metropolis m

In Indonesia, engaged art is more popular than ever. After a rapid succesion of movements over the past decades, nowadays the participation of the public is predominant in art, as was recently seen at the Jakarta Biennial. Nuraini Juliastuti places this development in critical perspective. The fundamental issues that underlie aesthetic explorations are shifts in ideology and the search for better ways to represent society. Indonesia has long been going through a sequence of changes in visual ideology. The works made by the artists of Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (GSRB) in the 1970s, also known as the New Art Movement, bear visible features of a confrontation with the style called ‘Mooi Indie’ (Beautiful Dutch East Indies), a form of painting considered to focus merely on beauty while neglecting social representation. The New Art Movement chose to highlight subtle subjects such as the differences between Western and Eastern perspectives, repudiation of a tradition that tends to glorify feudalism, and a strong inclination to condescend to the younger generation. Looking further back to the 1950s and 1960s, the rail against depoliticization and Mooi Indie’s beauty disguises is also apparent. Another artists’ group, Lekra (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat, or Organization of the People’s Culture), chose to display their anti-beauty style by practicing field research as one of their art-making strategies. Lekra was known for its strategy called ‘Turun ke Bawah’, abbreviated to ‘Turba’ (literally meaning ‘going down to the grassroots’). After the coup in 1965, however, Lekra was stigmatized as Communistic. That dark historical moment, combined with strong pressure from Suharto’s New Order government, succeeded in turning local cultural producers away from practices that could be linked to ‘Turba’ or to any other mass movement. Jumping forward to the 1990s, the spirit of the times is reflected in strident artworks characterized by powerful expressions against the repressive regime. During this period, we witness the proliferation of words such as ‘personal’ and ‘politics’. Seen as words designating two opposing camps, artists had to make clear which side they identified with. Affiliates of each camp were required to establish a conceptual framework to support their choice. However, there was no absolute certainty as to which camp was more justifiable. In a situation where politics played a dominant role, those adhering to non-political themes were expected to explain their positions. With the Reformation in 1998, we witness a surge of political themes. Communism, social realism – themes that had long disappeared from the landscape of the Indonesian art discourse during the 1970s to the end of 1990s – again became references for contemporary art practices. On the other hand, the repression of local identity (regarded as a major threat to the monolithic idea of the nation-state) had come to an end. This prompted artists to shift their interest from denouncing formal political institutions to emphasizing narratives about their daily lives, which had been considered trivial in the not-so-distant past. The vocabulary of popular culture was listed in the dictionary of the new aesthetics, with aesthetic technology following a similar path to that of everyday technology. The production of art emerged from a strong desire to communicate with a wider audience, an idea that became the bottom line in this new development.The boredom prompted by the over-exploitation of political themes linked with oppressed local identities contributed to a growing body of works characterized by the personal and the everyday. Indeed, works containing such characteristics were not new, but their contemporary outlook was unprecedented. New virtual works became elemental in orchestrating the environment that produced expressions of local identity. Vernacular media mushroomed, as well as various zines and personal websites. Alternative spaces, fostered by the need to create new outlets for marginalized art expressions, were also on the rise.

The Creative Expression of the Citizen

The relation between art and society entered a new phase after 1998. It is now heading in two different directions examined in this article. Firstly, art has reached the participatory era, where participation has become a key means in the production of art. Its birth might have arisen from the yearning for change, and other Reformation promises that have not been fulfilled. Secondly, art has reached a point where the boundaries of categorization have become blurred. The appropriation of popular culture – a culture commonly deemed low – is now acknowledged as part of identity celebration. Based on this framework, I would like to illustrate how artists are positioning themselves within society, and on the other hand, how society is being represented in artworks. Even though society may have occupied an important position in the eyes of Lekra artists, it was nevertheless perceived as a passive entity. The group’s primary concern was capturing the soul of the people and reflecting that through the arts. In today’s individual and collective works, attempts are being made to include society as an integral part of art production, with the result being that the main characteristics employed to distinguish artists from ‘ordinary’ people and to evaluate an artwork have been erased. The meaning of an artwork has expanded. Everyone can and has the right to come up with their own creative expressions and present them in any art space. The engagement and/or participation of members of the public with art has become the chief concept of art production. This is clearly exemplified by, among other things, the burgeoning of video involving audience participation in the art and cultural scene over the past five years. The products of non-artists now have access to art spaces. The collaborative works resulting from visual workshops facilitated by the artist Moelyono with children in Papua and Aceh, as well as a number of works featured in the Jakarta Biennale 2009 – especially those trying to challenge restrictions and boundaries at the levels of both production and presentation – are cases in point. The practice of engaging members of the wider public in the production of art can also be found in the past. The main difference between audience engagement then and now is the fact that it has become more commonplace and more participatory. The current trend is for artists to work as facilitators with non-governmental organizations. The new creative exchange process intertwines with civil empowerment projects. Non-governmental organizations produce works that can easily be considered artworks, whereas art organizations and artists produce art projects based on the notion of empowerment and the exploration of a medium. It would be difficult to distinguish the results from empowerment projects in the form of photography and video works organized by international funding agencies with those made by a local non-governmental organization in collaboration with artist initiatives.Nevertheless, on a broader scale, all of this is viewed simply as matters sharing similar forms, and not as a potential civil movement. Artists who are busy working on projects involving audience participation believe they are conducting an entirely new activity and disregard similar projects conducted in non-governmental organization circles.

Society and History as Free Space

If we examine the works made by artists born in the 1980s, it is safe to say that the theme of the everyday constitutes a great part of their engagement. This can be traced back to an older generation of artists who adopted popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Heri Dono, Eddie Hara and Apotik Komik. The works of Eko Nugroho, the youngest member of the older generation, for example, have often been referred to in recent years.Surrounded by works bearing similar tones and pointing their fingers at the authoritarian regime in the 1990s, the older generation of artists attained a strong identity. Not only did they offer a new visual approach, they also managed to nurture subtle political thoughts away from formal power institutions, by zooming in instead on major social and cultural issues through trivial encounters in daily situations. Let us take a look at the old works of Apotik Komik. They gave a new meaning to the mural, the classic method for conveying a message. The boasts of gangs and the fragments of particular feelings expressed on city walls are forms of communication that have long been known. Apotik Komik elevated mural painting to a level of artistic exploration that had never been experienced before by the local people. In their Mural Kampung (The Mural of the Kampong) project conducted in 2003, they showed their recognition of the mural as a popular medium with great potential to stimulate society to effectively represent local voices in public space. When local people started to adopt the mural for their own purposes, however, commercial businesses began to see it as the perfect method to communicate their products to the public. But I will not go further into this side effect here. Obviously, this sets them apart from the recent generation of artists. In contrast to their predecessors, the younger generation of artists do not regard the appropriation of popular culture aesthetics as a reaction against or a response to history. Rather, they see themselves as belonging in this cultural environment. Youth and popular culture are constantly appropriating one another. The language of young people is absorbed by popular culture, only to be applied once again in their everyday lives. The following story illustrates a shift in the appropriation of popular culture. In one of her conversations with me, Gintani Swastika (25), a Yogyakarta-based artist, said that it really is not easy for young artists like her to find topics for their work. She thinks this might have been a lot easier for artists working in the 1990s. There were so many political topics available for them to use as a source of inspiration. ‘Now we use everyday stories, stories of our own friends, things we just bought, cute tags attached to clothes, in short, everything which draws our attention,’ she said. Young artists select certain images from this vocabulary of popular culture that most accurately reflect their concerns or interests as inspiration for work where the act of creating an artwork is perceived as a way of establishing one’s self-existence. The appropriation of popular culture is not used to embody particular ideas; rather, it is used to emphasize personal interests. The past does not function as a reference related to the present and the future, complete as a series of struggles that require responses. Instead, the past is seen as merely just another possible subject that can be selected from a vast source of reference in art practice. Arguably, society is currently identified as a site that provides readily available references that can be easily employed and explored. Today, it is difficult to trace the process of cultural products from the germination of an idea to its end result, since historical and global disjunctures interpolate artistic expression with ever-growing complexities, simultaneously situating both artists and society in an awkward, yet engaging encounter. Nuraini Juliastuti is director of the KUNCI Cultural Studies Center in YogyakartaJakarta Biënnale 2009www.jakartabiennale.com