TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 44
24th November 2015
Dear friends and colleagues
I was in Jogja (Jogjakarta or Yogyakarta) last weekend to see some artists and go to the Jogja Biennale.
Before I went to the Biennale I went to see my good friend Hahan (aka Uji Handoko Eko Saputra) who like many artists lives in a kampong on the outskirts of Jogja. Often instead of getting a regular taxi I get a guy on a motorbike to drive me. It’s a motorbike town: it much easier to find someone with a bike than a taxi. A lot of the roads are very narrow so it’s more convenient and you see more. You go down backstreets and alleyways, alongside rivers. Look at the image above. The kampongs (a word meaning “villages” or more properly “communities”) are surrounded by trees and rice fields. Nature and the built up are fitted together differently from in Europe.
When we got to Hahan’s studio we found he hadn’t got there yet so I resolved to go straight to the biennale. But the driver wanted to get his back tyre fixed first as it was flat. A guy nearby had a pump so we blew it up enough to get back to the main road where there was a wayside repair shop.
I watched the traffic while they put in a new inner tyre. We were opposite a mosque given to the people of Jogja by the Acehnese as thanks for support during the tsunami. (Aceh is the one area of Indonesia hardcore enough to have sharia law.) Most mosques here are traditional Javanese buildings, comfy and unpretentious. But this mosque is like the mosques you see being built now in Malaysia: a pastiche of something you’d find in Saudi Arabia. It’s not Islamicisation, it’s Arabisation: the replacement of local traditions with a foreign one. I don’t know what you call this style where old forms (minarets, domes, etc.) are combined with modern building techniques – Mecca techno perhaps?
I sat and watched the bikes go by. A lot of women drive around on bikes including those who choose to wear a hijab. (For the record I once did a survey in Bandung and then one in Jogja: I counted a hundred women in each town and I reckoned about thirty percent wore one.)
Often people have to stop at the traffic lights, like this lady taking her chickens and ducks to, I presume, market. Yes, they were all still alive. And I can feel some of you cringing and thinking, “this is so cruel!” Well, they didn’t seem distressed. And they have had a far better life than most chickens and ducks get in the UK: they have been allowed to roam around the kampong, free and easy. No-one has de-beaked them or starved them or caged them up so tight they can’t move. People’s relationship with animals here is, can I say, more organic?
I have always enjoyed watching how people use motorbikes here. Earlier that morning I had snapped someone delivering crackers for breakfast, big bags of them filling his panniers.
Sometimes, as in this photo of a bakso (meatballs) man from 2011 the bike can even carry the wayside stall.
And of course, if you don’t have a car (and very few people here can afford a car) you can use your bike to travel with your family. Yes, I know what some of you are thinking as you look at the kid in the front of the bike. “That is so dangerous! No crash helmet either!” While, no-one travels very fast here and I remember how much as a young boy I loved travelling on the back of my dad’s scooter (without a helmet) and I can’t help thinking, “I would have loved to travel like that in the front. What a view! It would be like driving the bike yourself!” Very often a second kid will be squeezed between mum and dad too.
Now this isn’t just a travelogue, though I would argue that the journey to see art or artists is often an important part of the experience. It also is a sort of metaphor or allegory for something particular to art and artists in Jogja. The bikes come from abroad – Japan normally. They have been adapted, improvised, and used in a communal way. And that is a bit how art happens here. Essentially people make “Western” art here, but it has been adapted, improvised, and used as a very chatty, local discourse.
Anyway, I did eventually get to the Biennale. I’ll talk about it next week. In the context of Jogja it is an important show, though I am not sure it is a very good one.
Wishing you all a very pleasant day.
Tony