Dear friends and colleagues
I really like Balinese food: it is much spicier than other food in the region, but it did for me this time, which is why I am sending this missive a week late.
I was making a brief visit to Bali prior to going to Jogja, and before my digestive system was so outraged, I managed to make two good studio visits.
At Gede Mahendra Yasa’s studio his assistants are still working away at his hyper detailed painting of famous scenes from Indonesian painting, blended with scenes from other painting and “real life” (see Tuesday in Tropics V). It is a painting hanging between Balinese art, traditional Western painting and the spoofs of painting we got so used to in the age of post-modernism. (Do you remember that word? One used to hear it so often!). He reckons it will take two more months. I suggest, not entirely frivolously, it could make a wonderful jigsaw, and that that could be part of the conceptual package, but I don’t think he likes the idea.
Scattered around the studio are earlier works from when he was taking an avowedly conceptual approach to modern painting and its conventions: re-painting De Kooning but keeping it smooth and flat, getting his assistants to laboriously copy his sketches a la Jackson Pollock, making hyperrealist paintings and then interrupting and obstructing the viewer’s visual pleasure with giant dots or other erasures.
But he talks of how when he showed his work in Milan in 2011 he had somewhat of an identity crisis and began thinking more about Balinese art and its tradition – which is very separate and different from the rest of Indonesia. It has roots in traditional temple painting, albeit inflected by a couple of Western artists (Spies and Bonnet) who acted as advisors and agents. Painting in Java has no such roots, being very much a matter instead of taking Western forms and using them for, initially at least, nationalist and revolutionary purposes.
As part of this re-positioning Mahendra, has initiated a group Neo Pítamaha, in which he is joined by three younger artists – Kemalezedine, Ketut Moniarta and Tang Adimawan. We talked about the exhibition of their work at the excellent alternative space in Bandung, Platform 3. It is no matter of mocking, of seeing traditional Balinese painting as charmingly quaint or so corrupted by their mass production as tourist mementoes as to be invalidated, but of seeing it as an area in which to make intelligent contemporary art. Can post-conceptual art and traditional Balinese techniques and imagery co-exist?
Neo Pita Maha at Platform 3. Works by Kemalezedine, Gede Mahendra Yasa, Tang Adimawan, Ketut Moniarta and Tang Adimawan.
Gede Mahendra Yasa
Gede Mahendra Yasa
I think we should see this as neither a critique of originality nor authorship, but rather a critique of authenticity. Perhaps more precisely an exploration for where one can be authentic.
It is inevitable I guess but the only artist in the region comfortable with using tribal art in his work seems to be an Italian, Filippo Sciascia – though he has lived in Bali for many years. In a recent work he has taken a very battered sculpture from Timor and, struck by how it looks like a “primitive” Italian madonna and child, renamed it “papa” and “son”.
We talk together, as we so often do, of arte povera, the history of Italian painting and the museums in Europe. Of course, however much I like being here in the Tropics, I miss working within walking distance of London’s National Gallery and the British Museum, and being but a simple tube ride from the two Tates and all the kunsthallen. Sure, the amount you can find on Google and YouTube is now amazing but it is always a rumour of art, never the real thing.
Filippo has worked with galleries here and shown with Indonesian artists but for me he is always an Italian artist. I am sure he will always think of me as being English. Of course, he is deeply affected by being here, as I am. At a basic level this shows in the materials: as for example in the sledge the old Chinese bowls from a wreck that are have covered in coral. But, of course, the first name that pops into my head when I see this work is Beuys. The mood and aesthetics of Filippo’s work is very different though. I like it very much. The sledge is unlike Beuys’ sledges entirely made by him, not bought from the shop. (The chances of finding a sledge in Bali are zero anyway!)
If his work has become increasingly orientated to sculpture, his paintings, which are primarily made with gesso, are becoming less figurative and more object like. The crown of thorns painting is a case in point. Actually, it is painted on the back of a painting he was dissatisfied with, peeled off the canvas and stuck on a new one, but reversed. Fixed to a tabletop it becomes a curious, evocative object. Or, perhaps, neither picture, nor object.
It is a poetic way of working which seems very italian to me, but, and here is the point, is also very appropriate for the culture here.
Have a good Tuesday
And once again, apologies for the lateness
Tony