Dear friends and colleagues
As I related last week, I went to the Thirteenth Jogja Biennale, curated by Rain Rosidi and Wok the Rok, held in the Jogja National Museum – which is the building where the art school (ISI) used to be. The show was entitled Hacking Conflicts. I presume the word “Hacking” refers to breaking into computer systems not to having a bad cough: the catalogue curiously never explains or even mentions the title!
As I told you back in letter 25 although Jogja has always been known as a painter’s town, when Bambang Toko curated Art Jog earlier this year he included one painting only. This was in part an acceptance that the younger generation of painters are, disappointingly, producing little original or exciting work, and in part a recognition that other artists throughout Indonesia are producing interesting work in installation and other media. In the Biennale too there are few paintings, though many graphics and comics.
A few years back they made a very pragmatic decision in Jogja about their Biennale. They could not afford to do a full-scale international biennale but they could afford to send a curator or two to one other country or area, collaborate with a curator there and bring back some artists to engage with artists in Jogja. The overall concept was based on the Equator, so there has been a biennale that included Indian artists, and another that focused on Arab artists. This year’s focus was Nigeria. In two years time it will be Latin America or part of it. The Nigerian artists have blended with the Indonesian ones in a way the Indians and Arabs didn’t. You sensed there were substantial interchanges and collaborations. Several artists tried to see similarities in both situation and creative output – as for example between writers.
A long time ago – twenty-two years to be exact – I went to the Whitney Biennale. This was the famous (or infamous?) biennale curated by Elizabeth Sussman that was focused on identity issues. I went in the evening and it was remarkably crowded with people arguing and generally having a good time. I wanted to go and see it again but the Whitney had weird opening hours then and was shut on (if memory serves me right) Wednesday. I was flying out on Thursday so I claimed a reviewer’s right to see have an especial viewing. A curator showed me and another writer around. The other writer worked for a Texas Real Estate magazine or something like that. She confided in me half way round that there was no way her editor would publish a review of an exhibition as radical as this. After she had run off to find a more docile show to write about, I chatted with the curator and she told me of how she had taken an elderly collector and patron of the museum around the exhibition a few days previously. When they finished their tour the elderly collector had shaken her head and said dolefully, “this is the end of collecting”. The phrase stuck in my head, but what had struck me most was the oddity of going round an exhibition when the electrics were turned off and where so much depended on electricity for visuals or amplification. It felt like going round a fairground after it had closed.
That is how this biennale in Jogja, which was all about events, participation and social praxis, felt to me. I went early on a Friday morning and there were very few people about. It was dead. As a result, all I had to look at were the things on the wall to look at and the few staff waiting to interact or facilitate participation.
I bumped into a Malaysian artist whom I know: “it’s interesting but it isn’t very visual,” he said. In a town famed for craftsmanship a lot of it seemed a bit rough, as if good finish was too petit bourgeois to consider. Not only that but the messages seemed often a bit banal. Maryanto is a serious and subtle artist but his collaboration with Nigerian Victor Ehikhamenor was striking but hardly sophisticated.
Likewise, Yazeid Syafeet’s set of videos where ten ordinary people were asked to explain contemporary art works was amusing but not very revealing.
But, and it is a very big “but”, I didn’t see any events and something like Arief Yudi’s speech platform is meaningless without someone talking from it.
And I have to say that by lunch when I left it was getting livelier. There were more people and they were enjoying poking round the various booths which were not only in the museum but spread around the grounds – as if it were a fair.
Therefore, in a way I have to say I don’t feel I can make any conclusive statement. I wish I had been able to go to the opening.
But, and it is another very big “but” what does the “The end of collecting” mean in Indonesia? In the USA art like this that doesn’t sit comfortably on the wall or plinth has found some more adventurous collectors and there is a vast support system of museums, publically funded galleries, residencies and biennales. That isn’t the case here. If we are going to be pragmatic (and pragmatism helps pay the rent) these artists will have to find a way of making some form of collectible thing or else be content with a precarious, marginal existence. Well, I can hear some older artists saying, “that’s how things used to be anyway before the market boom a few years ago. We carried on. They can carry on, regardless too.”
Whatever, however it pans out, it means it will be interesting to watch art in Indonesia over the next few years.
Have a nice day
Tony