In 1980’s, fine art galleries started to dot big cities, and oil painting on canvas became an upperclass craze, and Indonesian artists and critics who now could afford foreign books got them voraciously, and fine arts begot additional branches and twigs — installation art, performance art, and so on, although until 1990’s the term ‘pop art’ that was used in Indonesia was the mere continuation of ‘popular art’, and not Andy Warhol’s, Roy Lichtenstein’s, Tom Wesselman’s or James Rosenquist’s.
All of this was enabled by economic relative health, and political stability (only this Suhartoist term fits to convey what it was).
All in all, it seemed that Fantasy World Fair (Pasaraya Dunia Fantasi, in which the world was of the fantasy, and not the fair’s), the title of a fine art exhibition in 1987, held by exponents of the quickly forgotten ‘New Fine Art Manifesto’ (Manifesto Seni Rupa Baru), is nearly correct to tell what life was like then.
The relics of Indonesian fine arts of 1960’s, which actually were legacies of 1940’s and 1950’s themselves, close-knitted groups that in Indonesian was caleld ‘sanggar’ (could be anglicized into ‘workshop’, but moulded in communal attitude), began to disappear between 1970’s and 1980’s, including the most famous of them all, Yogyanese Sanggar Bambu and poet Umbu Landu Paranggi’s flock in Bali.
The ITB in West Java and ISI in Yogya (plus to a far lesser degree IKJ in Jakarta) consisted of about the only large centers, when official government-supported bodies like the Ismail Marzuki (Taman Ismail Marzuki/TIM, named after an Indonesian composer’s) started to wobble.
Yogya’s Center of Cultural Activities (Taman Budaya Yogyakarta) would see the worst of its days a little later in 1990’s.
What mattered in the history of fine arts, literature, and other branches or arts had been, anyway, happening elsewhere. Those ‘centers’ had been nothing but unnecessarily bureaucratic buildings where you might display your art works, perform your correographies or reading your poetry, all through their lives, even in their days of roses.
There wasn’t much going on between 1970’s-1980’s when it came to television.
There was only one channel for the entire country, owned by the state and operated by civil servicepersons, on air for around six hours (from 4 p.m. to approximately 11) each day.
It was called the Television of the Republic of Indonesia (Televisi Republik Indonesia/TVRI).
This channel was so far away from any artistic and social notion that it would have made no difference whatever to Indonesians if it were set up in Mars.
TVRI’s cultural mind was set at the previous decade of any decade, so other than the nostalgic it served no audience.
Plus there was no politics on the screen — only Suharto’s speeches, Suharto’s meetings, Suharto’s public appearances, and similar things done by Mrs. Suharto and the kids and Suharto’s political party.
But in literature, movies and fine art, culture was quite vigorous.
Now the so-called universal humanism — of the Cultural Manifesto — was whacked to bits.
As the pyramid of merit in each branch of arts acquired solidity, and the classification of their population turned into concrete and steel, sparks of dissent were common occurences.
The Poetry Court (Pengadilan Puisi) created some bubbles on the surface of literary profession in 1973; in it the Indonesian poetry ‘stood trial’ (literally) for the crime the Court took as being committed, i.e. it had been smug enough to claim that there was ‘no poetry’ after the death of Chairil Anwar (click here for what this man was).
It spurted venom to the direction of editor H.B. Jassin, poet Sapardi Djoko Damono, and essayist Goenawan Mohamad, among others.
In 1970’s, H.B. Jassin was dubbed the ‘Pope’ of literature in Indonesia — a seat he would hold until the end.
This inimitable critic and archiver was (I have no idea how) the supreme judge of literary ventures, whose verdicts — either religiously followed up, silently accepted, or hotly disputed, alike — determined what was what, who was who, and what to read, although the latter didn’t include his magazine Horison which — like every literary and ‘intellectual’ periodicals of all times — was never circulated beyond the small circle of accolytes.
As literature was only incorporated into daily diet by writers and poets, it made sense that the very small Horison was everything to them.
The interpersonal tones in the debates was only natural since everyone knew everybody else, being members of a tiny community, while Jassin also collected personal letters that he made use of whenever he felt necessary.
Jassin had combatively picked over the marketable facts of history, and much of what would happen in Indonesian literature stemmed from here.
Then the New Fine Art Movement (Gerakan Senirupa Baru) came out in 1975.
This comprised of, among a few, Dede Eri Supria — whose ‘realist-photographic’ paintings generated a nationwide pleasant shock (click here for more about him and his contemporaries).
In mid-1980’s, a streak of surrealism came out in Yogya, claimed as ‘totally different from Salvador Dali’s surrealism’ since it mostly mined local mysticism. To this genre Ivan Sagito and Lucia Hartini belong (click here for specimens).
Now in both fine arts and literature Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were pushed down the junk bin as ‘obsolete’.
To fill their place was picked up — around a decade late, as usual — Michel Foucault’s term ‘discourse’ (from the French original of The Order of Things, 1966), sometimes in chillingly erroneous applications and at other times the use was chokingly incredulous, but, as always, who cared about the rest of the text when shreds were enough to spark movements to bring down ‘the establishment’? (‘The establishment’, by the way, always means people and institutions who turn down your application, ignore you in award-giving, never mention you in public speeches, dismiss you in writing, and so on).
While the frustrated poets couldn’t score, the artists did flush some ‘outdated’ rules down the drainpipe; it generated a wave of redefinition of freedom with a lasting impact. Dramatists got their conflict around the newly introduced genre that defied dependence on words to drag a show on, in the same decade.
Among directors, actors, screenwriters and critics of the movies the major alibi for bashing each other was formally social orientation and basically economics.
The favorite accusations that Indonesian movies between 1970 and 1990 were a disgrace to Homo sapiens intelligence, and that they were the opposite of social realism, were to an extent justifiable.
But criticism about the movies of being nothing more than ‘parades of wealth’, that directors and screenwriters were pathetic critters seeking nothing but cash, and everyone in the industry never brought up reality to the cinema, actually missed the target, and unfortunately so very few could see that it did.
Watch now the condemned movies of the two decades: the wealth they displayed was so shallow, artificial, and awkward; the mentality didn’t fit into the material surrounding, the pauper that was our moviemakers couldn’t feel at ease in the king’s garment.
And that was realism.
That was our reality.
We are ‘social’.
So that was social realism.
Really.
Indonesian Everything Since 1990’s Until Today
From here to 2000 perhaps not much had happened to shake Indonesian literature, although some would insist that Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s short stories and Ayu Utami’s novels were landmarks of the era, and the distastefully named ‘chick-lit’ — books written for young women — is a more than a passing fad in 2004 Indonesia (the first wave of this genre was translations of American books of the same category — that’s why the term was used untranslatedly — but in 2004, while the term was still English, domestic writers predominated).
In the Indonesian fine arts of 1990’s did emerge the most veteranized globetrotter of Indonesian artists of all times, Heri Dono (click here for example of his works).
A little later Agus Suwage came to the scene, as well as one of the (rumored to be) wealthiest Indonesian artists, Nasirun; the same period gave birth to the professional career of Ugo Untoro (see the Indonesian contemporary fine art page for more artists, art galleries, curators, and collectors).
While most artists in this era — unless they are Balinese — are somewhat ‘cosmopolitan’ (or impossible to relate them with specific ethnicities, or even nationality), Untoro is one of the persistently Javanese, taking his roots to canvases, that included the indisposible shadow puppet (wayang — click here if you have absolutely no idea what this thing is).
In sculptural art, Yogyanese Anusapati was the most prominent in this era, with a tendency similar to Untoro’s (but with some entirely different outcome).
Since centers of development in fine arts have been in Java, a number of ethnicity-based groups of artists, like the Minangnese (West Sumatera) Sakato, were growing in this island in 1990’s.
While Tionghoan (Chinese Indonesian) artists, who didn’t cherish ethnicity-based grouping in fine arts, couldn’t get distinguished by their works either.
This has been so since 1900’s.
In this respect they were very different from Tionghoan authors who dug their own subculture and made it a source for their novels (click here for more).
Generally, Balinese artists could be easily detected via their canvases (click here for an example and why so), and the ones who formally studied fine arts in Java formed a kind of web in 1980’s, that followed the organisational structure at ‘home’. Younger Balinese artists commonly got support from their seniors or fellow Balinese who had gained some prominence and financial security in Yogya or Jakarta.
Around ‘established’ Balinese painters such as Nyoman Gunarsa a net of juniors could always be expected.
Compared to other ethnicities’, groups of migrant Balinese are more likely to be homogenous, communalist, and permanent, even as younger artists started to depart from the stereotype of Balinese paintings and sculptures since late 1990’s, that congealed into a massive leave after 2000.
One obvious result of grouping has been, whenever patrons advanced, the undergraduates did, too; when the patriarchs declined, all those in nursery did as well. It’s a whole solar system in motion.
So things that normally are very personal — choice of style, of media, of subjects, of whether or not to use the Amsterdam oil paint of number 876D deep yellow — these tend to get minutely observed and meticulously noted and faithfully imitated.
It gave Balinese paintings of 1990’s a more or less uniform look, just like their traditional village-based communal paintings had been prior to 1945.
Even when the new millennium dawned and a few young Balinese artists — born between 1970 and 1980 — decided to author their own systems (so everything from style and technique to themes were altered), once the pioneers got critically accoladed and subscribed new collectors, the rest of the flock switched to the same direction.
Nyoman Masriadi, for example, upon leaving Nyoman Gunarsa’s generation’s system after 2000, found himself instantly followed very closely at the heels by Pande Ketut Taman and the like.
It’s not easy today to see Balineseness fluttered on canvases — see Putu Sutawijaya’s works for striking example — but this un-Balinese visual language has been a collective Balinese exodus from the ‘classic’ masterpieces of their predecessors. (Click here for Putu Sutawijaya’s work.)
The tendency to flock is very Indonesian if based on ethnicities.
Other famous groups in Indonesia, though, haven’t been so, even though the laws governing them are most likely to be some traditional sort of communal living’s gudelines.
The poet and dramatist W.S. Rendra, the greatest of 1970’s and stayed a legend eversince, has his Bengkel Teater in between Jakarta and West Java enlarged in 1990’s.
Rendra’s ‘disciples’ haven’t been homogenous, although the center of this solar system himself is Javanese.
Sculptor Sunaryo of Bandung, West Java, did the same.
Muslim essayist/dramatist/poet Emha Ainun Nadjib in Yogya was next in the list, as was another Yogyanese poet of (very) far lesser caliber, Ragil Suwarno Pragolapati, who seemed to nurture the ambition to take up the course from where Umbu Landu Paranggi left it.
Artist Agus Suwage in Yogya got all kinds of people around his house day and night, unlimited by his own cultural identity as Tionghoan (Chinese Indonesian).
As happened to Gunarsa’s Balinese circle, in time would emerge a new leader of a new pack, whether as a ‘branch office’ of his ex-mentor’s or more to be called his own (from Rendra’s system, for example, poet Sitok Srengéngé got out and formed his own plasticer circle in 1990’s).
Painter Agung Kurniawan of Yogya was another ‘patron’ in the area, around whom some aspirants to be citizens of the art world rotated.
The Kurniawan orbit in due time brought out Hanura Hosea as ‘ex-follower’ who luckily didn’t have what it takes to build his own circle.
Even highly individualist artists like Ugo Untoro got his own swarm of people whose ranks are diverse; either simple admirers, ardent worshippers, conscious copycats, honest students, curious guests, or just those who wanted some beer on the patron’s expense. This habit trickled down to smaller and smaller circles to the very bottom of artistic and financial success.
It’s only hindered by the fact that some 1990’s artists, like S. Teddy D., who wasn’t big enough to become a patron but not small enough to be a ‘vassal’ of someone else, were hovering between personal loathing upon ‘parasitism’ and nursing an exalted ego at being seen as worth following.
Anyway, at this time, the artistic ‘generals’ and their ‘lieutenants’ alike didn’t really form distinct courses that differed them from the ‘independents’.
In 1990’s, whether ‘independent’ or not, authors, journalists, artists and critics were all swept up whole by what they perceived as ‘postmodernism’.
This newly imported but stale stuff, gotten in pieces and after the thing had been decomposing in Europe and the U.S., was taken as the ensign of intellectual sophistication and artistic pinnacle in this country all though the last years of 20th century.
We got tons of written legacy of the craze, much of which is a jarring collective confusion ‘postmodernism’ had generated in the Indonesian minds; also loads of art works characterized by blocky texts and scavenged images.
Aside from that, a striking number of artists who were originally painters created three-dimensional works since 1990, with a lot of different ideas of what sculptures are to be now, but none of them bore ideological convictions even though some critics still judged the outcome using the same old definitions of ‘painting’ and ‘sculpture’ that we imported from Europe decades ago.
Cross-bordering artists in this matter are, among others, Bunga Jeruk, Rudi Mantofani, S. Teddy D., Agung Kurniawan and Ugo Untoro — who all by himself brought up papier-mache ‘dolls’ and made it a genre hitherto unknown (click here for more).
There is also Handiwirman and his stuff — he’s the maker of objects that often couldn’t be defined in conventional fine art terms.
An interesting turn in drawings (mainly of pencil on paper) happened around the first years of the 21st century, following Sekar Jatiningrum’s artistic and monetary flash (click here for Agung Kurniawan’s work — or here for Sekar Jatiningrum’s — or here for Bunga Jeruk’s).
Among her contemporaries, Jatiningrum’s way with pencils has been unrivalled. She alone lifted up the artistic value of drawings on paper.
And she was the one who kicked up the financial worth of such pictures from practically zero dollar to several hundred bucks.
This has never ever happened in the history of Indonesian fine arts.
Of the decidedly ‘communal’ artists, the mess that was called ‘postmodernism’ by Indonesian art critics and influential artists was taken to legitimize their own ways.
Hailed loudly as ground-breakers in this era were comic-book artists and mural painters such as Samuel Indratma from Yogya, who came forth within organizations like Apotik Komik (Apothecary of Comics).
Another obvious stamp of this period was also the ‘looking outward’ tendency — strengthened by the multitude of foreign students of Indonesian arts and foreign aspirants of artistic greatness and foreign fund-granting foundations and foreign researchers.
These people, usually from Australia, lived for some time with Indonesian artistic communes like the socialist Taring Padi in Yogya, or with an Indonesian boyfriend (or girlfriend) which ‘happened to be’ an artist (click here for example).
Accustomed to see caucasians as somehow smarter as a race, what they brought from abroad mattered and what they said was listened to in the immediate vicinity.
Some stayed long enough to establish something — like Dutch artist Mella Jaarsma who got herself naturalized, married Yogyanese Nindityo Adipurnomo, and together set up the (so far, since 1988) best art gallery in town, Cemeti Art House (click here).
One of the Yogyanese artists under Jaarsma’s umbrella, Hanura Hosea, took up German citizenship upon marrying Alexandra Kuss, who had been, in Indonesia, revered as an art curator of nationwide prominence (click here for Hosea’s personal pictures & paintings).
Not all of the outward gaze was translated into interracial unions in personal realms, and not every interracial alliance turned out to be artistically profitable and financially supportive to the Indonesians’ careers, but the occurence has been often enough to constitute a ‘trend’ or something like that — and through which imported ideas came in.
Meanwhile, most of Indonesian art galleries today are owned and managed by Tionghoans, from the best of the lot to the worst.
A chunk of art collectors are also better-moneyed Tionghoans.
This helped occasional sparks of seemingly racist contradiction between ‘the market’ and ‘art’ — still happened despite the conspicuous absent of racism and the like among Indonesian artists, because of the long history (click here for it).
Artists of this era seem to get more inclined to join debates around ‘commercialism’ versus ‘art’ rather than ‘Indonesian’ versus ‘Western’, although in this case ‘art’ has often been mixed-up with ‘arts for the people’, which is an entirely different thing.
Their other favorite subject to whack each other about is whether one and one’s works are ‘contemporary’ or not — this has been done to such an extent of ridiculous monstrosity, since a lot of them never even know what the term ‘contemporary art’ means or supposed to mean.
Meanwhile, all the so-called ‘serious curators’ and art critics crammed European and American names, dates, places, theories, art works, movements, etc. into their writings, since 1990’s.
Such a practice is taken as marks of ‘intellectual’ erudition of Indonesian fine arts, that even an obese book published recently by the venerable Cemeti Art House, that meant to deal with history of Yogyanese fine arts, nearly missed the object; it is certainly an excellent tome about history of European and American fine arts.
Postmodernist frenzy surely marked this era of importers.
One of the postmodernist tenets is an anti-authoritarian outlook. In the jumbling chaos of Indonesian literature and fine arts (thankfully not in the movie industry, because there was no movie industry at the time), that laudable primary motive reminiscent of the good old struggles had become an authority itself.
It was part of the appeal to Indonesian writers and ‘intellectual’ artists, who had such a long history of being easily excited by ‘Western’ theories and grand narrations.
The other appeal was that postmodernism is a dense spot of complicated jargons. This effectively disowned the uninitiated.
1990’s was ten years of Indonesian literature and arts where fear of ridicule seemed to permeate very boldly.
More here: History of Indonesian Fine Arts
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