Dear friends and colleagues
After writing my last missive I did not in fact go, as I said I would, to see Arin Dwihartanto and ask him about his expereience at Mecca. In fact, I had to go to a meeting at Sunaryo’s Wot Batu to discuss the monograph on the sculpture garden with Sunaryo, the writer Agung Hujatnikajennong and a book designer. As is so often the case, we spent most of the time discussing the subtitle. They have a problem with the word “garden” (kebun in Bahasa) as to them it seems too small and domestic. They would prefer to use “park” (taman) as that sounds more public. But to me as a native English speaker a garden can be grand (I was born near Stourhead) but “park” implies a wide, open space, which Wot Batu clearly is not. It remains an unresolved discussion. Such problems of the non interchangability of languages are common.
However, afterwards I drove down with Agung to Arin’s studio and I did get to ask him about his haj. He had gone with his father (Sunaryo) and family and for the first few days at Mecca was very turned off by the experience. He just felt the whole country (Saudi Arabia) was corrupt and so intent on wringing as much money out of the tourists (haji) as possible. Only on the last day could he make himself swallow his distaste and try and enter the experience. When circumnambulating the kaa’ba, doing all the rituals, everything seemed to fall away. But for him this was a response to the energy there, not necessarily a specifically Muslim experience.
Agung, Sunaryo, Arin
Like most of his artist contemporaries, he is no five prayers a day Muslim. He prays sometimes but really as a way of meditating. Unusually for an Indonesian artist he went to Art School in London – no-one knew he was the son of a very famous artist there. And it was in London that he left figuration behind and embarked on his current way of working, abstract colour paintings and objects made with resin.
Arin’s studio
Arin with assitant
Having poured transparent resin onto a glass sheet he has about fifteen minutes when the first layer is still tacky but not hard, to add, pouring, dripping, throwing, splashing, three or more other colours – and sometimes volcanic ash too – and finally a concluding layer of transparent resin. After a while the solidified resin has to be very delicately teased off the glass. Sometimes he will add a photograph as backing. The smell is not nice and one needs a mask when the resin is poured and several assistants are needed. Moreover, this is a process with a great deal of chance involved: many works break or crack, many just do not work aesthetically, but when successful the results are intriguing and often spectacular. Look at the large work he showed with me in a show in Singapore in 2013. In Bandung where abstraction to a great extent derived from cubism with a strong influence of Islamic calligraphy his work is unique. In London where there are process-led artists such as Ian Davenport and Alexis Harding it would be seen to have more ancestry.
At Equator Art Projects 2013
Before he took up art Arin was very much part of the skateboarding scene in Bandung. Agung told me many people in that scene went on afterwards to other creative work, especially in the Indie music scene. As you can see, Arin has a small selection of skateboards in his office and in his studio some that he has made himself. As well as “paintings” he makes sculptures with the copious amounts of discarded resin. Ridges of solidified resin are building up around the tables his works are made on – they are also now, as the picture shows, fringed by “stalagmites” of resin. Though his earlier work used a lot of bright colours, now he prefers a moody gray-brown tonality.
in Arin’s office
Skateboards and sculptures by Arin
He is going to do a show at Selasar Sunaryo at the same time as his father opens Wot Batu two hundred yards away, but the idea Arin has come up with is as different from his father’s conception as possible. He will make ramps, curved panels and objects with poured resin to form something like a skateboarder’s park – and outside he will make a real skateboarder’s park so the skateboarding community can be truly involved.
Plan for exhibition
Sunaryo examines a ramp/painting
Agung, Arin, Sunaryo
Sunaryo himself came in to the studio as we talked and drew the gallery roof over Arin’s sketch to better envisage how it would look. (Later he will tell me how happy he is that Arin’s art is so different from his, how happy that Arin has developed his own artistic personality.) Agung asks me whether I could envisage this as a museum project in Singapore or Europe. “Yes!” I answer, “especially if there is a local skateboarding community.”
Have a good Tuesday
Tony