Propuestas de acción

Bishop contends that methodological readings of socially-engaged art demand a sociological approach.39 In building a picture of art practice in Indonesia, I have considered specific artists and artworks as well as the historical, structural, social and institutional background to artists’ work. This includes: the broader field of contemporary art in global contexts, in which Indonesian art is inevitably implicated; the national and regional context; provincial and local cultural permutations; and importantly the “art scene”, the institutions, galleries, museums, collectors, curators,

37

Pamela Zeplin, “The ARX Experiment, Perth, 1987–1999: Communities, Controversy & Regionality”, paper presented at the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (Edith Cowan University, University of Western Australia, Curtin University and Central TAFE, 2005); “Winged Horse Dreaming: Heri Dono in Adelaide” in The Dream Republic, ed. Pamela Zeplin and Jim Supangkat (Adelaide: South Australian School of Art Gallery, 2007).

38

Caroline Turner and Nancy Sever, eds., Witnessing to Silence: Art and Human Rights (Canberra: Australian National University School of Art Gallery, 2003).

35 theorists, critics, art workers and so on, which play a role in disseminating, guiding, funding and exhibiting particular modes of praxis.40

In undertaking this research I have also been conscious of my own positions as both an artist and a researcher. Furthermore, my studio research for this PhD also explores the question of how individual and participatory practice can be read with one practice. My dual position as a practising artist and art researcher during my time in the field gave me a perspective grounded in a familiarity with the challenges and obstacles inherent in this kind of art practice in Indonesia. Thus, the perspective on participatory and individual art presented in this dissertation is grounded in experiences of practice and production as I witnessed them. I have constructed contemporary case studies from observation, participation and conversations with artists, and contextualised them through analysis of the social and historical contexts from which they emerge. The artists addressed in the case studies represent a diverse range of practices that combine participatory and individual approaches. Before the going in to the field I identified a number of senior artists to approach; I selected emerging artists during my field research based on recommendations from curators and other artists. From an initial list of around a dozen artists, I researched the practices of eight, and selected five as case studies for this dissertation. Some of these artists, such as Tisna Sanjaya and Arahmaiani, are well-known internationally, yet their participatory practices are not widely documented or critiqued. I focus particularly on individual artists rather than artist collectives in order to map the different ways artists formulate individual and participatory practices. Furthermore, looking at individual artists who combine both of these practices in Indonesia demands (as it does in the broader literature) a re- evaluation of modernist discourses. It enables a critical deconstruction of the apparent binaries of individual and participatory art without deferring to stereotypes of Eastern communitarianism and Western individualism.

In 1995 Hal Foster argued persuasively against the artist as ethnographer, identifying a tendency among artists working with ethnic and culturally sited communities to make assumptions about the political transformativity and alterity of their subjects. This

40

In Indonesia this is usually referred to as the medan sosial seni rupa – the social scene of visual arts. A comprehensive analysis of this “social scene” can be found in Andryanto Rikrik Kusmara, “Medium Seni Dalam Medan Sosial Seni Rupa Kontemporar Indonesia”, 2011, Bandung (unpublished thesis).

36 alterity, as a key aspect of anthropology, is what Foster contends draws artists to the “quasi-ethnographic” turn, fulfilling a desire to “self-otherise”. In Foster’s reading there are three main assumptions that drive the ethnographic art projects: that artistic transformation creates political transformation and that it originates from elsewhere; that the other is always outside and also the site of subversion; and lastly that:

… if the invoked artist is not perceived as socially and/or culturally other, he or she has but limited access to this transformative alterity, and, more, that if he or she is perceived as other, he or she has automatic access to it.41

This argument that artists are attempting to exploit the other in the search for self- actualisation echoes literary theorist Edward Said’s Orientalism, a most influential and formative text for those in any field of study related to post-colonial nations like Indonesia.42 Foster and Said’s arguments here present limitations for artists who seek to address cultural or ethnic issues (from their own or other cultures). One of the major issues both texts raise is the problem of representation – or, more specifically, on whose behalf artists speak. Which institutions, formal or otherwise, lie behind artists’ work and thus influence the representational forms that emerge? This is salient in the Indonesian context, where artists have historically been closely aligned with social movements, political parties and non-government organisations in various periods.

While these particular texts by Foster and Said create intellectual obstacles for the kind of research I am attempting here, a more recent position helps to locate the artist-as- researcher in the context of a cultural “other”, specifically in Southeast Asian civilisation. Indonesia specialist Adrian Vickers argues that Southeast Asian studies need to return to these studies of representation:

Examining the civilisation of Southeast Asia thus requires complex forms of cultural history and anthropology…A Western-oriented model of change would perhaps locate forms of modernity as a response to the West, but such an approach ignores Southeast Asian agency. A post-Saidian analysis needs to incorporate Southeast Asian modernities as Southeast Asian epistemologies...The way into these civilizational forms is a study of representations, which can be

41

Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?”, in The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. George E. Marcus (Berkely and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 302-309.

37 philological or art historical. The study of Southeast Asian civilisation

should take as its object both high and popular forms of culture.43

In an effort to foreground this Southeast Asian agency – or in this case, Indonesian agency – I have focused my research of secondary resources mainly (but not exclusively) on Indonesian writers.44 Furthermore, to return to Vickers’ comments, the distinction between high and popular culture is one of the very aspects that Indonesian artists and writers perceive as dominant in “Western” art history and attempt to distance themselves from through participatory art and social engagement.45 Artists, from early modernist painter Soedjojono through to GSRBI, and writers like Sanento Yuliman, have valorised art that engages with the vernacular of lay society. Yuliman also attempted to develop an Indonesian epistemology of art by deliberately eschewing almost all reference to art discourses from outside Indonesia.46 He produced a body of work of the kind that art historian John Clark describes as “originary works for the long-term term and, in most cases, almost wholly endogenous genealogies of the modern”.47 This dissertation is heavily indebted to Yuliman’s historical accounts, theories and critical frameworks.

Thus I argue for an ethnographic approach to this research. As an artist-researcher, the ethnographic field research provides a methodology that requires both an immersive, emic approach and a distanced, etic phase. In the emic phase, I took a reflexive, intuitive approach. I participated in or assisted with artists’ projects, attended events and devoted considerable hours to simply being in the same space and time as the artists, observing and recording photographic, video and audio documentation of their interactions with participants. Questions, where they arose, were unstructured, formulated in response to the situation at hand. This contingent approach, dependent on the artists’ process, is intended to understand how the artists see their own

43

Adrian Vickers, “Southeast Asian Studies after Said”, Arts: The Journal of the Sydney University Arts Association 31 (2012), pp. 68-69.

44

In this I am indebted to the Indonesian Visual Arts Archive, which provides a comprehensive digitised collection of Indonesian language sources, many of which are being translated for the first time. I was a part of the translation team for the Indonesia Visual Art Archive and Asia Art Archive Translation Project. See http://www.aaa.org.hk/IVAA_TranslationProject.

45

See for instance, “Manifesto Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru 1987” in Jim Supangkat et al., Seni Rupa Baru Proyek 1: Pasaraya Dunia Fantasi, catalogue for exhibition at Taman Ismail Marzuki (Jakarta: Percetakan Gramedia, 1987), pp. 4-6.

46

“Ihwal Kritik Seni Rupa Yang Berwibawa” in Enin Supriyanto, Setelah Aktivism (Yogyakarta: Hyphen, 2015).

38 practice, rather than how it is experienced by participants. Contingency is particularly evident where the artists’ voices emerged. As a rule, interviews involved minimal questions, and artists tended to speak at length on – and off – topic, with relatively little input from myself. As a result, quotations from artists included in the body of the dissertation are rarely accompanied by questions, as they seldom relate to a specific query.

Researcher Alexandra Crosby described a similar methodology for her study of festivals and environmental activism in Java, which she tied to nongkrong.48 This term loosely translates to “hanging out”, but occupies a more specific dialogical and sociological (and often gendered) space in contemporary culture, and in the Indonesian art world. It also relates closely to the practice of conversation as a method or medium in art practice. Post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha identifies conversation as useful because of its contingent and uncertain approach:

What kind of knowledge do we expect from the practice and representation of art? How does conversation change our relation, as artists and audiences, to cultural experience and the social transformation of our times?49

Using conversation rather than structured interviews in data collection offers research subjects more agency in negotiating the ideas contained therein. The result may be more speculative but this creates productive fissures from which I generate new approaches to ideas of what participation means in art practice in Indonesia and in the broader context of contemporary art.

The etic phase provides a counterpoint, and requires periods of concentration on the reading and writing of theory. In my methodology, field notes were a part of this analytical period, and were written soon after, but not during, field activities. Writing requires a self-distancing from (art) activity, providing space to reflect on my experience of artists’ practice. The analytical period contains tensions and contingencies as well, and the task of reading proved endless. Added to this was the evolution of the field as I wrote. Participation, art in society, community art, art as an urban tactic, the commons: these were some of the themes of major exhibitions held

48

Alexandra Lara Crosby, “Festivals in Java: Localising Cultural Activism and Environmental Politics, 2005–2010” (University of Technology, Sydney, 2013), pp. 69-70.

39 during my two years of field research, evidence that focus on participatory art in Indonesia is intensifying. Consequently, discourses and practice remain in a state of negotiation. While the etic position of analysis from a critical distance may aim for greater impartiality, it nonetheless remains a dynamic and responsive practice in this field.

From the merging of the etic and emic positions, a third space is generated from which this dissertation emerges (much as my artwork emerges from a personal experience of a broader social reality). The result is not purely art history, art theory or ethnography; it is unavoidably sociological due to the very nature of the kind of art practice being explored. In short, reflecting the field in which the research is located, the methodology I have adopted is responsive and contingent, designed to analyse a field which is continuously negotiating/renegotiating cultural and artistic practices and their role within society.