Since the commencement of her interventionist practice in the 1990s, Mella Jaarsma’s work has consistently explored the limits of belonging. Radiating outwards from her local community in Yogyakarta, Central Java, Indonesia, Jaarsma’s explorations have extended across the generally established lineaments of ethnicity, language, religion, and nationality, and onwards into ontological boundaries between species and life forms, and existential relationships between natural and artificial environments inhabited by human and other beings. This essay analyses Jaarsma’s work through three conceptual frames as a way of generating insights into the experience of belonging, alienation and an ethics of contemporary art practice that are pulled sharply into focus even as recent developments across the world cast renewed doubt on our ability to co-exist with each other, with other animals and with the environment conditioned by human action. The first section situates Jaarsma’s work in terms of the history of pluralism and diversity in modern Indonesia, and her adopted home city of Yogyakarta. The second section proposes a politics of radical otherness that emerges from Jaarsma’s work, comprising a refusal to subscribe to identity politics. Finally, the essay seeks to move the discussion beyond dualities of insider-outsider to consider what Jaarsma’s work might tell us about the nature of the human and non-human world amid a global state of anxiety and precariousness.
- Dialectics of belonging
Given her biography, it is perhaps inevitable that Jaarsma’s work is contextualised through the experience of migration.[1] Since her first visit to Indonesia in 1983, she has explored opportunities to think beyond existing frameworks as an individual artist, but also as a mentor, organiser, curator and administrator. A Dutch woman who married a Javanese man and made her home in the heartland of traditional Javanese culture, Yogyakarta, since the mid-1980s, Jaarsma has become a prominent figure in the contemporary art ecology of Indonesia. Jaarsma’s career points to ways of belonging that extend beyond the grossness of ethnic or racial identity and into a complex network of relational conditions that govern private and public behaviours and attitudes. Her international reputation as a major Indonesia-based (if not outright Indonesian) practitioner signals a utopian alignment of belonging with aspiration, a fulfilment of cosmopolitan desire that exceeds the limits of birth and race.[2] In contrast to the more commonly visible and broadly theorised experience of migrants from underdeveloped/ developing countries who have made a home and achieved prominence in affluent economies, Jaarsma is part of a relative minority who have migrated the other way in recent times.[3]
As an orang Belanda (the Indonesian designation originally denoting Dutch people, but now widely used for white people) based in Yogyakarta, Jaarsma lives out the insider-outsider dialectic in her everyday life. Yogyakarta is paradoxical in that it is at once a bastion of Javanese heritage and a tourist haven that specialises in packaging heritage into pleasing morsels. The refinement and sophistication of old Javanese culture is accompanied by a history of armed resistance to colonialism and a gentle tourist-friendly vibe (at least among several inner-city districts) of an economy dependent on the presence of outsiders. The packaging of Javanese culture into cultural commodity is discernible in the cultural performances rooted in Hindu mythology that form part of the landscape alongside money changers and restaurants serving Indonesian, pan-Asian and European food.
In addition to the usual handicaps of being outside one’s “home” environment the experience of expatriation comes with a certain degree of privilege in Jaarsma’s case. Her physical appearance which marks her as clearly separate from the general population can also at times, afford exemption from the strictures and taboos governing mainstream society. It was this exemption that Jaarsma and her orang Belanda collaborators harnessed in the 1998 performance Pribumi Pribumi where the cooking and offering of marinated frog legs (a delicacy among Chinese Indonesians, but haram-unclean for Muslims) along one of central Yogyakarta’s main thoroughfares, Jalan Malioboro, issued a hospitable challenge to sectarian privilege that underpinned the targeting of Chinese-Indonesian homes and businesses amid the political upheaval surrounding the downfall of Suharto’s Orde Baru (new order) regime. Jaarsma’s practice since then has repeatedly made reference to the history of hegemonic power in Indonesia including the compulsory subsumption of cultural differences in favour of unitary, Java-centric national identity that has been played out against a complex network of influence and dominance in the archipelago, and continues to have implications on culture and politics in contemporary Indonesia.[4]
Starting with Hi Inlander produced for the 1999 Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Jaarsma’s works in the first decade of the 21st century are marked by a sustained analysis of the limits of belonging, and the endemic practices of differentiation and discrimination that underpin hierarchical social and political arrangements. With their starting point in the bodies or bodily fragments of animals prized for their taste or utility, or reviled as unclean and pestilential, Jaarsma’s body-cloaks developed a lexicon of concealment and display. Delicately skinned, sliced, sewn and spliced, parts of buffalo, chicken, frogs, fish, kangaroo, squid and squirrels stood in for human divisions and distinctions in their various subtle and palpable forms. These works operate as instruments of simultaneous display and obscurement, armour for the fragile bodies within and shelters from the hostility of the world. In their performative manifestations, the works challenge the viewer with the discernible humanity of the performer’s body within (frequently manifest in the eyes gazing out) which contrasts with the affective and visceral qualities of abjection or aggression evoked by the cloaks.
Ideas of shelter, refuge and home in Jaarsma’s work in the first decade of the 21st century operate as an ironic corollary to cloaking and concealment. The act of taking shelter is at once an arrival at belonging and an acknowledgement of hostile circumstances. The work sets up a ricochet of images including those of refugees, the homeless and the destitute. Visible abjection is frequently accompanied by a challenge to the gaze of the viewer. Overt references to tent-like structures made from different fabrics and improvisatory constructions of corrugated iron, timber and other materials signify tentative and tactical devices that are always provisional, always in need of anchorage and confirmation. Iconographic symbols including Cirebon batik patterns and Javanese architectural motifs are marshalled as a means of camouflage, even as “outsider” symbols including ritual objects from Buddhist and Chinese traditions seek to blend in with denominators of national authority such as military insignia and uniforms. Whether attaching itself to existing structures as parasitic appendage or “hacking” into infrastructures of belonging, Jaarsma’s work probes the limits of social acceptance and belonging, persistently investigating boundaries of gender, sexuality, class, race and nationhood.
- Radical Otherness
Since the late 1990s and increasingly in more recent years, Jaarsma’s work suggests a sustained discourse of radical otherness. Here, the position of otherness is not of passive acceptance or embittered alienation, but of defiant assertion, pulling into question the accepted frameworks that generate normative positions. Otherness here is “owned” and projected as a fundamental and critical element of being in the world. Identity formation is necessarily a process requiring conformity on part of the subject and continuity on part of the system. Identity ensures identifiability and effective surveillance, whereas cloaking and camouflage are strategies of subterfuge, subversion and resistance. The refusal to be easily identifiable is thus a refusal to be monitored and controlled.
Jaarsma’s professional career has developed alongside tremendous political upheaval in Indonesia. Her work has developed in the midst of mechanisms of control, enforced amnesia around endemic violence, and denial of basic liberties during the Suharto dictatorship, and continued corruption, political instability and growing fundamentalism in the decades since. There is considerable history of artists seeking to identify with the position of the orang kecil (small or lowly people in Bahasa Indonesia) or wong cilik (little people in Javanese) in Indonesian modernism. For the first two generations of modernists in 20th century Indonesia, a celebration of the lives of common folk and a valorisation of their hopes and struggles was a central concern.[5] Starting with the freedom struggle, this was seen as the duty-bound contribution of the artists towards the project of nation-building, resulting in social justice as a cardinal virtue enshrined in the national credo of Pancasila (the five principles). The failure of successive administrations to achieve social justice and the emergence of fundamentalist politics occupying the resulting vacuum of peoples’ aspirations is a particularly pressing call to action for Jaarsma’s generation.
Jaarsma’s works have frequently made use of camouflage and mimicry, where the human body encased in an armour or architecture devised by the artist seeks to merge with other structures or alternatively, presents an entirely incomprehensible hybrid appearance that defies evolutionary logic and political categorisation. In either case, resistance to mechanisms of intelligibility and control is expressed through a denial of identifiability. Radical otherness is expressed as an absolute refusal, not only a refusal to conform to mainstream expectations, but a refusal to be counted, to be subject to surveillance, to be identified. The desire for belonging always has a psychic twin in the refusal to belong, the two comprising a dyad vying for supremacy. If identity offers comfort in togetherness, it also implies sameness and non-differentiation. Viewed in the totality of their manufacture and performative deployment, Jaarsma’s works present themselves as machines of otherness that produce conditions of non-compliance, asking the viewer to encounter and acknowledge presences that stand outside or beyond accepted codes of conformity and harmony. Here, her work explores intellectual, psychological and political terrain that has been part of international movements—including women’s movements—against oppressive structures. Subaltern conditions producing marginality are viewed in such a purview as liminal conditions, which are deliberately deployed by artists seeking to counter majoritarian tyrannies. Jaarsma’s work has parallels in projects by other artists, especially women artists in different parts of Asia, where limit-conditions across gender positions, bodily conformity, religious or ethnic identity, and national belonging are challenged. Jaarsma’s work can be seen as part of an international comradeship or sisterhood of women artists who challenge the limits of belonging, including Lee Bul’s production of hybrid presences that merge human, animal and cyborg entities, or Nalini Malani’s exploration of “insanity” through the figures of Medea and Mad Meg, and Mithu Sen’s ongoing interventions in her #unhome and #unworld projects.[6] Jaarsma shares with these artists the impulse towards a contrarian consciousness that seeks to plumb human conditions in extremis as a way of unmasking conditions of oppression masquerading as mere difference.
The dynamic of insider-outsider is after all, premised on desire, greed and power. Like Jaarsma’s work of the same title, the Bule (foreigner) is an otherworldly creature with a skin like spectral armour, an alien presence projecting a near impossible surfeit of sexual potency. Jaarsma’s costume-creatures of the 2000s extend the dynamic of otherness beyond racial dimensions, wilfully trespassing the boundaries of biological species, and at time oscillating between living and non-living entities. Irrepressibly combining human, animal, building and machine, Jaarsma’s parade seems to assert the existence and vitality of evolutionary orders entirely outside established epistemologies, an otherness so extraordinary and radical that it forces an extension of existing categories of thought.
- Endemic precarity: a future history
Two interlinked arguments emerge from Jaarsma’s work over the last decade, both contributing to a consideration of entangled pasts and imperilled futures. One investigates histories of cultural contact and attends to its ongoing repercussions, while the other considers human histories as expressions of greed and mechanisms of conditioned delusion that maintain cycles of oppression. Where her earlier work could be understood through binary constructions such as insider-outsider, native and foreigner, inhabitant and interloper, and so on, more recent work repeatedly pushes against the boundaries of being human. Seeds for these developments, which are already implicit in her earlier work, are further developed through research and orchestrated projects conducted in non-Javanese Indonesia (Bali, Sulawesi), and outside Indonesia, in Europe, Australia and Japan.
Especially over the previous five years, Jaarsma has been attentive to the history and material manifestations of post-Enlightenment knowledge systems as they encounter the non-European world, inaugurating complex transactions of desire and dominance. Manifest in networks and practices of collecting, classification and exhibition, these knowledge systems rationalised European encounters with other cultures and manifestations of humanity so different as to be considered sub- or proto-human. The colonial enterprise reached public manifestation in elaborate productions of the nineteenth century styled as the Universal or Great Exhibition. Presenting the riches, curiosities and monstrosities of far-flung corners of the world, these Exhibitions produced political, philosophical and ethical legitimacy for European domination in a hierarchical classification of races, cultures, languages and epistemic systems. The spectacularized variegation of cultural manifestations from a range of sources assembled together in encyclopaedic format through these universal exhibitions placed Algeria and Morocco in forced companionship with the East Indies and the Pacific, and all of these in subservience to the implicit superiority of Europe, a superiority so evident in the very act of assembly as not to require further elaboration or explication. Alongside colonial projects of knowledge production through survey, enumeration and classification, museum collections and displays in European capitals including Amsterdam, Berlin and Vienna co-produced systems of primitivism, refracting the seemingly infinite variety of cultures into indisputable justification for administrative domination and ethical superiority. The exhibitionary order of post-Enlightenment knowledge systems did not remain confined to European locations: with regional variations, it was replicated in colonial cities like Batavia and Calcutta, where this system served to order into governability the diversity of imperial possessions.
Jaarsma’s experimentation with bark-cloth also produces one of the few occasions in which the artist poses in a performative cloak, a tube-like extension of which allows visitors to peep in to her bared abdomen with the words “I am an atheist” inscribed on the skin.[7] The artist produces a collision between disparate orders of signification here, using a material tradition that originates in a more “primitive” part of Indonesia to cloak a European female body while making an assertion that challenges one of the cardinal principles of Pancasila, that of faith in God. The staged exterior offers up an underlying reality, only accessible to those willing to shed the veneer of modest behaviour. By bodily inhabiting the bark-cloth construction and giving voice to an “interior monologue” Jaarsma both salutes her feminist forebears and invites a consideration of how colonial epistemological hierarchies are often transferred into post-colonial administrative systems. Cloaks and tokens of identity displayed in ethnographic dioramas of national museums become tools that consolidate and enforce centralised authority in many Asian nations marked by immense diversity. The bhinneka tunggal ika (Javanese: out of many, one) motto of the Republic of Indonesia can only be sustained insofar as all the constituent elements of the republic agree to subsume their local consciousness into the constructed unity of the nation-state.
The second argument that emerges from Jaarsma’s recent work is more subtle, but perhaps more powerful. It concerns human proclivities to greed, animosity and delusion, and the limits of our ability for empathetic and transformative action. Her skins and cloaks signifying belonging were also marks of secession from racial, social, national and species identities. Her persistent production of entities that are biological and social hybrids is also a gesture of repeated veiling and unveiling, masking and display that has added potency in the context of identitarian assertions of Islam in the public domain. Rather than merely commenting on veiling and display in terms of physical appearance, Jaarsma seems more interested in excavating what is implied in acts of shielding, guarding, securing and protecting, peeling apart façades in an anatomy lesson for the Republic. This dissection raises important ethical and political issues, bringing ideas of the macabre, the fetish and the abject into direct encounter with deep-seated psychic conditionings that underpin the seeming normalcy of social relations. The performative aspect of Jaarsma’s work quite literally involves entering the skin of another, asking thereby that we feel the sting of the needle and the scrape of the knife that punctures this skin. Perhaps if we were to make this effort, it would be possible to realise once again the shared consciousness of fragility and impermanence that marks human sentience.
[1] For an account of Jaarsma’s move to and early years in Indonesia, see Meta Knol, “The Existentialism of Mella Jaarsma” in Mella Jaarsma: The Fitting Room, Bandung: Selasar Sunaryo Art Space; Yogyakarta: Cemeti Art House, 2009, pp. 50, 58, 60 and 64.
[2] Martha Nussbaum makes a very significant contribution to contemporary understandings of cosmopolitanism in her differentiation between communities of birth and those of aspiration.
[3] There are plentiful examples across the 19th and 20th centuries, of European (male) artists who pursued professional success and creative innovation through an embrace of untrammelled simplicity and directness (as well as erotic conquest) in the East Indies and the Pacific as an antidote to the corrupting influence of European modernity. Émigré and expatriate artists such as Walter Spies, Rudolf Bonnet, W.G. Hofker, Simon Admiraal and RIes Mulder played an important role in the history of modern art in Indonesia.
[4] While this is too vast a subject to discuss here, it is important to remember that the Indonesian archipelago in its entirety had never been under single authority until the apogee of Dutch power in the early 20th century, and that the geographical dimensions and political project of modern Indonesian nationhood can only be imagined in the context of nationalist resistance to Dutch colonialism.
[5] These tendencies are especially visible in the work of left-leaning artists usually associated with Yogyakarta, including Sudjojono, Affandi, Hendra Gunawan, Djoko Pekik, Sudjana Kerton and others active from the 1940s into the 1980s.
[6] On Lee Bul, see Jeon Hyesook, “Woman, body and posthumanism: Lee Bul’s cyborgs and monsters”, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol 23, Issue 1. Malani’s work has been written about extensively, including the retrospective publication Nalini Malani: You Can’t Keep Acid in a Paper Bag 1969-2014, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, 2015. See also, Nalini Malani: The Rebellion of the Dead, ed. Sophie Duplaix, Hatje Cantz, 2018. Mithu Sen’s ongoing experiments and interventions can be seen at instagram.com/p/B-ZtIQXDwZv/?hl=en See also, Irina Aristarkhova, Arrested Welcome: Hospitality in Contemporary Art, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
[7] It is necessary to note that while the cloak is made of a traditional material from Sulawesi, the design of the object appears to have no connection to Sulawesi textile traditions, but rather shares kinship with contemporary studio textile productions.