by Afrizal Malna
Arts exhibition date: 25 Marc-10 May 2010
Artists: Affandi, Mella Jaarsma, Titarubi, Nyoman Erawan, Jompet Kuswidananto, S. Teddy D.

Curator: Afrizal malna

Fine art exhibitions today have become increasingly common and are thematically arranged, making for exhibitions that make some kind of statement, and this is true for both solo and group exhibitions. However, it is often the case that there is little significant relationship between the themes and the works being shown. This is only a mild sort of prologue to the exhibition Oasis To Be. Why Oasis To Be? There are three strands I’d like to bring together here in order to build a narrative of the exhibition:

1. Interwoven To Be

This exhibition is not too far from forming opinions about the global warming and  human rights violations currently colouring contemporary international affairs. These topics have become part of an art agenda advocating the birth of a new kind of human rights, in which there is respect and reverence for all forms of life and co-existencence. This reflects a cosmological norm according to which even the slightest damage that we inflict has a significant effect on the entire web of life.

The whole network of life is like a fabric of being (to be), and any artist who continues to read the creative area between the self and the outside world, the boundaries of art with no art, between the body and outer media, and between art works and the critical discourse that develops around them, is assumed to have a deep appreciation of the processes of being.

But the term to be here, as seen against the backdrop of global warming and the melting of the ideological tensions of a post-cold war world, no longer automatically imply recourse to existentialist discourse. Fine art is no longer read as a history of style, rather as a history of ideas, themes and techniques. And technique is not read as the way in which the artist maintains style in his paintings, rather the way he uses technique to support the ideas in the works. Therefore, this to be fabric is read as a kind of post-identity.

2. Oasis To Be

Bali affords a socio-historical context that is interesting in terms of the various processes found in the region, especially cultural processes. The front and back pages of all the processes of qualitative and quantitative culture coincide in Bali. Tradition and all things contemporary can be seen here and now. The current of globalization is the most concrete reality we face in this area: foreign language, foreign currency, all circulating along with various domestic entities. Difference is seen in mutual existence and joint reality.

In the context of Bali itself, the process becomes legible as a cycle from birth to  new birth (reincarnation, enlightenment), and a cleansing of karma on the way to perfection. The process of becoming within this cycle of rebirth does not by itself assume the premise of change through revolution. Any radical change tends to oppose the cycle. On the other hand we can read this cycle as a safety net for the global liberalization seeping into Bali.

In this sense Bali provides a unique context for fine art, which distinguishes itself from other regions in Indonesia in so many ways. The Balinses context is “an oasis to be”. In this exhibition, the idea of oasis has been adopted as a central theme, becoming Oasis To Be.

3. Affandi Sharing

This exhibition also involves the work of Affandi. Affandi’s presence in this exhibition is part of an effort to communicate the effect of reading the Oasis To Be. Affandi is an important milestone in the history of Indonesian contemporary fine art – the toughest of artists in in terms of his becoming, amidst world war and the war of independence.

In the context of the journey of art, Affandi is an important figure to ‘read’. First, Affandi used his own body as object, becoming central to the various surprises and visual strategies he adopted when painting. Affandi almost never painted in the studio: the body, nature, people’s behaviour at the time of painting, object and canvas, all simultaneously occur in time and space together and finish at that time and in that space. Painting for him was a creative moment with uninterrupted duration, and was irreplaceable. His hands touched and immediately sensed when feeling the surface texture of the canvas as he painted.

This resulted in the expressionism described by Eric Newton: “Affandi did not paint reality, rather he painted the feeling that he got from the reality he experienced.” (Bambang Bujono, 2007). Expressionism led Affandi to an appreciation of major international fine art in India, Europe, Japan and the United States. Indeed he is considered to have brought a new expressionism to the canon of Western expressionism that was commonplace at the time (Herbert Read, 1959).

Second, as his art developed, Affandi entered another phase, which lingered until the end of his life. Critic Soewarjono formulates this stage: “Affandi jumped from classic expressionistic figurative language, to the visual language of the abstract-expressionist” (1970). This period continued as Affandi witnessed with amazement the technological developments at the Osaka’70 Expo in Japan. The anatomy of line seen previously in Affandi’s work – snaking lines, puppet-like, tropical, stemming from a coastal culture that has underlying past, was suddenly transformed into cubistic forms and straightness from the world of technology. Soewarjono describes in detail the abstract-expressionistic Affandi, where the expressive lines moving Affandi no longer followed or represented objects, rather they began from the object but moved toward another phenomenon.

This period did not continue for long, because Affandi felt himself to be more a naturalist. Abstraction for him was still a foreign world. Affandi painted in the open air, and this is an important factor that served to prevent him from becoming too abstract, because it was the object that remained the ultimate reason for him to paint. In addition their was his humanism which also determined emotional attachment to, as well as his selection of objects. However, the works prior to his death again show a tendency towards abstract painting, in which emotion no longer stems from minimal, provocative lines. There is the impression that Affandi had entered the substance of humanity.

Third, Bali and Affandi are almost inseparable in the context of Affandi’s art. Bali seems to have served well Affandi’s connection between the body and art. The exhibition includes a video of Affandi (Affandi After Epoch), and a discussion for sharing ideas about Affandi.

Five artists before the Six

It is this third problem that will be a central feature of Oasis To Be, an exhibition that states that any process of becoming is an oasis for life, differences and readings based on our being together. Artists are uniquely able to create a reading environment (the basis for creativity and critical awareness), which is – if you like – the ‘kitchen’ of the oasis, and the starting point for the works on display. Incidentally it should be said that this curatorial tour is not intended to describe every work to be exhibited. It is more a description of the exhibition as event.

The presence of visual artists Nyoman Erawan, Mella Jaarsma, S. Teddy D, Titarubi and Jompet Kuswidananto in this exhibition, and then Affandi, is considered representative for reflecting the theme of the exhibition. These five artists are, in addition to Affandi, artists who each have a variety of visual strategies, and who experiment with media in their works.

Nyoman Erawan, for example, is a visual artist who often travels back and forth between fine art and Balinese tradition as a basis for the formation of energy and his own narrative. Nyoman Erawan highlights the way fine art is embodied in performance and vice versa, and how  performance is realised in fine art. Both media merge, one with the other, to produce – for him – a kind of contemporary fine art ethos that no longer separates the contempoary and the traditional into heterogeneous anthropological boxes. Identity politics are no longer limited by either ethnic or national prejudices.

As a contemporary artist, Nyoman Erawan still feels obliged to conduct ritual in Bali. This mobility, between traditional and contemporary values, between ritual and everyday life, might well be thought to produce friction in the imagination, in a way that is not experienced by artists who live with contemporary values alone. The expressive form in the paintings shows the quality of this friction. The space ritual, it seems, can take place simultaneously with the space of statement.

For most of this decade, Mella Jaarsma has wrestled with the boundaries between clothing-building-painting, arriving at critical architectural questions of gender domination and how to position the history of mankind through clothes that have become icons of tradition. At the national level, clothing is how people define the traditional values in which they believe. At the individual level, clothing is how one presents him or herself, either in public or in specialised forms of work. Uniforms, as worn by the military, factory workers, civil servants and others, continually tempt us to contrast uniformity and diversity.

In many ways, Mella disassembles models of how humans are defined by the clothes they wear at work. Mella generally makes sketches or drawings that serve as the initial readings of the work to be made. After that there follows a media search to support the ideas found in the initial reading. Generally she produces installations, new forms of object, or various kinds of sculpture. We can see the emergence of a new phenomenon – the way architecture is manifested through clothing. Clothes that turned into buildings, dressed as a house, prison clothing, or clothing that contains potential gender oppression and social class discrimination.

And the media exploration trip doesn’t end there. Mella has also tried 2-dimensional painting. All of the work using various media is mutually informative, thanks to the autonomy of the visual language that each carries. Discourse then grows like clothing and the body philosophy that runs through all art.

S. Teddy D brings yet another phenomenon. His works reveal the sensitivity of body consciousness in narcosis – between the social imagination and the imagination that has no name. Man is described as the human body that will be spilled, and splattered brutally in our memory – something that remains in a state of vulnerability to illustrate the ethos of the man who imagines. In other words the  history of mankind is to be read anarchistically in the search for the values that made him a living thing, and not only an object of history or society.

When we look at the works of S. Teddy, either the installations or the other 3 dimensional works, we find yet other readings: the material tends to be hard, with sharp and massive forms, and themes of militarism and violence. The 3-dimensional works precisely describe the dimensions of a setting or human context , and illustrate his prediliction for perceiving humanity as history that should be read anarcgistically in his paintings. He shows how people are increasingly isolated by their own history, and how this history attacks human values. Humanity is echoed back through art.

Titarubi, who now increasingly features large sentences in her installations – say, an exhibition theme statement – opens a kind of internal space in her work. Internal space is present as a domestic or private sphere where Tita arrives at a visual language that is more personal. Visual language is as though made for her alone. The struggle between the charcoal and the canvas, between the black and white and the shading, between the composition and format of the chosen canvas. Her paintings  produce a kind of combination of graphic work, drawing and painting in progress simultaneously.

In a forest landscape, for example, there is a play between the forest as forest, and the shadows of the forest as the forest itself. Shadow belies shadow to create a kind of sound world of a forest, inseperable from the various sounds of insects. Friction between massive lines creates the effect of a black block but remove the black block itself. It is an auditory effect that arises from superimposed patterns of frictional lines.

Finally, whatever is not done by other people, is done by Jompet Kuswidananto. This artist works like a garage mechanic – day and night. The workshop metaphor extends to the variety of exploration undertaken by Jompet. He is as if making music in the installation, creating a video theatre of meaning, making the body electric in works of three dimensions. The presence of Jompet in the world of contemporary fine art, is electrifying – literally! His magnification of visual phenomena is achieved electronically, taking as subject matter the surrounding social environment.

Jompet’s work is like transforming the workshop metaphor into a discrete language as statement in art. All possibilities are electrically conducted by Jompet, who strives to show how the artist can design his own world by using the body as a text written back through electric lines.

Oasis To Be The exhibition is in turn a kind of intimate celebration of how the creative ethos is cultivated by artists, and produces a discourse that enables us to read ourselves as something that betrays the will to be constantly updated. Importantly, it distances us from the kind of history that hurts, like children immersing themselves in images of the language that shaped them.