Avant-Gardism in 1990s Indonesia and Timor-Leste: defying the repression of the Indonesian New Order regime (peer-reviewed) (original) (raw)

The Contemporary Turns: Indonesian Contemporary Arts of the 1980s

This essay is an attempt to look back at points of encounter between Indonesian socio-political art practices and post-modern theory as a means of tracking the emergence of a particular art discourse and practice occurring in the 1990s. Originally published for the exhibition catalogue of Negotiating History, Home and Nation, Iola Lenzi (ed.), Singapore Art Museum, 2012.

Constructions of ‘Indonesian-ness’ in Modern Art and Artistic Identity in a Politically Fraught Terrain during the 1950s

INContext: Studies in Translation and Interculturalism

After four years of physical struggle and diplomacy, Indonesia’s independence was officially recognized, and its sovereignty transferred on 27 December 1949. While protracted struggle and sacrifice to obtain independence had galvanised the people around an idea of Indonesia, this shared experience and political victory could not provide the sole points of reference for the social and cultural transformation necessary to engender national unity. In this article, I engage three conflicting yet ultimately overlapping arguments and positions, each one positing a modern artistic subjectivity and perspectives of an Indonesian modern art. At stake was not only participation in constructing a national identity, and giving meaning and expression to an amorphous keIndonesiaan (Indonesian-ness), but also related issues of creative freedom and the role art and artists would play in its formation. Regardless of their ideological differences, the positions discussed here share a common commitment...

Manifesto of the new aesthetic: Seven artist from Indonesia

Almost twelve years have passed since the political reform in 1998 took place. Of course, there have been many changes that have happened over the course of this time in various aspects of social life, especially those pertaining to relations between an individual and the State, or one social group with another. Most significantly, post-1998 has been a prime time for the blossoming of democratic ideas, although the plan and strategy of implementation remains too abstract for the majority of the society.

The Third Avant-garde: contemporary art from Southeast Asia recalling tradition

The Third Avant-garde: contemporary art from Southeast Asia recalling tradition, 2018

The Third Avant-garde investigates radical art manifestations in Southeast Asia, which took place around the mid-1980s when postmodernism started to gain force in the region. It proposes that the advent of postmodernism in Southeast Asia is anchored in the materiality of traditional arts, an aspect that renders it different from its Western equivalent. The dissertation distinguishes two sets of postmodern manifestations: first, practices that use traditions in a celebratory way, and second, a set of works that use traditional arts radically. This study proposes that the second possibility manifests a double dismantle—first, against local patronizing forces that were enforcing artists to practice academic art and Western media (such as painting and sculpture), and second, a distancing attitude from Western art intelligentsia, who acted as ‘owners of the discourse’, and regarded ‘non-Western’ practitioners as followers rather than as trendsetters. For this investigation, the discipline of anthropology was called in, as was the art historical category of the avant-garde. The two approaches combined reveal how contemporary art from Southeast Asia that reprocesses traditional arts can be regarded as avant-garde. These gestures are novel, and result from practicing art in a certain location, and which is bound to a specific socio-political context. Keywords for Library Repository Avant-garde Tradition Southeast Asia Art History Anthropology Postmodernism Agency Multi-temporality

Beyond Markets: The New Zeitgeist of Indonesian Art

Concept, Context, Contestation: Art and Collective in Southeast Asia , 2014

Essay about collaborative practices in contemporary art, essay part of the Concept, Contest, Contestation: Art and the Collective in Southeast Asia show, curated by Iola Lenzi, at BACC, 2014

“There is Only One Word: Resist!” Performing Arts and Politics in New Order Indonesia

Performing art was one of the main locus for Suharto's New Order regime to sustain its hegemony. The regime imposed a tight control on performing event in order to ensure that there was no political theme in any performance. Based on some of poetry-reading events, I will analyze how artists responded toward this hegemonic designs. Although some of the committed-artists were bold enough to fiddle around with political theme, yet in certain circumstance, they engaged in secure relationship with the regime during the performances. Any attempt of both artists and the regime's agencies to collaborate would only weaken the bargaining position of the former, regardless of the fact that they should have served as agents of change.

Modern Art and Civilizational Transformation , Indonesia and Beyond

2012

There are many ways to approach the theme above proposed by the Conference Conveners. It is possible to focus exclusively on the art side, to try to show for example how modernity appears in Indonesian artworks. But this would be, let us be frank, the easiest and narrowest way. I consider indeed that it is possible to read in the arts not only the state of the society that produces it, but, adopting a broader historical approach, to see in the evolution of the visual art forms a mirror of the evolution of society and, beyond, of civilization in general. This is no novelty. Pierre Frankastel, in his groundbreaking studies of sociology of art, reads in the apparition of perspective and that of modern(ist) art important paradigmatic changes in European civilization.

Indonesian experimentalisms, the question of Western influence, and the cartography of aesthetic authority

2010

The eclectic profile of Indonesian creative musical activity designated by the term musik kontemporer drives and confounds attempts at definition. But among a chaotic mixing of conventions are exemplary practices which invite the labels experimental and avant-garde. Though suggesting links to a “now-global Cageian experimental movement,” closer inspection raises a host of qualifications. The happening art of certain Javanese villagers has a seed that can be traced circuitously to Cage, but it grew in soil in which art never was so separate from life. The Western-oriented composers taught by the senior figure Slamet Abdul Sjukur after his fourteen years in Paris share with him a practical experimentalism, as the underdeveloped state of European classical music in Indonesia precludes a rigorous high modernism. Traditionally-based composers at the arts academy in Solo, spurred to innovate by director Gendhon Humardani and the notions of autonomous art he abstracted from Western philoso...