WHAT IS INDONESIAN ART, REALLY?

By: B.T.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us into a new normal: working remotely, optimizing cloud services, reducing the frequency of physical meetings, and adapting to online meeting applications. This new normal feels foreign sometimes, because it pushes our social behaviors to change with the times.

Our initial intention for meeting with Handiwirman was to cultivate our gallery’s relationships with artists, as well as to map the art world’s current situation through the eyes of its main actors. By its end, this meeting made us smile, and at the same time aware of and empathizing with the anxieties of grassroots art practitioners. We hope that Handi’s views could represent the concerns of other artists. He began by talking about how this pandemic has put him and other artists through challenges they had never gone through before. As uncertainty hung over many art events, where previously set dates can suddenly change right before the D-day, his mood and enthusiasm was ruined, adversely affecting his art conceptualization and production work. According to him, most other artists he knows felt the same. The current world situation simply isn’t conducive for his fellow artists who were already comfortable in the physical/offline fine arts scene and wishing to take part in performances or offline events. Indeed, many artists dealt with this situation by seeking out platforms in the digital world: participating in art galleries’ online exhibitions, actively posting their latest works on social media, and holding meetings online. “It’s a matter of feeling” he said. He is one of the many artists who couldn’t do that, or maybe he simply hasn’t. We can’t really say for sure.

We moved across the street from Handi’s studio to the ADA SaRang coffee shop to continue our conversation. We chatted casually while taking coffee and snacks at the quiet and intimate coffee shop, which that morning felt like it belonged to just the three of us.

As we sipped our coffee, Handi’s anxieties became more and more interesting to listen to. “What is Indonesian art?” he asked, sharing a conversation he had with Asmujo [the curator Asmujo Irianto] to us. “Do we need to propose that the word Seni (art) in ISI [acronym for the Indonesian Institute of Art, Yogyakarta] be changed to Kriya (craft)? So the school’s name will become the ‘Indonesian Craft Institute’”. Because according to him, the word “art” is actually an extension of the West’s cultural understanding of their own creative production, which spread to influence other artistic cultures throughout the world. “So what exactly is Indonesian art?” he half-pessimistically questioned. His expression turned serious, with a distinctive smile that somehow we feel there is a satire behind it. He recalled the time he was invited by the Venice Biennale to talk about Indonesian art and found that he couldn’t answer this seemingly simple question. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to, but more because almost all of what he had studied during his student days was the Western understanding of art. Even if there are intersections with Indonesian culture, even that is still from the point of view of Western looking at art in Indonesia. So he sent his book collection to Venice, an entire cardboard packing box’s worth, as reference material for the Venice committee in hopes that they could help him explain what “Indonesian art” actually means. To his astonishment, no one could reach an absolute conclusion on this matter.

Another story that really made an impression on us is about Handi’s visit to Japan, where he met members of the art community there. Someone asked him about the identity of Indonesian art too, the context of the conversation being Japan’s tendency for giving local names to foreign cultural artifacts that acculturate with their local culture. For example, karakuri, which is a Japanese automaton or mechanical technique that is sophisticated enough to move puppets like wayang golek. Even though this mechanical technique is actually imported western technology, Japanese artistic culture has always been able to localize incoming foreign elements to create something that is very Japanese. Handi, who was clueless at that time, with his witty Indonesian soul, replied (perhaps evasively), “Oh, Indonesia has that too. We call it angkrek.” Although angkrek can move puppets and dolls (generally flat puppets), the technique is much simpler than the mechanisms of karakuri dolls, and depends on thread or rope tension to move the puppets. Handi chuckled as he told us this, because he is aware that even he, who is already a well-known veteran of the Indonesian art world was not really able to describe and explain the true meaning of Indonesian art. And even now, if asked, refuses to be a speaker who would be tasked with explaining what Indonesian art is. In his honest opinion, he and many other Indonesian artists are just artists from Indonesia who are western-influenced, who study and understand art of western origin, and whose places of study and work happen to be in Indonesia, emphasizing that these are extensions of western concepts as understood by him, who is Indonesian.

Handi observed that the weakness of the Jogja Biennale and many other Indonesian art events and performances is that they still heavily follow existing norms established by art scenes outside Indonesia. He found that art events in Indonesia often compare themselves to established counterparts abroad, wanting to catch up to the success of these events and use them as a yardstick. Whereas what is needed is: identifying what is needed by the local art scene, generating awareness of these needs, and then developing solutions to these needs locally, and finally building a particular local artistic identity so that people outside Indonesia come here to experience art that is unique to Indonesia and is presented in a singularly Indonesian way. This became a discussion topic among us unintentionally. Handi was initially telling a story about a problem that arose at the start of the pandemic: many markets closed, leaving gaps in the availability of essential items that were normally fulfilled by these markets. To solve this, the local community decided to join farmers’ groups and maximize the utilization of small land parcels leased from Sultan Hamengkubuwono X. Because of these efforts, you can now find many microtraders in Yogya who sell vegetables and fruits independently, who are able to meet local food demand at least in their area, as well as benefitting the local economy by helping to reduce dependence on imports from neighboring regions. Yogyakartans organically and collectively came up with a response to solve their own local food supply problems. That is, created a successful concrete solution borne out of the community’s recognition of a problem particular to their area. This story serves as a lesson to introduce the problems that exist in the Indonesian art world today.  Handi supposes that if Indonesian art events can learn from the local problem-solving of the food supply shortage in Yogyakarta, then perhaps they can gain a similar awareness, namely absorbing what is happening locally, processing and mapping this information, and finally solving and fulfilling local needs locally as well.

The conclusion the three of us reached is, if the Indonesian art world can recognize the problems around itself and collectively tries to produce solutions, then these problems can be solved: starting from the matter of the identity of Indonesian art itself to ways of increasing stakeholder support and other issues until Indonesian art can finally be widely recognized for its own charms, as Western art is.

Time flew by as we chatted, the clock having ticked past 13.00. We’d have liked to continue this discussion because Handi seemed to have so much more to say. Unfortunately, we couldn’t as our schedule was tight and we had several other items to check off on our Yogya trip agenda. However, we are grateful that Handi was willing to share his thoughts, leaving us with new insights which, while not entirely new, are valuable. We left with smiles on our faces, while also feeling unsettled by the issues he raised.

Yogyakarta, 13 November 2021.