Sekarat
Visitors to Sekarat, a show featuring the works of thirty-some sculptors that opened on Wednesday September 21, 2011 at Taman Budaya, were greeted by Noor Ibrahim’s monumental pieta, Pieta From Masongan placed at the entrance to the gallery. The two familiar figures of suffering and supplication were rendered in stainless steel and placed atop a pile of ruins. This dramatic and moving piece served as a fitting signal for some of the main themes of the show. The word sekarat, originally from Arabic, in Indonesian is used to indicate the process of dying, of being in agony, caught in the throes of death. This corporeal and human suffering is related to the Indonesian word karat, meaning corrosion or corruption, when metal starts to rust, decay, or disintegrate. As such the word sekarat can be used as a sort of curse, or accusation, a critical acknowledgement of how gravely screwed up something or someone has become.
A number of artists responded to the theme by directly addressing the condition of the country and the world today: pollution that has brought the earth and her fragile ecosystems close to death, corruption and financial irresponsibility that has destroyed traditional forms of subsistence, globalized technology that has at best derailed and at worst sucked the life out of spiritual practice. As such two works by Sutrisno Abee, WC Leaks, where a squat toilet seems to have heaved and spewed radioactive excrement all over the rusted barrel it rests upon, and Dajjal (a false god who spreads his evil and portends the end of days), where a dark cell phone replaces a holy carved tablet to be supplicated by all with offerings of coke and hamburgers, fit in with many of the works that use oil drums, trash, and discarded mechanical parts as their material to critique the fate of the nation and the world, whose condition is now near-fatal, and to call attention to the interrelated forms of material and behavioral corruption that has brought us to the edge. In such a world, the only creatures that can survive are post-apocalyptic salvage assemblages such as Ono Gav’s Scorpion Embryo or Tri Suharyanto’s Ganesha, clever creatures that reminded me a little bit of Wall-E.
A more subtle and specific but no less sharp critique was found in Beban ada di Belakang (The Burden Is Behind) by Sumarwan. Here a traditional ontel bicycle with woven baskets that might otherwise be used to carry the fruits of harvest has been overwhelmed by chunks of cement, the words “utang negara” (national debt) scrawled on them. The back half of the bike sits grounded while the top half has been set free, flying up into the sky like a ghost or a memory, connected to the rest of its body by slim red threads. The piece gracefully and almost wistfully asks us to remember who is left to bear the burden of irresponsibility when political decisions are made. Meanwhile, a small dark face in the back corner of the exhibit, Budi Santoso’s Muka Kelaparan (Starving Face), thin and twisted in pain but heavy like a fist, reminds us that some left behind are even pushed to the edge of death. I was reminded of a recent article by Junot Diaz, “Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal” explaining how so-called natural disasters—such as the earthquake in Haiti, the tsunami in Japan, Hurricane Katrina—are more accurately described as social and political disasters, where the human effects of natural processes are exponentially exacerbated by histories of mismanagement, greed, and blatant disregard.
These heartfelt critiques seem to evoke or question our totems of power and belief; totems which may be simultaneously satirical and heartfelt, like Sutrisono’s handphone, or take more traditional totemic form, such as the carved faces in Landar Jiwo’s Wayang Patung Hello Liberty. There were even what I would call ambivalent totems, such as Adhir Kristiantoro’s The Pirate to depend, whose hanging figure could be a totem or an effigy, and Tri Suharyanto’s totem, in his work Tuhan Kita Sama (Our God is the Same) that lies dead or dormant. This ambivalence seems most acute with the appearance of the totemic penis, depicted in Yayas Budiyanto Trisno’s Krisis Kemaluan penis gavel (or sledgehammer?) with the word “stake holders” carved into it and Adhik Kristiantoro’s Mati Rasa, where the male genitalia has been pierced (perhaps in the orgiastic pursuit of masochistic pleasure?) and then finally, impaled with an axe. In questioning these gendered emblems of power, clearly something has gone too far but I wasn’t sure whether they have been or should be castrated, whether they are the aggressor or the victim. Is there is indeed a crisis of masculinity, is it grieved or aggrieved?
In a conversation with Yustoni Valentero, who contributed to and helped organize the show, he told me that sculpture is a male art form, because of the physical strength and activity it takes to make such work, using tools that drill and pound. But in the context of Sekarat, where old forms of power are under attack or perhaps not to be trusted, maybe the presence of feminine energy can provide some sort of antidote or alternative. A few works that called to mind the female form seemed to speak softly but insistently, providing a hopeful counterbalance to the dominant hard-edged metallic mood with organic shapes that evoked suppleness and fragrance. In Khadir Supartini’s Obstinate Spring a luminescent female figure sprouted grass and flowers, while in Barnabas Budiyono’s Next Generation, golden flowers that looked like women’s lips grew out of molten rock, and Priyaris Munandar’s Di Antara Nasib dan Takdir (In between Fate and Destiny) where a tree made of old mufflers and cans sprouted grapes and roses.
The evocation of the feminine, and the fertility and regeneration it represents, brings to mind questions of value. How do we determine what is precious, what do we cherish? If one the one hand sekarat means the process of dying and thus encompasses most fundamental human measurement, the span of a lifetime, it also indicates the unit of appraisal for the value of so-called precious metals and jewels like gold and diamonds, which is the karat. One karat, se-karat. We are thus invited to consider what do we use to measure what makes a life precious. Similarly we could ask, what makes a jewel a jewel rather than just an ordinary stone? We look perhaps to the swirl of colors, its surface and its density, the way it catches the light, but perhaps also to the bold adventure required to seek it in its raw state, the danger it takes to pull it from the earth or ocean, the labor required to cut, polish, and manipulate it in order to reveal its natural elegance. Meanwhile the life it lived inside the depths of earth or water, the memory of soft cool dirt, of waves and grains of sand, its story of emergence, remains a secret, already and always buried and sealed.
In Sekarat we are reminded that a single life, though often treated as expendable, is precious, secret, and mysterious. No work expressed this more clearly than Syafirizal’s breathtakingly elegant Melindungi (Protect), a hanging nest made from barbed wire protecting a single resin egg. We are also reminded that death is not necessarily just an end, but just as significantly, a transition. Sekarat, dying, may be the experience of intense change, a painful or overwhelming or even ongoing transition, as shocking as Joni Candra’s ferocious Dragon Kite that seemed to rush into the space like a herald of the afterworld. Which is to say, that sekarat might be more complicated than a purely one-way process of deterioration.
Some of the most interesting works to me therefore were the ones that played with surface and called attention to material and process and changing forms. In doing so they contain an element of alchemy or mystery, that might turn metal to rust and then to powder, that turns man into dirt. I found myself returning again and again to Aris Munandar’s Metamorphosis Sapi (Cow’s Metamorphosis) where man and beast of burden seem to be sucked into and simultaneously fighting with one another and the sepulchral figure by Tri Suharyanto in his work Tuhan Kita Sama. Here a heavy figure lies about to buried but I was struck by the juxtaposition of the heavy stone body and the beauty of the casket it lay within, the thin wood encircling the rusted corpse, evoking the plants that might grow again after burial.
In weighing the precious stone or the arc of a biography we are invited again to consider form and its rebirth. In the paroxysms of dying, or the upheavals of natural disaster, when the skin shrivels and the hands tremble, eyes cloud and lungs clutch, when buildings topple and everything turns to rubble, how do we find that which can be salvaged? How do we negotiate the inevitable crisis of faith that descends when that which is most vital to us has been robbed? For the show Sekarat, this becomes the task of sculpture. Three-dimensional artworks use visual language to trigger a response through a variety of forms that interrogate and respond to the mandates and measurements of value. Through offering multiple approaches to the theme Sekarat this extended family of sculptures insist that when our external luxuries are destroyed, stripped away, whether by natural processes or man-made forces beyond our control, we must have the courage to face—to find—not just the trappings of material treasure or the pleasure of form, but the struggling spirit inside that might make it precious and the means we have to protect and nurture it.
Annie Tucker
UCLA, Department of World Arts and Cultures
September 22, 2011
