5th July 2022
Dear friends and colleagues
People have been asking me, “You spent a lot of time in Indonesia. Do you know Ade Darmawan, the most prominent of the artists in Ruangrupa who curated Dokumenta” “No,” is the answer, “but I worked with him briefly in a project I initiated eleven years ago. Ruangrupa are based in Jakarta. They deal with issues of urbanization. I was so put off Jakarta on my first visits there – the traffic jams, the congestion, the pollution – I rarely went there again. Most Indonesian artists lived in Jogja, Bandung or Bali so it didn’t seem so necessary. But, let me tell you about my HATNAT project.
HATNAT. Exhibition announcement 2012
HATNAT Print by Ade Darmawan
Crispin de Passe. Burying the dead
Crispin de Passe. Visiting prisoners
But firstly, I have been thinking about that odd, awkward word “glocal” or “living glocally”.
And about art history. Which art history belongs to us? Or, put another way, “Which art history do we belong to?”
Art, we can say grandly, belongs to everyone. We have a global culture now. Or do we instead have a mush of differing cultures partly stirred together?
I remember one Indian critic saying that every bit of Western culture came with a problem, insularity, arrogance, whatever, with one exception – classical music. Bach, Beethoven are available to all in a way Western literature and visual art never quite is.
We need, or most of us need, a sense of belonging, roots, whatever, in the local, in our language, our history, our culture.
But we also need, or most of us need, a sense of the world beyond.
So, for example, I am very interested in the work of Edith Lawrence because she lived in the village I was brought up in. I would like to feel sone kinship with her – a shared sense of belonging. I have affinities to much British art, indeed much European art – though Greek ikons remain a closed world to me.
As a Britisher and as a European I have an incredible heritage of local, national cultural making.
But how does that pan out for an Indonesian or Filipino? Their indigenous traditions are, if not dead, marginalised. From the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries they have been making “Western” art, but their products are rarely noted in Western art history. Witness the interview with Jill Paz where she talks about her grandfather – a master and founding father in Filipino art history but not even a footnote in Western art history.[1]
Whereas we in the UK can share world cultures through the British Museum it is very difficult to see serious western art out here. How can we bring it out here and share it? And, how do we share our western culture without appearing in any way patronising? And how do we make them feel that they too are part of that tradition?
I tried to do this eleven years with my HATNAT project ay Langgeng Art Foundation (LAF) in Jogja, Indonesia. Old master prints from my own collection shown alongside contemporary prints made by Indonesian artists.
HATNAT exhibition at LAF upstairs gallery old and new prints
HATNAT exhibition at LAF. Basement gallery old and new prints
As I wrote in the catalogue for that exhibition:
Why did this exhibition happen?
Since first coming to Jogja[2] in 2009 one thing that intrigued me was that though there were many artists who had trained as printmakers, few of them still made prints as their main art form. In the absence of a strong print market, artists who remained committed to print as a medium made editions of one by printing on canvas or else exhibited and sold the prints with the actual woodblock next to it.[3] Even when prints were editioned the print run was limited to at the most five.
To someone who had spent a lot of time looking at old master prints, where editions were normally of several hundreds, this seemed absurd. Even today in Europe print runs of artists prints are normally fifty or more. Printmaking was invented specifically to make multiple copies.
When I asked the artists that I knew in Jogja if they had ever seen the sort of old master prints I collected except in books they said “no” and when I asked whether they would like to see them they said “of course!”. Therefore I brought 180 of the best or most interesting prints I owned to Jogja and having showed them personally to some of the artists left them at the Langgeng Art Foundation for others to see.[4]
There was a print collective. Grafis Minggiran[5] looking for premises so Langgeng Art Foundation was able to give them a space at the back., and commissioned them to edition the prints. Compared to STPI or Thumbprint Editions in London where I had worked before they had little equipment – just the one medium sized press. And the room we offered lacked air conditioning and museum level lighting. It was not easy to work there after the sun set. When it rained heavily the floor flooded.
Bamban Toko and Hahan etching
Deni Rahmen and Andre Tanama etching
But what mattered was the spirit in which people worked together. When I visited Jogja (I live in Singapore) I would often find half a dozen or more artists in the back room, talking, examining each other’s work, asking questions about technique. I was struck by the respect shown by younger artists for the older more established artists —who had often been their teachers— they were always keen to watch what they were doing. There was a real sense of a community and it must also be added a lot of laughter and fun. Work and social exchange were synonymous.
One purpose of the project was to get artists who had never made a print such as the painter Ugo Untoro, installation artist Tintin Wulia or the sculptor Yuli Prayitno to make one. Some, like Wimo Bayang the photographer, came to the Foundation to chat with friends, made a small print just to see how it was done and then made a larger one with greater seriousness. Several artists made more than one print: they became interested in the process and what they could do with it.
At the exhibition only two artists responded directly to the old master prints. Ay Tjoe Christine did respond to the print by I S Beham of Melancholia. Tintin Wulia respomded to a print by Wenceslaus Hollar of the public exhibition of Earl Stafford with a print of dead flies. The others were happy for me to select who they showed next to: for Ade Darmawan I chose two prints of the acts of mercy by Crispin de Passe
HATNAT Print by Ay-Tjoe Christine
I.S Beham. Melancholia
HATNAT print by Tintin Wulia
Wenceslaus Hollar. Execution of Stafford. 1641
The project was also, I think, a challenge to the artists. It was an opportunity to see and present Jogja printmaking as an entity in its own right. Also the presence of the old prints was a challenge. Although no artist made any thing which can be regarded as a direct or indirect copy of these prints there was on the one hand a sense they were working within a tradition and also that they had to make work that was as intense and detailed as the prints in my collection.”
A visitor from the Goethe Institute in Jakarta came to the exhibition. “Surely that is not a real Durer is it?” He asked. “Of course it is,” I replied. “You have to trust people.” Trust is implicit in the act of sharing.
When I was back in the UK a little later, I showed some people from the British Museum Print department an image of the team in Jogja mounting a Tiepolo print as they squatted on the floor. They were horrified. But look at their hands,” I said. “they are wearing white gloves. They are professionals, just like you!”
Mounting a Tiepolo print Indonesian style
It is a project I wanted to redo in the Philippines and in Singapore but however involved the artists were and however much they got out of it, I cannot claim the project made money or even paid for itself. Nevertheless, maybe I should try and set it up again: it was a lot of work, but a lot of fun!
Have a good month
Tony
PS Further interviews for the website are proceeding slowly at the moment. People since the election are either discombobulated or discouraged.
- (N.B. The Chinese use of tern “oil painting” instead of “western painting” is very astute. Can a Chinese become a Western painter? He can certainly become an oil painter.) ↑
- Officially spelt Yogyakarta and alternately Jogjakarta; the town is normally known just as Jogja. ↑
- Apart from the unfailing good humour of Deni Rahman and other members of Grafis Mingram I must thank Enin Suprianto and Aminuddin “Ucok” Siregar for the conversations on Indonesian printmaking I have had with them. ↑
- A very few of these I collected in the 1970s. Twenty I inherited from my brother when he died in 2003. He, though originally an artist, had been an expert on old master prints writing several books on the subject. The rest I collected in the subsequent nine years. ↑
- The members of Grafis Minggiran are Alexander Nawangseto, Deni Rahman, Rully Putra Adi P., Theresia “Tere” Agustina Sitompul and Danang “Tape” Hadi Phe.