David Elliott and Gilane Tawadros: 'Blooming in Oxford'
In: Heri Dono. Edited by David Elliott and Gilane Tawadros. Published by the Institute of International Visual Arts, London in association with the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1996, pp. 8-17
The work of the post-Freeze generation of British artists which has made such an impact on the international art world over the past five years has been a salutory reminder that all art is rooted in the society in which it is made. [1] The effects of Thatcher's and Major's Britain have been seen and critiqued here, but the response has taken many forms: agit-prop has had its day - there is no longer a coherent ideology with which it would make sense to intervene - and the making of art has become, in a sense, an ideology of its own. Art cannot avoid the moral, social, cultural and economic vacuum within which public life has been acted out. The questioning of established values has again become important.
Heri Dono, a thirty-five year old artist from Yogyakarta in Indonesia, confronts similar issues and conflicts in his work but from a different perspective. Indonesia is located firmly with the Developing World; it enjoys a military government and encompasses many different and flourishing traditional cultures. As one of the "Tiger Economies" of South East Asia some centres are undergoing modernisation at breakneck speed, while others have remained virtually unchanged for hundreds even thousands of years.
There are a number of art schools in Indonesia and modern art developed there - tentatively at first - from the 1930s. In spite of the current boom in contemporary art, the legacy of colonialism has meant that there has been an unsure relationship with the West: there is a wish to be part of its art club yet a desire also to be separate. A dependency on self-consciously nationalist or particularist art styles is also problematic when the Government is fighting a war in East Timor and trying to establish a homogenised political and economic culture within a country which is vast, dispersed and heterogeneous.
In making art Heri Dono has been concerned to find a language with which he can communicate both to an Indonesian and to an international audience. His works spring out of the situation he knows best - the social, cultural and political life of Indonesia - yet he concentrates on phenomena, such as bureaucratic absurdity, torture, hypocrisy, stupidity and ecological madness, which may be found anywhere. To date, Dono's work has focused on four separate but interconnected media: painting, wayang (shadow puppet) performances, video and installation which all synthesise elements from western modern and Javanese traditional art. [2]
In his paintings, which use acrylic and collage on paper and canvas, Dono brings together the flat modernist distortions of Expressionism or Cubism with imaginary figures from the shadow puppet theatre. Throughout his work the Wayang is a central metaphor for the whole social and political body.
A taste for the fantastic has played a central part in the myths of the Ramayana and Mahabarata which are the source of the traditional Wayang stories but they have been enjoyed and re-interpreted as satirical glosses on the present as well as for themselves. Dono has departed from tradition in constructing his own pseudo-traditional stories which make a more pointed comment on the present. In The Drunkenness of Semar, for example, the performance he presented in Oxford, Dono examined in a playful, but powerful way, the impact of modernisation and militarism on a developing society. [3] The character Semar - which ostensibly means a guru (teacher) and God of the Javanese religion - also plays the role of a joker or jester. But there are other levels of parody which are typical of Javanese literary and artistic forms of expression: through the cartoon-like invention of Supersemar (a parody of Superman) this figure is keyed back through a word play to the Batak acronym for the Decree of 12th March 1966: the date of the military coup by which the existing President Suharto replaced President Sukarno - the founder of the Indonesian Republic. Traditional Javanese myths, recent political history and American cartoons are brought together in a single word, each reference signifying a different power base, interest, order, and way of looking at the world.
A similar word play may be found in the title of the installation Blooming in Arms that Dono has made during his three month residency at the Museum of Modern Art. [4] This contrasts the Indonesian government's official green policy of encouraging every family to plant a tree outside their home with its economic policy of allowing multi-national interests to decimate the forests of Sumatra, Kalimantan and Irian Jaya. Under such conditions little that is really "green" could be said to bloom - except for the khaki uniforms of the young army cadets which grow in ever increasing numbers.
Along with a number of other young Indonesian and Thai artists, Dono uses his work as a starting point for a discussion of the issues which lie behind it while at the same time realising that "sometimes the political idea is good, but the painting is not so good What is important is to keep the quality of the ethical problem in art." [5] For Dono the issue of quality makes the art more eloquent, more communicable at an intuitive level so that the attention of the public is focused on the heart of the problem.
Communication is not always so easy in the west and modern art is often criticised for its alienation from a broader public. This kind of criticism misses the point because much western work takes alienation as its starting point, but communication is difficult in Indonesia for clearer reasons: the government controls the media and not all interests are represented in it. As a result there is what Dono characterises as a fear of talking, of questioning, which, when allied to a traditional distaste for verbal argument, means that real debates about social and environmental issues rarely happen. [6] For Dono time is short and the role of art is to cut through this impasse - to make people realise and feel comfortable with their differences as well as with their similarities.
Like the traditional shadow puppet show, art is also for sensual enjoyment and delight as well as for humour and instruction; it is there to expand feeling, thought and debate and by doing so acts as a metaphor for individual human freedoms.
[1] Freeze was an artist-curated exhibition held in London in the late 1980s which is now seen as a landmark for a new generation and attitude in British art.
[2] Dono stresses that he works in a specifically Javan tradition and the cultural references in his Gamelan and Wayang pieces are part of this.
[3] The performance took place as a MOMA2 project at Freud's Arts Cafe, Walton Street, Oxford on 10th December 1995.
[4] The installation was shown in the John Piper Gallery of the Museum of Modern Art Oxford from 14 January to 11 February 1996.
[5] Interview with Tim Martin published in this catalogue.
[6] Ibid.