The presence of all sorts of skin and all types of bodies performs an important part in Mella Jaarsma’s works. But for me, it is the frog skin that comes to my mind when thinking about Mella’s works. I still remember the scene of frog legs being friend in one of Mella’s earliest performance, PribumiPribumi, or Natives (1998), on a street in Jogja. The frog legs reappeared in the other work titled Hi Inlander (1999). In the latter work, Mella processed the frog legs’ skins into leather and created cloaks from it. The physical form and the metaphorical meaning of the frog legs and skins are used to discuss the complexity around Indonesian multi-racial communities, hidden tensions, and how it has been appropriated as a tool to mobilise a myopic sense of solidarity. These are the subjects that Mella continuously explores in her works. All of her works are tasked with delivering sensitive-provocative issues in a straightforward manner.
I was in my fourth year of university in Jogja in 1998. The PribumiPribumi performance was held in October 1998 and the Reformasi spirit was high. It brought forward optimism, revealed racial sentiments and many unresolved problems at once. They were left up in the air with a heavy dose of uncertainties. The experience of being involved in the student protests and rallies leading up to 21 May 1998 — when Soeharto stepped down from power made me high-spirited. But the consequent riots which took place in various cities throughout archipelago coupled with the systematic mass rape — conducted by the military-backed gangs, or some groups of random people with racial thoughts in their mind, and who may have been unaware of being manipulated by the military — towards the Chinese women haunted the nation, and scarred it for life. Mella’s PribumiPribumi drew on this specific political event.
The frog legs were suitable for the performance. Frog legs are a part of the Chinese culinary tradition. This was the reason of how this specific performance related to me in many ways. To talk about eating frog legs, and to organise a performance where frying frog legs on the street is a central part like in PribumiPribumi, was a provocative thing to do. Eating frog legs is considered taboo for a group of people, growing up in a strong Javanese – Muslim tradition like my family. Enjoying a plate of kodok goreng saus mentega, deep fried frog legs in buttery tomato sauce, in a Chinese restaurant, though, is one of the things that I carefully hide from other family members. Eating frog legs (and caramelised pork in sweet soy sauce included) is part of how I crafted a personal mode of rebellion against the familiar taboos and tradition in my youth. I could reflect on the harshness of the politics of race in the everyday life, and the subtlety of it when tied in with religion, principles, and tradition, in this work. Such is the power of the directness in Mella’s works. It is the kind of work, which is able to take you inside it, inhabit it, and let you to imagine the usefulness of it.
Hypersensitivity
Mella’s works present a wide range of materials, sourced from natural and unnatural environment — frog skins, squirrel and snake skins, cow, sheep, and goat leather, buffalo leather, chicken feet, kangaroo skins, fish skins, sliced bull horns, buffalo horn plates, bark-cloth, black coral, seaweed, cocoons, coconut, wood, rubber, cassava bags, to enamel plates, bags, paper, zippers, emblems, canvas, mattresses, wire, and hair curlers. Through these materials she creates works which emerge as an avenue which explore a diverse range of materialities. Or rather, these materials have found homes in Mella’s works. Otherwise they might be homeless.
Mella is a very diligent social commentator. This is coupled with the considerable ingenuity in the way she incorporates different materialities in her works. It is as if they are designed to swallow up, submerge, occasionally suffocate, overwhelm, and give us a sudden shock. This performs an important role in Mella’s mode of commenting. She always wants us to be “in it”, and aware of the affect that a certain element has on another. She wants us to be inside the skins, the costumes, the superficial masks we are wearing. Being hypersensitive is a good thing, as it allows us to look further, deep into our own depth, gazing deep into our navels (as suggested in Binds and Blinds 2017). In an age where everything is oriented towards clear outcomes and fast action, being hyper-reflective might be considered too slow. The slowness, however, as shown in Mella’s works, is a character that makes up an act of endurance. In the case of her works, it is also the character which has the capacity to stare back.
The critical readings of Mella Jaarsma’s works usually direct their observation on the skin and the body, with reference to her existence as the other and the person who inhabits in-between cultures. That is, Mella, as a Dutch artist who has lived in Indonesia for thirty-five years. Such short description is not sufficient to explain what Mella has been doing, and is continuing to do, in Indonesia. She is not just being part of the whole social ecosystem, but goes beyond that. In collaboration with Nindityo Adipurnomo, her husband, they initiated Cemeti Art House (now Cemeti Institute for Art and Society). Cemeti is considered to be one the earliest form of artist-run-space to exist outside the dominant state-backed art organisation during New Order era. She helped to establish Cemeti Art Foundation (now Indonesian Visual Art Archive), and laid the foundation of developing the independent contemporary art archives. Citing these two things as the fruits of Mella’s artistic and intellectual labour seems minimum. They represent the infrastructural works — another important character in her works. I will go back to this later.
I recall reading an article in a cultural section in Kompas newspaper back in the early 2000s. While the article celebrated the contribution of Mella (and Nindityo) to the local art scene and narrated how they nurtured the space to grow the family together with their two daughters. There is a term in the article title that I always remember, and somehow it has nagged me since. The term is kopi susu, which means coffee mixed with milk; it is used to refer to Mella and Nindityo as a couple. It emphasised her existence as a foreigner. The perception is unlikely to change. The choice to focus on the skins, the body, and clothing, is propelled by her otherness. At the same time, it is also driven by what is happening around her. It leads me to think that to comment, and to being sensitive, is perhaps a route that she has chosen to carve a specific place, a niche, a habit, to establish her position.
A body wrapped in an old pink mattress
The infrastructural character is apparent in Mella’s works. In many of her works, she is building outside — tents, veils, sheath, shelter. She also perceives the bodies, or the models, who perform and display her creations, as part of the structure. Mella’s works depend on the existence of the bodies. Otherwise, as stated in her interview with Adeline Ooi (1999), “my work is only complete when it contains the presence/absence of the body. Otherwise, they look like mere structures, like strange cupboards and shelves, which is not what I want at all.” Such dependence adds a performative layer to her works. To attend a performance by Mella often means to be ready with the theatrical aspect of it. Apart from frog legs, another work by Mella that sticks in my mind is an installation titled Rubber Time II (2003): Mella’s body wrapped in an old pink mattress — stuffed with cotton produced by the kapok trees. The whole body was covered in a roll of mattress; it was only the leg and the food sticking out. It is an old style of mattress because it has lost the battle against dense foam or other modern mattress technology. The legs in the mattress were casted legs while she laid inside another costume in the floor, silently. The installation looked displaced in the gallery room. It was there to confront everyone. It is as if it was being taken straight out of a crime scene somewhere, or a particular unfortunate event, where someone had died unexpectedly, and deadly. The body was being left somewhere just like that. I swear I saw this kind of thing before somewhere.
At this stage, it is important to go back to the term ‘clothing’ that Mella used in referring to her works. It can be seen as costume, but also furniture. The body which adorns Mella’s works is a cupboard or shelf full of furniture and crockery. Reading the essays written about Mella, or examining the concepts for her works, while browsing through the online archives of the works in the artist website, provides the vocabulary of clothing. The clothing functions as protection, amulet, and camouflage. It serves as a mask, or shade. It hides some parts of the body. But it also let some other parts open, revealing their true personality —two real stuffed crocodiles dangling from a woman’s breasts, being fed by her (Pure Passion – After Murni 2016), or a red camouflage with bags, baskets, and suitcases attached to the body, screaming the desire to consume (The Carrier 2016).
The bodies in Mella’s works come in many functions, shapes, and meanings. They function to record histories — the salient and the significant matters. What matters that are changing, and what others that remain the same? Mella talks about the body as “the ancestral home”, a vehicle to carry layers of memories, experiences, and trauma. In the I Owe You series, she learns from the bodies in the past. The body is perceived as a living archives from which she attempts to revive bark-cloth as an ancient clothing technology.
Mella refers to the body as the frontier, the meeting point, the pioneer, and the guardian. She makes clear many vulnerable points in the body, while also emphasises on the powerful capacity that it might have. The bodies in her works provide historical traces of how various policies and religion-based laws regulating body and sexuality (see Domain). The veil and the camouflage evoke the visibility of Muslim women wearing veils in everyday streetscapes. The association might be different for everyone. At once it would be difficult to not associate the veil and the camouflage with the jilbab, the Muslim scarves that are so apparent on the streets. It goes the same with seeing the tent shape in Mella’s works. Such shape brings forward an immediate thought about homeless and displaced people, makeshift houses, and refugees camps. At times Mella makes clear that her works intend to discuss the issues related to the politics of migration. But in other times she seems to let the people wonder in their own thoughts. Her works deal with directness and allusion. To go back to clothing, it functions as something to emphasise the façade appearance and to cover something.
Until Time Is Old (2014) talks about the politics of clothing and morality in the country; it discusses sharia law in Aceh, the story of a group of punk kids who got their mohawk shaved clean by the police in charge of disobedience, and various tribes in Papua with their koteka— whom always been the subject of conforming to the so-called modern clothing. A group of models who walked the catwalk performed The Dog Walk (2016) is reminded me of followers, or netizen (the Internet citizen) in Indonesia digital environment. The crowd, the masses, the anonymous, or the people who allowed themselves to be blinded by religion, are parts of the demography that Mella likes to explore.
A compilation of triangular ideas
I now want to go back to the frog legs and the body wrapped up in an old mattress. Frog legs are illicit for some people, but they are a delicacy for others. In between illicit and delicacy, there is a room that is available for one to belong. The body laid inside the horn costume on the floor was not dead. Mella was just lying there, being silent, pretending to be dead. In between alive and being dead, or pretending to be dead, there is asleep. I began to see the pattern in Mella’s works where one idea, stand firmly on two other ideas. In between travellers and migrants, there are refugees. What stand in between partisan and follower is possibly terrorists. In between the act of killing and feeding, there is a possibility to healing (The warrior, The Feeder, The Healer 2003). Mella builds many rooms to explore new directions, or confusion, but all lead to new possibilities.
Nuraini Juliastuti
Melbourne, August 2019
Published at the catalogue In Ravel Out, 2019