When Remy Jungerman asked Mella in an artist’s interview why she chose to study at an Indonesian Art Institute, Mella answered: ‘The need to make art in Indonesia is directly related to a community, and this appeals to me’[1]. This answer is characteristic of Mella. She feels strongly connected with the social surroundings where she lives and works as an artist. She has also shaped that environment herself over time, through the many initiatives that she developed for and with other artists. In her oeuvre, moreover, she also researched many kinds of social, cultural, religious, and community codes, rituals and symbols. Through the years, life and work flowed together increasingly into an indivisible whole.
There were other reasons to go to Indonesia. The contrast between light and shadow, for example, held her under a spell; the perpendicular position of the sun, the quickness of dawn and, in the evening, street life with the magic shadow play of the oil lamps of the food stalls. She started to research shadows as ‘in-between images’, immaterial reflections of shapes that appeared as silhouettes, cut out through the light. She was inspired by the ancestor sculptures from Toraja on the island Sulawesi – also a form of ‘in-between imagery’ – as well as the Balinese custom of shaping the ashes of a deceased person into the form of a (baby sized) human figure. She processed these impressions in photos, installations, drawings, and paintings.
During her first trip in 1983, she tasted a tempting new sort of freedom, the possibility to operate outside the boundaries of the current thinking of the Dutch art scene, the loosening of existing frameworks and finding new directions.
Also, there was the freedom to start from the here and now of the Indonesian reality to capture the pure appearance of life in art. This daily reality imposed itself upon her continuously in Indonesia, through the open relationships between the houses and the streets, the studio and social life. Her first visit to Indonesia was an eye-opener. “In Indonesia, existence became valid for me”, she said.2 Thinking and working outside existing frameworks has been, since then, a constant in the works of Mella Jaarsma.
There was something scalding in Yogyakarta in those years. The young generation artists wanted to escape the abstract-ethnic material painting style that was promoted by their lecturers. Heri Dono, Eddie Hara and Nindityo Adipurnomo, all classmates of Mella at the Art Institute in Yogya, were searching for other directions: multi-disciplinary works and the exploration for a connection with popular visual culture, but also, the re-interpretation of their cultural backgrounds by looking for inspiration in Javanese traditions and rituals. Mella met with FX Harsono and Moeljono, who put their artistic practices in service of social and political ideals. Their sincere engagement, and the urgency and energetic change that they generated was infectious. The contrast with the Dutch situation even became more pronounced.
Mella experienced life in Indonesia, under the dictatorial political system of that time, in enormous social injustice, religious and ethnical twists, and the always continuous danger of potential natural disasters, like earthquakes, floated as capricious, unpredictable and unstable. Furthermore, there was no official artistic infrastructure to which artists could link up. In these uncertain circumstances there was no other way than to pave a new path. This initiated a process of self reflection that appears to have been very fertile: the question about who you are and which identity you want or could adopt in an ongoing changing environment, has occupied her thoughts ever since. The analyses of insiders and outsiders has clearly become a leading theme in her works.
Before the political situation changed in 1998 and the Reformasi period introduced democratic reformations, Mella couldn’t work for several months. Too many things happened and much had changed. There were demonstrations and killings. The popular fury was addressed to Indonesians of Chinese ethnicity. There was a political and social vacuum, in which the identities of everybody – participants and observers – was challenged. Mella decided to use her work to connect people of different religious and cultural backgrounds. In front of the ‘Gedung Agung’, or the presidential palace in Yogyakarta, on Malioboro street, she made a performance of frying frog legs, a Chinese delicacy that is considered to be ‘unclean’ by Muslim Indonesians, but that she as a foreigner could distribute to bystanders. Shortly after that, she created the work ‘Hi Inlander’: four veils made from basic natural and, at the same time, meaningful materials, such as frog skins, fist skins, kangaroo leather, and chicken feet. She raised questions about native and ethnic stereotypes in visual self-explanatory forms.
Since then, Mella has dismantled cultural codes and meanings of garments and other forms of body coverings and protection, building on the theme of the burka, the veil that, at the same time, both covers and reveals; the subject of temporary shelters that barely give protection to vulnerable persons, and other forms of camouflage that straddle the middle between serving as both armor and a weapon. She developed new dress codes, as hybrid mixtures of bodies, garments and rudimental architectural sculptures that collectively show the liquidity and intangibility that present human identity: “Through my work, I try to reject the question of origin and actually deconstruct identities by producing renewable identities, seeing identity as a transient invention[1]. In the eyes of Mella Jaarsma, identity is multiform, flexible and, therefore, personal.
With this she retains all shades of the human identity. It characterizes her fundamental, human life philosophy. Therefore, it is tempting to connect Mella’s work with the ‘humanistic psychology’ of the American psychologist, Abraham Maslow (1908-1970). He developed a theory linking basal, physical needs, and the need for self-development that would be of a higher mental order.
According Maslow, a meaningful life with individual development, freedom and responsibility could be only be in balance after the fulfillment of pure physical needs, such as eating, drinking, sleeping, sex, and protection against extreme physical circumstances. Upon the fulfillment of these securities, the needs for social contact, love and acknowledgement are able to manifest themselves, which leads to a pure experience of truth and beauty. Maslow assumes that every person in principle is actually longing to reach a certain form of higher self-development. The nice thing is that the work of Mella Jaarsma shows all steps in the pyramid of Maslow at the same time, without creating a forced hierarchic order. Her works are not only earthy, basal and physical, but they are also visual expressions of what Maslow would call ‘self-actualizations’.
Already during her academic time in Groningen, Mella Jaarsma read books from the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that impressed her a lot. Sartre (1905-1980) was, together with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, a representative of the atheistic humanism, which developed strongly during the mid-twenties in Europe.
In his eyes, the human being was not pre-destined: “Man makes himself; he is not found ready-made.”[2] The human being stands in first of all, naked in his existence, and secondly, through self-reflection and self-improvement, develops him/herself as a meaningful essential individual. “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. That’s the first principle of existentialism,” Sartre said in his lecture ‘Existentialism is a Humanismin 1946’[3].
The humanism of Sartre’s vision not so much lied in his view about individual development, but more about his ideas concerning the self image of a person in relation to his view on ‘the other’ : “Thus, at once, we find ourselves in a world which is, let us say, that of ‘inter-subjectivity’. It is in this world that man has to decide what he is and what others are.” Your own self image defines your view of the other, and with this you have taken a responsible position over the other, that is in short the message of Sartre. You have to be conscious of your responsibilities for the other: “There is always some way of understanding an idiot, a child, a primitive man or a foreigner if one has sufficient information.”[4]
This way of thinking formed an important driving force for Mella Jaarsma ever since she arrived in Indonesia, now twenty-five years ago. In concrete visual objects and performances, she discloses the complicated process of ‘seeing and being seen’. Complex themes like race, gender, identity, social class, and religion are put under the microscope through a critical, personal, but at the same time, accessible way, in which each taboo in principle is treated indifferently, but respectfully. Whoever is confronted with her artworks, experiences the psychological pressure of shame, shyness, vulnerability, and resistance, but also the promise of improvement, connection, care, and correlation. Mella delivers through her artworks the most elementary questions. Whoever passes through her oeuvre, makes a journey through different worlds and possibilities, becoming for a moment an insider in the artistic omniversum of the artist.
Meta Knol
Director Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden, The Netherlands
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References
[1] Op. Cit. (noot 1), p. 55;
[2]. Jean-Paul Sartre, lezing ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, 1946, uitgave World Pulblishing Society, 1956;
[3].Ibidem.;
[4]. Ibidem.