs. Typical of the multiple meanings and functions of many installations, this one serves practical ends (providing a new source of running water) as well as imaginative ones. Characteristically playful, the work alludes to Hindu and esoteric myths about water as well as to the serious water and sanitation needs of villagers and the urban poor.

Heri Dono is similarly playful in addressing a wide variety of issues. Some of his installations comment on corruption and lack of official concern for the needs of common people. He humorously exposes hypocrisy in a series of mechanical wooden heads which, when the power is turned on, nod up and down, chatter endlessly and roll their eyes. Like Eddie Hara, he often depicts genitalia, a form of subject matter which is particularly shocking in Java, where social circumspection is primary, sex is hardly acknowledged, and Muslim law enforces dress and behavior codes.

Using different imagery, the Dutch-born Mella Jaarsma also comments on Indonesian society. Jaarsma recently installed a permanent cremation site outside a remote Balinese village. Its center, a brick oven, is the torso of an 18-foot supine figure. There is a wire outline of a head over an entranceway. The villagers determined placement of the work and supplied much of the labor for construction. Used for a cremation ceremony shortly after its installation, it is impressive visually and is an outstanding example of functional, interactive public sculpture.

Jaarsma's Javanese husband, Nindityo Adipurnomo (b. 1961) explores Javanese rituals and symbols. In an altarlike installation called Lingam and Yoni (referring to Hindu fertility symbols) he placed the carved "male" element (lingam), decorated with jewels, in a round, "female" container (yoni) lined with batik and topped with a Javanese ritual sword. Patterns of court dances, originating in Hindu rituals and later extended in the Muslim court of the sultan of Yogyakarta, inspire his drawings, paintings, sculptures and performances, while his Catholic religious background adds another layer of complexity to his syncretic work.

Yogyakarta is an important traditional center for batik. Among the patterns produced by this ancient process of dyeing textiles are many that encode cultural and historical information largely unreadable by outsiders. Although the textile's status is now diminished, a number of so-called batik painters are exploring its potential as a fine-art medium. This is an uphill fight, because the technique is difficult, innovation is discouraged by traditionalists, and great quantities of low-quality batik merchandise are sold to tourists. Serious practitioners are generally ignored by the Indonesian art world, and an important artistic potential is thus overlooked.

Ida Hadjar's batiks symbolically employ a set of stylized Javanese characters in narratives which operate Re episodes in the wayang or in traditional dances. From memories of her childhood and from the streets of her present home in Yogyakarta, she gleans images of mothers and children, plants, animals and birds, dancers and street performers, Hadjar is respected for inventing techniques to incorporate characteristics of Western painting into the traditionally flattened space of her pictorial batik panels, Figures are defined by heavy outlines and those lines are broadened with dots of color that mimic the contouring of forms in etching. Nia Fliam, an American, collaborates with her Javanese husband, Agus Ismoyo (b. 1957), to produce large batik paintings composed of abstract shapes that refer to Hindu philosophy and cosmology.

As an art center, the city of Bandung in West Java is internationalist and abstractionist; images derived from Hindu and Buddhist traditions play a lesser role. Artists associated with the "Bandung school" are generally Muslim, urban and somewhat Westernized in education and convictions. Their subjects reflect local concerns and points of view and often emphasize Islam as a source of identity.

A.D. Pirous (b. 1933) represents his Muslim faith and Javanese identity in prints and paintings in oil or acrylic which combine areas of symbolic figuration (usually animals significant in Indonesian culture) with geometric abstraction and calligraphic texts from the Koran. Cool, rational and complex, these highly polished works are meant to be distillations of the ineffable. Stating that "calligraphy is a symbolic language" and that "the Arabic letter is a symbol containing a view of the world," Pirous has become a leader in the development of calligraphy as at emblem of Islamic identity.2 He reproduces texts that symbolize religious truths to believers. An old Javanese saying that "beauty and ethics and esthetics serve the good of the world" reveals the affirmative, integrated Indonesian attitude toward art as a means of seeking cosmic balance and harmony.3

For Umi Dachlan, abstraction in her acrylic paintings seems a natural way of expressing the abstraction of Muslim religious teaching as a conveyance of the supreme truth emanating from Allah. Her works hover between flatness and depth, with gold paint strokes interacting with earth-tone shapes and white spaces to invoke a cosmos of material and spiritual presence. Similarly, both Heyi Ma'mun (b. .1952) and Sudianto Aly (b. 1954), an architect, manipulate color to create space in their paintings. Large areas of white, surrounded by exquisitely placed patches of black and colors, are accented with gold to symbolize both the material and the sacred, the present and the otherworldly. More formal goals related to textile design inspire Biramil Anas (b. 1947), who sometimes collaborates with 'Heyi Ma'mun and Sudianto Aly on local commissions. His own woven and knotted wall hangings use mixed local materials. These artists exemplify a particular sense of shared identity in their dialogues and their cooperative attitudes toward creating and exhibiting work. Studio R/66 is an institutional example in which Heyi Ma'mun provides space in her studio for artists to gather regularly for intellectual stimulation and collaborative artistic ventures, as well as to show their work.

On Bali, the tiny, predominantly Hindu island whose dramatic scenery and profusion of colorful temples, rituals and arts and crafts attract the of Indonesia's tourists, most artists remain in family or village compounds, creating paintings and sculptures (often collaboratively) that reflect the social and religious issues of their milieu, even if they are made for foreign consumption. Here art has only recently begun to reflect the social changes wrought by Western influences. Nyoman Nuarta (b. 51) uses contemporary Western materials such as bronze or iron mesh to depict people who, like himself, tensely straddle traditional and contemporary life. Now living in Bandung, he creates realistic figures that are at the same time idealized and generalized emblems of modern urban fife. His coppers mesh Rush Hour sculpture of three racing cyclists is the embodiment of fast movement, yet the bicycle is the transportation mode of ordinary local working people.

The painter Nyoman Gunarsa (b. 1944), who divides his time between Bali and Yogyakarta, re-creates the imagery of the Balinese sites and rituals that remain a part of his life. His loose, gestural abstraction shows his identification with Western modernism, but at the same time the restless movement of his brushstrokes mimics the fluidity and spatial patterning of ceremonial Balinese movements.

I Made Wianta (b. 1949) and Nyoman Erawan (b. 1958) convey Hindu ritual and village life in contemporary idioms. Erawan's paintings and sculptures focus on fife-cycle rituals: a hanging sculpture consisting of a desiccated human form on a litter refers to the dead body before cremation. The Balinese concern with orientation to mountain and sea carries over into Wianta's paintings.4 Perhaps because he is also a dancer, his primary relationship to space is abstract: he suggests the indigenous landscape by means of geometry. For instance, triangular forms signify volcanoes while linear divisions imply the alternation of flatness and depth in terraced rice fields. His upward- and downward-pointing triangles can also be read as masculine and feminine elements, in a yin-yang representation.

For Westerners, traditional Indonesian arts are intriguingly exotic. There is a danger of our desiring an exotic contemporary art as well. Indonesia's art today is often dismissed when outsiders are unable to grasp the different ways of seeing that it reflects, For example, to Indonesians, the use of perspective may signify Western modernity rather than Renaissance history, and the repetitiveness, polish, finish and elegance of some Indonesian art, which may be unappealing to Western taste, grows out of tradition. Such characteristics have cultural roots in the Indonesian esthetics of refinement and nuance, and reflect a concern with subtly changing restatements of themes.

Indonesian artists are developing new dialogues with the West. One strong voice is that of critic and former installation artist Jim Supangkat. His ability to articulate often-unverbalized traditions, impulses, desires and social concerns enables artists to clarify their goals and better explain their art to outsiders. Some Indonesian artists may have accepted the Western notions of personal innovation and artistic professionalism, but they often reject other Western attitudes, such as elitism (the assumption that common people will not understand the work) or secularism (which they see as a soulless existence). As they engage in a search for new meanings and relationships within their culture and with the international art world, the West is important to Indonesia's contemporary artists, but only on their own terms.

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.